|
|
|
More "Degenerate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bits of the woodland scenery—shaded rills, flowing springs, dashing cascades, fairy glens, and among the castellated rocks of the dark ravines. Their parts are so exquisitely perfect, almost they persuade the nature-lover to degenerate into a mere naturalist, walking through the woods seeing nothing but sporophytes through his lens, just as a rare book sometimes causes the bibliophile to become a bibliomaniac, reading nothing but catalogues. It is a credit to be a bibliomaniac provided one is a bibliophile ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... for you yet," she said. "I was afraid that you were a very degenerate Osbaldistone. But what brings you to Cub Hall? I suppose you could have stayed away if ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... which he can reap but small advantage. They look on the desire of the bloodshed, even of beasts, as a mark of a mind that is already corrupted with cruelty, or that at least by the frequent returns of so brutal a pleasure must degenerate into it. ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... level of any motives existing under pagan moralities; and, on the other hand, he traduces great men like Caesar, whose natures were beyond his scale of measurement, by tracing their policy to petty purposes entirely Plutarchian. But he was a Greekling in a degenerate age of Grecians. As to the French Memoirs, which are often so exceedingly amusing, they purchase their liveliness by one eternal sacrifice of plain truth. Their repartees, felicitous propos, and pointed ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... That love should be capable of ending in such vermiculate results as too often appear, is no more against the loveliness of the divine idea, than that the forms of man and woman, the spirit gone from them, should degenerate to such things as may not be looked upon. There is no plainer sign of the need of a God, than the possible fate of love. The celestial Cupido may soar aloft on seraph wings that assert his origin, or fall down on the belly of a snake and creep ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... painters work and work, and thanks to them the comforts of life grow greater every day, the demands of the body multiply, but we are still a long way from the truth and man still remains the most rapacious and unseemly of animals, and everything tends to make the majority of mankind degenerate and more and more lacking in vitality. Under such conditions the life of an artist has no meaning and the more talented he is, the more strange and incomprehensible his position is, since it only amounts to his working for the amusement ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... considering the policy to be adopted for suppressing the insurrection I have been anxious and careful that the inevitable conflict for this purpose shall not degenerate into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle. I have therefore in every case thought it proper to keep the integrity of the Union prominent as the primary object of the contest on our pan, leaving all questions which are not ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... to a minor, or some one unfit to take up the chieftainship, and this continued to prevail for centuries after the Anglo-Norman invasion, and was even adopted by many owners of English descent who had become "meere Irish," as the phrase ran, or "degenerate English." ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... Degenerate Douglas! oh, the unworthy Lord! Whom mere despite of heart could so far please, And love of havoc (for with such disease Fame taxes him) that he could send forth word To level with the dust a noble horde, A brotherhood of venerable Trees, Leaving an ancient Dome, ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth
... time there was a tendency for the free laborer to degenerate into a serf, attached to the soil of the farm on which he and his forefathers had been settled for centuries. A contract dated in the first year of Cyrus is an illustration of the fact. It records the lease of a farm near Sippara, which belonged to the temple of the Sun-god, ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... wedding, an archbishop had performed the ceremony, and the newspapers had devoted pages to describing the gowns and the jewels and the presents and all the rest of the magnificence. And the Count was a wretched little degenerate, who beat and kicked his wife, and flaunted his mistresses in her face, and wasted fourteen million dollars of her money in a couple of years. The mind could scarcely follow the orgies of this half-insane creature—he had spent two ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... Swift's 'Polite Conversation,' and compare the bill of fare with the menu of a modern London dinner. The very report of such conviviality—before which Christopher North's performances in the 'Noctes Ambrosianae' sink into insignificance—is enough to produce nightmares in the men of our degenerate times, and may help us to understand the peevishness of feeble invalids such as Pope and Lord Hervey in the elder generation, or Walpole in that which was rising. Amongst these Gargantuan consumers, who combined in one the attributes of 'gorging Jack and guzzling Jemmy,' Sir Robert ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... impassioned eloquence. His musical criticisms are refined and acute, but without repulsive technicalities or scientific terms, ever sparkling with the poetic ardor of the generous soul through which the discriminating, yet appreciative awards were poured. Ah! in these days of degenerate rivalries and bitter jealousies, let us welcome a proof of affection so tender as his "Life ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... unfitted, And if recover'd, prove no source of joy, But one of deep regret, that a young stock Which culture and the graft of education Would now have loaded on each bough with fruit, Neglect hath left degenerate and worthless. How should I joy, yet dread to meet my cousin, Should your ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... dramatic power into this meagre form, that even now the truth and sincerity of his songs charm us no less than their extraordinary melodic beauty. But it is easy to see that in the hands of composers less richly endowed, this form was fated to degenerate into a mere concert upon the stage. The science of vocalisation was cultivated to such a pitch of perfection that composers were tempted, and even compelled, to consult the tastes of singers rather than dramatic truth. Handel's successors, ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... letter to King would have been favoured with the imprint "de l'Imprimerie Imperiale." Peron's anthropological studies among Australian aboriginals led him to conclusions totally at variance with the nebulous "state of nature" theories of the time, which pictured the civilised being as a degenerate from man unspoiled by law, government, and convention. The tests and measurements of blacks which he made, and compared with those of French and English people, showed him that even physically the native was an inferior animal; his ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... Eleanor's aunt did not prevent her from being an agreeable acquaintance. Although she believed in the intellectual capacity of woman, she did not look upon herself as a representative of the class: her admiration of her sex did not degenerate into self-laudation, and her enthusiasm was not tainted by egotism. Hers was not a strong-mindedness that showed itself in ungainly coiffures and tasteless attire. It was content with desiring and claiming for ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... toast will show the animus of the assembly, and of its orators. It was delivered by M. Saint Just:—"To the men strong, courageous, and valiant in the cause of humanity. To those whose names serve as a guide, a support, and an example to the degenerate beings—to all those whom history calls heroes!... To Brutus, to Catiline, to Jesus Christ, to Julian the Apostate, to Attila!... To all the thinkers of the middle age.... To unfortunate thinkers!... To Jean Jacques Rousseau, and his pupil, Maximilian Robespierre!" This enumeration of names ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... our Churchmen learned to associate themselves with the popular cause; and, with few exceptions, neither the hierarchical spirit of the foreign divines, nor the monarchical bias peculiar to the French, characterised the writers of the English school. The Civil Law, transmitted from the degenerate Empire to be the common prop of absolute power, was excluded from England. The Canon Law was restrained, and this country never admitted the Inquisition, nor fully accepted the use of torture which invested Continental royalty with so ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... Eastern Empire to its ancient seat in these islands, to a time when two of my ancestors, Joyce Bolge and Hengist Horsa Bluebin, wrestled with one another for the prime ministership of the British Empire, and occupied that position successively with a glory of which we can in these degenerate days form but a faint conception. When I think of these mighty men, lions in war, sages in peace, not babblers and charlatans like the pigmies who now occupy their places in Baghdad, but strong silent men, ruling an empire on which the sun ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... suspects the new order, he does not hide either from himself or us. Intellectual contempt for the idolatries of the forum and the market-place has infected him with a touch of that chagrin which came to men like Tacitus from disbelief In the moral government of a degenerate world. Though he strives, like Tacitus, to take up his parable nec amore et sine odio, the disgust is ill concealed. There are passages where we almost hear the drone of a dowager in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. It was said of Tocqueville that he was an aristocrat who accepted ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... Holland. This was situated in a high part of the town; and from the window of her summer apartment, we had the prospect of the sea, the islands, and the Asian mountains.—My letter is insensibly grown so long, I am ashamed of it. This is a very bad symptom. 'Tis well if I don't degenerate into a downright story-teller. It may be, our proverb, that knowledge is no burden, may be true, as to one's self but knowing too much, is very apt to make us troublesome to other ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... of Bill pledging national credit for loan to East African Protectorates entered upon. Not without opposition from Ministerial benches. ALPHEUS CLEOPHAS MORTON, of whom we hear little in these degenerate days, insisted that this kind of charity should begin at home—that is in the Highlands of Scotland. WEDGWOOD and THORNE thought Government had gone far enough in the way of lavish expenditure of tax-payers' money by providing them and others with salaries of L400 a year. From other side of House ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 22, 1914 • Various
... are to understand that his time is come and so should a Viking die: further, if you will, the subject is a modern Viking, ready for the responsibilities of the title. Sketches of our ancient wooden walls and our iron and plated defences line the panellings. These degenerate artists do ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... inherited the sentiment of chivalry, and contrasted with the roundhead not more by its loyalty to the person of the prince, than by its recognition of the superior grace and refinement of womanhood. Even in the debased and degenerate epoch of court life which followed 1660, the forms and language of homage still preserved the tradition of a nobler scheme of manners. The Puritan had thrown off chivalry as being parcel of Catholicism, and had replaced it by the Hebrew ideal of the subjection and seclusion of woman. ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... descent from the ancient Romans, they were, in reality, for the most part, the sons of the bolder barbarians of the North; and, contaminated by the craft of Italy, rather than imbued with its national affections, they retained the disdain of their foreign ancestors for a conquered soil and a degenerate people. While the rest of Italy, especially in Florence, in Venice, and in Milan, was fast and far advancing beyond the other states of Europe in civilisation and in art, the Romans appeared rather to recede than to improve;—unblest ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... reconstruction of the Whig party is indispensable to the perpetuity of the Union. The Democratic party, though now national, if left to the sole opposition of the Republican, which is a sectional party, must inevitably, sooner or later, itself degenerate into sectionalism. This must be the necessary result of such antagonism. But a party based upon intelligence and moral worth must, most of the time, be in the minority of the country, and much of the time exceedingly small. This the Whigs ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of self must always poison this young man's ointment, and to-night there was some excuse from his degenerate point of view. He must give it up. Stingaree was right; it was only one man in thousands who could do unerringly what he had done that night. Oswald Melvin was not that man. He saw it for himself at last. But it was a bitter hour for him. Life in the music-shop would ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... sad and solitary—a pale and beautiful ruin, pathetic beyond speech, infested by noisy shop-keepers and petty pilferers, the degenerate sons of the robbers who once roamed the sea and enthroned her on her ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... no sudden desertion of it. For many months no news had been heard of the Argonauts. They were considerably overdue: the sages of Dreamland shook their grizzly heads. They were just as sage and shaky in those days as in these degenerate times. The maids of the hamlet wept for a season, then turned from sorrowing, dried their tears, took unto themselves new lovers, and the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... preside at the table, and act the part of a mother, so far as she can; she must watch the characters of the men who approach her charge, and endeavor to save the inexperienced girl from the dangers of a bad marriage, if possible. To perform this feat, and not to degenerate into a Spanish duenna, a dragon, or a Mrs. General—who was simply a fool—is ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... scarfs and pincushions. There is no supremer test of character. Eleven years of hotel housekeepership guarantees a knowledge of human nature that includes some things no living being ought to know about her fellow men. And inevitably one of two results must follow. You degenerate into a bitter, waspish, and fault-finding shrew; or you develop into a patient, tolerant, and infinitely understanding woman. Martha Foote dealt daily with Polack scrub girls, and Irish porters, and Swedish chambermaids, and Swiss waiters, and Halsted Street bell-boys. Italian tenors fried ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... narrative, but the pictures of the natives are atrocious. Many of the figures are distorted, and all of them have a smutty look, as if they had been rubbed with lampblack or coal-dust. There is not one simple, honest presentation of the natural human form in the book. When the Parisian becomes a degenerate, he is the most degenerate of all—a refined, perfumed degenerate. A degenerate Englishman may be brutal and coarse, but he could never be guilty of the inane or the outrageous things which the Cubists, ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... was a very brave man himself, said now in great anger: The more base and degenerate in you to take such means for her as you have done, and leave her on such slight conditions.' Then turning to Valentine, he said: 'I do applaud your spirit Valentine, and think you worthy of an empress's love. You shall have Silvia, for you have well deserved her.' Valentine then ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... I'm afraid, look like a young man of our degenerate day. She was far too beautiful and distinguished for that. Besides, her dark curling hair, quite short for a woman, was too long, and her eyes—like the eyes of all poets—were women's eyes. She looked, indeed, like one of those wonderful ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... of writing assigned to an epoch remarkable for the severity and precision of its taste? If Spain is meant, the attack is perfectly intelligible, as the epoch is exactly that when Spanish taste began to degenerate, and the style of Spanish writers to become vicious, inflated, and fantastic, in imitation of Gongora, who did so much to ruin the literature of his country; as other writers of much less ability, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... can, therefore, claim from us no further consideration; it is mere naked rudeness and selfishness, ill-disguised by the gaudy rays of outward decency; a mere cherishing of the sensual nature which, left to itself, would soon degenerate into monstrous barbarism, of which we already ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... times are much degenerate from those, Which your sweet Muse, which your fair fortune chose; And as complexions alter with the climes, Our wits have drawne th' infection of our times. That candid age no other way could tell To be ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace
... depression, as if he had been staying with a clergyman.... He was very agreeable, but spoke too lightly, I thought, of veal soup, I took him aside, and reasoned the matter with him, but in vain; to speak the truth, Luttrell is not steady in his judgments on dishes. Individual failures with him soon degenerate into generic objections, till, by some fortunate accident, he eats himself into better opinions. A person of more calm reflection thinks not only of what he is consuming at that moment, but of the soups of the same kind he has met with in a long course of dining, and which have gradually ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... course every one understands that "high art" becomes very much diluted in its country progress, and when it appears in out-of-the-way places, where the people are neither wealthy nor well read, it is apt to degenerate into ...
— The Youth's Companion - Volume LII, Number 11, Thursday, March 13, 1879 • Various
... dared); He ate it knowing. Then divisions came. She, like a spirit strayed who lost the way, Too venturesome, among the farther stars, And hardly cares, because it hardly hopes To find the path to heaven; in bitter wise Did bear to him degenerate seed, and he, Once having felt her upward drawing, longed, And yet aspired, and yearned to be restored, ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... thing you can do," said Gladys. Her tone was forcible. She was full of the vulgar shrewdness of a degenerate race, for the old acumen of that race ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... wiry-looking fellow, whom so far drill and six months in the North-west Territory of Her Majesty's Indian dominions had not made muscular-looking; though, for the matter of that, he did not differ much from his companions, who in appearance were of the thorough East-end Cockney type—that rather degenerate class of lads who look fifteen or sixteen at most when twenty. Stamina seemed to be wanting, chests looked narrow, and their tunics covered gaunt and angular bodies, while their spiked white helmets, though they fitted their heads, had rather an extinguisher-like ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... try to persuade him that seed-time and harvest were the same thing, and that he had nothing to do but to rest in what he had done; show his bright colours and flutter like a moth in the sunshine, or sit down like a degenerate bee in the summer time and eat his own honey. The power of action which he knew in himself could not rest without something to act upon. It longed ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... reconciling the numerous class of small traders, the great majority in all urban constituencies, to the change—to its continuance, and also justify its extension to all incomes above L50 or L100 a-year. Without that extension it will inevitably degenerate into a confiscation of property ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... true sexual act, and passes insensibly into it. If, however, continued on into adult age, it becomes morbid, passing into erotic fetichism; what in the inexperienced youth is the natural auxiliary and stimulus to imagination, in the degenerate onanist of adult age is a sign of arrested development. Thus, onanism," the author concludes, "is not always a vice such as is fiercely combated by educators and moralists. It is the natural transition by which we reach the warm and ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... "love of the human race is nothing else in us but love of justice," and that "of all the virtues, justice is that which contributes most to the common good of men." While enjoining the discipline of pity as one of the noblest of sentiments, he warns us against letting it degenerate into weakness, and insists that we should only surrender ourselves to it when it accords with justice.[308] But that is all. What constitutes justice, what is its standard, what its source, what its sanction, whence the extraordinary holiness with which its name has come to be ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... followed the dusty road and examined the telegraph poles, for the woodpecker of these latter days has departed from the ways of his fathers, deserted the cool and fragrant woods, and taken up his abode in degenerate places, a fitting change of residence to follow his change of habit from digging his prey out of the tree-trunks to catching it ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... and where art thou, My Country? On thy voiceless shore The heroic lay is tuneless now— The heroic bosom beats no more! And must thy Lyre, so long divine, Degenerate into hands like mine? ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... Price. I tremble for the cause of liberty, from such an example to kings. I tremble for the cause of humanity, in the unpunished outrages of the most wicked of mankind. But there are some people of that low and degenerate fashion of mind that they look up with a sort of complacent awe and admiration to kings who know how to keep firm in their seat, to hold a strict hand over their subjects, to assert their prerogative, and by the awakened vigilance of a severe despotism to guard ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... different toes. There are no associated constitutional symptoms, no tendency to similar morbid changes in other parts, and no infiltration elsewhere. There is little or no edema with ainhum. In ainhum there is, first, simple hypertrophy, then active hyperplasia The papillae degenerate when deprived of blood supply, and become horny. Meanwhile the pressure thus exerted on the nervi vasorum sets up vascular changes which bring about epithelial changes in more distant areas, the process advancing anteriorly, that is, in ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... words: for the which Timocrates reprooued him in the hearing of one Polemon. That is no wonder quoth Polemon, for so be all women. And besides, Phanorinus being knowen for an Eunuke or gelded man, came by the same nippe to be noted as an effeminate and degenerate person. ...
— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham
... still more in the sequel of my tour, my eye was amused; but the pleasing vision cannot be fixed by the pen; the particular images are darkly seen through the medium of five-and-twenty years, and the narrative of my life must not degenerate into a book ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... of the Indians conquered in war. Roger Williams in a letter to John Winthrop in 1637 writes as follows of a successful expedition against the Pequots: "It having again pleased the Most High to put into our hands another miserable drove of Adam's degenerate seed, and our brethren by nature, I am bold (if I may not offend in it) to request the keeping and bringing up of one of the children." The following extract from a letter to Winthrop in 1645 is a curious mixture of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... If Edward Griffin's smiling face I should present in colors true— In good Samaritanic view; The patron of Joe Lee, whose name Is known to histrionic fame; Who play'd at Shylock on the stage, When tragedy was more the rage Than in this sad degenerate age. And where art thou, my friend, George Story, A man of yore, though not yet hoary? The even tenor of thy way Hast thou maintain'd for many a day; They tell us within human range That mortal things are given to change, It may be so, yet thou art still But little changed, ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett
... time they lose! ... There are dozens of men I know who are far less presentable than this highly coloured and robust young human being; and yet they are part of the accomplished scheme of things—like degenerate horses, you know—always pathetic to me; but they're still horses, for all that. Quid rides? Species of the same genus can cross, of course, but I had rather be a donkey than a mule. ... And if I were a donkey I'd sing and cavort with my own kind, and let horses flourish their ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... but well-authenticated historical fact. Have we yet realised its significance? Have we pictured, are we able to picture to ourselves, what company He kept? Among what surroundings His divine figure was actually seen? In what purlieus of degenerate Jerusalem? In what iniquitous splendours? In what orgies of the Gentiles? And who are they to whom He showed most tenderness? Who but the rich young man? The woman taken in adultery? And Mary Magdalene with her seven devils? ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... men for nourishment or refreshment, must be almost poison to an entirely different and lower order of human beings. The virtues of the common man would perhaps mean vice and weakness in a philosopher; it might be possible for a highly developed man, supposing him to degenerate and go to ruin, to acquire qualities thereby alone, for the sake of which he would have to be honoured as a saint in the lower world into which he had sunk. There are books which have an inverse value for the soul and the health according as the inferior soul and the ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... methysticum, generally called Ava or Kava—its name in the Tongan and other languages. Some old men assert that the true Fijian mode of preparing the root is by grating, as is still the practice in two or three places; but in this degenerate age the Tongan custom of chewing is almost universal, the operation nearly always being performed by young men. More form attends the use of this narcotic on Somosomo than elsewhere. Early in the morning the king's ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... After exhibiting his character in its true light, ringing all the changes upon his worthlessness, and ridiculing his opponent for bringing him there, he closed by saying, "Gentlemen of the jury, I will convince you that this degenerate specimen of humanity is not the son of the saintly and exemplary Elder Asbury Newman, but that he is the legitimate son of Beelzebub the prince of devils. He is an eyesore to his father, a sore eye to his mother, a vagabond upon earth, and a most damnable liar!" Poor Asbury never ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... Sir Henry, as he rose. "I am giving her to you, understand, for your father's sake; in the trust that you are the same honourably good man, standing well before the world and Heaven, that he was. Unless your looks belie you, you are not degenerate." ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... goodwill is the very spirit which we desire to foster. And finally its customs—or at any rate, its main customs—are well designed to symbolize that spirit. If we have allowed the despatch of Christmas cards to degenerate into naught but a tedious shuffling of paste-boards and overwork of post-office officials, the fault is not in the custom but in ourselves. The custom is a most striking one—so long as we have sufficient imagination to remember vividly that we are ...
— The Feast of St. Friend • Arnold Bennett
... till the meal was done To pledge a health? Degenerate son Of friendly sires! a health thrice-told Each guest had pledged to fellowships old,— Untarrying eager mouth to wipe, And across the board with hearty gripe Joining rough hands,—ere the meal was o'er:— Hearts and hands went with "healths" ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... Provencal.[369] To the north there is a similar exchange between Italy and Switzerland with the adjacent Austrian province of the Tyrol. In the rugged highlands of the Swiss Grisons bordering upon Italy, we find a pure Alpine stock, known to the ancients as the Rhaetians, speaking a degenerate Latin tongue called Romansch, which still persists also under the names of Ladino and Frioulian in the Alpine regions of the Tyrol and Italy. In fact, the map of linguistic boundaries in the Grisons shows the dovetailing of German, Italian, and Romansch ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... sympathies, and there was a dread of intrusting to it too many important functions. Mason thought that the sway of an aristocracy would be worse than an absolute monarchy; and if the Senate might every now and then elect the president, there would be a risk that the dignity of his office might degenerate, until he should become a mere creature of the Senate. On the other hand, the small states, in order to have an equal voice with the large ones, in such an emergency as the failure of choice by the electoral college, wished to keep the eventual choice in the hands ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... commune with her and no other; Care and the battle of life shall cease; Men her degenerate children behind us, Only the might of her beauty shall bind us, Full of rest, as we gaze on the face of our mother, Earth in the health and ...
— Among the Millet and Other Poems • Archibald Lampman
... England, and dictates the vote of Parliament on the most momentous question in the history of the world. Why, when these sentiments were uttered, I almost expected to see the shades of Burke and Fox, and Pitt and Chatham, and Peel and Wellington, rise in the midst and denounce the degenerate bearer of such a message. What! the British Commons become the supple tools, the obsequious minions, the obedient parasites, to do the bidding of a foreign master, and tremble when his envoy should stamp his foot and wave the imperial banner in the halls of Parliament. From whom was this message, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the writer's own canons of taste. In hac est pura oratio, a phrase of the prologue to The Self-Tormentor, is the implied burden of them all. He is a sort of Literary Robespierre; one seems to catch the premonitory echo of well-known phrases, "degenerate condition of literary spirit, backsliding on this hand and on that, I, Terence, alone left incorruptible." Three times there is a reference to Plautus, and always with a tone of chilly superiority which is too proud ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... have joined in giving testimony against our author, as to the choice of his verse, which they condemn as boyish and being apt to degenerate into the doggrel; but while they censure his verse, they applaud his matter, and Dryden observes, that had he chose any other verse, he would even then have excelled; as we say of a court favourite, that whatever his office be, he still makes it uppermost, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... apart from the racial factor, enables it to respond for good or for evil to the pre-natal—that is to say, maternal—environment. Thus we may easily fall into the mistake of supposing our race to be degenerate, when poor feeding and exposure to unhealthy surroundings on the part of the mothers are really responsible for the crop of weaklings that we deplore. And, in so far as it turns out to be so, social reformers ought to heave a sigh of relief. Why? ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... which fall under these last heads are only tolerable within narrow limits, and always require careful watching; for they may easily become excessive or even betray an animus; and in either case they pass at once into quite a different category. From cases of excusable oscitancy they degenerate, either into instances of inexcusable licentiousness, or else into ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... vantage the steeples of Notre Dame de Noyon add the one ingredient which makes a unity of the entire ensemble,—a true old-world atmosphere, a town seen in not too apparent a state of unrepair and certainly not a degenerate. ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... thief? The persecutor of women? The pitiless butcher of defenseless men? Were those fine, clean-cut features but a mask that covered an abyss of black evil? Did that broad forehead actually conceal the crafty, degenerate brain that planned and executed the bloody and treacherous piracy ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... treated by the "cyanide" process), I collected specimens for some time in the beautiful forests at the foot of the limestone mountains of Poak. Here I saw something of the Land Dayaks, but they are a poor degenerate breed, and not to be compared to the Sea Dayaks, who are born fighters, and whose predatory head-hunting instincts give a great deal of trouble to the government. These latter were the Dayaks I was anxious to meet, and I soon made arrangements ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... be added here, that an occasional girl goes wrong through temperamental shortcomings within herself—perhaps she may even be a degenerate; but the proportion of women who would willingly and deliberately sacrifice their virtue is vanishingly small as compared with the proportion of young men who seem to be willing to sacrifice their virtue. This is probably ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... concerns us a good deal more. Further, it is unfair to the Lower-Empire to view it only as a time of feebleness and cowardice and corruption. It was also an epoch of immense activity, prolific of daring and high-flying adventurers, some of them heroic. Even the most degenerate of the last Emperors never lost the conviction of Roman majesty and grandeur. Unto the very end, they employed all the ruses of their diplomacy to prevent the Barbarian chiefs from imagining themselves anything else but vassals of the Empire. ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... condition of the Jews been more abject than at the time of Mendelssohn's appearance on the scene. It must be remembered that for Jews the middle ages lasted three hundred years after all other nations had begun to enjoy the blessings of the modern era. Veritable slaves, degenerate in language and habits, purchasing the right to live by a tax (Leibzoll), in many cities still wearing a yellow badge, timid, embittered, pale, eloquently silent, the Jews herded in their Ghetto with its single Jew-gate—they, the descendants of the Maccabees, the ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... book, where the heroine receives whacks with patient smiles. Fate boots her from pillar to post and she blesses Fate and is much obliged. That most deadly reproach to degenerate human nature—the accidental fact of sex—had been so skilfully extirpated from those pages that, like chaste amoebae, the characters merely multiplied by immaculate subdivision; and millions of lineal ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... practice. This agrees with the facts generally shown by criminology and sociology, that the elements practicing promiscuity to any great extent in modern societies are those most closely related with the degenerate and criminal elements. Those elements, in other words, in modern society that practice promiscuity are on the road to extinction, and if a people generally were to practice it there is no reason to believe that such a people would meet with ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... scattered here and there among the keepers of the Seal, observant priests. They omit isolated groans. They launch Quixotic sorties. But they retire and collapse without waiting combat. To their denunciation of "degenerate, sinful and corrupting cesspools of alleged art" (I quote from a review of some of my own work appearing in an issue of the Springfield (Ill.) Republican), there is no answering response. They are left abandoned, the Fiery Cross burning ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... whiteness and silky texture, that on the tail is three or four inches long; these cats frequently spread their tails on their backs, as squirrels do. The colour is generally white, but sometimes light brown; they do not catch mice. This beautiful species does not degenerate speedily, and it appears to thrive better in Paris than in any other part of Europe. The figures of both these animals ...
— A Trip to Paris in July and August 1792 • Richard Twiss
... perhaps, they do not speak as they pass each other, and their caresses are lavished on others. Such friendships are not only silly, they are even dangerous. They are a weakening of moral fiber, a waste of mawkish sentimentality. They may be even worse. Such friendship may degenerate even into a species of ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... people of Korea against Japan in the spring of 1919 came as a world surprise. Here was a nation that had been ticketed and docketed by world statesmen as degenerate and cowardly, revealing heroism ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie
... were communities, scarce known by name In these degenerate days, but once far-famed, Where liberty and justice, hand in hand, Ordered the common weal; where great men grew Up to their natural eminence, and none Saving the wise, just, eloquent, were great; Where power ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... was of opinion, at the time—and am so still— that we might have obtained considerably more than we did of the last, but for the eagerness with which we prosecuted our search for the larger gems, which caused our search for the smaller seed pearls to degenerate into a ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... upon as fulfilling the true social function of Art; standing midway between theory and practice; inspired by thought, and stimulating action. Only the social artist has to look to it that his thoughts be not merely true but adequate, lest he degenerate into a mere decorator. How far will a series of "regional surveys," like those of [Page: 143] Mr. Booth in London and Mr. Rowntree in York, carry us! Not so far, I fear, as Professor Geddes seems to hope. Cities in our modern ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... fleeting westward. Sometimes I have had such thoughts, Why may not that be the place of the New Jerusalem? But you have handsomely and fully cleared me from such odd conceits. But what, I pray? Shall our English there degenerate, and join themselves with Gog and Magog? We have heard lately divers ways, that our people there have no hope of the conversion of the natives. And, the very week after I received your last letter, I saw a letter, written from New England, discoursing of an ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... day, but they had gallons of tea, and they consumed them, too; and these stalwart Nor'westers afterwards became as uproarious on that inspiring beverage as if they had all been drunk. There was this peculiarity, however, in their uproar, that it was reasonable, hearty, good-humoured; did not degenerate into shameful imbecility, or shameless impropriety, nor did it end in stupid incapacity. It subsided gradually into pleasant exhaustion, and terminated in profound ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... in an electric chair before he got his deserts. His mind had passed through innumerable phases since he left his sister's house in Washington, and now as he shamelessly flirted with Miss Seebrook he knew himself for an unmoral creature, a degenerate who was all the more dangerous for being able to pass muster among decent folk. He had always imagined that citizens of the underworld were limited in their social indulgences to cautious meetings in the back rooms of low saloons, but this he had found to be a serious mistake. ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... the Minds of the People the Idea of unfortunate from that of the Want of some necessary soldierly Quality. At best the unfortunate General has Pity only as the Reward of his Services; and how soon does Pity degenerate into Contempt. Cicero if I mistake not some where tells us, that when a General is fortunate it matters not whether it is ascribd to his being a Favorite of the Immortal Gods, or to certain good Qualities in him which others are incapable of observing. ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... history nor their fate. What was once a land occupied by nations superstitious and sensual is now inhabited by robbers and slaves. The robbers have been expelled or slain, and the oppressed peasant is emancipated by the arms of the nation who avenged the cause of Heaven upon the degenerate Greeks, but who nevertheless have derived neither instruction nor warning from their downfall and subjugation. The Nile meantime, which has seen so many nations and generations rise and disappear, still flows and overflows, to distribute its fertilizing ...
— A Narrative of the Expedition to Dongola and Sennaar • George Bethune English
... government of college, Those liberal helluos of knowledge, Who, e'en in these degenerate days, Deserve the world's unceasing praise; Who, friends of science and of men, Stand forth Gomorrah's righteous ten; On them I naught but thanks bestow, For, like my cash, my credit's low; So I can give nor clothes nor wines, But bid them welcome ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... satisfactory progress is made the instructor will proceed to the exercises at will, by which is meant assaults between two men, each endeavoring to hit the other and to avoid being hit himself. Fencing at will should not be allowed to degenerate into ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... it. This is the subject which this narrative opens; and we, the long-descended offspring of these hordes, have seen this sight and witnessed this exertion of power carried on through centuries; and degenerate and ungrateful children as we are, we are living still upon the deeds which God wrought in that conversion of the nations by the pastoral staff of St. Peter, leading them into a land ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... that is, he tortures him. From that moment the fall of that man is rapid. The heat, the loneliness, the fever, the fear of the black faces, keep him on edge, rob him of sleep, rob him of his physical strength, of his moral strength. He loses shame, loses reason; becomes cruel, weak, degenerate. He invents new, bestial tortures; commits new, unspeakable 'atrocities,' until, one day, the natives turn and kill him, or he sticks his gun in his mouth and blows the top ...
— Once Upon A Time • Richard Harding Davis
... lessons concerning Esau. He was a man intent upon immediate physical enjoyment; an idle drifter without spiritual ideals. From his character and that of the Edomites, his descendants, there is taught the lesson that such an unambitious man or nation will always become degenerate and prove a failure. God himself cannot make a man out of ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... a large area relatively to its population; it has broad streets and very few slums. But it has come down in the world since the Renaissance. Degenerate descendants of the d'Estes of that time stripped many of the Palazzi of their artistic beauties and sold them to help pay their debts. Ferrara is a city of old Palazzi, street after street of them, inhabited mainly now by well-to-do ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... so much credit at the Elks, the Athletic Club, and the Boosters'. His friends had always congratulated him on his oratory, but in their praise was doubt, for even in speeches advertising the city there was something highbrow and degenerate, like writing poetry. But now Orville Jones shouted across the Athletic dining-room, "Here's the new director of the First State Bank!" Grover Butterbaugh, the eminent wholesaler of plumbers' supplies, chuckled, "Wonder ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... marvellous and mysterious character that seemed at the first glance to invest it, and takes rank, without any straining, among the other processes of selection. It seems to me that, from the facts that sterile animal forms can adapt themselves to new vital functions, their superfluous parts degenerate, and the parts more used adapt themselves in an ascending direction, those less used in a descending direction, we must draw the conclusion that harmonious adaptation here comes about without the cooeperation of the Lamarckian principle. This conclusion once established, however, we ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... B.C.): degenerate polished red and painted white ware; wheel-made white ware with painted ornament in glazed black or brown, of the 'Late Minoan' or 'Mycenaean' style introduced from the Aegean; various hand-made wares of foreign styles, probably from Syria or ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... disappeared as an efficient organ, but the significant fact is that small rudiments of hind limbs are present just where corresponding structures are placed in the seal. These vestiges cannot be reasonably accounted for, unless they are the degenerate hinder limbs of a remote four-footed ancestor. Furthermore the unborn whale possesses a complete coat of hair, which is afterwards replaced by blubber; but hair is a thatchlike coat to shed rain, as the way the hairs lie on a terrestrial mammal indicates. ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... invited him to meet the Prince of Wales.] meal. But I am too old for company that would be so new, so don't take it amiss, my best of friends, if I ask to be bidden when I should see more of YOU. You don't know how dull a man, once lively, can degenerate into being. ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... case of the epileptic Misdea, which first suggested to my father the idea of a link between crime and epilepsy. As this case has become famous in the annals of crime in Italy, it will perhaps be of interest to the reader. Misdea, the son of degenerate parents, manifested a series of typical epileptic anomalies—asymmetry, vaso-motor disturbances, impulsiveness, ferocity, etc. At the age of twenty, while serving in the army, for some trivial motive he ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... shown in Figs. 18 and 19, the difference being that the Apache shack is not covered with birch bark, a material peculiar to the North, but the Apache uses a thatch of the rank grass to be found where his shacks are located. To-day, however, the White Mountain Apache has become so degenerate and so lost to the true sense of dignity as a savage that he stoops to use corn-stalks with which to thatch the long, sloping sides of his shed-like house but by so doing he really shows good horse sense, for corn-stalks and corn leaves make ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard
... the excellent and gifted young man every success; I trust that his youthful idealism and impulse towards the ideas of the people may never degenerate, as often happens, on the moral side into gloomy mysticism, and on the political into blind chauvinism—two elements which are even a greater menace to Russia than the premature decay, due to misunderstanding and ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... go back; year by year, the tone of public opinion must sink lower down; year by year, the Congress and the Senate must become of less account before all decent men; and year by year, the memory of the Great Fathers of the Revolution must be outraged more and more, in the bad life of their degenerate child. ...
— Contributions to All The Year Round • Charles Dickens
... makes a donkey load. The gigantic cauliflower is not distinct from our European species, but is solely produced by a cultivation which necessity has dictated. Being one of the Northern vegetables that degenerate or bear no seed if not annually procured from Europe, it is propagated by cuttings. After the heads are gathered the stubs are allowed to throw out new shoots, which are again planted and have to grow two years, producing the ...
— The Cauliflower • A. A. Crozier
... and his time as a subject and thus to challenge comparison with Dumas's immortal musketeers; but the result justifies the boldness.... The plot is admirably clear and strong, the diction singularly concise and telling, and the stirring events are so managed as not to degenerate into sensationalism. Few better novels of adventure than this have ever been written."—OUTLOOK, ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... right himself in her eyes. But so headlong was he in the attempt, and so misguided, that presently he overshot his mark by dropping an unflattering word concerning Crispin, whereby he attributed to the Tavern Knight's influence and example the degenerate change that had of late been wrought ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... of the Philadelphia Convention favored the indefinite eligibility of the President. It was Jefferson who raised the objection that indefinite eligibility would in fact be for life and degenerate into an inheritance. Prior to 1940 the idea that no President should hold for more than two terms was generally thought to be a fixed tradition, although some quibbles had been raised as to the meaning of the word "term". President Franklin ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... there must be moral equality or else no respect; and hence between parent and child intercourse is apt to degenerate into a verbal fencing-bout, and misapprehensions to become engrained. And there is another side to this, for the parent begins with an imperfect notion of the child's character, formed in early years or ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... it. He seemed to take a kind of satisfaction in disgusting them, and driving them nearly mad, while they were so irritably sensitive at the age of fourteen or fifteen. So that Arthur, who was growing up when his father was degenerate and elderly, hated ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... defend ye—and rehearse FIVE glorious ACTS of yours—in modern verse; Each one concluding with a generous deed For Dunlap, Cooper, Woodworth, Knowles, Placide! 'Twas nobly done, ye patriots and scholars! Besides—they netted twenty thousand dollars! "A good round sum," in these degenerate times— "This bank-note world," so called in Halleck's rhymes; And proof conclusive, you will frankly own, In liberal actions ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... Holland, being truly and absolutely a Dutch enterprise; and though all the proofs in the world were introduced on the other side, I would set them at nought as undeserving my attention. If these three reasons be not sufficient to satisfy every burgher of this ancient city, all I can say is they are degenerate descendants from their venerable Dutch ancestors, and totally unworthy the trouble of convincing. Thus, therefore, the title of Hendrick Hudson to his renowned discovery ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... supplementary buildings fit for companionship with this quaint home, and a fenced garden and ancient orchard, beyond which five woodmen were leisurely sawing an old-fashioned woodpile of immense size;—only princely estates can supply such a luxury in these degenerate days. ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton
... changed in our degenerate days, and it is now possible for any one to find any other person with the simple key of ...
— A Hundred Years by Post - A Jubilee Retrospect • J. Wilson Hyde
... intellectual messages and ambitious discussions into the film houses. Political and economic, social and hygienic, technical and industrial, esthetic and scientific questions can in no way be brought nearer to the grasp of millions. The editors will have to take care that the discussions do not degenerate into one-sided propaganda, but so must the editors of a printed magazine. Among the scientists the psychologist may have a particular interest in this latest venture of the film world. The screen ought to offer a unique opportunity to interest wide ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... degenerate youth (who before the war had been unlovingly known throughout Europe as the "White Rabbit" and who now was mentioned in dispatches as the "Crown Prince") had succeeded in leading some half-million fellow-Germans into a "pocket" that had ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... and its physical constitution traces of a foreign origin. The Caribs preserve traditions that seem to indicate ancient communications between North and South America. Such a phenomenon deserves particular attention. If it be true that savages are for the most part degenerate races, remnants escaped from a common wreck, as their languages, their cosmogonic fables, and numerous other indications seem to prove, it becomes doubly important to examine the course by which these remnants have been driven from one hemisphere ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... at Jedburgh, in the days of yore It was a pewter measure, the claret being in ancient days served from the tap, and had the figure of a hen upon the lid. In later times the name was given to a glass bottle of the same dimensions. These are rare apparitions among the degenerate topers of ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... utriculus is a warped, irregular bag, whose sections have become unrecognizable. The utriculus and sacculus are in wide-open communication with each other and have almost become one. The utriculus opens broadly into the scala tympani, and the nervous elements of the cochlea are degenerate. ...
— The Dancing Mouse - A Study in Animal Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... the episode in the Farmers' and Merchants' burglar-proof had become an episode forgotten—or at least forgiven. "You know men—a little; but when it comes to the women ... well, if I didn't keep continually nagging at you, your two heroines—with neither of whom you are really in love—would degenerate into ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... we repay The debt thou claim'st in this exhausted age? Thou givest our lyres a theme, that might engage Those that could send thy name o'er sea and land, While sea and land shall last; for Homer's rage A theme; a theme for Milton's mighty hand - How much unmeet for us, a faint degenerate band! ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott
... such an education are not counteracted by the life of the battle-field or the laborious sport of hunting. And if the laws of etiquette and Court manners can act on the spinal marrow to such an extent as to affect the pelvis of kings, to soften their cerebral tissue, and so degenerate the race, what deep-seated mischief, physical and moral, must result in schoolboys from the constant lack of ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... of Murray, the natural son of James V. The Franciscan monks were not very popular at this period, and at the suggestion of the King Buchanan wrote a satirical poem entitled Silva Franciscanorum, in which he censured the degenerate followers of St. Francis, and harassed them in many ways. This poem so enraged the monks that they seized him and imprisoned him in one of their monasteries. One night, while his guards slept, he contrived to escape by a window, and underwent great perils. ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... felt Out along the wall for support. Was this a dream, some ghastly, soul-terrifying nightmare! Danglar! Those working lips! That callous viciousness, that leer in the degenerate face. It seemed to bring a weakness to her limbs, and seek to rob her of the strength to stand. She could not even hope against hope; she knew that Danglar was in deadly earnest. Danglar would not have the slightest compunction, let alone hesitation, in ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... do myself justice; whether wise or weak in the presence of the only being who had ever mastered my mind, I was determined not "to point a moral and adorn a tale." I had other duties and other purposes before me than to degenerate into a slave of sighs. I was to be no Romeo, bathing my soul in the luxuries of Italian palace-chambers, moonlight speeches, and the song of nightingales. I felt that I was an Englishman, and had the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... of the degenerate race on the high Realt was rightly feared in the whole district. He was the terror of the peaceful inhabitants of the district, and harried not only them but also merchants and pilgrims who passed along ...
— Legends of the Rhine • Wilhelm Ruland
... background for his plays, but only a background. A picture of Spanish society does emerge from the dramas, indeed. It is a society in which there are great extremes of wealth and poverty, in which the old titled families are generally degenerate and slothful, and the middle classes display admirable spiritual qualities, but are too often unthrifty and inefficient. Of the laboring classes, Galds has little to say. Bitter religious and political intolerance creates ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... did more than this: it gave her a self-reliance quite unusual—indeed not very desirable—in one so young; and there was danger, all the greater because she was quite unconscious of it, that it might degenerate into something different from an humble yet earnest self-reliance. But there was nothing of that as yet, and all ...
— Shenac's Work at Home • Margaret Murray Robertson
... with him; and the fragrant clouds would be some consolation in the eyes, or rather in the noses, of some of us. But still,—almost six hours of tragedy! It is too much of a good thing for these degenerate days; and we must allow the prompter to use his pencil on the actors' copy of "Hamlet," though he strike out page upon ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... statesman and general, was an hereditary priest of the Eleusinian family of the Kerykes, and held the offices of archon basileus and eponymus in Athens. When the Heruli overran Greece and captured Athens (269), Dexippus showed great personal courage and revived the spirit of patriotism among his degenerate fellow-countrymen. A statue was set up in his honour, the base of which, with an inscription recording his services, has been preserved (Corpus Inscrr. Atticarum, iii. No. 716). It is remarkable ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... by these light wizards of our degenerate age, I dreamed away most of my school life, utterly deaf to the voices of the older enchanters—Homer, Horace, Virgil—whom I was sent to school on purpose to make friends with; a deafness I lived to deplore, like other dunces, when ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... been of the same type as her step-daughter, Masa. Both possessed high courage and intellectual endowments of an extraordinary order, and both were profoundly ambitious. Maki saw no reason why her husband, Hojo Tokimasa, should lend all his great influence to support the degenerate scions of one of his family in preference to the able and distinguished representative of the other branch. Tomomasa was both able and distinguished. By a prompt and vigorous exercise of military talent he had crushed a Heike rising in Ise, which had threatened for a time to become perilously ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... Leonard took note of these things, which, to his mind, showed clearly that the inhabitants of this city were the degenerate inheritors of some ancient and forgotten civilisation. Their fortifications, stone-built houses, drinking-shops, and markets indicated this, just as their rude system of theology, with its divinities of Light ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... the worthless men become workmen. Worthless men are changed into economic assets. The dependents become independent. Working by means of the laws of environment and association, the Army elevates the degenerate from a pseudo-social and anti-social class to a higher level and to social position. Where individuality was lost, independence of ...
— The Social Work of the Salvation Army • Edwin Gifford Lamb
... them and to protect them from fraud and injustice.* The current opinion of the Indian character, however, is too apt to be formed from the miserable hordes which infest the frontiers and hang on the skirts of the settlements. These are too commonly composed of degenerate beings, corrupted and enfeebled by the vices of society, without being benefited by its civilization. That proud independence which formed the main pillar of savage virtue has been shaken down, and the whole moral fabric lies in ruins. Their ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... wrought velvet of knavery;" and in his Father Hubburd's Tales, we find "like an old cunning bowler to fetch in a young ketling gamester:" see Middleton's Works, v. 543, 589, ed. Dyce. Keistrels are hawks of a worthless and degenerate breed. ...
— Kemps Nine Daies Wonder - Performed in a Daunce from London to Norwich • William Kemp
... they have made less progress in civilization than their philanthropic champions have promised or anticipated, let the want I have suggested receive some consideration. It may be that even a white peasantry would degenerate under such influences. Reverse this, and when the negro has cropped his sugar or his coffee, create a demand for his labour in the mills and manufactories of which nature has invited the establishment on this island, and before another sixteen years ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... descended from the apes being generally quoted as a correct expression of Darwin's theory, whereas he never suggested any such thing, but that man and the apes had a common ancestor, which makes of the ape rather a degenerate lemur than a human ancestor. Other and more prevalent errors will occur to the reader, these being due to the use of what is called "the evidence of the senses"; and of all criteria the evidence of ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... which they were made. And as, according to Dr. Ingleby, "the primal evidence of the forgery lies in the ink writing, and in that alone," with that alone we shall at present concern ourselves. As the careless, half-formed hand of the present day, degenerate from "the round hand of the school-master," appears only in the pencil writing, we have therefore to deal but with the first three styles of writing enumerated by Mr. Hardy; and as he himself admits that "it is perfectly possible that any ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... note that this is most filthy and deadening and brutalizing work; that it is a cause of anemia, nervousness, ugliness, and ill-temper; of prostitution, suicide, and insanity; of drunken husbands and degenerate children—for all of which things the community has naturally to pay. And now consider that in each of my little free communities there would be a machine which would wash and dry the dishes, and do it, not merely to the eye and the touch, but scientifically—sterilizing them—and ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... of noble birth. He would probably have been better for a plebeian strain, since there was in him a touch of the degenerate. His mother's father had published a humanitarian poem on cats. His great-uncle had written a peculiar novel. Young Alfred was nervous, delicate, slightly epileptic, and it is certain that he was given to dissipation, which so far had affected his health only ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... glittered on the sideboards, the numerous dishes, that covered the tables, the number and gay liveries of the attendants, with the chivalric and splendid attire of the guests, united to form a scene of magnificence, such as we may not hope to see in these DEGENERATE DAYS. ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... and to depend for their livelihood on the property of others, as soon as they find a leader who is enterprising but is excluded from the honors of office by his poverty, institute the rule of violence; and now uniting their forces massacre, banish, and plunder, until they degenerate again into perfect savages and find once more a master ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... military manoeuvre was repeated more than once by Roman generals, and shows how admirably the troops were drilled in what are called the degenerate days of the Roman armies.—(Finlay's Greece under the Romans, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... would do him good now; he was thoroughly bewitched by the girl, and though he made a hundred promises to give her up, would never hold one of them. Alas! alas! that the son of good Duke Philip should be so degenerate. ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... towards the Brill, Sylvia still remaining under that amiable disguise: but in their passage from town to town, which is sometimes by coach, and other times by boat, they chanced one day to encounter a young Hollander of a more than ordinary gallantry for that country, so degenerate from good manners, and almost common civility, and so far short of all the good qualities that made themselves appear in this young nobleman. He was very handsome, well made, well dressed, and very ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... other half-human demons, are sometimes regarded as degenerate gods. It will be seen, however, that while certain spirits developed into deities, others remained something between these two classes of supernatural beings: they might attend upon gods and goddesses, or operate ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... beauties; you should have extracted 'em. "The Ancient Marinere" plays more tricks with the mind than that last poem, which is yet one of the finest written. But I am getting too dogmatical; and before I degenerate into abuse, I will conclude with assuring you ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... than error, and must have been, on the whole, useful to mankind. We do not believe that they originated in human fraud, that their essence is superstition, that there is more falsehood than truth in their doctrines, that their moral tendency is mainly injurious, or that they continually degenerate into greater evil. No doubt it may be justly predicated of all these systems that they contain much which is false and injurious to human virtue. But the following considerations may tend to show that all the ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... a single woman. It may degenerate to a fault, it is true; but in most of those in this condition it is so restricted, as to be a theme not for censure, but approbation. In a country like ours, where, if fortunes are often made, they are also not seldom lost, in a day, this virtue is of prime concern. And everywhere ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... common thing as a wheel. Idiots! Solomon's court fool would have scoffed at the thought of the young Galilean who dared compare the lilies of the field to his august master. Nil admirari is very well for a North American Indian and his degenerate successor, who has grown too grand to admire anything but himself, and takes a cynical pride in his stolid indifference to everything worth reverencing ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... our young friends begin to think, becoming mercenary, 'This is the man who HAD pounds, who borrowed them,' which I did. I always borrow pounds. So our young friends, reduced to prose (which is much to be regretted), degenerate in their power of imparting pleasure to me. Why should I go to see ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... Enough. It is all seeming, and no being. If you would know how a man speaks in earnest, Read here this passage, where St. Peter thunders In Paradise against degenerate Popes And the corruptions of the church, till all The heaven about him blushes like a sunset. I beg you to take note of what he says About the Papal seals, for that concerns Your ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... plays? What necessity is there at times to put one piece into another? Are not his discussions and monologues too long? Does not his own exuberant genius become a fatigue to himself and to his readers? Are not, perhaps, his characters too real? and do they not often degenerate, without motive, from the sublime into the ridiculous? Would Hamlet have appeared less interesting or less mad had he not spoken indelicate and cruel words to Ophelia? Would Laertes have seemed less grieved on hearing of ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... handsomest young man in Athens. He was aristocratic, proud, insolent, and needlessly rich. He had a passion for gambling, horse-racing, dog-fighting, and indulged in the churchly habit of doing that which he ought not and leaving undone that which he should have done. He was worse than that degenerate scion of a proud ancestry, who a-kneiping went with his lady friends in the Cincinnati fountain, after the opera, on a wager. He whipped a man who admitted he did not have a copy of the "Iliad" in his house; publicly destroyed ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... pages of a dictionary in an endeavour to express her feelings and the pleasure she experienced in seeing these faithful retainers again: she wept, and the old men wept, and we all agreed, as elderly people will, that in former days the sun was brighter and life altogether rosier than in these degenerate times. Before leaving, the old servants simultaneously lifted their arms in the Mahommedan gesture of blessing, with all the innate dignity of the Oriental; it was really a very touching sight, nor do I think that the very ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... laudable attempts to bring about a closer connection with that country by means of a wise and liberal treaty of commerce brought on him the severe censure of the opposition. He was told in the House of Commons that he was a degenerate son, and that his partiality for the hereditary foes of our island was enough to make his great father's bones stir under the pavement ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... up a complete system of allusions similar to the allegories of our own classics but superior in that they never degenerate into frozen symbols, but on the contrary keep in close touch with nature, investing her with a vibrant life, in which human consciousness vanishes making way for the dawning consciousness ...
— Chinese Painters - A Critical Study • Raphael Petrucci
... brought from Europe lose in a few years their distinctive qualities, and degenerate at length into the cur with erect ears, kuyu, vulgarly called the pariah dog. An instance did not occur of any one going mad during the period of my residence. Many of them are affected with ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... their caresses are lavished on others. Such friendships are not only silly, they are even dangerous. They are a weakening of moral fiber, a waste of mawkish sentimentality. They may be even worse. Such friendship may degenerate even into a species of self-abuse ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... at the incoherence of what I write. Diverse emotions inflame me; thoughts at times assail me truly worthy of my immortal soul; but at times also I fall into a lamentable state of dejection, and I am reminded of the weak and degenerate characters whose baseness you have painted to me in such strong colors, in order that I might abhor them. In the state in which I am to-day I am ready for good or for evil. God have pity upon me! I already know what prayer is—a solemn and reflexive supplication, so personal that it is not compatible ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... end, not in the fifth century, as ordinarily considered, but in the fifteenth; not at Rome, but at Constantinople, where the Eastern empire survived the Western for a thousand years. At length, in 1453, the Turks captured Constantinople, set a broad foot upon the degenerate empire of the East, and crushed out the last feeble remnants of life left in the pygmy successor of ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... Dunn, again, "how village girls fall for a bankclerk—when we are made of the very stuff their own brothers are made of. Most of us came from a farm or a village. The bank has fitted us out with a shine and a shave, also has made us more useless year after year, and when we degenerate sufficiently the girls begin to adore us. I used to correspond with ten ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... profusion of gold and silver, that glittered on the sideboards, the numerous dishes, that covered the tables, the number and gay liveries of the attendants, with the chivalric and splendid attire of the guests, united to form a scene of magnificence, such as we may not hope to see in these DEGENERATE DAYS. ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... am a man of few words, and, therefore, constitutionally economical of them; but brevity is apt to degenerate into obscurity. Writing a book, however, and book-making, are two very different things: "spinning a yarn" is mechanical, and book-making savours of trade, and is the employment of a manufacturer. The author ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... the Leprechawn of Ireland, a relic of the pagan mythology of that country. By birth the Leprechawn is of low descent, his father being an evil spirit and his mother a degenerate fairy; by nature he is a mischief-maker, the Puck of the Emerald Isle. He is of diminutive size, about three feet high, and is dressed in a little red jacket or roundabout, with red breeches buckled at the knee, gray or black ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... activities of mind, and their connection with definite parts of the brain; psychiatry has shown that those psychical processes are disturbed or destroyed if these parts of the brain become diseased or degenerate. Histology has revealed to us the extremely complicated structure and arrangement of the ganglion-cells. But, for the settlement of this momentous question, the discoveries of the last ten years with regard to the more minute occurrences in the process of ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... sincere in disbelief based on rational grounds. He had found those who evaded and some who were indifferent, many who compromised, never before a sweeping denial. He could not picture an atheist as other than a perverted monster, a moral degenerate, the personification of all evil. This was his conception of such as denied his God. Blasphemers. Foredoomed to hell. Yet he had found MacLeod hospitable, ready with kindly advice, occupying a position of trust in the service of a great company. Was it after all possible that ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... in her eyes. But so headlong was he in the attempt, and so misguided, that presently he overshot his mark by dropping an unflattering word concerning Crispin, whereby he attributed to the Tavern Knight's influence and example the degenerate change that had of ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... springing from episodes of the Moorish wars, and the romances novelescos, which deal with romantic incidents of daily life. The romances juglarescos are longer poems, mostly concerned with Charlemagne page 254 and his peers, veritable degenerate epics, composed by itinerant minstrels to be sung in streets and taverns to throngs of apprentices and rustics. They have not the spontaneity and vigor which characterize the better ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... forefathers have exterminated all the Indians, and their degenerate children no longer dwell in garrisoned houses nor hear any war-whoop in their path. It would be well, perchance, if many an "English Chaplin" in these days could exhibit as unquestionable trophies of his valor as did "good young Frye." We have need to be as sturdy pioneers still ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... rest in the same manner, he observed that one of his grandsons, for his better accommodation, had rolled a large snow-ball, and placed it below his head. The wrath of the ancient chief was awakened by a symptom of what he conceived to be degenerate luxury. 'Out upon thee,' said he, kicking the frozen bolster from the head which it supported, 'art thou so effeminate as to need a pillow?' The officer of engineers, whose curious Letters from the Highlands have been more than once quoted, tells a similar story ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... a fortitude beyond description she had faced it, gently, quietly, but firmly faced it—firmly, because she had to be firm in keeping him within those bounds the invasion of which would have killed her. And after the first struggle with his unchangeable brutality it had been easier: for into his degenerate brain there had come a faint understanding of the real situation and of her. He had kept his side of the gulf, but gloating on this touch between the old luxurious, indulgent life, with its refined vices, and this present ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... thirtieth of September, 1809, Governor Harrison called all the tribes that claimed certain lands between the White and Wabash rivers to a council. Only a few of the weak and degenerate tribes answered the summons. Nevertheless, he went through the ceremony of making a treaty by which the United States government claimed three million acres of ...
— Four American Indians - King Philip, Pontiac, Tecumseh, Osceola • Edson L. Whitney
... repugnant world which surrounds him. As a postillion of the State he has frequent communications with the distant world which glows vaguely on his mental horizon. Everything displeases him: both the savage country in which he has to live, and the world of stupid, degenerate, and miserable postillions whom he mercilessly criticizes. His random attempts to get away fail. Despairing, he becomes an accomplice in a crime so that he can leave this solitary place and go where ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... observation as at other times. It may, in some schools, where the number is small, or the prevailing habits of seriousness and order are good, be well to allow the older scholars to read the prayer in rotation, taking especial care that it does not degenerate into a mere reading exercise; but that it is understood, both by readers and hearers, to be a solemn act of religious worship. In a word, if the teacher is really honest and sincere in his wish to lead his pupils to the ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... be between its practices and its professions. Again and again its poet goes back to the heroic founders of Spoon River, back to the days which nurtured Lincoln, whose shadow lies mighty, beneficent, too often unheeded, over the degenerate sons and daughters of a smaller day; and from an older, robuster integrity Mr. Masters takes a standard by which he morosely measures the purposelessness and furtiveness and supineness and dulness of the village which ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... eldest son is in a blacksmith's shop at Worcester, and is sending her part of his weekly savings. But it has been a poor season for canaries, and a still poorer one for lodgers; for people in these degenerate days prefer to be nearer the hotels and the mild gaieties of the larger settlements. It is all very well so long as I remain with her, and she wishes fervently that that may be for ever; for never, she says, eloquently, never in all her Cheltenham and Belvern ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... young lady's boudoir—a place of business and not a drawing-room. It was a very pretty room, as Sarrasin saw at a glance when he entered it with a grand and old-fashioned bow, such as men make no more in these degenerate days. It was very quietly decorated with delicate colours, and a few etchings and many flowers; and Dolores herself came from behind her writing desk, smiling and blushing, to meet her tall visitor. The old soldier scanned her as he ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... reproach himself, and thenceforth, as before, he went straight to his aim in silence. We all know what that aim was; we also know that it was never given to any man to succeed more fully. With less conviction or less firmness, it is probable that, notwithstanding his natural genius, his degenerate works would not have long survived those of his mediocre rivals now completely forgotten. But truth of expression, purity of style, and grandeur of form belong to all time. Gluck's fine passages will always be fine. Victor Hugo is right: the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... recorded the facts as they occurred, and the impressions as they arose, without attempting to make a case against any person or any policy. Indeed, I fear that assailing none, I may have offended all. Neutrality may degenerate into an ignominious isolation. An honest and unprejudiced attempt to discern the truth is my sole defence, as the good opinion of the reader has been throughout my chief aspiration, and can be in the end ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... only tolerable within narrow limits, and always require careful watching; for they may easily become excessive or even betray an animus; and in either case they pass at once into quite a different category. From cases of excusable oscitancy they degenerate, either into instances of inexcusable licentiousness, or else into ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... conceal the most sinister combinations. You are only an honest countryman wandering amongst a crowd of courtiers,—virtue in danger amidst a myriad of vices: they speak our language, and we do not know theirs. Would it be possible that they should not deceive us? Louis XVI., of a degenerate race, without elevation of mind, or energy of will, allowed himself to be enthralled early in life by religious prejudices, which have even lessened his intellect; fascinated by a giddy queen, who unites to Austrian insolence the enchantment of beauty and the ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... him—and I have seen them going in both directions. I do not know of any argument that can be used to prove that man is an improved monkey that may not be used just as well to prove that the monkey is a degenerate man, and the latter theory is more ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... once, on the other. Deplorable errors, innumerable mistakes, are thus committed—particularly in the intermediate parts—errors which the chorus-master and the conductor do not perceive. Once established, these errors degenerate into habits, and become part and ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... proportions disregarded in his plays? What necessity is there at times to put one piece into another? Are not his discussions and monologues too long? Does not his own exuberant genius become a fatigue to himself and to his readers? Are not, perhaps, his characters too real? and do they not often degenerate, without motive, from the sublime into the ridiculous? Would Hamlet have appeared less interesting or less mad had he not spoken indelicate and cruel words to Ophelia? Would Laertes have seemed less grieved on hearing of the death of his sister had he ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... gigantic and symmetrical figures of most of the warriors, who seemed as they reclined, in native ease and gracefulness, with their half naked bodies exposed to view, rather like statues from some master hand, than beings of a race whom we had heard characterized as degenerate and debased. They were clad in leggins and moccasins of buckskin, and wore blankets, which were thrown around them in the manner of the Roman toga, so as to leave their right arms bare. The youngest among ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake
... And from the see (whose bounty to the just And needy is gone by, not through its fault, But his who fills it basely, he besought, No dispensation for commuted wrong, Nor the first vacant fortune, nor the tenth), That to God's paupers rightly appertain, But, 'gainst an erring and degenerate world, Licence to fight, in favour of that seed, From which the twice twelve cions gird thee round. Then, with sage doctrine and good will to help, Forth on his great apostleship he far'd, Like torrent bursting from a lofty vein; And, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... forced to cohabit with them, for Relief and Conversation; and that in process of Time, they conform'd themselves to the Manners of their Indian Relations. And thus we see, how apt Humane Nature is to degenerate. ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson
... form is so unique that it is well to notice that the throwing-stick in Eskimoland has its simplest form in the center and not in the extremities of its whole area. It is as yet unsafe to speculate concerning the origin of this implement. A rude form is as likely to be a degenerate son as to be the relic of a barbaric ancestry. Among the theories of origin respecting the Eskimo, that which claims for them a more southern habitat long ago is of great force. If, following retreating ice, they first struck ...
— Throwing-sticks in the National Museum • Otis T. Mason
... the northern extremity of the Island of Ceylon, in the beginning of the year 1819: when, one morning, my servant called me an hour or two before my usual time, with, 'Master, master! people sent for master's dogs—tiger in the town!' Now, my dogs chanced to be some very degenerate specimens of a fine species, called the Poligar dog, which I should designate as a sort of wiry-haired grayhound, without scent. I kept them to hunt jackals; but tigers are very different things: ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... and a perverted and fantastic style of writing assigned to an epoch remarkable for the severity and precision of its taste? If Spain is meant, the attack is perfectly intelligible, as the epoch is exactly that when Spanish taste began to degenerate, and the style of Spanish writers to become vicious, inflated, and fantastic, in imitation of Gongora, who did so much to ruin the literature of his country; as other writers of much less ability, but who addressed themselves to a public ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... parrot, "of such excellencies as these are women composed. It is said that 'wet cloth will extinguish fire and bad food will destroy strength; a degenerate son ruins a family, and when a friend is in wrath he takes away life. But a woman is an inflicter of grief in love and in hate, whatever she does turns out to be for our ill. Truly the Deity has created woman a strange being in this world.' ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... distance, but forbear the prize. Then fierce Tydides stoops; and from the fields Heaved with vast force, a rocky fragment wields. Not two strong men the enormous weight could raise, Such men as live in these degenerate days:(147) He swung it round; and, gathering strength to throw, Discharged the ponderous ruin at the foe. Where to the hip the inserted thigh unites, Full on the bone the pointed marble lights; Through ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... is affected, and they are raised to a higher level. In this way then, in successful cases, the worthless men become workmen. Worthless men are changed into economic assets. The dependents become independent. Working by means of the laws of environment and association, the Army elevates the degenerate from a pseudo-social and anti-social class to a higher level and to social position. Where individuality was lost, ...
— The Social Work of the Salvation Army • Edwin Gifford Lamb
... Francis de Valois, to whom she was affianced, was a poor, bilious, degenerate weakling, stunted in figure, uncomely of face. He was shy and timid, shunning active exercises, and though at the time of his marriage (1558) he was too young to have been actively engaged in the vices ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... adds a steady current of what I may be allowed to call the rancid. That is exciting to the moralist; but what more particularly interests the artist is this tendency of the extreme of detail, when followed as a principle, to degenerate into mere feux-de-joie of literary tricking. The other day even M. Daudet was to be heard babbling of audible colours ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... from keeping a close watch that would degenerate into drudgery and to remain alive to events even when resting, with her back turned on the net, the ambushed Spider always has her foot upon the telegraph-wire. Of my observations on this subject, ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... their acclamations disparaging remarks upon his predecessor, whom they affected to regard as the issue of an adulterous intrigue, and as no true Arsacid. Tiridates was pleased to reward the unseemly flattery of these degenerate Greeks by a new arrangement of their constitution. Hitherto they had lived under the government of a Senate of Three Hundred members, the wisest and wealthiest of the citizens, a certain control being, however, secured ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... distinctions are rapidly disappearing. In fact, we have scarcely any thing left, even now, but the shadow of a true aristocracy, and that is only to be found in Virginia. At the North, mere wealth makes a man a gentleman; and this new invention of these degenerate times is fast being adopted even here in the 'Old Dominion.' But it won't do—unless a man is born and bred a gentleman, he ...
— Words for the Wise • T. S. Arthur
... it!" she cried. "What woman worth her salt doesn't regret it, doesn't want to live, even if she has to suffer for it? And those people—the revolutionaries, I mean, the rebels—they live, they're the only ones who do live. The rest of us degenerate in a painless paralysis we think of as pleasure. Look at me! I'm incapable of committing a single original act, even though I might conceive one. Well, there was a time when I should have been equal to anything and wouldn't ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... marks an important era in Roman history. Large treasures were obtained from this and other Greek cities in Southern Italy. Luxury became more fashionable; morals began to degenerate. Greed for wealth obtained by plunder began to get possession of the Romans. From now on the moral tone of the people continued to degenerate in proportion as ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... Emperor Augustus, of Herod and his degenerate son, Antipater, and of his daughter "the incomparable" Salome. A great triumph in the art of ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... To finish the concluding fable. "What ails my child?" the mother cries, "Whose sorrows now have fill'd your eyes?" "Oh, dear Mamma, can he want friends Who writes for such exalted ends? Oh, base, degenerate human kind! Had I a fortune to my mind, Should Gay complain; but now, alas! Through what a world am I to pass; Where friendship's but an empty name, And merit's scarcely paid in fame." Resolv'd to lull his woes to rest. She told him he should hope the best; That who instruct the royal race. ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville
... feared none? At this rate I have effected nothing. The great founder of Rome, I heard in Holland, slew his brother for despiting the weakness of his walls; and shall the founder of this better place spare a degenerate son, who prefers a vagabond life to a civilized one, a cart to a city, a Scythian to a Muscovite? Have I not shaved my people, and breeched them? Have I not formed them into regular armies, with bands of music and haversacks? Are bows better than cannon? shepherds than dragoons, mare's milk ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... Have we yet realised its significance? Have we pictured, are we able to picture to ourselves, what company He kept? Among what surroundings His divine figure was actually seen? In what purlieus of degenerate Jerusalem? In what iniquitous splendours? In what orgies of the Gentiles? And who are they to whom He showed most tenderness? Who but the rich young man? The woman taken in adultery? And Mary Magdalene with her seven devils? ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... far as she can; she must watch the characters of the men who approach her charge, and endeavor to save the inexperienced girl from the dangers of a bad marriage, if possible. To perform this feat, and not to degenerate into a Spanish duenna, a dragon, or a Mrs. General—who was simply a fool—is a very ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... the following sub-races failed to modify the type, which still remained essentially Toltec; and hundreds of thousands of years later we find one of their remote family races ruling magnificently in Mexico and Peru, long ages before their degenerate descendants were conquered by the fiercer Aztec tribes from the north. The complexion of this race was also a red-brown, but they were redder or more copper-coloured than the Tlavatli. They also were a tall race, ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... combine, instead of work for one's self in an independent business, tends to magnify the value of mere money-income gained through smartness rather than by ability. If life is made too easy, men will settle into indolent sterility, just as animals and plants degenerate ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... production of serfdom, stupid, without education, and even without religion. Euphemia was his mistress, and a victim of heredity. All the symptoms of degenerate life were in her. But the ruling spirit in this crime was Maslova, who was the mouthpiece of the lowest phenomenon of decadence. "This woman," said the prosecutor without looking at her, "received an education—you have heard here the evidence ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... the whole Mediterranean." Vain boast! Within one year Corfu, in two years Malta, were rent away from the state that could not support them by its ships. Nay, more: had Bonaparte not taken the latter stronghold out of the hands of its degenerate but innocuous government, that citadel of the Mediterranean would perhaps—would probably—never have passed into those of his chief enemy. There is here also a lesson ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... boasted institutions appeared in my eyes; it seemed to me as if I saw the kingdoms of the earth through an inverted spy-glass, or rather that, being myself grown and elevated, I looked down on the rest of my degenerate race with ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... apt to degenerate into occasions of riot, and in 1432 the following statute was passed with a view ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... each degenerate race hath fled Its shameful rites and orgies dread: Grim Baal in glowing furnace cast Sinks to ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius
... Howsoever, it may be perceived what manner of life there would be, where there were no common power to fear, by the manner of life which men that have formerly lived under a peaceful government used to degenerate ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... of the current theory therefore fall back on the hypothesis that the Australians are sadly degenerate.(1) Chiefs, it is argued, or kings, they once had, and the gods are surviving ghosts of these wholly forgotten potentates. To this we reply that we know not the very faintest trace of Australian degeneration. Sir John ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... believed, hesitate to signify to her son that the King was not his father—and this in the presence of that King and of Napoleon. Could crime justify crime—could the fiendish lusts and hatreds of a degenerate race offer any excuse for the deliberate guilt of a masculine genius, the conduct of this abject court might have apologised for the policy which it perhaps tempted the pampered ambition of Napoleon to commence, and which it now encouraged ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... flexibility, than it has gained in condensation and copiousness)—I read with sedulous accuracy the Minnesinger (or singers of love, the Provencal poets of the Swabian court) and the metrical romances; and then laboured through sufficient specimens of the master singers, their degenerate successors; not however without occasional pleasure from the rude, yet interesting strains of Hans Sachs, the cobbler of Nuremberg. Of this man's genius five folio volumes with double columns are extant in print, and nearly an equal number in manuscript; yet the indefatigable ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... all seeming, and no being. If you would know how a man speaks in earnest, Read here this passage, where St. Peter thunders In Paradise against degenerate Popes And the corruptions of the church, till all The heaven about him blushes like a sunset. I beg you to take note of what he says About the Papal seals, for that concerns Your office ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... likely would die on the gallows or be strapped in an electric chair before he got his deserts. His mind had passed through innumerable phases since he left his sister's house in Washington, and now as he shamelessly flirted with Miss Seebrook he knew himself for an unmoral creature, a degenerate who was all the more dangerous for being able to pass muster among decent folk. He had always imagined that citizens of the underworld were limited in their social indulgences to cautious meetings in the back ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... It was currently reported that every forest had one within its precincts, who ruled over the woodmen, and exacted tribute from them in the shape of little blocks of wood ready hewn for the fire of his underground palace,—such blocks as are bought at shops in these degenerate days, ...
— Wonder-Box Tales • Jean Ingelow
... regarding certain local conditions. In the place of individual advice, we have thus to a certain degree obtained general economic investigations from which each can gather what he needs. It seems that sometimes the danger of letting such offices degenerate into mere agencies for employment has not been avoided, but that is one of the perils of the first development. The mother institute in Boston, too, under its new direction emphasizes more the economic and hygienic ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... convertible into vices, so in some cases did the best traits of these people degenerate. Their frugality too often became parsimony; their devotion grim bigotry; and all this in a greater degree perhaps than could be predicated of the more immediate subjects ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... grimace, and affectation, 10 Though foes to sense, are harmless to the nation. Our last redress is dint of verse to try, And Satire is our Court of Chancery. This way took Horace to reform an age, Not bad enough to need an author's rage: But yours,[19] who lived in more degenerate times, Was forced to fasten deep, and worry crimes. Yet you, my friend, have temper'd him so well, You make him smile in spite of all his zeal: An art peculiar to yourself alone, 20 To join the virtues of two styles ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... ballad book flung heedlessly on my desk was—what should it be but the little morocco case, empty now, in which our Francesca keeps her dead mother's engagement ring,—the mother who died when she was a wee child. Truly a very pretty modern ballad to be sung in these unromantic, degenerate days! ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... that the people should be held responsible for all damage done to roads, railways, and telegraphs by guerillas. His orders, it is true, were warranted by the practice of war. But "forced requisitions," unless conducted on a well-understood system, must inevitably degenerate into plunder and oppression; and Pope, in punishing civilians, was not careful to distinguish between the acts of guerillas and those of the regular Confederate cavalry. "These orders," says a Northern historian, "were followed by the ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... or more the old wolf sat there, challenging his degenerate mates in every silence, calling the tame to be wild, the bound to be free again, and listening gravely to the wailing answer of the dogs, which refused with groanings, as if dragging themselves away from overmastering temptation. ...
— Northern Trails, Book I. • William J. Long
... the Indians at his speech, because such attractions are rare in Belleville, and the Indian would come to see what it is that stirs up so much his white friend and brother. Of course, the Indian in his degenerate days, would take the chance to get drunk, and, being in a whiskey stupor, he naturally supposed that Mr. Grayson was chanting a chant of victory, and quite as naturally he chanted in return his own chant, and also quite ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... of women, When Breffni's good sword would have sought That man, thro' a million of foe-men, Who dared but to wrong thee in thought! While now—oh degenerate daughter Of Erin, how fallen is thy fame! And thro' ages of bondage and slaughter, Our country ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... struck and stirred popular imagination. Some century earlier the last of the minstrels might have fashioned the last of the ballads out of that Homeric fight and chase; but the spirit was dead, or had been reincarnated already in Mr. Sheriff Scott, and the degenerate moorsmen must be content to tell the tale in prose, and to make of the "Four Black Brothers" a unit after the fashion of the "Twelve Apostles" or ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... swarm of stars," or "one little whole world," how shall we see her—with what sense of wonder and splendor—through the eyes of the flatboatman or the swamper, the raftsman, the island squatter, the trading-scow man, the runaway slave in the canebrake, the woodyard man, or the "pirooter"—that degenerate heir, dwarfed to a parasite, of the terrible, earlier-day land-pirates and river-wolves of Plum Point and Crow's Nest Island? To such sorts, self-described as human snapping-turtles and alligators, her peacock show ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... and spare, yet erect as ever, the iron-gray hair, closely shaven beard, dark complexion, and black eyes still formidably alive, made on me an impression at once of extreme age and unabated will. A prophet!—still delivering his message—but well aware that it found but few listeners in a degenerate world. He began immediately to talk politics, denouncing English Imperialism, whether of the Tory or the Liberal type. Canadian loyalty to the Empire was a mere delusion. A few years, he said, would see the Dominion merged ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... suburb known as the "Indian quarter;" sometimes also called "Spanish town"—both name having reference to the fact, that some queer little shanties around are inhabited by pure-blooded Indians and half-breeds, with poor whites of Spanish extraction—these last the degenerate descendants of heroic soldiers who originally established ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... am well aware that this custom of adorning graves with flowers prevails in other countries besides England. Indeed, in some it is much more general, and is observed even by the rich and fashionable; but it is then apt to lose its simplicity and to degenerate into affectation. Bright, in his travels in Lower Hungary, tells of monuments of marble and recesses formed for retirement, with seats placed among bowers of greenhouse plants, and that the graves generally are covered with the gayest flowers of the season. He gives a casual picture ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... hand felt Out along the wall for support. Was this a dream, some ghastly, soul-terrifying nightmare! Danglar! Those working lips! That callous viciousness, that leer in the degenerate face. It seemed to bring a weakness to her limbs, and seek to rob her of the strength to stand. She could not even hope against hope; she knew that Danglar was in deadly earnest. Danglar would not have the slightest compunction, let alone ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... able-bodied persons—mostly women to do the dishwashing of the country. And note that this is most filthy and deadening and brutalizing work; that it is a cause of anemia, nervousness, ugliness, and ill-temper; of prostitution, suicide, and insanity; of drunken husbands and degenerate children—for all of which things the community has naturally to pay. And now consider that in each of my little free communities there would be a machine which would wash and dry the dishes, and do it, not merely to the eye and the touch, but scientifically—sterilizing ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... great object of Jefferson's life was to promote popular education as an essential condition to the safety of the republic. While he advocated unbounded liberty, he knew well enough that it would degenerate into license unless the people were well-informed. But what interested him the most was the University of Virginia, in whose behalf he spent the best part of his declining years. He gave money freely himself, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... father attained to the post of duumvir and became the foremost citizen of the place, after filling all the municipal offices of honour. I myself, immediately after my first entry into the municipal senate, succeeded to my father's position in the community, and, as I hope, am in no ways a degenerate successor, but receive like honour and esteem for my maintenance of the dignity of my position. Why do I mention this? That you, Aemilianus, may be less angry with me in future and may more readily pardon me for having been negligent ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... of rulers, the greatest and most liberal statesmen, heroes, and conspicuous conquerors, originated in violations of the Decalogue, and those nations and kingdoms which have been founded upon strictly ecclesiastical ideas, have all sunk beneath the shifting sands of time, or have become so degenerate as to be bywords and ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... their goal had been Canaan. They were not mere Bedawin; they belonged to that portion of the Semitic race which had made settlements and founded kingdoms in Moab and Ammon and Edom, and their residence in the cultured land of the Nile had made it impossible for them ever to degenerate into the lawless robbers of the wilderness. They were settled Bedawin, not Bedawin proper; not Bedawin by blood and descent, but Semites who had adopted the wandering and pastoral habits of the Bedawin tribes. They were like their brethren of Edom, who, though they came to Egypt ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... receiver, and announced the new development. The Frenchman did not betray any cognizance of it. He had collapsed into a chair, and looked the degenerate ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... happens that these are often the noblest of their sex. Yet another small section remain single from an honest dislike of marriage and its duties. It is perhaps not too severe to say that a woman who has absolutely no vocation for wifehood and motherhood must be a degenerate, and so lacking in the best feminine instincts as to deserve the reproach of being 'sexless.' This type is apparently increasing! I shall deal with it ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... is said, by Ruffhead, to have told Warburton, that "Young had much of a sublime genius, though without common sense; so that his genius, having no guide, was perpetually liable to degenerate into bombast. This made him pass a foolish youth, the sport of peers and poets: but his having a very good heart enabled him to support the clerical character when he assumed it, first with decency, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... been built out across the beach into four or five feet of water, and you have to step gingerly lest you slip on the slime. At the end of the wall a solid stairway cut in the hillside leads up to the temple. It was formerly used daily by thousands of worshipers, but in this degenerate age nobody but tourists ever climb it. Every boat load that lands is greeted by a group of bright-eyed children, who follow the sahibs (gentlemen) and mem-sahibs (ladies) up the stairs, begging for backsheesh and offering for sale curios beetles and other ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... dear Ned, but there are needles and thread in the chest: why didn't you mend your knicks, as you call them? Don't let's degenerate into scarecrows because we are obliged to live this Robinson Crusoe-like life. It's many years since I read that book, Chris, but if I recollect right he used not only to mend his own clothes, but make ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... nobleman, the gratified uncle kept saying to himself, than that big dullard, the Honourable Balder. It filled him with a new pleasure to remember that Alfred had visiting cards presenting his name as D'Aubigny, which everybody of education knew was what the degenerate Dabney really stood for. The lad and his sister had united upon this excellent change long ago at Cheltenham, and oddly enough they had confessed it to their uncle, at the beginning of the trip, with a show of trepidation, as if they feared his anger. ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... politely made a collection among the audience. They gained their livelihood. The wolf was lettered, likewise the man. The wolf had been trained by the man, or had trained himself unassisted, to divers wolfish arts, which swelled the receipts. "Above all things, do not degenerate into a man," his friend would ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... conditional upon human perfection, which was a logical absurdity. Russia was a country as poor and dull as Persia. The intellectual class was hopeless; in Pekarsky's opinion the overwhelming majority in it were incompetent persons, good for nothing. The people were drunken, lazy, thievish, and degenerate. We had no science, our literature was uncouth, our commerce rested on swindling—"No selling without cheating." And everything was in that style, and everything was a ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Ariadne of the Vatican. This represents a woman reclining in a studied sentimental attitude, her arms thrown about her head, her body swathed in its protecting drapery. To the same period also belongs almost the last notable work of Greek art, the degenerate and sensuous conception of the Venus de Medici. In this statue the goddess stands as if rising from the sea, her attitude reserved, yet coquettish and self-conscious. The form is technically perfect, graceful, and soft in its refinement, but compared with the earlier Aphrodites ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... repay The debt thou claim'st in this exhausted age? Thou givest our lyres a theme, that might engage Those that could send thy name o'er sea and land, While sea and land shall last; for Homer's rage A theme; a theme for Milton's mighty hand - How much unmeet for us, a faint degenerate band! ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott
... white and purple all over the ceiling. It touched Ferris, when Don Ippolito confessed that this decoration had been the distraction of his own vacant moments, to find that it was like certain grape-arbors he had seen in remote corners of Venice before the doors of degenerate palaces, or forming the entrances of open-air restaurants, and did not seem at all to have been studied from grape- arbors in the country. He perceived the archaic striving for exact truth, and he successfully ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... juices to dissolve the siliceous skeletons of the diatoms on which they feed: they anchor themselves in the mud and pass water in and out of their bodies: sometimes the current is stimulated by cilia. There were colonies of Gorgonacea, which share their food unselfishly; and corals and marine degenerate worms, which started to live in little cells like coral, but have gone down in the world. And there were starfishes, sea-urchins, brittle-stars, feather-stars and sea-cucumbers. The sea-urchins are formed ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... has tried in vain to patronize her. For many years past the average German has held that the French are a nation of "degenerate weaklings." Inspired by these sentiments, with a mixture of hate, the German troops invaded France, and it is a promising symptom that during twelve months of war respect for French valour has taken the ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... history—the Medes and the Persians. The Medes at the west, nearer the Assyrians, destroyed Nineveh and its empire (625). But soon they softened their manners, taking the flowing robes, the indolent life, the superstitious religion of the degenerate Assyrians. They at last ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... horizons, leading him on through patience, hope and resignation to serenity, and beyond to temperance, purity, goodness, and self-devotion and self-sacrifice. Always and everywhere, for the past eighteen hundred years, as soon as these wings grow feeble or give way, public and private morals degenerate. In Italy, during the Renaissance, in England under the restoration, in France under the Convention and Directory, man becomes as pagan as in the first century; the same causes render him the same as ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... every kind to its utmost verge, men too often overshoot the mark, and frustrate the object they have most at heart, by eagerness to accomplish it. For though to a reasonable extent and in certain circumstances, all enjoyments are harmless, they degenerate into crimes, when excessively indulged, and particularly when the imagination is overstrained to improve their zest, or to refine or exalt them beyond the limits which Nature and sobriety prescribe. But this can no more be alledged as a reason for renouncing ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... our own immediate day is weak and weary, because it is no longer young; yet it possesses one noble attribute—it has an acute and almost universal sympathy, which does indeed often degenerate into a false and illogical sentiment, yet serves to redeem an age of egotism. We have escaped both the gem-like hardness of the Pagan, and the narrowing selfishness of the Christian and the Israelite. We are sick for the woe of creation, and we wonder why such woe is ours, and why ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... Romanists, only that it was not at all Romish, but entirely and truly Catholic! Was ever such like woful perversity? When they had just got a brother to be proud of, who could take them to theatres, concerts, balls, operas, and everywhere, for him to go and degenerate into an old solemn Presbyterian minister! It would be bearable, if he must be a minister, if he would only be a High Churchman, and would be called a priest, and wear the surplice, and read the service ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... And note that this is most filthy and deadening and brutalizing work; that it is a cause of anemia, nervousness, ugliness, and ill-temper; of prostitution, suicide, and insanity; of drunken husbands and degenerate children—for all of which things the community has naturally to pay. And now consider that in each of my little free communities there would be a machine which would wash and dry the dishes, and do it, not merely to the eye and the touch, but scientifically—sterilizing them—and do it at a saving ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... enabled successfully to resist the pressure which she suffered from the interdict. She foresaw, too, the growing power of the Turks, and perceived that in the future they would triumph over the degenerate Greek empire at Constantinople. She had spent her blood and treasure freely in maintaining that empire; but the weakness and profligacy of its emperors, the intestine quarrels and disturbances which were forever going on, and the ingratitude with which she had always ...
— The Lion of Saint Mark - A Story of Venice in the Fourteenth Century • G. A. Henty
... eleven. He did not care in the least. He had lapsed hopelessly. No urchin in the lower school, brewing cocoa over a form room fire, ladling out condensed milk with the blade of a penknife, would have been more dead to the decencies of life than this degenerate hero of the ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... common complaint in these degenerate days that we live harder than our fathers did. Whatever we do we rush at. We bolt our food, and run for the train; we jump out of it before it has stopped, and reach the school door just as the bell rings; we "cram" for our examinations, and "spurt" for our prizes. We have no time to read books, ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... errant sixpences." And printers' bills had to be paid. Moreover in the first number the editor Lucian Oldershaw confessed frankly that one reason for the paper's existence was "that the Society may not degenerate into the position of a mutual admiration Society by totally lacking the admiration of outsiders." The staff were able immediately to note, "Any apprehensions we may have felt on the morning of the publication of The Debater were speedily dispelled, when by nightfall we had disposed of all our ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... by the flash of an eye, and the charm of a face, can forsake his sacred ties of devotion and become a degenerate and outcast, with death as his only salvation. In either case Nature stands by with a sneer upon her lips, and God forgets his obligation to his children. But the final analysis proves beyond doubt that the physical ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis
... country, to look for work; so far, so good. If any fell away and acted as strike-breaker, instructions were immediately given for his punishment. In this way Pelle kept the ranks closed. There were many weak elements among them—degenerate, ignorant fellows who didn't understand the importance of the movement, but a strong controlling hand and unfailing justice made it a serious matter for them ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... send your wife to thank him for his kindness?" "Yes, I believe I did," answered Hampden; "but I know of no solid effects of that kindness. If there were any, I should be obliged to my Lord to tell me what they were." Disgraceful as had been the appearance which this degenerate heir of an illustrious name had made at the Old Bailey, the appearance which he made before the Committee of Murder was more disgraceful still, [547] It is pleasing to know that a person who had been far more cruelly wronged than he, but whose nature differed widely from his, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... rites pleased, why did Rome also take up foreign ones? I pass over the ground hidden with costly buildings, and shepherds' cottages glittering with degenerate gold. Why, that I may reply to the very matter which they complain of, have they eagerly received the images of captured cities, and conquered gods, and the foreign rites of alien superstition? Whence, then, is the pattern of Cybele washing her chariots in a stream ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... breathe—from the dawn of childhood, till the last gleam of twilight is lost in the darkness of dotage. But take the tyrant as he is, in the plenitude of his supposed strength. The vast country of Germany, in spite of the rusty but too strong fetters of corrupt princedoms and degenerate nobility,—Germany—with its citizens, its peasants, and its philosophers—will not lie quiet under the weight of injuries which has been heaped upon it. There is a sleep, but no death, among the mountains of Switzerland. Florence, and Venice, and Genoa, and Rome,—have their ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... far superior to the Italian. In the French comedy everything is graceful and natural; the Italians cannot catch this happy medium, so that their comedies and comic operas are mostly outre, and degenerate ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... own business, which is what few landlords do, in these degenerate days; and he knows nothing at all of his guests'. In that he is ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... said, that every ship's crew contained several lunatics and idiots, it was a foregone conclusion that our crew contained far more than several. In fact, and as it was to turn out, our crew, even in these degenerate sailing days, was an unusual crew in so far as its helplessness and worthlessness were beyond ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... places meet, and where the policeman stands, all the traffic of Dublin converges in a constant stream. The trams hurrying to Terenure, or Donnybrook, or Dalkey flash around this corner; the doctors who, in these degenerate days, concentrate in Merrion Square, fly up here in carriages and motor cars, the vans of the great firms in Grafton and O'Connell streets, or those outlying, never cease their exuberant progress. The ladies and gentlemen of leisure stroll here daily at four o'clock, ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... creature. I was brought up with her, and to the sweet contagion of her taste do I owe that love of true glory which carries me to the side of Sir William Wallace. The virtuous only can awaken any interest in her heart; and in these degenerate days long might have been its sleep had not the history which my uncle recounted of your brave master aroused her attention, and filled her with an admiration equal to my own. I know she rejoices in my present destination. ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... told that it is unparliamentary to say there are any representatives of the people in this House who have sold themselves to the purposes and views of any set of men in power; but the history of the degenerate senate of that once free people, the Romans, will serve to show how far corruption may make inroads upon public virtue or patriotism. The tyranny inflicted on the Roman people, and on mankind in general, ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... Nance, who had followed and blessed Father Tom the evening he left us. She did not bless me nor address me. I had to speak publicly of poor Nance; perhaps, indeed, I spoke too sharply and strongly,—it is so hard to draw the line between zeal and discretion, it is so easy to degenerate into weakness or into excess. And Nance feared me. Probably she was the only one of the villagers who never ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... self-reproachful, yet the singing and the uproar gave her a certain pleasure. There was nothing in the talk around her and the songs that were sung that made it a shame for her to be present. Plebeian good-humour does not often degenerate into brutality at meetings of this kind until a late hour of the evening. The girls who sat with glasses of beer before them, and carried on primitive flirtations with their neighbours, were honest wage-earners of factory and ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... when all around lay buried in darkness and slumber; and how is it possible for you, Amelia, still to doubt? if our love meets in one perfection, and if it is the self-same love, how can its fruits degenerate? (AMELIA looks at him with astonishment.) It was a calm, serene evening, the last before his departure for Leipzic, when he took me with him to the bower where you so often sat together in dreams of love,—we were long speechless; at last he seized my hand, and said, in a low voice, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... with Cortes, Malinal alone could speak two languages. The Tabascans spoke a sort of degenerate Maya, with which, as she had lived among them so long, she was of course perfectly familiar, at the same time she had not forgotten her native Mexican. It would have been impossible for Cortes to have communicated with the Mexicans without Malinal, for Aguilar could turn Spanish into ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... To quote Professor James' vigorous protest, "medical materialism finishes up St Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out St Teresa as an hysteric, St Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. George Fox's discontent with the shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a disordered colon. Carlyle's organ-tones of misery it accounts for by a gastro-duodenal catarrh. All such mental over-tensions, it says, are, when you ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... inestimable gift of freedom. The benevolence of the master was so frequently prompted by the meaner suggestions of vanity and avarice, that the laws found it more necessary to restrain than to encourage a profuse and undistinguishing liberality, which might degenerate into a very dangerous abuse. [51] It was a maxim of ancient jurisprudence, that a slave had not any country of his own; he acquired with his liberty an admission into the political society of which his patron was a member. The ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... moment of conception. Yet that superadded measure of plasticity, which has to be treated as something apart from the racial factor, enables it to respond for good or for evil to the pre-natal—that is to say, maternal—environment. Thus we may easily fall into the mistake of supposing our race to be degenerate, when poor feeding and exposure to unhealthy surroundings on the part of the mothers are really responsible for the crop of weaklings that we deplore. And, in so far as it turns out to be so, social reformers ought to heave a sigh ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... "he had never seen before." The men at the advanced posts carried on, what he called, "a diabolical good understanding" with the enemy, and the workmen would sometimes take fright and run away. "I make the best I can," said he, "of the degenerate race I have to deal with; the whole means of guns, ammunition, pioneers, &c., with all materials, rest with them. With fair promises to the men, and threats of instant death if I find any one erring, a little spur has been given." Nelson said of him with truth, upon this ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... entangled, that drove him to despair and made him desolate the garden. Remit him the too harsh punishment!'—'His fire is for the present extinguished,' said the Prince of the Spirits; 'but in the hapless time, when the Speech of Nature shall no longer be intelligible to degenerate man; when the Spirits of the Elements, banished into their own regions, shall speak to him only from afar, in faint, spent echoes; when, displaced from the harmonious circle, an infinite longing alone shall give ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... composer. The mock-coaxing of the nymphs might be a parody of the Venusberg scene in Tannhaeuser; and later on there occurs a passage that might be a parody on parts of Tristan. When Alberich steals the gold we get that degenerate form of the Valhalla theme repeated again and again, and the full effect of the device is only felt when, with the change of scene, we hear the passage in all its nobility and splendour. Wotan's greeting to his new castle is rather grandiose ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... to the Tahitian custom, the royal youngsters are carried about until it requires no small degree of strength to stand up under them. But Marbonna was just the man for this—large and muscular, well made as a statue, and with an arm like a degenerate Tahitian's thigh. ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... theatrical conditions often encourage a violent exaggeration of the characteristically dramatic elements in life does not make these elements any the less real or any the less characteristically dramatic. It is true that crispness of handling may easily degenerate into the pursuit of mere picture-poster situation; but that is no reason why the artist should not seek to achieve crispness within the bounds prescribed by nature and common sense. There is a drama—I have myself seen it—in which the heroine, fleeing from the villain, ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... departing from their parents. Some became souldiers, others tooke upon them farr viages by sea, and other some worse courses, tending to dissolutnes & the danger of their soules, to y^e great greefe of their parents and dishonour of God. So that they saw their posteritie would be in danger to degenerate & be corrupted. ...
— Bradford's History of 'Plimoth Plantation' • William Bradford
... commanded sternly. "The Meccans are a people corrupt and accursed. 'Their hearts are black as their skins are white.' They live by fleecing the Hujjaj, by making sale and barter of relics, by turning the holy places into marts of trade. All this is well known throughout Islam. Ah, the degenerate breed of the sons ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... closes round! my life draws to its end! Nay, weep not, child! were it not for thee I would long ere this have prayed the gods my masters to remove me from my sojourn among the degenerate sons of our noble fathers; but I trembled for thy fate, sweet one!" These last words were almost inexpressibly tender. "I dared not trust thy slight frame to battle unsheltered with the storm. Now the blast ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... inmates are usually handsome young girls between the ages of fifteen and thirty, that the precocious and well-to-do young men of this city fall an easy prey to vice, and become in time the haggard and dissolute man of the town, or degenerate into the forger, the bank defaulter or ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... a steady current of what I may be allowed to call the rancid. That is exciting to the moralist; but what more particularly interests the artist is this tendency of the extreme of detail, when followed as a principle, to degenerate into mere feux-de-joie of literary tricking. The other day even M. Daudet was to be heard babbling of audible colours ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Political and economic, social and hygienic, technical and industrial, esthetic and scientific questions can in no way be brought nearer to the grasp of millions. The editors will have to take care that the discussions do not degenerate into one-sided propaganda, but so must the editors of a printed magazine. Among the scientists the psychologist may have a particular interest in this latest venture of the film world. The screen ought to offer a unique opportunity to interest wide ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... or be strapped in an electric chair before he got his deserts. His mind had passed through innumerable phases since he left his sister's house in Washington, and now as he shamelessly flirted with Miss Seebrook he knew himself for an unmoral creature, a degenerate who was all the more dangerous for being able to pass muster among decent folk. He had always imagined that citizens of the underworld were limited in their social indulgences to cautious meetings in the back rooms of low saloons, but ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... distinguished ornithologist has said that little birds have two ways of making themselves attractive—by melody and by bright plumage; and that most species excel in one or the other way; and that the acquisition of gay colours by a species of a sober-coloured melodious family will cause it to degenerate as a songster. He is speaking of the redstart. Unfortunately for the rule there are too many exceptions. Thus confining ourselves to a single family—that of the finches—in our own islands, the most modest coloured have the least melody, while those that have the ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... in prime of life, all enterprise and vigour; in senility, all weakness and second childhood. Then, England, learn thy fate from the unerring page of time. Sooner or later, it shall arrive that thou shalt be tributary to some nation, hitherto, I trust, unborn; and thy degenerate sons shall read that liberty was once the watchword of the isle, and yet not even feel a ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... does not spend all of her time with her ducks, chickens, pigs, and cows, nor yet with her neighbors, her club, nor her Church. She finds some time to cultivate her intellectual nature and the finer feelings of her children. She does not degenerate into a mere household drudge. She is not the slave of her husband, but his companion. If she has musical ability, she keeps up the practice of her music; if she is inclined to literature, she reads some every day. Whether literary or not, every woman should spend some time each day in ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... the new Austrian Emperor on account of his amiable character. The Slavs have ample reason to distrust the Habsburgs who have proved to be treacherous autocrats in the past, and whose records show them as an incapable and degenerate family. As a political power Kaiser Karl is the same menace to his subject Slavs as his predecessors. Above all, however, he is of necessity a blind tool in the hands of Germany, and he cannot possibly extricate himself from her firm grip. The Habsburgs have had their chance, but they ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... buy a new one. No one applauded him. Think of the man who had originally caught the lion! He went out alone and trapped a lion, simply that his rude boys might be amused at the spectacle. In our degenerate days, we give our children a Teddy Bear. But in those strenuous times, the father said to his boys, "Come out into the back yard, and see the present I've got for you!" They came eagerly, and found a live lion. That man and his children were ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... seen them. The vilest inclinations, the basest actions, succeeded my amiable amusements and even obliterated the very remembrance of them. I must have had, in spite of my good education, a great propensity to degenerate, else the declension could not have followed with such ease and rapidity, for never did so promising a Caesar so ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... Ingleby, "the primal evidence of the forgery lies in the ink writing, and in that alone," with that alone we shall at present concern ourselves. As the careless, half-formed hand of the present day, degenerate from "the round hand of the school-master," appears only in the pencil writing, we have therefore to deal but with the first three styles of writing enumerated by Mr. Hardy; and as he himself admits that "it is perfectly possible that any two of these hands in succession may have ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... come and so should a Viking die: further, if you will, the subject is a modern Viking, ready for the responsibilities of the title. Sketches of our ancient wooden walls and our iron and plated defences line the panellings. These degenerate artists do work ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the students of the law the example of their worthiest predecessors. The tendency of the age is to lower, not to elevate, the standard set up by our ancestors for the attainment of preeminence. That our giants may not be stunted in their growth—that the legal stock may not hopelessly degenerate—Chief Justice Campbell does well to impress upon his brethren the patient and laborious course—the high and admirable qualities—by which Chief Justice Mansfield secured ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... a sort of hydrophobic shudder, "is only a fit beverage for asses!"—"To say a man could drink like a fish, was once the greatest encomium that a bon-vivant could bestow upon a brother Bacchanalian—but, alas! in this matter-of-fact and degenerate age, men do so literally—washing their gills with unadulterated water!—Dropsy and water on the chest must be the infallible result! If such an order of things continue, all the puppies in the kingdom, who ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... comparison with Dumas's immortal musketeers; but the result justifies the boldness.... The plot is admirably clear and strong, the diction singularly concise and telling, and the stirring events are so managed as not to degenerate into sensationalism. Few better novels of adventure than this have ever been written."—OUTLOOK, ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... accustomed to the horse as a slave, cannot know him as a freeman. That docked thing standing by the curb is a long bred-out degenerate. In the Hills a horse was born and bred up to be a freeman. When the time came, he yielded to a sort of human suzerainty, but he yielded as a cadet of a noble house yields to the discipline of a commandant, with the spirit in him ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... stateliness, what the French call "la vraie hauteur." This elevation of style, this dignity, is foreign to democracies, and it is hard to sustain it in the rude air of modern life. It easily degenerates, as Europe saw it degenerate for a century and a half, into pomposity relieved by flatness. It is apt to become a mere sonorous rhetoric, a cultivation of empty fine phrases. If we examine the serious poetry of the end of the ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... irresistibly away. But, confronted with the system in its practical working, she was staggered by many of its features. In the country churches around her she saw the peasantry encouraged in their grossest superstitions, and the ritual, carelessly hurried through, degenerate often into mere mockery. The practice of confession, moreover—her ultimate condemnation of which, as an institution whose results for good are scanty, its dangers excessive, will be endorsed by most persons ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... the night, in the midst of all those worlds and the great White Throne, without her mother? Ellen's grandmother, who was of a stanch orthodox breed, and was, moreover, anxious to counteract any possible detriment as to religious training from contact with the degenerate Louds of Loudville, had established a strict course of Bible study for her granddaughter at a very early age. All celestial phenomena were in consequence transposed into a Biblical key for the child, and she regarded the heavens swarming ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... of good or great ideas, these sentiments will be sure to organize all the capacity there is in them into positive intellectual character; but let them once divorce love from their occupations in life, and they will find that labor will degenerate into drudgery, and drudgery will weaken the power to labor, and weakness, as a last resort, will intrench itself in pretence and deception. If they are in the learned professions, they will become tricksters in law, quacks in medicine, formalists in divinity, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... Germany alone among nations has the power and the will to expand and to rule; that expansion and rule must be accomplished by war, which, far from being a misfortune, is a noble object to be aimed at and not avoided by statesmen; that all other nations are degenerate and must for their own good be crushed by Germany; and that any nation which resists Germany is through that very act an enemy of the human race. I also believed that German culture is something different from and superior to such culture (if it be worthy of the name) ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 4, 1914 • Various
... as it were smothered under their own social importance. It was not their fault. He recognized that they did their best. They were good specimens of their kind; neither soft nor luxurious, as things went in a degenerate and extravagant age; they evidently tried to be simple—and this seemed to him to heighten the pathos of their situation. Fate had been too much for them. What human spirit could emerge untrammelled and unshrunken from that great encompassing host ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... instance no one who has read "Notre Dame" can deny the presence of a certain savage delight in scenes of grotesque and exaggerated terror. No one who has read "Les Miserables" can deny the existence in him of a vein of lovely tenderness that, with a little tiny push over the edge, would degenerate into maudlin sentiment of ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... philosophers and theologians discovered an admirable way of escape in the "theory of degeneration." Granting the affinity, they turned the whole evolutionary theory upside down, and boldly contended that "man is not the most highly developed animal, but the animals are degenerate men." It is true that man is closely related to the ape, and belongs to the vertebrate stem; but the chain of his ancestry goes upward instead of downward. In the beginning "God created man in his own image," ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... drinking, clothed in purple and fine linen, and potters lie on sofas and have their wheel at hand, that they may work a little when they please; and cobblers and all the other classes of a State lose their distinctive character. And a State may get on without cobblers; but when the guardians degenerate into boon companions, then the ruin is complete. Remember that we are not talking of peasants keeping holiday, but of a State in which every man is expected to do his own work. The happiness resides not in this or that class, but in the State as a whole. I have another ...
— The Republic • Plato
... Zodiac's crew were collected by the foremost gun, watching her progress with no little interest. Two of them were regular salts of the old school, who still delighted in ear-rings and pigtails, though, in compliment to the degenerate taste of the times, they wore the latter ornaments much smaller than they had done in their younger days. They were prime seamen, and fellows who were ready to go down with their colours flying rather than strike to ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... beings, are mere accidents and appendages—the pedestal and the ornaments of that great white tower in the centre, whose sleepless fiery eye blinks all night long over the night-mists of the Atlantic. If, as a wise man has said, the days will come when our degenerate posterity will fall down and worship rusty locomotives and fossil electric-telegraphs, the relics of their ancestors' science, grown to them mythic and impossible, as the Easter-islanders bow before the ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... hope for the last two things, you know," said the young girl; "for I am sure that the flag that braved a thousand years was not half so strong as your brocade; and as to buying another, there are none to be bought in these degenerate days." ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... feet, as to render very briefly a faithful character of this young gentleman, in a more particular manner, whose virtues and extraordinary qualities, the former not lost, the latter acquired with much travels at few years, do no whit degenerate from the nobility of his blood, and active loyalty of his progenitors; my duty to your Majesty, as well as my affection to his person, obliging me ex officio to this short testimony of his merits unrequested, ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... golden race lived in perfect happiness on the fruits of the untilled earth, suffered from no bodily infirmity, passed away in a gentle sleep, and became after death guardian daemons of this world. The second or silver race was degenerate, and refusing to worship the immortal gods, was buried by Jove in the earth. The third or brazen race, still more degraded, was warlike and cruel, and perished at last by internal violence. The fourth or heroic race ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... who was a very brave man himself, said now, in great anger, "The more base and degenerate in you to take such means for her as you have done and leave her on such ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... this for the sake of argument to have been so, two months of his reign were sufficient to show him that the great question was not to conquer territories or foreign influence, but to save Monarchy. He saw clearly that though he might begin a war, necessarily it would soon degenerate into a war of propaganda, and that he and his family would be the first victims of it. His struggle has constantly been to strengthen his Government, to keep together or create anew the elements indispensable for a Monarchical Government, and this struggle is far from ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... most cherished notions disputed. What was the lady of the manor to do but to superintend the church, parsonage, and parish generally? Not her duty? She had never heard of such a thing, nor did she credit it. Papa would come home, make these degenerate Charnocks hear reason, and ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ripe and bursting. The plant was low and poor in growth, but the branches were laden with pods. Like the wheat it was planted or dibbled in rows. The cotton produced the second year was said to be considered as equally good with that of the first, but being found to degenerate the third year, it was then rooted out and the ground prepared ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... country. It bears under its title the significant date of 1897, the year of the unfortunate Greco-Turkish war which ended disastrously for Greece and plunged the nation into despair. After the defeat, almost the whole world spoke of the Greeks as of a degenerate people beyond the hope of redemption. The sensitiveness of the race helped in rendering the gloom of disaster most depressing. For some time, even the Greeks began to resign themselves to their fate as a hopeless one. Palamas is one of the first to sound ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... test of character. Eleven years of hotel housekeepership guarantees a knowledge of human nature that includes some things no living being ought to know about her fellow men. And inevitably one of two results must follow. You degenerate into a bitter, waspish, and fault-finding shrew; or you develop into a patient, tolerant, and infinitely understanding woman. Martha Foote dealt daily with Polack scrub girls, and Irish porters, and Swedish chambermaids, ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... Light; it should not only answer all the Hopes and Exigencies of the Receiver, but even out-run his Wishes: Tis this happy manner of Behaviour which adds new Charms to it, and softens those Gifts of Art and Nature, which otherwise would be rather distasteful than agreeable. Without it, Valour would degenerate into Brutality, Learning into Pedantry, and the genteelest Demeanour into Affectation. Even Religion its self, unless Decency be the Handmaid which waits upon her, is apt to make People appear guilty of Sourness ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... entertainment, but for the generation of children; it is a union of hearts and not of minds. When a woman says that she has fallen in love with a man's mind, it is either a vain and ridiculous pretence on her part or the exaggeration of a degenerate being. A man, on the other hand, is not controlled in instinctive love by the qualities of the woman's character; this is why so many a Socrates has found his Xantippe, as for instance, Shakespeare, Albrecht Duerer, Byron, and others. But here we have the influence of intellectual ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... (Pi-Bast, the city of Bast). From the Osiric term (Bass) the learned Egyptologist would derive Bacchus and his priests, the Bacchoi and the Bacchantes, whose dress was the leopard's skin. Could Osiris have belonged to the race whose degenerate descendants are the ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... Mauki, to toil for Bunster for eight long years and a half. There was no escaping from Lord Howe. For better or worse, Bunster and he were tied together. Bunster weighed two hundred pounds. Mauki weighed one hundred and ten. Bunster was a degenerate brute. But Mauki was a primitive savage. While both had wills and ways ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... talking religion all the way home: we are both mighty good girls, as girls go in these degenerate days; our grandmothers to be sure—but ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... have rever'd on a throne: My fathers have fallen to right it; Those fathers would spurn their degenerate son, That name should he scoffingly ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... book-shelf. "Now, look here: the biggest island of the lot on this map, barring Cuba, is Hayti. You know as well as I do that the western part of that island is peopled by the black republic of Hayti, and that the country is in a degenerate state of almost unexampled savagery, with a ridiculous show of civilization. There are revolutions all the time; the South American republics are peaceful and prosperous compared to Hayti. The state of the country is simply awful—read ...
— Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... put one piece into another? Are not his discussions and monologues too long? Does not his own exuberant genius become a fatigue to himself and to his readers? Are not, perhaps, his characters too real? and do they not often degenerate, without motive, from the sublime into the ridiculous? Would Hamlet have appeared less interesting or less mad had he not spoken indelicate and cruel words to Ophelia? Would Laertes have seemed less grieved on hearing of the death of his sister had he not ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... was next of kin to the expiring Swedish Lutheran Church in the three counties that became afterward the State of Delaware, and heir to its venerable edifices and its good will; it was the official and court church of the royal governors, and after the degenerate sons of William Penn abandoned the simple worship, as well as the clean living, in which their father delighted, it was the church promoted by the proprietary interest; withal it proved itself, both then and afterward, to hold a deposit ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... and winning. She was so devoted too to her husband and her husband to her; they really did come up to one's ideas of what lovers used to be in days of old; it was rare to meet with such a pair in these degenerate times; it was quite beautiful, etc., etc. Such were the comments of the ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... within the silken glove of its luxury finds its prototype in buildings which were stupendous crude brute masses of brick and concrete, hidden within a covering of rich marbles and mosaics, wrought in beautiful but often meaningless forms by clever degenerate Greeks. The genius of Rome finds its most characteristic expression, not in temples to the high gods, but rather in those vast and complicated structures—basilicas, amphitheatres, baths—built for the amusement and purely temporal needs of ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... The bow should never degenerate into a nod; this is both ungracious and ungentlemanly. The hat should be lifted sufficiently to clear the head, and the bow, in the reception room, should slightly incline the body also. Ladies should incline their heads gracefully and smile upon their ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... burglar is caught who does not wear a collar he is described as a degenerate of the lowest type, singularly vicious and depraved, and is suspected of being the desperate criminal who stole the handcuffs out of Patrolman Hennessy's pocket in 1878 and ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... mind, which occupied a pure and healthy physique. In a word he was well made and fully endowed with all the physical and mental forces necessary to the whole journey of his life. Now a question arises: "When did he begin to degenerate physically and mentally?" Let us reason some on this line, which seems to be a rather solid foundation, and as history is young itself, and has imperfectly recorded only such events as have transpired during a few centuries, with records ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... grow in darkness are perfectly white, languid, and unhealthy, and that to make them recover vigour, and to acquire their natural colours, the direct influence of light is absolutely necessary. Somewhat similar takes place even upon animals: Mankind degenerate to a certain degree when employed in sedentary manufactures, or from living in crowded houses, or in the narrow lanes of large cities; whereas they improve in their nature and constitution in most of the ...
— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier
... strange from the point of view from which Sunday was then regarded. Indeed many people feel about the same now. They would have the old laws enforced in regard to riding and neglect of public worship. They have fears that the day may degenerate into a European Sunday, with prayers in the morning and amusements in ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 3: New-England Sunday - Gleanings Chiefly From Old Newspapers Of Boston And Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... whereas the natural pour forth into the world all things of the will and understanding, covetously and fraudulently acquiring wealth, and regarding no other use therein and thence but that of possession. The above-mentioned adulteries change men in these degenerate degrees, one into this, another into that, each according to his favorite taste for what is pleasurable, in which taste his peculiar genius ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... must have been built by the same kind of people who cut their rock houses in some of the canons in Mexico," said Briscoe; "only those are a degenerate set, and their cells or dwellings are very rough and primitive. These people must have been greatly in advance. There: I want to get to work again. There must be a way into that temple place ...
— Old Gold - The Cruise of the "Jason" Brig • George Manville Fenn
... conclusion, I read that these innocent and happy beings, although evidently "creatures of order and subordination," and "very polite," were seen indulging in amusements which would not be deemed "within the bounds of strict propriety" on this degenerate ball. The story wound up rather abruptly by referring the reader to an extended work on the subject by Herschel, which has not ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... degree of national prosperity. The ardour and vigour with which they are at any one time pursued, is the measure of a national spirit. When those objects cease to animate, nations may be said to languish; when they are during a considerable time neglected, states must decline, and their people degenerate. ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... requisite; there being nothing eminent, in that case, to compensate for the want of them, or preserve the person from our severest hatred, as well as contempt. A high ambition, an elevated courage, is apt, says Cicero, in less perfect characters, to degenerate into a turbulent ferocity. The more social and softer virtues are there chiefly to be regarded. These are always good and amiable [Cic. de ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... Gulmarg is extremely apt to degenerate into the "trivial round" of the golf links varied by polo, or polo varied by golf, with occasional gymkhanas and picnics. There are, doubtless, many delightful excursions to be made, but upon the whole it seems difficult to break far beyond the "Circular Road," a fairly level ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... the faults of such an education are not counteracted by the life of the battle-field or the laborious sport of hunting. And if the laws of etiquette and Court manners can act on the spinal marrow to such an extent as to affect the pelvis of kings, to soften their cerebral tissue, and so degenerate the race, what deep-seated mischief, physical and moral, must result in schoolboys from the constant lack of ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... great families there, than he was well able to answer, while ever and anon, in the course of his queries, the good Lord kissed the wine cup by way of parenthesis, remarking that sociality became Scottish gentlemen, but that young men, like Quentin, ought to practise it cautiously, lest it might degenerate into excess; upon which occasion he uttered many excellent things, until his own tongue, although employed in the praises of temperance, began to articulate something thicker than usual. It was now that, while the military ardour of ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... we performe obedience then? As wee are bound by law of God and nature, Yealding true harts affection unto men, Ordain'd to rule and gouerne euery creature: Why then of all on earth that liue and moue, We should degenerate and ...
— The Bride • Samuel Rowlands et al
... a commission, the weak ones go to the wall. We must be like wolves to make anything we can save for a rainy day. But any girl or man who'll consent to act the spy on others—there's a way to earn money, lots of it. A few are tempted. They must degenerate more and more, I think! And there are other things that drive some of us—the women, I mean—to desperation. But I can't tell you about them. You must find out ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... long oval, with pessimistic, brooding eyes—eyes that saw everything except the small modicum of good which is in all human things, and to this they were persistently blind. Taking into consideration the small, set mouth, it was eminently a pugnacious face—a face that might easily degenerate to the coarseness of passion in the trough of a losing fight. But, fortunately, Luke's lines were cast upon the great waters, and he who fights the sea must learn to conquer, not by passionate effort, but ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... Woods, as particularly Box, whilst our Caput mortuum remain'd in the Retort, it continued black like Charcoal, though the Retort were Earthen, and kept red-hot in a vehement Fire; but as soon as ever it was brought out of the candent Vessel into the open Air, the burning Coals did hastily degenerate or fall asunder, without the Assistance of any new Calcination, into pure white Ashes. And to these two I shall add but this obvious and known Observation, that common Sulphur (if it be pure and freed from its Vinager) being leasurely sublim'd in close Vessels, rises into dry Flowers, ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... begun fasting in the morning chill and concluded, likewise fasting, in the noonday heat. Still, it would scarcely have distressed those sturdy limbs, well developed and preserved by Roman training, never permitted by him to degenerate into effeminacy. And as his fine countenance and well- knit frame testified, Marcus AEmilius Victorinus inherited no small share of genuine Roman blood. His noble name might be derived through clientela, and his lineage had a Gallic intermixture; but the true Quirite ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... whether, beyond all private benefit and pleasure, their chief result has not been the improvement and refinement of the human race. But, it must be confessed, the letter of introduction is too much fallen and degenerate. Convenience, depredation, the compassing of by-ends, rather than any loving communion, is too often its intent. It savors less of the paradise of affection than of the vulgar wilderness of the world. We are a little afraid of it, when it comes. A worthy man told me he knew not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... slangy and disreputable, they are wanting in all proper reverence, they are pampered, luxurious, affected, foolish, and disingenuous; unworthy, in short, to be mentioned in the same breath with those who have preceded them, and have left to their degenerate successors a brilliant but unavailing example of youthful conduct. These diatribes may or may not be founded to some extent in truth. At the best, however, their truth is only a half-truth. So long as the world endures, it is probable that young ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Nov. 1, 1890 • Various
... not Burke said so?) is the perpetual enemy of change, and prompts us to seek the public welfare not in alteration and improvement, but in a timid reverence for the decisions of our ancestors, as if it were the nature of the human mind always to degenerate and never to advance. Godwin thought with John Bright, "We stand on the shoulders of ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... worship, or "stock") in common. All brothers took the oath of abandoning all feuds of old; and, without imposing upon each other the obligation of never quarrelling again, they agreed that no quarrel should degenerate into a feud, or into a law-suit before another court than the tribunal of the brothers themselves. And if a brother was involved in a quarrel with a stranger to the guild, they agreed to support him for bad and for good; ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... shows, that it is impossible that our High Priest should degenerate or decay; for that he is made 'higher than the heavens'; the spirits sometimes in the heavens have decayed (2 Peter 2:4). The heavens themselves decay and wax old; and that is the farthest that by the Word we are admitted to go (Heb ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... pp. 213, 386, 403, 461, and 469.).—I fear if I were to adopt Mr. Bolton Corney's tone, we should degenerate into polemics. I will therefore only reply to his question, "Have I wholly mistaken the whole affair?" by one word, "Undoubtedly." The question raised was on an Irish edition of Malone's Shakspeare. Mr. Bolton Corney reproved the querists for not consulting original ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 32, June 8, 1850 • Various
... only meeting in ten years where there was no contention or bitterness of feeling. For once these good people were all of the same mind, and a "barrill of W. I. Rum," which in these days gives rise to such excited controversy, in the presumably degenerate days of 1796 acted like oil upon ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... night, to meet the hounds in the next county by ten in the morning. They are 'gone down to Hades, even many stalwart souls of heroes,' with John Warde of Squerries at their head—the fathers of the men who conquered at Waterloo; and we their degenerate grandsons are left instead, with puny arms, and polished leather boots, and a considerable taint of hereditary disease, to sit in club-houses, and celebrate the progress ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... most austere, generosity the most tender and boundless. Interwoven through his whole dispositions and actions was a strong, vehement temperament, which infused into all he said and did a vivid intensity, which would sometimes degenerate into sallies of passion, but which, upon the whole, raised and exalted his character to the true heroic dimensions. His factor, a respectable Edinburgh burgess, a gunsmith by trade, whom he had selected for no aptitude but from the freak of the name (Innes), could ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... which are represented as thus related by descent or cognation, do not always agree in sense; for it is incident to words, as to their authours, to degenerate from their ancestors, and to change their manners when they change their country. It is sufficient, in etymological enquiries, if the senses of kindred words be found such as may easily pass into each other, or such as may both be ...
— Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language • Samuel Johnson
... attacked Henry VIII for being fat; and when Milton and his Dutch opponent devoted pages of their controversy to the discussion of which of them was the uglier. . . . The new controversialists . . . call a man a physical degenerate, instead of calling him an ugly fellow. They say that red hair is the mark of the Celtic stock, instead ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... else that attracted my attention in the oppressed and degenerate life of the Venetian people, and the only impression I derived from the exquisite ruin of this wonderful city as far as human interest is concerned was that of a watering-place kept up for the benefit of visitors. Strangely enough, it was the thoroughly German element of good military ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... no great distance. But setting these considerations aside, was it laudable to grasp at wealth and power even when they were within our reach? Were not these the two great sources of depravity? What security had he, that in this change of place and condition, he should not degenerate into a tyrant and voluptuary? Power and riches were chiefly to be dreaded on account of their tendency to deprave the possessor. He held them in abhorrence, not only as instruments of misery to others, but to him on whom they were conferred. Besides, ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... organism of dejection and resentment at meals. Prisoners more than men in any other condition need abundance to eat and good cheer while eating; but the food they get, and the circumstances in which they get it, causes them to degenerate physically, and the body affects the mind. Physical disease breeds the disease of evil thoughts and impulses. Criminals might be generated by prison food alone, without taking account of their previous ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... by Ruffhead, to have told Warburton, that "Young had much of a sublime genius, though without common sense; so that his genius, having no guide, was perpetually liable to degenerate into bombast. This made him pass a foolish youth, the sport of peers and poets: but his having a very good heart enabled him to support the clerical character when he assumed it, first with decency, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... reach a book-lined library where a mere handful of men do not overflow the Persian rug before the fire. One of them is Raffles, who is talking to a large man with the brow of a demi-god and the eyes and jowl of a degenerate bulldog. And this ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... quote Jorian once more—is like a dirty, idle, little stupid boy who cannot learn his lesson and plays the fool with the alphabet. You smile, Miss Ilchester: you would appreciate Jorian. Modern wit is emphatically degenerate. It has no scintillation, neither thrust nor parry. I compare it to boxing, as opposed to the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the old wolf sat there, challenging his degenerate mates in every silence, calling the tame to be wild, the bound to be free again, and listening gravely to the wailing answer of the dogs, which refused with groanings, as if dragging themselves away from overmastering temptation. Then the shadow vanished from the big rock ...
— Northern Trails, Book I. • William J. Long
... other statements; when we ask, which are the persons we trust? we answer, those persons whose feelings and actions are congruous with themselves and with the feelings and actions of others. And, on the contrary, it is in the worthless, in the degenerate creature, that we note moods which are destructive to one another's object, ideas which are in flagrant contradiction; and it is in the idiot, the maniac, the criminal, that we see thoughts disconnected among themselves, perceptions ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... insensibly into it. If, however, continued on into adult age, it becomes morbid, passing into erotic fetichism; what in the inexperienced youth is the natural auxiliary and stimulus to imagination, in the degenerate onanist of adult age is a sign of arrested development. Thus, onanism," the author concludes, "is not always a vice such as is fiercely combated by educators and moralists. It is the natural transition by which we reach the warm and generous love of youth, and, in natural succession to this, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the experience he shall also be trained in the method of finding and establishing systems of means for himself and by himself. If, however, we lay the emphasis on the mere imparting of the garnered experiences of the ages, the danger to be feared is lest our teaching degenerate into mere dogmatism or mere cram. If, on the other hand, we lay too much emphasis on the ability to self-find and self-establish systems, we are in danger of losing sight of the social purpose of all knowledge—of forgetting that the only justification for establishing a system ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... happen when a really inferior civilization comes in contact with a really superior one. Rome did not become civilized in any decent sense: she simply forwent Roman virtues and replaced them with Greek vices; and made of these, not the vices of a degenerate culture, but the piggishness of cultureless boors.—Behold her ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... arms in his, their tact,—which is the outcome, partly of their self-forgetfulness, partly of the training which their perceptive faculties are always receiving,—is unfailing, and they never allow friendliness to degenerate into undue familiarity. ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... though the old dowager told us the story every day when the wine was produced, never served to get rid of any quantity of it—and the green ginger, though it had fired British tars for combat and victory, was not to the taste of us peaceful and degenerate gents of modern times. ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... contest of battle found no aid Against invaders; therefore, cooled in zeal, Thenceforth shall practice how to live secure, Worldly or dissolute, on what their lords Shall leave them to enjoy; for the earth shall bear More than enough, that temperance may be tried: So all shall turn degenerate, all depraved; Justice and temperance, truth and faith, forgot; One man except, the only son of light In a dark age, against example good, Against allurement, custom, and a world Offended: fearless of reproach and scorn, Or violence, he of their wicked ways Shall them admonish; and ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... scene Conservation cast his gaunt shadow. It was in June, the year of America's Great Step, that Emma, examining her household, pronounced it fattily degenerate, with complications, and performed upon it a severe and skilful surgical ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... so I do not like stepping into one every moment. We start numerous wild ducks and swamp-hens, and perhaps a bittern or two, by these conflagrations. On the whole, I like burning the hill-sides better than the swamp—you get a more satisfactory blaze with less trouble; but I sigh over these degenerate days when the grass is kept short and a third part of a run is burned regularly ever spring, and long for the good old times of a dozen years ago, when the tussocks were six feet high. What a blaze they must have made! The immediate results of our expeditions are ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... telling some things to Helen's mother. But he was not given to doubt concerning his motives and in this particular instance he had no hesitation over his own absolutely clean and disinterested motive. He wanted Helen to escape the horror of a union with a degenerate mind and heart as he knew they existed in Van Shaw's character and his own feeling for her did not occupy a prominent place in his motive. Of that much he was sure and it helped him somewhat to get through one of the most trying ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... it. It began with "Dear Fanny," and it ended with "yours truly." "—Yours truly—mine truly—and how kind to write at all!" Now it so happened that Vaudemont, having never merged the art of the penman into that rapid scrawl into which people, who are compelled to write hurriedly and constantly, degenerate, wrote a remarkably good hand,—bold, clear, symmetrical—almost too good a hand for one who was not to make money by caligraphy. And after Fanny had got the words by heart, she stole gently to a cupboard and took forth some specimens of her ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 5 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... had suffered from a pulmonary affection in early life, from which he never entirely recovered. His frame showed an extraordinary development of bone and muscle; his joints were large, as were his feet; and could a cast have been preserved of his hand, to be exhibited in these degenerate days, it would be said to have belonged to the being of a fabulous age. During Lafayette's visit to Mount Vernon in 1825, he said to the writer: 'I never saw so large a hand on any human being, as the general's. It was in this portico, in 1784, that you were introduced ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... regretted that Toby, hitherto, perhaps, the most perfect character of the three, should in these few weeks of prosperity degenerate the most. Having no school to attend, and no care whatever on his mind, this dog decided to give himself up to enjoyment. The weather was most bitterly cold. It was quite unnecessary for him to accompany Cecile and Maurice to school. His education had long ago been finished. ...
— The Children's Pilgrimage • L. T. Meade
... St. Francis had become, in spite of himself, an ecclesiastical institution: it must soon degenerate into a clerical institution. All unawares, the Franciscan movement had been unfaithful to its origin. The prophet had abdicated in favor of the priest, not indeed without possibility of return, for when a man has once reigned, I would say, thought, in liberty—what ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... neither to the left nor to the right. His eyes were fixed and yet unseeing, his features were pale and bony. There was no gleam of life, not even in the stone-cold eyes. Like some machine-made man of a new and physically degenerate age, he took his exercise under the eye of his doctor, a strange and ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... are denominated Swampies, a tribe of the Cree nation, whose language they speak with but little variation, and in their manners and customs there is a great similarity. But the Swampies are a degenerate race, reduced by famine and disease to a few families; and these have been still farther reduced by an epidemic which raged among them this summer. They were attacked by it immediately on their return from the interior with the produce of their winter hunts, and ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean
... Romish, but entirely and truly Catholic! Was ever such like woful perversity? When they had just got a brother to be proud of, who could take them to theatres, concerts, balls, operas, and everywhere, for him to go and degenerate into an old solemn Presbyterian minister! It would be bearable, if he must be a minister, if he would only be a High Churchman, and would be called a priest, and wear the surplice, and read the service in his charming voice, and be rector of such a fine, rich church as our own St. Mark's! ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... as in the instance of the general communion, were rendered more imposing by the attendance of the civil and military authorities, and most persons of rank and wealth in the vicinity. Nor did they degenerate into mere processions and pompous forms, if the narrative is to be trusted. The missionaries appear on every occasion to have availed themselves of the excitation of the moment, in calling forth such feelings as must ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... have prevented the miseries under which now we groane. But the Cup of trembling, before taken out of our hands, is again come about to us, that wee may drink deeper of it: And although when these bloody Monsters, the Irish Rebels, together with some degenerate, unnaturall, and perfidious Countreymen of our own, did first lift up their heads, and enter this Kingdome in a hostile way, it was looked upon as a light matter, and the great judgement which hath since appeared in it, not apprehended: ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland
... omission, the Worcestershire sauce is left out by braggarts who aver that they can take it or leave it. And, in these degenerate days, when it comes to substitutions for the original beer or stale pale ale, we find the gratings of great Cheddars wet down with mere California sherry or even ginger ale—yet so far, thank goodness, no Cokes. And there's tomato juice out of a can into the Rum ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... them. Each private person was liable to be called in question for every action of his life; and an elaborate network of canon law perpetually growing, enveloped the whole surface of society. But between the original design and the degenerate counterfeit there was this vital difference,—that the censures were no longer spiritual. They were commuted in various gradations for pecuniary fines, and each offence against morality was rated at its specific money value in the episcopal tables. Suspension and excommunication ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... heavens, an impulse, we can scarcely doubt, implanted in the heart of man by God Himself. It is a remarkable fact that in many—some would say most—of the less civilised races of mankind we find these social virtues, which some would have us believe are degenerate features foisted on to the race ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... the current theory therefore fall back on the hypothesis that the Australians are sadly degenerate.(1) Chiefs, it is argued, or kings, they once had, and the gods are surviving ghosts of these wholly forgotten potentates. To this we reply that we know not the very faintest trace of Australian degeneration. Sir John Lubbock and Mr. Tylor have correctly argued that the soil of Australia has not ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... stings me that this chivalrous king of ours, this degenerate grandson of Henry the Great, should think of selling for a few paltry livres such an heritage as this. Shame to you ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... far more beautiful than they are; and that indeed we cannot have too much of beauty in them, so that beauty be duly steeped in the grace and truth of Christian inspiration. But Art has its dangers here as well as its uses: especially it is apt to degenerate from a discipline of religious virtue into a mere relaxation, losing the severity that elevates and purifies, in what is merely pretty or voluptuous or pleasing. It is therefore of the utmost consequence what ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... himself somewhere confesses, That as the Fire betters some things and improves their Vertues, so it spoyles others and makes them degenerate. And elsewhere he judiciously affirmes, that there may be sometimes greater vertue in a simple, such as Nature has made it, than in any thing that can by the fire be separated from it. And lest you should doubt whether ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... that on the tail is three or four inches long; these cats frequently spread their tails on their backs, as squirrels do. The colour is generally white, but sometimes light brown; they do not catch mice. This beautiful species does not degenerate speedily, and it appears to thrive better in Paris than in any other part of Europe. The figures of both these animals are ...
— A Trip to Paris in July and August 1792 • Richard Twiss
... persons is, in my humble opinion, devoted to literary pursuits and sedentary occupations, and too little to the acquisition of the corporeal powers indispensable to make the former practically useful. If the present system does not undergo some change, I much apprehend we shall see a degenerate and sinking race, such as came to exist among the higher classes in France before the Revolution, and such as now deforms a large part of the noblest families in Spain;[5] but if the spirit of improvement, so happily ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... entered the sitting-room she again addressed me, to deplore the degenerate taste of ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... mankind in the disguise of truth: justice, unbiassed either by favour or interest, which now so fatally pervert it, was equally and impartially dispensed; nor was the judge's fancy law, for then there were neither judges nor causes to be judged. The modest maid might then walk alone. But, in this degenerate age, fraud and a legion of ills infecting the world, no virtue can be safe, no honour be secure; while wanton desires, diffused into the hearts of men, corrupt the strictest watches and the closest retreats, which, ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... his own real point of view, the artist must employ his energies, and create energy in others: to descend to their position is less noble, but practicable with ease. If I may be allowed the metaphor, one partakes of the nature of redemptive power; the other of that self-abased and degenerate will, which 'flung from his splendors' the fairest ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... except in a case of hunger. All the same, leaving the tree out of consideration, bear-chasing with hounds is a tremendously exciting and hazardous game. But my ideas about sport are changing. Hunting, in the sportsman's sense, is a cruel and degenerate business. ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... fortify themselves with, ere they set out on their long coach journeys. The Bill of Fare for the guests at that hostelry during the festive season of 1790 shows that our ancestors had an excellent conception of Christmas cheer. For variety and quantity it could not easily be surpassed, and in these "degenerate" days could not even be equalled. But let ...
— The King's Post • R. C. Tombs
... same sagacious thinker was able to point the moral of it all, and prove to his friends that their present trials were due to the selfish particularism of the German States: "It was a necessity that some great power should arise in the midst of the degenerate selfishness of the times and also prove victorious, for there was nothing vigorous to oppose it. Napoleon is an ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... use of wine, of flesh, and of marriage, chastised their body, mortified their affections, and embraced a life of misery, as the price of eternal happiness. The ascetics fled from a profane and degenerate world to perpetual solitude, or religious society. Like the first Christians of Jerusalem, they resigned the use, or the property, of their temporal possessions; established regular communities of the same sex and a similar disposition, and assumed the names of hermits, ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... at that idea for a moment. Then he thought, 'Someone would have telephoned,' "No," he said, "she's out. That's where she is. And I suppose I can wait here, as well as I can until she chooses to come home. Degenerate foolish nonsense!..." ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... a close watch that would degenerate into drudgery and to remain alive to events even when resting, with her back turned on the net, the ambushed Spider always has her foot upon the telegraph-wire. Of my observations on this subject, let me relate the following, which will ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... so considerate, however, as to let me leave the land. Pay me for my property in the kingdom, and return to me what I have expended in your service. Then I declare to you I will withdraw never to return to my degenerate, wretched, ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... politeness; a veiled image of politeness—sometimes impenetrably veiled. But my point is here that by losing the original idea of the city, which is the force and youth of both the words, both the things actually degenerate. Our politeness loses all manliness because we forget that politeness is only the Greek for patriotism. Our policemen lose all delicacy because we forget that a policeman is only the Greek for something civilised. A policeman should ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... manner in which the victim surveyed his tormentors only exasperated them still further. By the threat of the bayonet he was compelled to stand up in front of these degenerate members of the human race and the girl behind the counter, whose laughter could now be heard ringing above the frantic shrieks ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... uneasiness when the Turks made their unsuccessful strikes at the canal, but the population gave no trouble. At Alexandria and Cairo some few fanatics and ignorant people of the lower classes displayed some opposition to the Government. The sultan was fired on April 8, 1915, by a degenerate, Mohammed Khalil, a haberdasher of Masoura, the bullet missing the victim by only a few inches. Khalil was tried by court-martial and executed April 24. The attempt on Sultan Hussein's life had the effect of making him friends from among the disaffected in the higher ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... must not, from the faithful narrator, degenerate into the partial eulogist. Well, full well, do I know that Dr. John was not perfect, anymore than I am perfect. Human fallibility leavened him throughout: there was no hour, and scarcely a moment of the time I spent with him that in act or speech, or look, he did not betray something ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... Washington as the greatest man on earth. The war, he said, was the King's war, ministers were his tools, the press was bought. He denounced later the King's reception of the traitor Arnold. When the King's degenerate son, who became George IV, after some special misconduct, wrote to propose his annual visit to Holkham, Coke replied, "Holkham is open to strangers on Tuesdays." It was an independent and irate England which spoke in Coke. Those who paid taxes, he said, should control those who governed. America ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... the type, which still remained essentially Toltec; and hundreds of thousands of years later we find one of their remote family races ruling magnificently in Mexico and Peru, long ages before their degenerate descendants were conquered by the fiercer Aztec tribes from the north. The complexion of this race was also a red-brown, but they were redder or more copper-coloured than the Tlavatli. They also were a tall race, averaging about eight feet ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... after a fashion that sets back old Turnspit into the remotest corner under the backstairs of the Dark Ages. I have alluded to his alleged descendants, as pointed out to my observation in boyhood; but they were an effete and degenerate race, purposeless, and wallowing much with the pigs, whom their grandsires would have recognized only ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... predecessors. The tendency of the age is to lower, not to elevate, the standard set up by our ancestors for the attainment of preeminence. That our giants may not be stunted in their growth—that the legal stock may not hopelessly degenerate—Chief Justice Campbell does well to impress upon his brethren the patient and laborious course—the high and admirable qualities—by which Chief Justice Mansfield secured his greatness ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... to try to persuade him that seed-time and harvest were the same thing, and that he had nothing to do but to rest in what he had done; shew his bright colours and flutter like a moth in the sunshine, or sit down like a degenerate bee in the summer time and eat his own honey. The power of action which he knew in himself could not rest without something to act upon. ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... will come of it: they will waste a dozen years, write a lot of rubbish, make the subject more obscure than ever—and nothing more. It is always a good thing to think scientifically, but the trouble is that scientific thinking about creative art will be bound to degenerate in the end into searching for the "cells" or the "centres" which control the creative faculty. Some stolid German will discover these cells somewhere in the occipital lobes, another German will agree with him, a third will disagree, and a Russian ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... modification of the action of the rays so that the varying densities of bodily organs will enable them to be photographed, will bring all such morbid growths as tumors and cancers into the photographic field, to say nothing of vital organs which may be abnormally developed or degenerate. How much this means to medical and surgical practice it requires little imagination to conceive. Diagnosis, long a painfully uncertain science, has received an unexpected and wonderful assistant; and how greatly the world will ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... been great," "Rome has been powerful," we sigh and say. It is the pitying crust we toss decay, The dirge we breathe o'er some degenerate state, An epitaph for fame's unburied dead. God pity those who live ...
— Poems of Sentiment • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... A bully, a degenerate, a thug of the city, a brigand of the country, a horse thief of the western plains, attacks a weaker and unprepared victim. A man with red blood in his veins sees the assault, and attacks the attacker with strength enough to save the victim, arrest the disturber ...
— The Spirit of Lafayette • James Mott Hallowell
... and calculating now. A few minutes ago he had sent a jar of oxygen to keep Luke Claridge alive! But for it one enemy to his career, to his future, would be gone. He did not shrink from the thought. Born a gentleman, there were in him some degenerate characteristics which heart could not drown or temperament refine. Selfishness was inwoven with ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... but that of his own college, both under the Laudian Statute and after the great statute of 1800, which set up the modern system of examinations. What the founder had intended as an encouragement for industry was made by his degenerate disciples ...
— The Oxford Degree Ceremony • Joseph Wells
... Pyramids knew the distance of the sun rather better than we did, and that the height of the Great Pyramid had been so arranged that if it was multiplied by a thousand millions we should get this distance more exactly than we could measure it in these degenerate days. With him, to believe in the Pyramid was to believe this, and a great deal more about the civilization which it proved. So, when he asked me whether I believed in the Pyramid, I told him that I did not think I ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... he has withered the heart of the citizen. One must belong to the race of the invincible and the indomitable, to persevere now in the rugged path of renunciation and of duty. An indescribable gangrene of material prosperity threatens to cause public honesty to degenerate into rottenness. Oh! what happiness to be banished, to be disgraced, to be ruined,—is it not, brave workmen? Is it not, worthy peasants, driven from France, who have no roof to shelter you, and no shoes to your feet? What happiness to eat ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... millions of livres. For what, it may be asked, was the power of an empire exercised, and so much robbery perpetrated? In favor, at least, one would say, of some important sect? No such thing. It was all for the would-be Kupelian schism, seven hundred strong. It is needless here to say how soon the degenerate Sultan, Abdul Aziz, and his prevaricating empire met their reward, whilst the legitimate Armenian patriarch, Hassoum, so long the victim of persecution, has been restored, is honored by the government of his country and held in the highest ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... Akaphir, from the Arabic word kafer 'pagans.' These names are used in Binh-Thuan to make a distinction, but Banis and Kaphirs alike are all Chams.... In Cambodia all Chams are Mussulmans." (E. Aymonier, Les Tchames, p. 26.) The religion of the pagan Chams of Binh-Thuan is degenerate Brahmanism with three chief gods, Po-Nagar, Po-Rome, and Po-Klong-Garai. (Ibid., p. 35.)—H.C.] The books of their former religion they say (according to Dr. Bastian) that they received from Ceylon, but they were converted to Islamism by no less a person than 'Ali himself. The ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... "Ah, base and degenerate spirit!" said the General; "soul of mud and clay, wouldst thou not do it, and much more, for the possession of empire!—that is, peradventure," continued he, changing his tone as one who has said too much, "shouldst thou be called on to do this, that thereby becoming a great man ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... requisition, together with other fearful utterances of our most degenerate poets to the same effect. Now if I could see that they really found an escape from poverty in the lives they lead, I would not be too nice on the point of absolute freedom. But when we find them (to use ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... higher level. In this way then, in successful cases, the worthless men become workmen. Worthless men are changed into economic assets. The dependents become independent. Working by means of the laws of environment and association, the Army elevates the degenerate from a pseudo-social and anti-social class to a higher level and to social position. Where individuality was lost, independence of ...
— The Social Work of the Salvation Army • Edwin Gifford Lamb
... dwelling in Iran; two of these have become noted in history—the Medes and the Persians. The Medes at the west, nearer the Assyrians, destroyed Nineveh and its empire (625). But soon they softened their manners, taking the flowing robes, the indolent life, the superstitious religion of the degenerate Assyrians. They at last ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... assisting grace God permits it) weakness, want of government, our facility and proneness in yielding to several lusts, in giving way to every passion and perturbation of the mind: by which means we metamorphose ourselves and degenerate into beasts. All which that prince of [875]poets observed of Agamemnon, that when he was well pleased, and could moderate his passion, he was—os oculosque Jovi par: like Jupiter in feature, Mars in valour, Pallas ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... thro' the Treachery of the Natives, for we may reasonably suppose that the English were forced to cohabit with them, for Relief and Conversation; and that in process of Time, they conform'd themselves to the Manners of their Indian Relations. And thus we see, how apt Humane Nature is to degenerate. ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson
... became tutor of the Earl of Murray, the natural son of James V. The Franciscan monks were not very popular at this period, and at the suggestion of the King Buchanan wrote a satirical poem entitled Silva Franciscanorum, in which he censured the degenerate followers of St. Francis, and harassed them in many ways. This poem so enraged the monks that they seized him and imprisoned him in one of their monasteries. One night, while his guards slept, he contrived to escape by a window, and underwent great perils. He published two other ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... fault. That is due to your singular lack of perception. However, I am able to return the compliment. I, for my part, should have thought that you were more interested in the fashions than in paying exceedingly rash visits to degenerate orientals and negroes." ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... public is ever a laudator temporis acti, and whatever the authors or the orators immediately before it, were those authors and orators Homers and Ciceros, would still shake a disparaging head, and talk of these degenerate days as Homer himself talked ages before Leonidas stood in the pass of Thermopylae, or Miltiades routed Asian armaments at Marathon. Guy Darrell belonged to a former race. The fathers of those young members rising now into fame had quoted to their sons his pithy sentences, his vivid images; and added, ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... these various degenerate and illiterate attempts at book-work we have only to watch the last expiring gleams of classic art beneath the ruthless footsteps of the barbarian invaders ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... Locker vouches for a light-hearted old Tom who, at the close of a long and ill-spent life, actually squandered his last breath in the pursuit of his own elusive tail. But there are few of us who would care to see the monumental calm of our fireside sphinx degenerate into senile sportiveness. Better far the measured slowness of her pace, the superb immobility of her repose. To watch an ordinary cat move imperceptibly and with a rhythmic waving of her tail through a doorway (while we are patiently holding ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... comforts of life grow greater every day, the demands of the body multiply, but we are still a long way from the truth and man still remains the most rapacious and unseemly of animals, and everything tends to make the majority of mankind degenerate and more and more lacking in vitality. Under such conditions the life of an artist has no meaning and the more talented he is, the more strange and incomprehensible his position is, since it only amounts to his working ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... power in degenerate Italy. Even those States which were not in subjection to the emperor, were overawed by his imperious spirit. Genoa was nominally independent. The Genoese arrested one of the imperial officers for some violation of the laws of the republic. The emperor sent an army to the gates ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... the world, cautiously and carefully, moving unobtrusively and unobserved. We wanted to contemplate the corruption, seek out the weaknesses in your degenerate civilization. And we found them, immediately. Those weaknesses are everywhere apparent, for they are physical. You're one of a dying race, Littlejohn. Mankind's days are numbered. There's no need for grandiose ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... position to know the details of the plot and to prepare her for them. He had sought to use her in warning the Duchess, not as an agent of humanity and Christian charity, but as the emissary of the cowardly and vicious government across the border, Austria's enemy, Serbia the regicide and the degenerate, about the fate of which hung the peace of ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... old-style plumbing and of nine-dollar-a-week humanity in the unwashen raw—the odour of misery that permeated the lodgings to which his lack of means had introduced him. He could see again, and with a painful vividness of mental vision, the degenerate "brownstone fronts" that mask those haunts of wretchedness, with their flights of crumbling brownstone steps leading up to oaken portals haggard with flaking paint, flanked by squares of soiled note-paper upon which inexpert hands ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... Rome. The Pope was ready to spend enormous sums of money on this petty war; the Duke's purse was shorter, and the mercenary troops he was obliged to use, proved worthless in the field. Spaniards, for the most part, pitted against Spaniards, they suffered the campaigns to degenerate into a guerilla warfare of pillage and reprisals. In 1517 the duchy was formally ceded to Lorenzo. But this Medici did not live long to enjoy it, and his only child Catherine, the future Queen of France, never exercised the rights which had devolved ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... your defence of stamp collecting and collecting generally...But, by Jove, I can hardly stomach a grown man collecting stamps. Who would ever have thought of your collecting Wedgwoodware! but that is wholly different, like engravings or pictures. We are degenerate descendants of old Josiah W., for we have not a bit of pretty ware in ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... of my lays, Elate with whose majestic call Above degenerate Latium's praise, Above the slavish boast of Gaul, I dare from impious thrones reclaim, And wanton sloth's ignoble charms, The honours of a poet's name To Somers' counsels, or to Hampden's arms, Thee, Freedom, I rejoin, and bless ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... said, "infamous and audacious! By Heaven, I will have thy tongue torn out with hot pincers, for mentioning the very name of a noble Christian damsel! Know, degenerate traitor, that I was already aware to what height thou hadst dared to raise thine eyes, and endured it, though it were insolence, even when thou hadst cheated us—for thou art all a deceit—into holding thee as of some name and fame. ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... possessed a primordial talent that is rather rare in these physically degenerate days. He said nothing, but stood quietly in the middle of the road. The eyes of the crowd on either side of the road began to bulge, the lips of all opened with wonder, and a simultaneous burst of laughter rose around the Hon. Samuel Budd. ...
— A Knight of the Cumberland • John Fox Jr.
... Then she sighed, "I do not see why they assign a man only three names to select from. Surely they could be more liberal." She paused and her face hardened. "And to think that you men are permitted to call as often as you like upon those degenerate hussies who have been forbidden the sacred duties of motherhood. It is a very wicked institution, that level of lust—some day we women—we mothers of Berlin—will rise in our wrath and see that they are banished to the mines, for they produce nothing but sin and misery in ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... is as much concerned with the amount of effort put forth as with the comparative results of it measured with some other player. A defeated player should be led to recognize and do honor to the prowess of his adversary, and so to congratulate him honestly. A sense of superior power should never degenerate into gloating over a defeated adversary or into contempt for his weaker ability. Many thrilling examples of honest mutual admiration between victor and vanquished may be gleaned from the history of warfare, as when Grant handed back the sword of ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... the Coliseum, the most colossal of Roman ruins, only about one-third remained. Once capable of accommodating nearly ninety thousand spectators, it had, in succession, been turned into a fortress in the middle ages, and then into a stone-quarry to furnish material for the palaces of degenerate Roman princes. Some of the popes had occupied it as a woollen-mill, some as a saltpetre factory; some had planned the conversion of its magnificent arcades into shops for tradesmen. The iron clamps ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... much longer with two such learned and philosophical scholars, I shall inevitably degenerate into ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... and Mr. Addison[4] have joined in giving testimony against our author, as to the choice of his verse, which they condemn as boyish and being apt to degenerate into the doggrel; but while they censure his verse, they applaud his matter, and Dryden observes, that had he chose any other verse, he would even then have excelled; as we say of a court favourite, that whatever his office be, he still makes ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... it that you know my thoughts?' 'I have often,' said Tsze-sze, 'heard from you the lesson, that when the father has gathered and prepared the firewood, if the son cannot carry the bundle, he is to be pronounced degenerate and unworthy. The remark comes frequently into my thoughts, and fills me with great apprehensions.' The sage was delighted. He 1. 魯穆(or 繆)公. 2. 聖廟祀典圖考. 3. 或以六十二似八十二之誤. Eighty-two and sixty-two may more easily ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) Unicode Version • James Legge
... all white, pink, blue or light purple. About the base of the porch and of all the house's front, bloom flowers of these same delicate tints, the tallest nearest the house, the lesser at their knees and feet. The edges of the beds—gentle waves that never degenerate to straightness—are thickly bordered with mignonette. Not an audacious thing, not a red blossom nor a strong yellow one, nor one broad leaf, nor any mass of dense or dark foliage, comes into view until one reaches a side of the dwelling. But there ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... turning black on the distant hills, and the silent stars were slowly coming into view. Clean, health-giving Baden-Baden, in the Valley of the Oos, with its beauty and its pure air, was holding out her arms to all the disease and filth that degenerate ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... to whom she was affianced, was a poor, bilious, degenerate weakling, stunted in figure, uncomely of face. He was shy and timid, shunning active exercises, and though at the time of his marriage (1558) he was too young to have been actively engaged in the vices of the outwardly devout court, he appears to have been ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... contemporaries. His varied talents are further shown by his numerous literary labours, of which some small notices remain. His views were large and enlightened, his schemes were vast and boundless. His genius deserved a better sphere than the degenerate republic in which he lived. But the power which he acquired did not die with him. A youth of tender age succeeded to the name and the inheritance of Caesar, and by his great talents and a long career of wonderful success consolidated that Monarchy ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... by reason of his courage; for though he neither had the command of his sword nor of his hands, he prevented all abuses by dashing his head against a stone; so he demonstrated himself to be Herod's own brother, and Hyrcanus a most degenerate relation, and died with great bravery, and made the end of his life agreeable to the actions of it. There is also another report about his end, viz. that he recovered of that stroke, and that a surgeon, who was sent by Antigonus to heal ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... Sir William Harcourt on the subject of his answer to Mr. Freshfield, in which I said—"I tell you that you could not suppress the Freethinker if you tried. The martyr spirit of Freethought is not dead, and the men who suffered imprisonment for liberty of speech a generation ago have not left degenerate successors. Should the necessity arise, there are Freethinkers who will not shrink from the same sacrifice for the same cause." The sequel has shown that this was ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... Nicholas sternly, "was a faithful servant, but he has left behind him a degenerate son. For such an enterprise as yours large resources were requisite. ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... perhaps, of flattery. 'Twould scarcely here be out of place If Edward Griffin's smiling face I should present in colors true— In good Samaritanic view; The patron of Joe Lee, whose name Is known to histrionic fame; Who play'd at Shylock on the stage, When tragedy was more the rage Than in this sad degenerate age. And where art thou, my friend, George Story, A man of yore, though not yet hoary? The even tenor of thy way Hast thou maintain'd for many a day; They tell us within human range That mortal things are given to change, It may be so, yet thou art ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett
... worms. The effect was thrilling. Every sound save the soft swish of the ghastly robes and the delicate footfall of ghostly feet ceased. Not a whisper from a sap-headed youth or a yap from an aged degenerate or a giggle from a silly woman broke the ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... improvement to be hoped for, life would not be the less an unceasing struggle against causes of deterioration, as it even now is. Politics, as conceived by the ancients, consisted wholly in this. The natural tendency of men and their works was to degenerate, which tendency, however, by good institutions virtuously administered, it might be possible for an indefinite length of time to counteract. Though we no longer hold this opinion; though most men in the present age profess the contrary ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... the Khasis. The following is his opinion of them:—"They are a powerful, athletic race of men, rather below the middle size, with a manliness of gait and demeanour. They are fond of their mountains, and look down with contempt upon the degenerate race of the plains, jealous of their power, brave in action, and have ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... For a while the men absorbed and reflected the intellectual life, for there still ran in their veins the good red blood of their sturdy grandmothers. But the race was doomed by the indolent, self-indulgent and parasitic females. The women did not all degenerate. Here and there were found women on whom wealth had no power. There was a Sappho, and an Aspasia, who broke out into activity and stood beside their men-folk in intellectual attainment, but the other women did not follow; they were too comfortable, ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... and there were no birds visible, except a solitary heron or owl, and a thrush or grebe, flying from the falcon. Human beings there were none, not a native appeared; not even one of the GUASSOS, the degenerate offspring of Indians and Spaniards, dashed across the plain like a shadow, his flying steed dripping with blood from the cruel thrusts inflicted by the gigantic spurs of his master's naked feet. It was ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... heedlessly on my desk was—what should it be but the little morocco case, empty now, in which our Francesca keeps her dead mother's engagement ring,—the mother who died when she was a wee child. Truly a very pretty modern ballad to be sung in these unromantic, degenerate days! ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... natural philosophers and theologians discovered an admirable way of escape in the "theory of degeneration." Granting the affinity, they turned the whole evolutionary theory upside down, and boldly contended that "man is not the most highly developed animal, but the animals are degenerate men." It is true that man is closely related to the ape, and belongs to the vertebrate stem; but the chain of his ancestry goes upward instead of downward. In the beginning "God created man in his own image," as the prototype of the perfect vertebrate; but, in consequence of ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... differentiate than truly to characterise. The proportions of the sitter must be sacrificed to the proportions of the portrait; the lights are heightened, the shadows overcharged; the chosen expression, continually forced, may degenerate at length into a grimace; and we have at best something of a caricature, at worst a calumny. Hence, if they be readable at all, and hang together by their own ends, the peculiar convincing force of these brief representations. They take ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fortitude beyond description she had faced it, gently, quietly, but firmly faced it—firmly, because she had to be firm in keeping him within those bounds the invasion of which would have killed her. And after the first struggle with his unchangeable brutality it had been easier: for into his degenerate brain there had come a faint understanding of the real situation and of her. He had kept his side of the gulf, but gloating on this touch between the old luxurious, indulgent life, with its refined vices, and this present coarse, hard life, where pleasures were few and gross. The free ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... of fifty, and with him the Ciceronian traditions had ended in Casa Conti, and their place had been taken by the caprices of the big, healthy, indolent, extravagant Polish woman, by the miserable weaknesses of a degenerate heir, and the fanatic religious practices ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... "Notre Dame" can deny the presence of a certain savage delight in scenes of grotesque and exaggerated terror. No one who has read "Les Miserables" can deny the existence in him of a vein of lovely tenderness that, with a little tiny push over the edge, would degenerate into maudlin sentiment ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... had left too soon. They often spoke with visible enthusiasm, and tender and compassionate respect, of a young stranger, a lady, who had remained at the baths in a weak and languid state of health, which it was feared would degenerate into slow consumption. She had lived alone with her maid for the last three months, in one of the most retired apartments of the house, taking her meals in her own rooms; and was never seen except at her window that looked towards the garden, or on the stairs when she ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... tolerate, things that fill them, therefore, with envy and perplexity—such things as pleasure, beauty, delicacy, leisure. In the cant of modern talk you will find them call everything that is not crude and forcible in life "degenerate." But back to the very earliest writings, in the most bloodthirsty outpourings of the Hebrew prophets, for example, you will find that at the base of the warrior spirit is hate for more complicated, for more refined, for more beautiful ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... tenor of your member's conduct. Try whether his ambition or his avarice have justled him out of the straight line of duty,—or whether that grand foe of the offices of active life, that master vice in men of business, a degenerate and inglorious sloth, has made him flag and languish in his course. This is the object of our inquiry. If our member's conduct can bear this touch, mark it for sterling. He may have fallen into errors, he must have faults; but ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... involuntary explorer two planet years ago! The beast things which had lived in the dark of the desert world the Terrans' wandering galactic derelict had landed upon. Yes, the beast things whose nature they had never been able to deduce. Were they the degenerate dregs of a once intelligent species? Or were they animals, akin to man, ...
— The Defiant Agents • Andre Alice Norton
... holy the seventh day were only[82] a human institution, it would be the best method that could have been thought of for the polishing and civilising of mankind. It is certain the country people would soon degenerate into a kind of savages and barbarians, were there not such frequent returns of a stated time, in which the whole village meet together with their best faces, and in their cleanliest habits, to converse with one another upon indifferent ...
— The De Coverley Papers - From 'The Spectator' • Joseph Addison and Others
... going, but Laura held her back. "Oh, your majesty," she cried imploringly, "listen to me! do not leave me under this cruel misconception—these insulting suppositions. Do not think I am so degenerate, so base, so entirely without womanly feeling, as not to feel myself amenable to the laws of the land and of the Church. Oh, believe me, the husband of my queen is sacred in my eyes! and even if I were so unhappy as to love the king, otherwise than ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... oratio, a phrase of the prologue to The Self-Tormentor, is the implied burden of them all. He is a sort of Literary Robespierre; one seems to catch the premonitory echo of well-known phrases, "degenerate condition of literary spirit, backsliding on this hand and on that, I, Terence, alone left incorruptible." Three times there is a reference to Plautus, and always with a tone of chilly superiority which is too proud to break into an open sneer. Yet among these haughty and frigid manifestoes ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... at Gettysburg he would never have let his children go out to service. Poor soul, he bore the whole of his afflictions, those to his body and those to his pride, with a dignity not often seen in these degenerate days. He was by trade a blacksmith, and it was for that reason, I suppose, that Providence, who loves a little joke, elected for amputation his right hand rather than one or both of his feet. Since, even in these degenerate days, many a footless ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... acquittal—inasmuch as he told me to make myself as comfortable as I could in his house, and to enjoy myself thoroughly in it for the next fortnight to come, at the very least. It may have been that, in considering my faults as those of the degenerate age in which I lived—which age, however, be it known, lived afterwards to recover its character, and to be held up as a model of propriety and virtue to the succeeding generation—the merciful doctor was willing to merge my chastisement in that which he bestowed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... appear that climate to a certain extent directly modifies the forms of dogs. We have lately seen that several of our English breeds cannot live in India, and it is positively asserted that when bred there for a few generations they degenerate not only in their mental faculties, but in form. Captain Williamson (1/75. 'Oriental Field Sports' quoted by Youatt 'The Dog' page 15.), who carefully attended to this subject, states that "hounds are the most rapid in their decline;" "greyhounds and pointers, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... irregular oval; a cabbage patch where the arena had been; and various tumble-down farmsheds built into the shattered masonry —this was the Circus of Romulus. However, it was not the circus of the original Romulus, but of a degenerate successor of the same name who rose suddenly and fell abruptly after the Christian era was well begun. Old John J. Romulus would not have stood ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... face the reader on every page of this fssay: if, however, we realise Nietzsche's purpose, if we understand his struggle to be one against "Culture-Philistinism" in general, as a stemming, stultifying and therefore degenerate factor, and regard David Strauss—as the author himself did, that is to say, simply as a glass, focusing the whole light of our understanding upon the main theme— then the Strauss paper is seen to be one of such enormous power, and its aim appears to ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... determined," she answered, gaily, for she was before her time inasmuch as she was what is known in these days of degenerate speech ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... He seemed to take a kind of satisfaction in disgusting them, and driving them nearly mad, while they were so irritably sensitive at the age of fourteen or fifteen. So that Arthur, who was growing up when his father was degenerate and elderly, hated him ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... hardly dared to lift her eyes in Mary Pidwall's presence. For Mary knew not only the sum of her lies, but also held—or so Laura believed—that she came of a thoroughly degenerate family; thanks to Uncle Tom. And the early weeks spent at close quarters with her bore out these fears. The looks both M. P. and her friend bent on Laura said as plainly as words: if we are forced to tolerate this obnoxious little insect about us, we can ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... honors, they appended to their acclamations disparaging remarks upon his predecessor, whom they affected to regard as the issue of an adulterous intrigue, and as no true Arsacid. Tiridates was pleased to reward the unseemly flattery of these degenerate Greeks by a new arrangement of their constitution. Hitherto they had lived under the government of a Senate of Three Hundred members, the wisest and wealthiest of the citizens, a certain control being, ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... place of individual advice, we have thus to a certain degree obtained general economic investigations from which each can gather what he needs. It seems that sometimes the danger of letting such offices degenerate into mere agencies for employment has not been avoided, but that is one of the perils of the first development. The mother institute in Boston, too, under its new direction emphasizes more the economic and hygienic side, and has set its centre ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... knowledge would be extremely limited. On the other hand, if there were no naturalists, the hunter—instead of being the hero who dares every imaginable species of danger, in order to procure specimens and furnish information that will add to the sum of human knowledge—would degenerate into the mere butcher, who supplies himself and his men with meat; or into the semi-murderer, who delights in shedding the blood of inferior animals. The fact is, that the naturalist and the hunter are indispensably necessary to each other—'both are best,' to use an old expression; and when ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... (1500-1200 B.C.): degenerate polished red and painted white ware; wheel-made white ware with painted ornament in glazed black or brown, of the 'Late Minoan' or 'Mycenaean' style introduced from the Aegean; various hand-made wares of foreign styles, probably from Syria or ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... all good things is apt to degenerate into mere form," said I. "The outward expression of social good feeling becomes a mere form; but for that reason must we meet each other like oxen? not say, 'Good morning,' or 'Good evening,' or 'I am happy to see you'? Must we never use any of the forms of mutual good will, ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... occasionally to the Koldagi Heive mountains on the borders of Kordofan. This, it must be acknowledged, is a sad falling off from the rival of the lion, that we have honoured so long in the arms of England. But we sincerely hope, that by the next arrival, it will not degenerate into a cow, or worse, a goat. But he tells us, that to our knowledge of the giraffe he has added considerably. He obtained in Nubia and Kordofan five specimens, two of which were males and three females. He regards the horns as constituting the principal generic character, they being formed ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... old stories of wise animals or foolish men that have amused our childhood. But we should expect the fable, in company with other and more important literary forms, to be more and more loosely, or at least largely, comprehended as time went on, and so to degenerate in conception from this original type. That depended for much of its piquancy on the very fact that it was fantastic: the point of the thing lay in a sort of humorous inappropriateness; and it is ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... then entered my mind, and its degenerate inhabitants, but that was across a wide channel that would be hard to cross even if I had infinite time, freedom, and materials to make a boat which would withstand the waves, and I had none of the three. What little hope I had, then, was out of reach, lost to me ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... at all; and live at this day in that brutish manner, as I said before. Howsoever, it may be perceived what manner of life there would be, where there were no common Power to feare; by the manner of life, which men that have formerly lived under a peacefull government, use to degenerate into, in ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... Gilbert himself says in his diary that he had no income "except errant sixpences." And printers' bills had to be paid. Moreover in the first number the editor Lucian Oldershaw confessed frankly that one reason for the paper's existence was "that the Society may not degenerate into the position of a mutual admiration Society by totally lacking the admiration of outsiders." The staff were able immediately to note, "Any apprehensions we may have felt on the morning of the publication of The Debater were speedily dispelled, ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... they? and where art thou, My Country? On thy voiceless shore The heroic lay is tuneless now— The heroic bosom beats no more![cz] And must thy Lyre, so long divine, Degenerate into hands ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... and a few other instances, the polemical zeal natural to men who had sacrificed their worldly all for the sake of religion, was observed to degenerate among the refugees into personal quarrels disgraceful to themselves and injurious to their noble cause, it ought on the other hand to be observed, that some of the firmest and most affectionate friendships of the age were ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... Northern Forest, he must spend the winter if he would see the Indian at his best. There he is a beggar no longer. There, escaped from the civilization which the white man is ever forcing upon the red—a civilization which rarely fails to make a degenerate of him—he proves his manhood. There, contrary to the popular idea, he will be found to be a diligent and skilful worker and an affectionate husband and father. There, given health and game, no toil and no hardship will hinder him from procuring fur ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... O sire of gods! be mine The rights and honours of a power divine? Scorn'd e'en by man, and (oh severe disgrace!) By soft Phaeacians, my degenerate race! Against yon destined head in vain I swore, And menaced vengeance, ere he reach'd his shore; To reach his natal shore was thy decree; Mild I obey'd, for who shall war with thee? Behold him landed, careless ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... some wild boys and girls in the school who try to spread filthy knowledge, but if the atmosphere is filled with respect and reverence, and the minds are trained by inner discipline and morality, the contagion of such mischievous talk will reach only those children who have the disposition of the degenerate. The majority will remain uncontaminated. Plenty of lewd literature in the circulars of the quacks and even in the sensational newspapers will reach their eye and their brain, and yet it will leave not the slightest trace. The trained, clean mind develops a moral antitoxin which ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... Often in history has our noble Chinese race been enslaved by petty frontier barbarians from the north. Never have such glorious triumphs been won over them as your Majesty achieved. But your descendants were degenerate, and failed to carry on your glorious heritage; they entrusted the reins of government to bad men, and pursued a short-sighted policy. In this way they encouraged the ambitions of the eastern Tartar savages (Manchus), and fostered the growth of their power. They were thus able to take advantage ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... tyrant can accost, And wield the slavish sickle, not the sword: Ah, Greece! they love thee least who owe thee most - Their birth, their blood, and that sublime record Of hero sires, who shame thy now degenerate horde! ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... the Unitas By Providence was meant, In Christendom's degenerate days, That cold lump to ferment, From Scripture Pearls to wipe the dust, Give blood-bought grace its compass just, In praxis, truth from shew to part, ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... himself, and strokes of his own eloquence." So runs the complaint of Joseph Warton.[38] The distrust was not without ground. The danger that the method of Longinus in the hands of ungifted writers would become a cloak for critical ignorance and degenerate into empty bluster was already apparent.[39] Only rarely was there a reader who could distinguish between the false and the true application of the method. Gibbon did it in a passage which impressed itself upon the younger critics of Hazlitt's ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... obtained a new demonstration of love and favor from the prodigious image of the most Holy Mary, from that extremely ancient image which, saved from iconoclastic fury, always engaged the devout worship of their ancestors; and which their not degenerate descendants keep as a noble and precious heirloom of their hereditary religion, finding in it all comfort and support against public and private calamities. The late incessant and unseasonable rains having ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... such sexual manifestations in their children for a long time, but a false shame has prevented them from asking the advice of the physician. They have been afraid lest he should regard the child as intellectually or morally deficient, or as the offspring of a degenerate family. In addition, we have to take into account self-deception on the part of the parents, who, indeed, often deceive themselves willingly, saying to themselves that the matter is of no importance, and that the symptoms ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... deals in an interesting way with this ennoblement of life that is the mark of great poetry. He does not demand of poetry an orthodox code of morals, but he does contend that great poetry marches along the path that leads to abundance of life, and not to a feeble and degenerate egotism. ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... peace on our own terms, having utterly smashed all our enemies and having taken England's war-ships and her colonies for our own. "Long he cannot last," said my Professor, speaking of the War. "The French are a degenerate race, and we shall be in Paris in a month. The English are given up to games, and their mercenary army—I have it on the highest authority—cannot for a moment stand against our German heroes. The Russians ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 150, February 2, 1916 • Various
... For me, degenerate modern wretch, Though in the genial month of May, My dripping limbs I faintly stretch, And think I've ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... measured with some other player. A defeated player should be led to recognize and do honor to the prowess of his adversary, and so to congratulate him honestly. A sense of superior power should never degenerate into gloating over a defeated adversary or into contempt for his weaker ability. Many thrilling examples of honest mutual admiration between victor and vanquished may be gleaned from the history of warfare, as when Grant handed back the ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... the greater change that then Upon our hapless nature fell, When the degenerate hearts of men Bore sin and all the thorns ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... them often more vicious, more covetous, and more foolish than they really were, and this so set the people a gazing and wondering. With these sort of characters many of our modern Comedies abound, which makes them too much degenerate into farce, which seldom ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... students of the law the example of their worthiest predecessors. The tendency of the age is to lower, not to elevate, the standard set up by our ancestors for the attainment of preeminence. That our giants may not be stunted in their growth—that the legal stock may not hopelessly degenerate—Chief Justice Campbell does well to impress upon his brethren the patient and laborious course—the high and admirable qualities—by which Chief Justice Mansfield secured his ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... believe? What are we to do, amid this shaking of the earth and heaven? Are we to degenerate into a lazy and heartless scepticism, which, under pretence of liberality and charity, believes that everything is a little true, everything is a little false—in one word, believes nothing at all? Or are we to degenerate into unmanly and faithless wailings, crying out that the flood ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... love and pride, and the father was a gentleman, like Falstaff, a pure gentleman. The daughter-in-law also peered out to look at Il Giovann', who was evidently a figure of repute, in his sordid, degenerate American respectability. Meanwhile, this figure of repute blew himself red in the face, producing staccato strains on his cornet. And the crowd stood desolate and forsaken ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... death by the invaders of the white race, both here and on the great American deserts north of the Rio Grande, and well might their scalpings and torturings form the theme for those adventurous novels which made our flesh creep as we perused them in boyhood's days! Now the degenerate descendants of these once formidable Redskins seek a living in desultory cultivation of the soil, although bands of them and of other tribes still cause trouble to soldiery of the Mexican Republic at times. But the capital city of Chihuahua is an example of man ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... the Japetic, Indo-European, or Arian, spreading from the mouths of the Ganges over the greater part of Europe. And 3dly, the Egyptian or Hamitish,{B} who peopled the banks of the Nile, and of whom the African negroes are probably a degenerate offshoot. With regard to the knowledge of letters possessed by these three nations, our author gives two inconsistent ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... say, with a sort of hydrophobic shudder, "is only a fit beverage for asses!"—"To say a man could drink like a fish, was once the greatest encomium that a bon-vivant could bestow upon a brother Bacchanalian—but, alas! in this matter-of-fact and degenerate age, men do so literally—washing their gills with unadulterated water!—Dropsy and water on the chest must be the infallible result! If such an order of things continue, all the puppies in the kingdom, who would perhaps ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... easily caught that the blackfellows scarcely trouble to get them, which is rarely the case elsewhere. The Australian native is a man with an unknown history whether he is an improvement on his remote ancestors or a degenerate descendant it is impossible to form ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... the coast, and Colonel Lambkin reported that "In some districts 90 per cent. suffer from it.... Owing to the presence of syphilis the entire population stands a good chance of being exterminated in a very few years, or left a degenerate race fit for nothing." The earliest known account of the introduction of syphilis into the Maori race is in an old Maori song composed in the far North. The Maori population in a village on the shores of Tom Bowline's Bay was employed in a whaling-station ...
— Venereal Diseases in New Zealand (1922) • Committee Of The Board Of Health
... of high- born Chinese ladies in holiday attire are seated in a garden of potted plants on the river's bank, drinking tea, flirting their fans, and doubtless talking over the latest Court gossip. Nearby is a willow, not the stiff, ugly tree now seen upon tame and degenerate imitations of real old China pottery, but a graceful weeping-willow, whose drooping branches sweep the opposite shore, as sublimely indifferent to distance as the untrammeled ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... to London: he observed, that a man stored his mind better there, than any where else; and that in remote situations a man's body might be feasted, but his mind was starved, and his faculties apt to degenerate, from want of exercise and competition. No place, (he said,) cured a man's vanity or arrogance so well as London; for as no man was either great or good per se, but as compared with others not so good or great, he was sure to find in the metropolis many ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... most sinister combinations. You are only an honest countryman wandering amongst a crowd of courtiers,—virtue in danger amidst a myriad of vices: they speak our language, and we do not know theirs. Would it be possible that they should not deceive us? Louis XVI., of a degenerate race, without elevation of mind, or energy of will, allowed himself to be enthralled early in life by religious prejudices, which have even lessened his intellect; fascinated by a giddy queen, who unites to Austrian insolence ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... slay the monsters of disease and vice—but these weapons are not allowed to be employed, sometimes not even to be mentioned. Consider the misery which is piling itself up in the slums of our great cities—the degenerate, the defective, the insane, who are multiplying as never before in history. There exists a perfectly harmless and painless method of sterilizing the hopelessly unfit, so that they can not reproduce their hopeless unfitness; but ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... making so much of such a common thing as a wheel. Idiots! Solomon's court fool would have scoffed at the thought of the young Galilean who dared compare the lilies of the field to his august master. Nil admirari is very well for a North American Indian and his degenerate successor, who has grown too grand to admire anything but himself, and takes a cynical pride in his stolid indifference to everything worth reverencing ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... somewhat superfluous in a house already well-supplied with women-slaves) were able to dwell together, and Sahira was spared many humiliations and dangers to which a beautiful young slave was inevitably subjected in these degenerate days ...
— Virgilia - or, Out of the Lion's Mouth • Felicia Buttz Clark
... le President, a cripple, a degenerate, responsible for his actions, certainly, but a man in whom the doctors will find every form of wasting illness: disease of the spinal cord, tuberculosis, and all ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... London with the loss of his lawsuit. Justice was with him, but the law was against him. He found Scythrop in a mood most sympathetically tragic; and they vied with each other in enlivening their cups by lamenting the depravity of this degenerate age, and occasionally interspersing divers grim jokes about graves, worms, and epitaphs. Mr Glowry's friends, whom we have mentioned in the first chapter, availed themselves of his return to pay him a simultaneous visit. ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... rule, assumed forms which lack the purity and grace of those in Russia proper. Octagonal cupolas supported on thick, sloping bases involuntarily remind one of the cup-and-ball game. Not content with this degenerate beginning, they pursue their errors heavenward. Instead of terminating directly in a cross, they are surmounted by a lantern frescoed with saints, a second octagonal dome, a ball, and a cross. These octagons constitute a feature in ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... summer," he continued like one who begins a saga, "this man, alone and fearless, followed a violator of the law and arrested him in a house of the village. As he led the man away he noticed that an Italian followed. He was a little degenerate, wearing a green hat, and bearing now one name and now another. They traversed the village toward the municipal prison; and this creature, featured like a ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... he said, between his shut teeth. "I don't care whether these Martians are degenerate human beings or only animals; but from my point of view the reception they have given us justifies any kind of retaliation. If we'd had a single port-hole open during the first volley you and I would have been dead by this time, and I'm not going to stand anything like that without reprisals. ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... giver, the bearer, or the receiver, or whether, beyond all private benefit and pleasure, their chief result has not been the improvement and refinement of the human race. But, it must be confessed, the letter of introduction is too much fallen and degenerate. Convenience, depredation, the compassing of by-ends, rather than any loving communion, is too often its intent. It savors less of the paradise of affection than of the vulgar wilderness of the world. We are a little afraid of it, when it comes. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... wassailing—worthy of the days of Arthur—wine for the upper table; ale, medd, (mead,) and spirits for the other; and after all came the friendly contest at some manly game—wrestling, racing, pitching the bar, or the like. At a period somewhat later, these boisterous pastimes began to degenerate; and the Welsh squire became more polished, but not, perhaps, more happy. Still the custom of inordinate potation fondly clung to him. Immediately contiguous to every mansion of any magnitude was erected a summerhouse, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 271, Saturday, September 1, 1827. • Various
... to study my face without speech, his hand still on the button of the bell-rope, his eyes in mine; this was the decisive heat. My face seemed to myself to dislimn under his gaze, my expression to change, the smile (with which I had begun) to degenerate into the grin of the man upon the rack. I was besides harassed with doubts. An innocent man, I argued, would have resented the fellow's impudence an hour ago; and by my continued endurance of the ordeal, I was simply signing and sealing my confession; in short, I ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... theme, that might engage Those that could send thy name o'er sea and land, While sea and land shall last; for Homer's rage A theme; a theme for Milton's mighty hand - How much unmeet for us, a faint degenerate band! ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott
... "that you would. Your country is too young to be wholly degenerate. It is true that you are a nation of fused races—a strange medley of people, but still you are a nation. I believe that in time of stress you would place your country before ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... not the hour gone by? The mystic strain, Degenerate once, may never spring again. What long-forsaken gods shall we invoke To grant such increase ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... palpable steam, wholesome exhalations from reeking coach-horses, the usual furniture of a tea-table was displayed in neat and inviting order, flanked by large joints of roast and boiled, a tongue, a pigeon pie, a cold fowl, a tankard of ale, and other little matters of the like kind, which, in degenerate towns and cities, are generally understood to belong more particularly to solid lunches, stage-coach ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... faith, richer in virtue, deeper in knowledge, more strictly temperate, exercise a greater degree of brotherly kindness and godliness, and enjoy more of heaven's pure love in our hearts. Neglect the proper Scriptural culture of the spiritual life and the Christian will degenerate into a few irksome duties of cold formality. By the writers of the New Testament we are urgently exhorted, yea, commanded, to attend to certain duties necessary to keep us in the love of God. Of these especially important are reading the Scripture, ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... by example, nor led to it by temptation, or prompted to it by interest, it must be derived from his native constitution; and it is a remarkable confirmation of what revelation so frequently inculcates—that he brings into the world with him an original depravity, the effects of a fallen and degenerate state; in proof of which we need only to observe, that the nearer he approaches to a state of nature, the more predominant this disposition appears, and the more violently it operates. We see children laughing at the miseries which they inflict on every unfortunate animal which ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... of any group of these lower neurones is interrupted, not only do the nerve fibres degenerate, but the nutrition of the muscles supplied by them is interfered with and they rapidly degenerate and waste, and after an interval show the reaction of degeneration. In addition, the reflex arc is disturbed, and reflexes are lost. As these changes do not occur in lesions of the upper ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... between man and man in a savage and domestic condition, than between beast and beast; for as men and beasts have been treated alike by nature, all the conveniences with which men indulge themselves more than they do the beasts tamed by them, are so many particular causes which make them degenerate ...
— A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of - The Inequality Among Mankind • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... impregnable walls with which Constantine surrounded the city, were greatly improved and added to by Theodosius, called the Great. A triumphal arch, decorated with the architecture of a better, though already a degenerate age, and serving, at the same time, as a useful entrance, introduced the stranger into the city. On the top, a statue of bronze represented Victory, the goddess who had inclined the scales of battle in favour of Theodosius; and, as the artist determined to be wealthy if he ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... speaking of things unseen, the principal terms which we use should be few, and we should not allow ourselves to be enslaved by them. Instead of seeking to frame a technical language, we should vary our forms of speech, lest they should degenerate into formulas. A difficult philosophical problem is better understood when ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... I think that the Greek was the abler man by much. Comoundouros mitigated the rancors usual in the politics of Greece (as in those of Italy of to-day) by his unvarying good-nature, never permitting his antagonisms to degenerate to animosities. In the years when I first knew him, during the Cretan insurrection of 1866, he was at his best in power and in patriotism; but during the years which followed, full of the base intrigues which had their birth in the influences surrounding the court, he got more ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... But though a mere name be but a small matter, we are inclined to regard the term Board as somewhat too formidable and stiff. Let us, at least for the present, substitute the term Committee; and as large committees are apt to degenerate into little mobs, and, as such, to conduct their business noisily and ill, let us suppose educational committees to consist, in at least country districts or the smaller towns, of some eight or ten individuals, selected by the householders for their intelligence, integrity, ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... said he, you have but to tap the surface of the munificent earth. One thing only, he confessed, was lacking, and that need a few years would make good. "Wait," said he, with an assured if immodest boastful-ness,—"wait until we get a bit degenerate, and then we will produce a Shakespeare"! I had not the heart to suggest that the sixteenth century in England was a period of birth, not of decay. I could only accept his statement in awful appreciation. And emboldened by my silence, ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... or at least in that of his brother Morcar. And even the local leaders were not over-well obeyed. The reckless spirit of personal independence, especially among the Anglo-Danes, prevented anything like discipline, or organized movement of masses, and made every battle degenerate into a ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... keeping up their manners, customs, and language; the indigenous Malays are next in point of numbers, and their language is the Lingua-franca of the place. Next come the descendants of the Portuguese—a mixed, degraded, and degenerate race, but who still keep up the use of their mother tongue, though ruefully mutilated in grammar; and then there are the English rulers, and the descendants of the Dutch, who all speak English. The Portuguese ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... such concession, it will be said, can be made to these men's heirs. An Edison or a Bessemer may have produced whatever income has come to him in his latest years from the inventive efforts of his earliest; but if such a man has a son to whom this income descends—a half-witted degenerate who squanders it on wine and women, who will not work with his hands and who cannot work with his head—no one can pretend that, in any sense of the word, a fool like this produces any fraction of the thousands that he consumes. And though all of those who live on the ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... though a curtain that for months had hung between him and the blessed light of clear understanding had suddenly been rent in twain by her words. The woman stood revealed. All the baseness of her tribe, all the degraded savagery of a degenerate race, all the capabilities for wrong, for sordid treachery, that lay dormant in her, leaped to life at this unguarded moment, and in that new light, that now at last she had herself let in, stood pitilessly revealed, a loathsome thing, hateful as ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... she did not say it, it would not be good for him to leave the struggle for any length of time. Once out of the game of life, for which he had been trained like an athlete, he would degenerate and lose his peculiar power. And yet she shrank unaccountably from his reentering the old life, with the bitter feeling in his heart he now had. It meant their living in New York, for one thing, and a growing repugnance to that huge, squirming, ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... has settled it let the head announce it," he said. "I won't take it from you. I believe you to be a low, gibbering degenerate. Let us see the head ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... ideas of books and by personal discussions is indeed the mightiest factor of modern improvement. But the mere meeting to talk about things unless it is combined with the disposition and the apparatus for studying things is but barter without production, and may degenerate to a barren exchange of words, as unprofitable as that described in the Yankee proverb, "swapping jackknives in a garret." This aspect of the truth Mr. Cooper doubtless came to appreciate; but at the outset, habituated as he was to get ideas ...
— Peter Cooper - The Riverside Biographical Series, Number 4 • Rossiter W. Raymond
... of Brummell, and the open breach upon the subject of velvet collars, in which the town followed the lead of the younger man. My uncle, who was not born to be second to any one, retired instantly to St. Albans, and announced that he would make it the centre of fashion and of society, instead of degenerate London. It chanced, however, that the mayor and corporation waited upon him with an address of thanks for his good intentions towards the town, and that the burgesses, having ordered new coats from London for the occasion, ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the further life-history of hydatids, the living elements of the cyst may die and degenerate, or the cyst may increase in size until it ruptures. As a result of pyogenic infection the cyst may be ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... Roman youth of fifty years ago. But the Prince had died prematurely at the age of fifty, and with him the Ciceronian traditions had ended in Casa Conti, and their place had been taken by the caprices of the big, healthy, indolent, extravagant Polish woman, by the miserable weaknesses of a degenerate heir, and the fanatic religious practices of ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... our way. We may be strong and thoroughly able to rely upon ourselves but there comes a time when we need friendship and sympathy. Society would crumble into dust without these influences. The family circle would degenerate into a hollow mockery if consideration each for the other was absent. It sweetens and makes wholesome what otherwise might only be an ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... years after Buddha there were from time to time, such personages in the world, who attained the end of the Holy Path; but in these latter days people are more insincere, covetous and contentious, and the discipline is too hard for degenerate times and men. The three trainings already spoken of are the correct causes of deliverance; but if people think them as useless as last year's almanac, when can they complete their deliverance? H[o]-nen, deeply meditating on this, ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... evil, or, at least, gets no harm from it. She inherits the promise made to the disciples, that they should take up serpents, and, if they drank any deadly thing, it should not hurt them."—"It has borne, and can bear, principles or doctrines which, in other systems of religion, quickly degenerate into fanaticism or infidelity." This marvellous power of assimilation, which made "those observances pious in Christianity" that were "superstitions in Paganism," advanced, rapidly in its work, and successively introduced ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... feeling of pleased expectancy. I anticipated a daily hold-up. I had visions of stage robbers in cambric masks, and running gun fights, and horses in frightened flight, and my driver stricken to the heart and tumbling from his seat. But it is a degenerate and tame world out here. Give me ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... type of man I had yet met on my travels, a typical degenerate, dirty, drunken, diseased. He had three suits of underclothing, which he never washed. He would wear through all three in succession, and when the last got too dirty for words he would throw it under his trunk ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... Omar in a weak voice, his eyes starting from his head. "Life cannot be unchequered by the frowns of fate, but death must bring dumbness to my lips. Caution, when besmeared in blood, is no longer virtue, or wisdom, but wretched and degenerate cowardice; no, never let him that was born to execute judgment secure his honours by cruelty and oppression. Hath not thy Koran told thee that fear and submission is a subject's tribute, yet mercy is the attribute of ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... one moment may change into the former. The most watchful circumspection, therefore, is required, lest that which is, even in its best form, a weakness and an instrument of misery to ourselves and others, should still further degenerate into a meanness and a vice;—as, for instance, when you fear that the person you love may be induced, by seeing the excellences of another, to withdraw from you some of the time, admiration, and affection you wish to be exclusively bestowed upon yourself. In this case, there is a strong temptation ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... strong liquors. They kindly received me as well as the English, who were few before the people concerned with me came among them. I must needs commend their respect to authority, and kind behaviour to the English. They do not degenerate from the old friendship between both kingdoms. As they are people proper and strong of body, so they have fine children, and almost every house full: rare to find one of them without three or four boys and as many girls; some six, seven, and eight sons. And I must do them that ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Vol. II - The Planting Of The First Colonies: 1562—1733 • Various
... that haue parents, or that parents be, Depart a space, and giue not eare at all To the foule tale that here shall vttered be: Some filthy shame let on all other fall, If possibly there can be any such, From nature to degenerate so much. ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... one of the most fruitful Germanic motives, probably has its origin in the custom of burying a dead man's possessions with him. In the Waterdale Saga, Ketil Raum, a viking of the eighth and early ninth centuries, reproaches his son Thorstein as a degenerate, in that he expects to inherit his father's wealth, instead of winning fortune for himself: "It used to be the custom with kings and earls, men of our kind, that they won for themselves fortune and fame; wealth was not counted as a heritage, ...
— The Edda, Vol. 2 - The Heroic Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 13 • Winifred Faraday
... clothes, and likes people to be lively and merry. His next object should be to ingratiate himself with the court ladies and others, as much is done here by the influence of women; but he should on no account allow familiarity with the Queen and other ladies to degenerate into lightness or worse, for that would involve the ruin of the whole undertaking. It is customary to say here, 'if a man's life is good, his religion must be a good one'; but the English are shocked at every little thing. The King is extremely modest, ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... much of their courage and strength. The Goths under Vitiges, not fifty years after the immigration of Theodoric into Italy, were cowards, and unable to resist the twenty thousand men of Belisarius: showing how easily barbarians degenerate in such climates. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... town. I remember the counsel you give me in your letter; but dissembling, though lawful in some cases, is not my talent; yet, for your sake, I will struggle with the plain openness of my nature, and keep in my just resentments against that degenerate order. In the mean time I flatter not myself with any manner of hopes, but do my duty, and suffer for God's sake; being assured, beforehand, never to be rewarded, though the times should alter. Towards the latter end of this month, ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... circumstances to render possible the existence of an independent character. But when, God alone knows at the cost of what efforts and of what happy accidents, a vigorous and original personality has been able to unfold, nothing is rarer than not to see it degenerate into a mere personage. History teaches us that men exceptional in will and energy almost always become obstructive and mischievous. They commence by serving a cause and end by taking possession of it so completely that, from being its ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... the confusion of the Catilinarian conspirators after detection; [55] the character of Catiline; [56] the debauchery of Antony in Varro's villa; [57] the scourging and crucifixion of Gavius; [58] the grim old Censor Appius frowning on Clodia his degenerate descendent; [59] the tissue of monstrous crime which fills page after page of the Cluentius. [60] These are pictures for all time; they combine the poet's eye with the stern spirit of the moralist. His power of description is equalled by the readiness of his wit. Raillery, banter, sarcasm, ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... that fill them, therefore, with envy and perplexity—such things as pleasure, beauty, delicacy, leisure. In the cant of modern talk you will find them call everything that is not crude and forcible in life "degenerate." But back to the very earliest writings, in the most bloodthirsty outpourings of the Hebrew prophets, for example, you will find that at the base of the warrior spirit is hate for more complicated, for more refined, for ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... that they have fallen from a higher. In such cases, however, there is some danger lest the beauty and appropriateness of the conception should entice us to receive it on insufficient evidence. The fact that some plants in certain adverse circumstances tend to degenerate, and in certain favourable circumstances to attain a higher type, is well known in natural history; but it seems questionable whether these changes ever take place to such an extent, and in such a uniform method, as must be assumed ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... traffic in all things, even in the chastity of their women. What with pre-nuptial excesses, with early unions, often infructuous, with a virtual system of community, and with universal drunkenness, it is not to be wondered at if the maritime tribes of Africa degenerate and die out. Such apparently is the modus operandi by which Nature rids herself of the effete races which have served to clear the ground and to pave the way for higher successors. Wealth and luxury, so generally inveighed against by poets and divines, injure humanity only when they injuriously ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... viages by sea, and other some worse courses, tending to dissolutnes & the danger of their soules, to y^e great greefe of their parents and dishonour of God. So that they saw their posteritie would be in danger to degenerate & be corrupted. ...
— Bradford's History of 'Plimoth Plantation' • William Bradford
... evening—remembering, however, that Rubini actually broke his collarbone in delivering a very high note. Tenors sometimes reach for their high notes with their arms and legs, and if the high note comes out all right, we forget the effort in the thrill over the result, provided effort does not degenerate into contortion. Similarly in an unusually powerful, explosive fortissimo, a momentary use of pure abdominal breathing may be excusable. But these are exceptions that prove the rule, and very rare ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... in this degenerate son of the Cumberlands since many there had confronted him face to face. Physically he was improved. Enough time had elapsed since his sudden dropping of old habits, for him to have risen above its first effects and to have acquired that tone of personal dignity which follows a successful issue ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... for Eugenius III. that his old preceptor, St. Bernard, composed at his disciple's request, his famous book "de Consideratione;" in which the subject handled is, on the duties of a pope; and in which is given such a graphic description of the degenerate character of the Romans, as also of the Roman clergy in that age. The following extract will not ...
— Pope Adrian IV - An Historical Sketch • Richard Raby
... Degenerate as human nature is said to be, and in many instances, worthless and unprincipled it is, still there are bright examples to the contrary; examples that even in the eyes of superior beings, must shed a lustre ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... intended to end in the erection of a permanent Temple. The time for the next step appeared to David to have come when he had no longer to fight for his throne. Rest from enemies should lead to larger work for God, else repose will be our worst enemy, and peace will degenerate into self-indulgent sloth. A devout heart will not be content with personal comfort and dwelling in a house of cedar, while the ark has but a tent for its abode. There should be a proportion between expenditure on self and on religious objects. How many ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... looked neither to the left nor to the right. His eyes were fixed and yet unseeing, his features were pale and bony. There was no gleam of life, not even in the stone-cold eyes. Like some machine-made man of a new and physically degenerate age, he took his exercise under the eye of his doctor, ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... was a very brave man himself, said now, in great anger, "The more base and degenerate in you to take such means for her as you have done and leave her on ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... patiently,—the expressions you used in your letter, about "drudgery," occurred to me. I remember the time when I, too, deified the "soul's impulses." It is a noble worship; but, if we do not aid it by a just though limited interpretation of what "Ought" means, it will degenerate into idolatry. For a time it was so with me, and I am not yet good ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... with benevolence for its moving principle, instead of self-love, and with every evil disposition in all its members corrected by reason and not force, would, from the inevitable laws of nature, and not from any original depravity of man, in a very short period degenerate into a society constructed upon a plan not essentially different from that which prevails in every known state at present; I mean, a society divided into a class of proprietors, and a class of labourers, and with self-love the main-spring of ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... will be sure to organize all the capacity there is in them into positive intellectual character; but let them once divorce love from their occupations in life, and they will find that labor will degenerate into drudgery, and drudgery will weaken the power to labor, and weakness, as a last resort, will intrench itself in pretence and deception. If they are in the learned professions, they will become tricksters in law, quacks in medicine, formalists in divinity, though regular practitioners in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... fortunes of Mr John Shanks. That rather vacant and somewhat degenerate youth, having his precious bag slung from his shoulders, and his left arm round it for further security, sauntered forth, and began to view the town. His viewing it consisted chiefly in looking long and steadily at the shop windows ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... existed, but all of which annoying symptoms were speedily dispelled by the cure of the piles. We have no doubt that neglected piles, fistulae, and other morbid conditions of the lower bowels, frequently degenerate into cancerous disease. We have the eminent authority of J. Hughes Bennett, of Edinburg, and many other close observers, for saying that benign or ordinary tumors often degenerate into real cancerous disease, and our own extensive ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... who stands face to face with death often drops the mask by which he cheats his fellows. There we may see faces which you would shudder to look on, but others, too, which merely to see is enough to make us regard the degenerate species to which we belong with ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... The more degenerate and base art thou To make such meanes for her, as thou hast done, And leaue her on such slight conditions. Now, by the honor of my Ancestry, I doe applaud thy spirit, Valentine, And thinke thee worthy of an Empresse loue: Know then, I heere forget ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... lessons from two undistinguished professors named Gegenbauer and Finsterbusch. But it all amounted to very little. There was the regular drilling for the church services, to be sure: solfeggi and psalms, psalms and solfeggi—always apt to degenerate, under a pedant, into the dreariest of mechanical routine. How many a sweet-voiced chorister, even in our own days, reaches manhood with a love for music? It needs music in his soul. Haydn's soul withstood the numbing influence of pedantry. He realized that it lay with himself to develop ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... Stage Company want to keep up with the times, and not degenerate into the old style 'one hoss' road-wagon business, they'd better make some reform on the line. They might begin by shipping off some of the old-time whiskey-guzzling drivers who are too high and mighty to do anything but handle the ribbons, and are above speaking to a passenger unless he's a favorite ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... tragedian. If virtuous authors must be patronised only by virtuous peers, who shall point them out? Yet Pope is said by Ruffhead to have told Warburton that "Young had much of a sublime genius, though without common sense; so that his genius, having no guide, was perpetually liable to degenerate into bombast. This made him pass a FOOLISH YOUTH, the sport of peers and poets: but his having a very good heart enabled him to support the clerical character when he assumed it, first with ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... in similar circumstances, began to degenerate into a pretty sharp altercation, when they heard the steps of two persons mounting the stairs. As the three individuals who had appointed a meeting at D'Harmental's were all assembled, Brigaud, who, with his ear always on the qui-vive ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... development was characteristic. Having no longer any need for their old accomplice, Gould and Fisk, by tactics of duplicity, gradually sheared Drew and turned him out of the management to degenerate into a financial derelict. It was Drew's odd habit, whenever his plans were crossed, or he was depressed, to rush off to his bed, hide himself under the coverlets and seek solace in sighs and self-compassion, or ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... held most dear and best rewarded whose words and deeds are the most atrocious, to the great reproach and scandal of the world of to-day; whereby it is abundantly manifest that virtue has departed from the earth, leaving a degenerate generation to wallow in the ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... branches were laden with pods. Like the wheat it was planted or dibbled in rows. The cotton produced the second year was said to be considered as equally good with that of the first, but being found to degenerate the third year, it was then rooted out and the ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... have also the lessons concerning Esau. He was a man intent upon immediate physical enjoyment; an idle drifter without spiritual ideals. From his character and that of the Edomites, his descendants, there is taught the lesson that such an unambitious man or nation will always become degenerate and prove a failure. God himself cannot make a man out of an ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... and say, "We promised you victory and it is defeat," or he has to say, "It is not defeat, but we are going to make peace with these Russian barbarians who invaded us, with the incompetent English who betrayed us, with all these degenerate and contemptible races you so righteously hate and despise, upon such terms that we shall never be able to attack them again. This noble and wonderful war is to end in this futility and—these graves. You were tricked into it, as you were tricked into war ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... conceive some broader sense of the meaning of the Reformation; and he had gathered from Cromwell and Latimer a more noble conception of the Protestant doctrines. He had entered upon an active course of legislation for the putting away the injustices, the falsehoods, the oppressions of a degenerate establishment; and in the strong sense that he had done right, and nothing else but right, in these measures, he was not now disposed to submit to a compromise, or to consent to undo anything which he was satisfied had been justly done, in consideration of any supposed benefit which he could receive ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... Magnus, remembering the duties of his office and rapping his knuckles on the table. "This meeting has been allowed to degenerate too far already." ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... language words. To tell a mother's tender ceaseless charge. Children! can all your future lore repay The nights of watchfulness, and days of care, Which a fond parent gives?— See, last, sad sight! the hardy British Tar, Cutlass unsheath'd, unlike the truly brave. Here, watching, night and day—degenerate lot! To seize a fisherman, or stop a cart, Or "fright the wandering spirits from the shore." His "brief authority" has just detain'd A boat of cockles and a quart of gin! The smart Lieutenant's epaulette, methinks, Blushes at this degrading, pimping trade.— For ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... in this very place let loose the wild beastises on poor St. Paul!—Oh, no! by the bye, I believe I am wrong, and betraying my want of clergy, and that it was not at all St. Paul, nor was it here. But no matter, it would equally serve as a text to preach from, and from which to diverge to the degenerate heathen Christians of the present day, and all their naughty practices, and so end with an exhortation to 'come but from among them, and be separate;'—and I am sure, Miss Lushington, you have most scrupulously ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... loud cry of all the inhabitants of every denomination, from the well-known integrity, the extraordinary piety, the singular charity and devotedness of the Catholic Clergy, came in peals of just wrath and well-merited indignation on the heads of the degenerate monsters who basely, but ineffectually, attempted to murder the unsullied fame of those whom they deservedly held, and will hold, ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... Queen is a princess of as many and great virtues as ever filled a throne: How would it brighten her character to the present and after ages, if she would exert her utmost authority to instil some share of those virtues into her people, which they are too degenerate to learn only from her example! And, be it spoke with all the veneration possible for so excellent a sovereign, her best endeavours in this weighty affair are a most important part of her duty, as well as of her interest and ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... immediate hope; it is our safeguard against mere craftsmanship, against dilettant dexterity, against cleverness for its own sake, against the danger that our cosmopolitanism may degenerate into Alexandrianism and that our century may come to be like the age of the Antonines, when a "cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators darkened the face of learning," so Gibbon tells us, and "the decline of genius was soon ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... to God this legal, self-exalting, Christ-dishonouring doctrine had been confined to the times in which our author wrote, or had been then banished to hell, from whence it came; but alas! it is but too prevalent in these degenerate times, in which Arianism, Arminianism, Socinianism, &c., &c., so dreadfully infect the multitude even of professors! In the national churches, what do we hear but Moses and the law, 'This do and live'; or, in other words, do your duty as well as you can, and Christ will do the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... fortune of all blame, by making yourself seem to deserve your mishaps, and to have been unworthy of your former prosperity, but worthy of your present misery? And why do you depreciate the value of my victory, and make my success a small one, by proving degenerate and an unworthy antagonist for Romans? Valour, however unfortunate, commands great respect even from enemies: but the Romans despise cowardice, even though it ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... exquisite workmanship. To that feast of fifty revellers no less than seventy cooks had contributed the inventions of their art, but under one great master, to whose care the banquet had been consigned by the liberal host, and who ransacked earth, sky, and sea for dainties more various than this degenerate age ever sees accumulated at a single board. And the epicure who has but glanced over the elaborate page of Athenaeus, must own with melancholy self-humiliation that the ancients must have carried the art of flattering the palate to a perfection as absolute as the art ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... said the prophet, with entire simplicity, "which has lately made a practice of joining us at family worship." It did not appear the thing was visible, and, like other spirits raised nearer home in these degenerate days, it was rudely ignorant, at first could only buzz, and had only learned of late to bear a part ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... because it seemed unattainable,—from a sort of morbid craving for whatever had become as unattainable as my mother's presence. I loathed action, even for the realization of my dreams, and over-concentrated thought threatened to degenerate into a sickly reverie that should presently exhaust the forces of my life, like an unnaturally prolonged sleep. New influence added in this direction might have driven me insane, while the diversion afforded by Valeria's counter-enthusiasm and the necessity of making an ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... are called the 'correct' odes of Part III, or those belonging to a period of good government, and the composition of which is ascribed mainly to the duke of Ku, come to an end; and those that follow are the 'changed' Major Odes of the Kingdom, or those belonging to a degenerate period, commencing with this. Some among them, however, are equal to any of the former class. The Min Lo has been assigned to duke M of Sho, a descendant of duke Khang, the Shih of the Sh, the reputed author ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... a fine specimen of our real aristocracy, and such specimens are becoming rarer and rarer in these degenerate days. ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... organized the principle of individualism into its home, its school, its market-place and forum. By reason of the increase in gold, books, travel and personal luxuries, some now feel that selfness is beginning to degenerate into selfishness. The time, therefore, seems to have fully come when the principle of self-care should receive its complement through the principle of care for others. These chapters assert the debt of wealth to poverty, the debt of wisdom ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... that went to St. Helena dwelt in a worn-out body, a fat, degenerate perversion of the Napoleon ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... threatening ghosts, the outraged witnesses of their own humiliation. "For what are you selling us?"—they seemed to say. "Because some one, who was already overfed, must needs grab at a larger mess of pottage—and we must pay! Unkind! degenerate!" ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... idolatry; whereas the kings of Judah were good as well as evil, and some of them were illustrious for virtues and talents. The descendants of David reigned in Jerusalem in an unbroken dynasty for more than 500 years, while the monarchs of Samaria were a succession of usurpers. The degenerate kings were frequently succeeded by the captains of their guards, who in turn gave way for other usurpers, all of whom were bad. The dynasty of David was uninterrupted to the captivity of the nation. And the kingdom of Judah was also more powerful ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... eighth century, but one whose sentiments indicate a Saxon origin, thus laments the degenerate state ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... unconscious. But it differs from the body in one important respect. It is not, like that, now subjected to the human will. Its serene order is inviolable by us. It is, therefore, to us, the present expositor of the divine mind. It is a fixed point whereby we may measure our departure. As we degenerate, the contrast between us and our house is more evident. We are as much strangers in nature, as we are aliens from God. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer run away from us; the bear ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... mean that he suffers from a lack of digestion. In the same way we speak of a man suffering from nerves when we mean that his nerves are more inefficient than any one else's nerves. If any one wishes to see how grossly language can degenerate, he need only compare the old optimistic use of the word nervous, which we employ in speaking of a nervous grip, with the new pessimistic use of the word, which we employ in speaking of a nervous manner. And as digestion is a good thing which sometimes goes wrong, as nerves are ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... thinking, culminating in development of the Moi and production of the Uebermensch, and general self-engrossment and currishness, are peculiarly hostile to courtship. Whereas the old religious training, where it did not degenerate into excessive asceticism, was a school of good manners towards the universe as well as towards one's neighbours. The "Fioretti di San Francisco" is a handbook of polite friendliness to men, women, birds, wolves, and, ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... early years of their marriage the Rogrons had a son and a daughter, both hideous; for such human beings degenerate. Put out to nurse at a low price, these luckless children came home in due time, after the worst of village training,—allowed to cry for hours after their wet-nurse, who worked in the fields, leaving them shut up to scream for her in one of those ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... the procession moved away, "I want to know where this thing's going to stop. I am trying hard to get used to wearing a shirt without any lice in it, and to sitting down on a chair, and to sleeping in a clean bed, but when it comes to having my meals sent to my room, I'm afraid I'll degenerate into a pampered child of luxury. They are really piling it on too strong. Let us see, Mc.; how long's it been since we were sitting on the sand there in Florence, boiling our pint of ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... fleet, and comes only occasionally to the Koldagi Heive mountains on the borders of Kordofan. This, it must be acknowledged, is a sad falling off from the rival of the lion, that we have honoured so long in the arms of England. But we sincerely hope, that by the next arrival, it will not degenerate into a cow, or worse, a goat. But he tells us, that to our knowledge of the giraffe he has added considerably. He obtained in Nubia and Kordofan five specimens, two of which were males and three females. He regards the horns as constituting the principal generic character, they ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... he continued like one who begins a saga, "this man, alone and fearless, followed a violator of the law and arrested him in a house of the village. As he led the man away he noticed that an Italian followed. He was a little degenerate, wearing a green hat, and bearing now one name and now another. They traversed the village toward the municipal prison; and this creature, featured like a Parisian ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... possibility had never entered his head as that they could be defeated. They were changing everything in these degenerate days, even to the manner of fighting; had not those fellows a right to remain on their own side of the valley and wait for the French to go and attack them? There was no use killing them; as fast as they were ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... exhibiting his character in its true light, ringing all the changes upon his worthlessness, and ridiculing his opponent for bringing him there, he closed by saying, "Gentlemen of the jury, I will convince you that this degenerate specimen of humanity is not the son of the saintly and exemplary Elder Asbury Newman, but that he is the legitimate son of Beelzebub the prince of devils. He is an eyesore to his father, a sore eye to his mother, a vagabond upon earth, and ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... god with libations of wine and odours of incense, and at table had his head crowned by descending Victories amidst theatrical thunder with the golden laurel of the conqueror— are no better attested than most historical anecdotes; but even such gossip reflects the degenerate ambition of the generations of Epigoni. Even the better men were content when they had gained not power and influence, but the consulship and a triumph and a place of honour in the senate; and at the very time when with right ambition they would have just begun to be truly useful to their ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... appreciate and improve the light and privileges which God bestows. Unless the church will follow on in His opening providence, accepting every ray of light, performing every duty which may be revealed, religion will inevitably degenerate into the observance of forms, and the spirit of vital godliness will disappear. This truth has been repeatedly illustrated in the history of the church. God requires of His people works of faith and obedience corresponding to the blessings and privileges bestowed. Obedience requires ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... chieftainship, and this continued to prevail for centuries after the Anglo-Norman invasion, and was even adopted by many owners of English descent who had become "meere Irish," as the phrase ran, or "degenerate English." ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... burning brands. A great scene of confusion ensued, and the performance came abruptly to an end. One of the blacks remarked, not without reason, "Me tink dis white fellows' corrobboree." It is a painful thing to see a race so degenerate as to be willing to show themselves for money before their supplanters, and to see the former "lords of the soil" begging a copper from the passer-by. One cannot but desire that their extinction in these ...
— Six Letters From the Colonies • Robert Seaton
... not degenerate days. We have still strong thinkers amongst us; men of untiring perseverance, who flinch before no difficulties, who never hide the knot which their readers are only too willing that they should let alone; men who dare write what the ninety-nine out of every hundred will pronounce ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... to degenerate into occasions of riot, and in 1432 the following statute was passed with a view to ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... crimes. I resented the wrong done to father and to fatherland: I slew him who was governing you outrageously and more hardly than it beseemed men. Acknowledge my service, honour my wit, give me the throne if I have earned it; for you have in me one who has done you a mighty service, and who is no degenerate heir to his father's power; no fratricide, but the lawful successor to the throne; and a dutiful avenger of the crime of murder. It is I who have stripped you of slavery, and clothed you with freedom; I have restored your height of fortune, ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... who are but farmers, that in their housekeeping may compare with a lord or baron, in some countries beyond the seas;—yea, although I named a higher degree, I were able to justify it." We have no such "golden farmers" in these degenerate days! ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... to the law & know My blowes are mortall, I would strike thee dead. Ignoble & degenerate from Spanish bloud, Darst thou maintaine this to be charity? Thy strumpett itch & treason to my bed Thou seekst to act in ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... to feel that they must exert themselves for each other in little matters. Knowing themselves accepted, they lounge—mentally, mannerly, and physically—when at home or elsewhere alone together. Some of this relaxation is a good thing, but it is a mistake to let home and spouse degenerate into nothing more than an ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... years are also desirable, not only for restoration of physical vigour, but also, for a recementing of domestic and social ties and for a renewed contact with and a new inspiration from the Church of God in the West. Life in all its aspects has a tendency to degenerate in the tropics; and one needs occasional returns to northern climes for the blessings which they ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... the rest, the lord mayor of London and the sheriffs had their lords of misrule, ever contending, without quarrel or offence, who should make the rarest pastime to delight the beholders." Alas! where are all these, or any similar, "merry disports" in our degenerate days? We have no "lords of misrule" now; or, if we have, they are of a much less innocent and pacific character. Mr. Cambridge, also, (No 104, of the World) draws a glowing picture of an ancient Christmas. "Our ancestors," says he, "considered Christmas ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction - Vol. X, No. 289., Saturday, December 22, 1827 • Various
... certain social frills and furbelows; but no one could look into her honest face above the trim little black lace tucker, without realizing that she was of good, old-fashioned stock which never would degenerate. No one but a lady born could take herself so simply. Scott read Opdyke's approval in his eyes, the while he himself stood apart ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... Nothing but evil upon evil can accrue from such a system,—and those who have prophetic eyes to see through the veil of events can perceive, even now, the not far distant end—namely, the ruin of the country that has permitted itself to degenerate into a mere nation of shopkeepers, —and ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... firmly in the propriety of this order of things, yet we would not have you imagine that we underestimate the value of a respectable lineage, but it is better to be the originator of a great family than to be the degenerate ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... him. As a postillion of the State he has frequent communications with the distant world which glows vaguely on his mental horizon. Everything displeases him: both the savage country in which he has to live, and the world of stupid, degenerate, and miserable postillions whom he mercilessly criticizes. His random attempts to get away fail. Despairing, he becomes an accomplice in a crime so that he can leave this solitary place and go where his restless ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... who had followed and blessed Father Tom the evening he left us. She did not bless me nor address me. I had to speak publicly of poor Nance; perhaps, indeed, I spoke too sharply and strongly,—it is so hard to draw the line between zeal and discretion, it is so easy to degenerate into weakness or into excess. And Nance feared me. Probably she was the only one of the villagers who never dared ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... will grow out of her little heretic prejudices, and learn to love her mother's staunch friends, the champions of Holy Church, and the representatives of true knighthood in these degenerate days. Ah, child! couldst thou but see a true Spanish caballero, or again, could I but show thee my noble cousin of Guise, then wouldst thou know how to rate these gross clownish English mastiffs who now turn thy silly ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... is all seeming, and no being. If you would know how a man speaks in earnest, Read here this passage, where St. Peter thunders In Paradise against degenerate Popes And the corruptions of the church, till all The heaven about him blushes like a sunset. I beg you to take note of what he says About the Papal seals, for that concerns ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... reason for supposing that the images of El Salto were idols, as supposed by the early Spaniards, and still by the degenerate half-breeds. They are more likely portrait-statues of famous chieftains who led the tribe to many a victory. When they died, a loving people, with wailings and lamentations, celebrated their obsequies. The funeral pyre was built, the ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... had returned upon him; something instinctive and inherited had reappeared; and the gentlemanly, easy-going father, who yet, as Doris remembered, when matters were serious "always got his way," was there—strangely there—in the degenerate son. ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... only an honest countryman wandering amongst a crowd of courtiers,—virtue in danger amidst a myriad of vices: they speak our language, and we do not know theirs. Would it be possible that they should not deceive us? Louis XVI., of a degenerate race, without elevation of mind, or energy of will, allowed himself to be enthralled early in life by religious prejudices, which have even lessened his intellect; fascinated by a giddy queen, who unites to Austrian insolence the enchantment of beauty and the highest rank, and who makes of her secret ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... machinery to grinning passengers, that even the railroad journals were printing funny quips about Barstow's prize superintendent and his mountain snow plough. Nor could even the news that Aldrich, over on the Blue Ribbon division, was allowing that once proud bit of rail to degenerate into an ordinary portion of a railroad bring even a passing cheer. They, too, were laughing! In a last doglike hope Martin looked up the precipitation reports. It only brought more gloom. Only four times in thirty years had there been a snowfall ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... Up-Swedes ought to have the ruling of it; it has always been so, that what the chiefs of the Up-Swedes have resolved among them, to this the other men of the land have listened. Our fathers needed not to receive advice from the West Gauts about their ruling of the land. Now are we not so degenerate that Emund need teach us counsel; I would have us bind our counsel together, kinsmen ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... turtles, etc., we have studied and observed its forms. We see the limbless snakes; the lizards with active limbs; the huge, clumsy, slow crocodiles and alligators—the armor-bearing turtles and tortoises—all belonging to the one great family of Reptiles, and nearly all of them being degenerate descendants of the mighty Reptile forms of the geological Age of Reptiles, in which flourished the mighty forms of the giant reptiles—the monsters of land and water. Amidst the dense vegetation of that pre-historic age, surrounded ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... "in semine patris." The cavalier section of society had inherited the sentiment of chivalry, and contrasted with the roundhead not more by its loyalty to the person of the prince, than by its recognition of the superior grace and refinement of womanhood. Even in the debased and degenerate epoch of court life which followed 1660, the forms and language of homage still preserved the tradition of a nobler scheme of manners. The Puritan had thrown off chivalry as being parcel of Catholicism, and had replaced it by the Hebrew ideal of the subjection and seclusion ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... dwell on the dunghill, feed on ashes, catch vanities, lying vanities, pour out itself to them, serve all the creatures—whereas it should have made them servants, yea, a slave to his own greatest enemy, to the ground he treadeth upon. O what a degenerate plant! It was a noble vine once in paradise, but sin hath made it a wild one, to bring forth sour grapes. What is there in all the world could defile a man? Matt. xv. 20. Nothing that goeth out or cometh in, but sin ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... and silky texture, that on the tail is three or four inches long; these cats frequently spread their tails on their backs, as squirrels do. The colour is generally white, but sometimes light brown; they do not catch mice. This beautiful species does not degenerate speedily, and it appears to thrive better in Paris than in any other part of Europe. The figures of both these animals ...
— A Trip to Paris in July and August 1792 • Richard Twiss
... refer to both men in a future chapter, when I shall examine the degenerate growths of metaphysical eroticism; for the ardour of their souls was frequently kindled by sexual imaginings; in the case of emotional mystics it is often difficult to distinguish between sensual conceptions and ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... that I endeavored to avoid their company, and from that time have never seen them. The vilest inclinations, the basest actions, succeeded my amiable amusements and even obliterated the very remembrance of them. I must have had, in spite of my good education, a great propensity to degenerate, else the declension could not have followed with such ease and rapidity, for never did so promising a Caesar so quickly ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... tyrannized over by about two thousand men; and yet this body of two thousand are so far from enjoying any liberty by the subjection of the rest, that they are in an infinitely severer state of slavery; they make themselves the most degenerate and unhappy of mankind, for no other purpose than that they may the more effectually contribute to the misery of a whole nation. In short, the regular and methodical proceedings of an aristocracy are more intolerable than the very excesses of a despotism, and, in general, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... unworthy of the name and can, therefore, claim from us no further consideration; it is mere naked rudeness and selfishness, ill-disguised by the gaudy rays of outward decency; a mere cherishing of the sensual nature which, left to itself, would soon degenerate into monstrous barbarism, of which we ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... candidates for public posts, should be critically traced in their views and pretensions, and though we would despise mean and base suspicion, there is a degree of jealousy which is absolutely necessary in this degenerate state of mankind, and is indeed at all times to be considered as a political virtue. It is in your power also to prevent a plurality of places incompatible with each other being vested in the same persons. This our patriots have loudly and very justly complained of in time past, and it will be ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. III. • Samuel Adams
... are a follower of Renan, sir, you had better admit it before proceeding further in your studies," he said irately,—"The Church is too much troubled in these days by the members of a useless and degenerate apostasy!" Whereupon the young man had left his presence abashed, puzzled, and humiliated; but scarcely penitent, inasmuch as his New Testament taught him that he was right and that the ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... stood open, as if to convey the idea that it was an office rather than a young lady's boudoir—a place of business and not a drawing-room. It was a very pretty room, as Sarrasin saw at a glance when he entered it with a grand and old-fashioned bow, such as men make no more in these degenerate days. It was very quietly decorated with delicate colours, and a few etchings and many flowers; and Dolores herself came from behind her writing desk, smiling and blushing, to meet her tall visitor. The old soldier scanned her as he would have scanned a new ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... table, and the guests greeted him with loud laughter as he looked down. He had a hard, unlovely face, that little dwarf. He suggested to Vergilius unwelcome thoughts of a new sort of Cupid—deformed, evil, and hideous—typifying the degenerate passions of Rome. There were in the quiver of this Cupid arrows which carried the venom of the asp. Some at the table mocked his grinning face and made a jest of his deformity. When he could be heard he mimicked the speech and manners ...
— Vergilius - A Tale of the Coming of Christ • Irving Bacheller
... time there was up I had learned to know what that meant. Yet I had come in the degenerate day of trolley, bicycle and rural delivery, when communication was easy between the scattered mountain villages, and the bigger towns in the valleys, such as Bettsbridge and Shadd's Falls, had libraries, theatres and Y. M. C. A. ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... father's partner. But what strikes us, is the daring courage of the hero who thus gallantly risked life and limb, rather than that the lady of his love should pine in vain. Except Leander's, of old, we know of no such feat of love and gallantry in these degenerate days.' ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... settled on the Lower Mississippi may have been a degenerate remnant of the Mound-Builders. They differed in language, customs, and condition from all other Indians in the country; and their own traditions connected them with Mexico. Like the Mexicans, they had temples or sacred buildings ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... deal more. Further, it is unfair to the Lower-Empire to view it only as a time of feebleness and cowardice and corruption. It was also an epoch of immense activity, prolific of daring and high-flying adventurers, some of them heroic. Even the most degenerate of the last Emperors never lost the conviction of Roman majesty and grandeur. Unto the very end, they employed all the ruses of their diplomacy to prevent the Barbarian chiefs from imagining themselves anything else but vassals of the Empire. Honorius, at bay in Ravenna, ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... of September, 1809, Governor Harrison called all the tribes that claimed certain lands between the White and Wabash rivers to a council. Only a few of the weak and degenerate tribes answered the summons. Nevertheless, he went through the ceremony of making a treaty by which the United States government claimed three million ...
— Four American Indians - King Philip, Pontiac, Tecumseh, Osceola • Edson L. Whitney
... annoyance, indeed, and during their dinner had seemed thoroughly at his ease. Scientifically speaking, the professor regretted the accident of the morning. Madame Patoff had been a very interesting study so long as she was under the influence of a dominating idea. Her case might now degenerate into one of common apathy such as Cutter had seen hundreds of times. There would be nothing to be done but to try the usual methods, with the usual unsatisfactory results, abandoning her at last to the care of her relations and nurses as ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... exclaimed Barere, "that men really attached to liberty will imitate the most frightful excesses of despotism!" He proved to the Convention, after his fashion, out of Sallust, that such arbitrary courts may indeed, for a time, be severe only on real criminals, but must inevitably degenerate into instruments of private cupidity and revenge. When, on the tenth of March, the worst part of the population of Paris made the first unsuccessful attempt to destroy the Girondists, Barere eagerly called for vigorous measures of repression and punishment. On the second of April, another ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... nature of my duties too much for me," replied Mr Wilkins with a peculiar smile, "and it is almost impossible that I can get along without a clever, honest, intelligent clerk, or, shall we say, secretary—a character that is not easily found in these degenerate days. Can you ...
— Philosopher Jack • R.M. Ballantyne
... slender mother was holding a crying baby, two small children huddling beside her. In the seat in front of him slouched a mulatto of the new era—the degenerate descendant of two races that mix only to decay. Further off there were several men returning from business trips, and across from them sat a pretty girl, asleep, her hand resting on a gilded cage containing a startled canary. At intervals she was aroused by the flitting ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... dust shalt thou arise once more, Not by thine own degenerate sons upreared, But strangers who have sought thy verdant shore Shall hail thy fallen greatness, still revered; Until among the kingdoms of the earth Thou shalt appear ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... full of ghosts; and he could fancy that the spirits of his ancestors were returned from the other side of Styx to finger the pages of bygone ledgers, and to mock from between the shadows of his incongruous bookshelves, at their degenerate descendant. And these did but give place, amid strange creaking and contortions of the decaying walls, to spectres more intimate, whose reprobation moved him more: the faces of many persons whom he had known forming themselves, ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... complaint in these degenerate days that we live harder than our fathers did. Whatever we do we rush at. We bolt our food, and run for the train; we jump out of it before it has stopped, and reach the school door just as the bell rings; we "cram" for our examinations, and "spurt" ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... man of so abandoned a character should be the choice of a sister of Lord Orville! and how strange, that, almost at the moment of the union, he should be so importunate in gallantry to another woman! What a world is this we live in! how corrupt! how degenerate! well might I be contented to see no more of it! If I find that the eyes of Lord Orville agree with his pen,-I shall then think, that of all mankind, the only virtuous individual resides ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... this letter an outline of what Professor James would suggest as steps toward vivisection reform? In perfunctory inspection of laboratories or supervision by State inspectors, he has no confidence; such inspection would probably degenerate into a sham. A well-known experimentor once said to the rwiter: "Your inspectors of laboratories must be either well-educated and competent men, or else officials of the grade of the average policemen. If the belong to the first class, do you think they will become detectives and spies? ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... simple games patiently, or patiently sat in the shade of pine and cedar waiting, while now and then a band made havoc with the lazy summer air. And there, that morning, Jason had learned from a red- headed orator that "a vicious body of deformed Democrats and degenerate Americans" had passed a law at the capital that would rob the mountaineers of the rights that had been bought with the blood of their forefathers in 1776, 1812, 1849, and 1865. Every ear caught the emphasis on "rob" and "rights," ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... acquisition of territory by any means, they are willing to reject William's title, by right of war, to the crown of England. It is needless to enter into a controversy, which, by the terms of it, must necessarily degenerate into a dispute of words. It suffices to say, that the Duke of Normandy's first invasion of the island was hostile; that his subsequent administration was entirely supported by arms; that in the very frame of his laws, he made a distinction between the Normans and English, ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... these have become noted in history—the Medes and the Persians. The Medes at the west, nearer the Assyrians, destroyed Nineveh and its empire (625). But soon they softened their manners, taking the flowing robes, the indolent life, the superstitious religion of the degenerate Assyrians. They at ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... London: he observed, that a man stored his mind better there, than any where else; and that in remote situations a man's body might be feasted, but his mind was starved, and his faculties apt to degenerate, from want of exercise and competition. No place, (he said,) cured a man's vanity or arrogance so well as London; for as no man was either great or good per se, but as compared with others not so good or great, he was sure to find in the metropolis many his equals, and some his superiours. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... longer remember in what connection—said that human beings are degenerate monkeys. He is a little fellow who gets his ...
— Marie Bashkirtseff (From Childhood to Girlhood) • Marie Bashkirtseff
... studied. The science of evasion, already tolerably understood, would then be brought to the greatest perfection. It is no inconsiderable part of wisdom, to know how much of an evil ought to be tolerated; lest, by attempting a degree of purity impracticable in degenerate times and manners, instead of cutting off the subsisting ill practices, new corruptions might be produced for the concealment and security of the old. It were better, undoubtedly, that no influence at all could affect the mind of a Member of Parliament. But of all modes of influence, ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... Philadelphia Convention favored the indefinite eligibility of the President. It was Jefferson who raised the objection that indefinite eligibility would in fact be for life and degenerate into an inheritance. Prior to 1940 the idea that no President should hold for more than two terms was generally thought to be a fixed tradition, although some quibbles had been raised as to the meaning of the word "term". President Franklin D. Roosevelt's violation ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... learned to pick grapes a whole long day and come home at the end of it with that tired happy feeling, instead of being in a state of physical collapse. That fireplace—those big stones—I was soft, then, a little, anemic, alcoholic degenerate, with the spunk of a rabbit and about one per cent as much stamina, and some of those big stones nearly broke my back and my heart. But I persevered, and used my body in the way Nature intended it should be used—not bending ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... clinkers, about a mile from the Landing, subsequently called after him, in a vale, or expanded gulch, containing here and there among the rocks about two acres of soil capable of rude cultivation; the only place on the isle not too blasted for that purpose. Here he succeeded in raising a sort of degenerate potatoes and pumpkins, which from time to time he exchanged with needy whalemen ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... Cestius, and mused by the graves of Shelley, Keats and Salvator Rosa! The Palace of the Cassars looked even more mournful in the pale, slant sunshine, and the yellow Tiber, as he flowed through the "marble wilderness," seemed sullenly counting up the long centuries during which degenerate slaves have trodden his banks. A leaden-colored haze clothed the seven hills, and heavy silence reigned among the ruins, for all work was prohibited, and the people were gathered in their churches. Rome never appeared so desolate and melancholy ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... lesson of every Jewish mother from Sarah to Deborah, and from Deborah to the women who were last at Christ's cross and first beside his tomb. Deborah, who was the judge, prophetess and poet, but first of all "a mother in Israel," under whom her degenerate people had peace for forty years, rebuked Barak and said, to their humiliation: "This day shall the Lord deliver Israel by the hand of a woman." From this teaching Paul uttered his rebuke to the wayward church at Corinth: "It is a shame for a ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... Bill pledging national credit for loan to East African Protectorates entered upon. Not without opposition from Ministerial benches. ALPHEUS CLEOPHAS MORTON, of whom we hear little in these degenerate days, insisted that this kind of charity should begin at home—that is in the Highlands of Scotland. WEDGWOOD and THORNE thought Government had gone far enough in the way of lavish expenditure of tax-payers' ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 22, 1914 • Various
... great branches of the sources of the Nile. In the beginning of our era, we hear of the Eunuch of the "Queen of the South[107]," or of Abyssinia, who was a Jew, and converted by Philip to Christianity. There is therefore no manner of difficulty in accounting for the presence of these corrupt degenerate black Jews, amongst the tribes of ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... fortunate that such an occupation offered to interest and keep alive the spirit of the colonists. Man must have something to do; some main object to live for; or he is apt to degenerate in his ambition, and to fall off in his progress. No sooner was it announced that whales were to be taken, however, than even the women became alive to the results of the enterprise. This feeling was kept up by the governor's letting it be officially ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... mother, as if making a great concession, 'I fear it is only too true that those old families become degenerate. One does hear such shocking stories of the aristocracy. But get to bed, dear, and don't let this trouble you. What a very good thing that all that wealth didn't go into such hands, isn't it? Mr. Mutimer will at all events use it in a decent way; ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... understood so well all the snares of temptation and all the arts of virtue, fell like the puppet of any Asiatic court. What a contrast between the wise and great king as described in I Kings iv. 20-34 and the same king in his degenerate ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... which the authority of the United States is to be maintained, not by law, not by constitutional agreement between the States, but by physical force; and will you stand still and see this policy consummated? Will you fold your arms, the degenerate descendants of those men who proclaimed the eternal principle that government rests on the consent of the governed; and that every people have a right to change, modify, or abolish a government when it ceases to answer the ends for which it was established, and ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... protest in favour of the English press against the assertions of those who would judge the opinions of a great liberal nation by the wretched specimens which are under our eyes. Heaven be praised. The civilized world is not so degenerate that the ignoble conduct of Prussia fails to elicit universal reprobation." We have had two more pigeons, but Gambetta either cannot or will not let us know anything of importance. These two messengers confirm the news of the "victory of Orleans," and inform us that public ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... they are; and that indeed we cannot have too much of beauty in them, so that beauty be duly steeped in the grace and truth of Christian inspiration. But Art has its dangers here as well as its uses: especially it is apt to degenerate from a discipline of religious virtue into a mere relaxation, losing the severity that elevates and purifies, in what is merely pretty or voluptuous or pleasing. It is therefore of the utmost consequence what style of beauty we cultivate, ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... secure to bring the children up. Yes—wait a bit, and I'll make it clearer what I think ought to be done. The tame ones will go like all tame beasts; in a few generations they'll be big, beautiful, rich-blooded, stupid—rubbish! The risk is that we who keep wild will go savage—degenerate into a sort of big, savage rat. . . . You see, how I mean to live is underground. I've been thinking about the drains. Of course those who don't know drains think horrible things; but under this London are miles and miles—hundreds ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... attacked every Minister and every measure which favoured the interest of the army—encouraged the workmen not to pay their taxes and the farmers not to pay their rents—and thus became the leader of a noisy faction, and is now surrounded by the degenerate class throughout Italy which dreams of reconstructing society by burying it ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... considerable timber. Beeches came to a good growth, with here and there an oak; and the track now passed under a high arcade of branches, and now ran under the open sky in glades. As the girl proceeded these glades became more frequent, the trees began again to decline in size, and the wood to degenerate into furzy coverts. Last of all there was a fringe of elders; and beyond that the track came forth upon an open, rolling moorland, dotted with wind-bowed and scanty bushes, and all golden brown with the winter, like a grouse. Right over against the girl the last red embers of the sunset ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his characters too, and drew them often more vicious, more covetous, and more foolish than they really were, and this so set the people a gazing and wondering. With these sort of characters many of our modern Comedies abound, which makes them too much degenerate into farce, which seldom ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... simplicity of his confession: A sinner: I am a sinner; "God be merciful to me a sinner." This indeed he was, and this indeed confesses; and this, I say, he doth of godly simplicity. For, for a man to confess himself a sinner, it is to speak all against himself that can be spoken. And man, as degenerate, is too much an hypocrite, and too much a self-flatterer, thus to confess against himself, unless made simple and honest about the thing through the power of conviction upon his heart. And it is yet worth your noting, that he doth not say he was, or had ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... adrift from the great national parties and pursues a purely Socialistic Labour policy. "A member of an Imperial Parliament is an Imperialist in spite of himself. A party which concerns itself with sectional interests only will soon cease to be a party; it will degenerate into a group, and as such it cannot hope to receive serious backing in ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... make a business of "head hunting," accumulating the ghastly visages of their victims in their huts.39 The Caribs have a sort of sensual paradise for the "brave and virtuous," where, it is promised, they shall enjoy the sublimated experience of all their earthly satisfactions; but the "degenerate and cowardly" are threatened with eternal banishment beyond the mountains, where they shall be tasked and driven as slaves by their enemies.40 The Hispaniolians locate their elysium in a pleasant valley abounding with guava, delicious fruits, cool shades, and murmuring rivulets, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... she was refused with the first glance at her. No good-looking girls wanted; even though they behaved themselves and attracted customers, the customers lost sight of matters of merchandise in the all-absorbing matter of sex. In offices a good-looking girl upset discipline, caused the place to degenerate into a deer-haunt in the mating season. No place did she find offering more than four dollars a week, except where the dress requirements made the nominally higher wages even less. Everywhere women's wages were based upon the assumption that women either lived at home or made the principal part ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... disputed. What was the lady of the manor to do but to superintend the church, parsonage, and parish generally? Not her duty? She had never heard of such a thing, nor did she credit it. Papa would come home, make these degenerate Charnocks hear reason, and ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and Diuels. Saddle my horses: call my Traine together. Degenerate Bastard, Ile not trouble thee; Yet haue I left ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... of that affectionate far-seeking care which the owner bestows upon the property for which he alone is responsible? Will not the gladsome absence of care, which has certainly hitherto been brilliantly conspicuous in Freeland, eventually degenerate into frivolity and neglect of that for which no one in particular is responsible? The fact that this has not yet happened may perhaps be due—for it is not yet a generation since this commonwealth was founded—to the dominant enthusiasm that marked the beginning. New brooms, it is ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... religion, and could never think of parting with one hoof, or the least grain of truth, being persuaded, that Christian concord must have truth for its foundation, and holiness for its attendant, without which it will decline into a defection, and degenerate into a conspiracy against religion. As to the duties of Christianity, he enforced the performance of these with all the arguments of persuasion, so that, through the blessing of God, his pulpit discourses became the power of God to the illumination of the understandings ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... to that, I should distinguish," returned the doctor. "The mother is; not so the children. The mother was the last representative of a princely stock, degenerate both in parts and fortune. Her father was not only poor, he was mad: and the girl ran wild about the residencia till his death. Then, much of the fortune having died with him, and the family being quite extinct, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... The time for the next step appeared to David to have come when he had no longer to fight for his throne. Rest from enemies should lead to larger work for God, else repose will be our worst enemy, and peace will degenerate into self-indulgent sloth. A devout heart will not be content with personal comfort and dwelling in a house of cedar, while the ark has but a tent for its abode. There should be a proportion between expenditure on self and on religious ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... a weak voice, his eyes starting from his head. "Life cannot be unchequered by the frowns of fate, but death must bring dumbness to my lips. Caution, when besmeared in blood, is no longer virtue, or wisdom, but wretched and degenerate cowardice; no, never let him that was born to execute judgment secure his honours by cruelty and oppression. Hath not thy Koran told thee that fear and submission is a subject's tribute, yet mercy is the attribute of Allah, and the most pleasing ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... towards the universal harmony of twain making one. That love should be capable of ending in such vermiculate results as too often appear, is no more against the loveliness of the divine idea, than that the forms of man and woman, the spirit gone from them, should degenerate to such things as may not be looked upon. There is no plainer sign of the need of a God, than the possible fate of love. The celestial Cupido may soar aloft on seraph wings that assert his origin, or fall down on the belly of a ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... seemed to lead an existence as it were smothered under their own social importance. It was not their fault. He recognized that they did their best. They were good specimens of their kind; neither soft nor luxurious, as things went in a degenerate and extravagant age; they evidently tried to be simple—and this seemed to him to heighten the pathos of their situation. Fate had been too much for them. What human spirit could emerge untrammelled and unshrunken from that great ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... and naively anxious to find something "worth doing," therefore had settled on this one definite duty. She had wrestled in a determined silence with the many incompetent and degenerate negresses, with the few impertinent Americans, with the drunken Irish and insolent Swedes, who had filed in and out of her kitchen ever since her marriage. Suburban life was a new thing in Endbury, and "help" could see no advantages in it. She had strained ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... most numerous, keeping up their manners, customs, and language; the indigenous Malays are next in point of numbers, and their language is the Lingua-franca of the place. Next come the descendants of the Portuguese—a mixed, degraded, and degenerate race, but who still keep up the use of their mother tongue, though ruefully mutilated in grammar; and then there are the English rulers, and the descendants of the Dutch, who all speak English. The Portuguese ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... considered as a moral being singly (owed to the humanity subsisting in his person), is a departure from truth, or lying."[1] And when a man like Fichte,[2] whom Carlyle characterizes as "that cold, colossal, adamantine spirit, standing erect like a Cato Major among degenerate men; fit to have been the teacher of the Stoa, and to have discoursed of beauty and virtue in the groves of Academe," declares that no measure of evil results from truth-speaking would induce him ...
— A Lie Never Justifiable • H. Clay Trumbull
... like a young man of our degenerate day. She was far too beautiful and distinguished for that. Besides, her dark curling hair, quite short for a woman, was too long, and her eyes—like the eyes of all poets—were women's eyes. She looked, indeed, like one of those wonderful boys of the Italian Renaissance, whom you may ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... in vain to try to persuade him that seed-time and harvest were the same thing, and that he had nothing to do but to rest in what he had done; show his bright colours and flutter like a moth in the sunshine, or sit down like a degenerate bee in the summer time and eat his own honey. The power of action which he knew in himself could not rest without something to act upon. ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... its golden age is the subject of attack, and a perverted and fantastic style of writing assigned to an epoch remarkable for the severity and precision of its taste? If Spain is meant, the attack is perfectly intelligible, as the epoch is exactly that when Spanish taste began to degenerate, and the style of Spanish writers to become vicious, inflated, and fantastic, in imitation of Gongora, who did so much to ruin the literature of his country; as other writers of much less ability, but who addressed themselves to a public far inferior ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... stirred popular imagination. Some century earlier the last of the minstrels might have fashioned the last of the ballads out of that Homeric fight and chase; but the spirit was dead, or had been reincarnated already in Mr. Sheriff Scott, and the degenerate moorsmen must be content to tell the tale in prose, and to make of the "Four Black Brothers" a unit after the fashion of the "Twelve Apostles" or the ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... emotion of his subject, but his emotion, his pathos, are invariably tempered and restrained by the calm moderation of the quattrocento. The golden mean still has command of Bellini, and never allows his feelings, however poignant, to degenerate into sentimentality ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... the morality of good sense is, that it tends to degenerate into cynicism, either of the indolent variety which commended itself to Chesterfield, or of the more vehement sort, of which Swift's writings are the most powerful embodiment. A shrewd man of the world, of placid temperament, accepts placidly the conclusion ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... Persian is a very degenerate representative of the ancient Arian stock. Slight and supple in person, with quick, glancing eyes, delicate features, and a vivacious manner, he lacks the dignity and strength, the calm repose and simple grace of the race from which he is sprung, Fourteen centuries of subjection ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... side of the Almond, above Caerlowrie, was designated by a name, having apparently the Celtic "battle" noun as a prefix in its composition—viz., Cat-elbock. This fine old Celtic name has latterly been changed for the degenerate ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... the most important coaching house in the city, it could not be spoken of as particularly attractive in appearance. It looked more like a barracks than an hotel, indeed, we believe it was used for such a purpose in its degenerate days before it was finally demolished ...
— The Inns and Taverns of "Pickwick" - With Some Observations on their Other Associations • B.W. Matz
... the preponderating power in degenerate Italy. Even those States which were not in subjection to the emperor, were overawed by his imperious spirit. Genoa was nominally independent. The Genoese arrested one of the imperial officers for some violation of the laws of the republic. The emperor sent ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... greater change that then Upon our hapless nature fell, When the degenerate hearts of men Bore sin and all the thorns ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... virtue in itself, and may as easily degenerate into a scramble for office as may any other phase of group relationship. Its success would only be possible where its power was strictly limited to the control of those matters that had reached a plane of world importance. ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing
... For a poetic composition requires some connection with a time or space to make perceptible to the senses its view of the advancing development of the mind of humanity. So it is that Kleist's "Arminius-battle" does not in the least refer to the ancient Romans, but to the degenerate race, the mixture of tiger and ape, as Voltaire has called them, and in this symbol of art he strengthened the determination of his people until in the battles of nations it conquered. Wagner even transfers the scene ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... B. Anthony appeared to the convention like Minerva, goddess of wisdom. Her advent was with thunders, not of applause, but of the scorn of a degenerate masculinity. The great Horatio said, with infinite condescension, that he held in his hand a memorial of the women of the United States. The name of Miss Anthony was greeted with a yell such as a Milton might imagine to rise from ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... that, if it be regarded as a penance, it must have a certain deterrent effect. The man who foresees the necessity of undergoing this severe penance will think twice before putting on a disguise. So at least it must have been in the good old times; but in these degenerate days—among the Russian peasantry as elsewhere—the fear of the Devil, which was formerly, if not the beginning, at least one of the essential elements, of wisdom, has greatly decreased. Many a young peasant will now ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... 'conspicuous citizens,' who set the fashion, and are looked to as authorities and leaders, whether in political or commercial or social life. The word by which they are designated is used in Numbers i. 17: 'Which are expressed by name.' The word 'carried back the thoughts of the degenerate aristocracy of Israel to the faith and zeal of their forefathers' (Pusey, Minor Prophets, on this verse). Israel, Amos calls 'The first of the nations.' It is singular that such a title should be given to the nation against whose corruption his one business is to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... a burning hot iron. He that is given to please his senses, and delighteth in the excesse of eating and drinking, may, as Sallust saith, bee called animal, for hee is unworthy the name of a man. For wherin can a man more resemble brute beasts, and degenerate from his angelicall nature, than to serve his belly and his senses? But if our predecessors exceeded us in superfluitie of meats, wee can compare and goe beyond ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 348, December 27, 1828 • Various
... both had decided ideas about things, both were also much too well bred to be willing to allow differences of opinion—which must arise as inevitably as two human beings live under the same roof—to degenerate into the deplorable thing commonly referred ...
— The Indifference of Juliet • Grace S. Richmond
... contemporary political life cannot but degenerate into the most sterile bysantinisme and the most corrupt strife for bribes and spoils, when it is confined to the superficial skirmishes between individualist parties, which differ only by a shade and in their formal names, but whose ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... the most degraded type of man I had yet met on my travels, a typical degenerate, dirty, drunken, diseased. He had three suits of underclothing, which he never washed. He would wear through all three in succession, and when the last got too dirty for words he would throw it under his trunk and sorrowfully go back to the first, keeping up this rotation, till ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... dependencies is in an inverse ratio of excellence to their character at home. The best people in the mother-country will generally be the worst in the colonies; the worst at home will be the best abroad. Or, perhaps, I may state it less offensively thus:—The colonists of a well governed-country will degenerate; those of an ill-governed country will improve. I am now considering the natural tendency of such colonists if left to themselves; of course, a direct act of the legislature of the mother-country will break in upon this. Where this tendency is exemplified, the cause is obvious. In countries ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... Darien on the Georgia coast. "I fear," he writes to his wife, "that such actions will hurt the reputation of black troops and of those connected with them. For myself I have gone through the war so far without dishonor, and I do not like to degenerate into a plunderer and a robber,—and the same applies to every officer in my regiment. After going through the hard campaigning and the hard fighting in Virginia, this makes me very much ashamed. There ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... of Kent. Whether he tooke vpon him of his owne accord to vsurpe the kinglie title and roiall authoritie, or whether that the same was giuen to him by consent of other, the certeintie appeareth not. But sure it is, that he being a woorthie prince, did not degenerate from his noble ancestors inuincible in warre abroad and at home, qualifieng his kinglie seueritie with a naturall kind of courteous humanitie. The bounds of his kingdome called (as is said) Brenitia, began in the south at the riuer of Tine, ...
— Chronicles 1 (of 6): The Historie of England 5 (of 8) - The Fift Booke of the Historie of England. • Raphael Holinshed
... now take her part, so that there is no need to fear for the position of a Yugoslav Rieka based solely—omitting Hungary and the Ukraine altogether—on her Yugoslav hinterland. Rieka without Yugoslavia would be ruined and would degenerate into a fishing village, with a great past and a miserable future. This could very well be seen during the spring of 1919 when the communications were interrupted between Rieka and Yugoslavia. At Rieka during April eggs were 80 centimes apiece, while at Bakar, a few ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... authorities themselves. From every point of vantage the steeples of Notre Dame de Noyon add the one ingredient which makes a unity of the entire ensemble,—a true old-world atmosphere, a town seen in not too apparent a state of unrepair and certainly not a degenerate. ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... they not be altered to serve better; must they of necessity be thrown to the dogs? The truth is, Teufelsdroeckh, though a Sansculottist, is no Adamite; and much perhaps as he might wish to go forth before this degenerate age 'as a Sign,' would nowise wish to do it, as those old Adamites did, in a state of Nakedness. The utility of Clothes is altogether apparent to him: nay perhaps he has an insight into their more recondite, and almost mystic qualities, what we might call the omnipotent ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... pages more of this carte and tierce of compliment; but perhaps a degenerate and impatient age may desire that we should pass to the next subject. Whether it is right or not in so desiring may perhaps be discussed when the three ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... raised above the daily cares, the troubles, and the sorrows of life. As the drama, with the arts which are subservient to it, may, from neglect and the mutual contempt of artists and the public, so far degenerate, as to become nothing better than a trivial and stupid amusement, and even a downright waste of time, we conceive that we are attempting something more than a passing entertainment, if we propose to enter on a consideration of the works produced by the most ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... also the lessons concerning Esau. He was a man intent upon immediate physical enjoyment; an idle drifter without spiritual ideals. From his character and that of the Edomites, his descendants, there is taught the lesson that such an unambitious man or nation will always become degenerate and prove a failure. God himself cannot make a man ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... dog-watch, the boys, I found, were allowed to skylark about the upper deck and aloft, playing 'follow my leader' up and down the rigging, without any interference or interruption from the officers and instructors, save when it seemed to them the larking might degenerate ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... of this part of my argument that the ordinary time-telling clock is no affiliate of the other simple time-telling devices such as sundials, sand glasses and the elementary water clocks. Rather it should be considered as a degenerate branch from the main stem of mechanized astronomical devices (I shall call them protoclocks), a stem which can boast a continuous history filling the gap between the appearance of simple gearing and the complications of de Dondi. We shall return to the discussion of this main stem after analyzing ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
Copyright © 2025 Diccionario ingles.com
|
|
|
