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More "Degenerate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from something deep down. They formed an element in my blood. My patriotism resented the failure of our government. Therefore such advice had very little influence upon me. The criticism that really touched and influenced me was that which said, "Don't preach,—exemplify. Don't let your stories degenerate into tracts." Howells said, "Be fine, be fine—but not too fine!" and Gilder warned me not to leave Beauty out of ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... 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 descendants of the American ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... view; for they are "patriots," which means that the fall of the birth-rate in all other countries but their own is a source of much gratification. "Woe to us," they exclaim in effect, "if we follow the example of these wicked and degenerate peoples! Our nation needs men. We have to populate the earth and to carry the blessings of our civilised culture all over the world. In executing that high mission we cannot have too much cannon-fodder in defending ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... 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 a kind ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... told that he has again exercised his function. That is the reason why the story of a poet's part in leading the Italian people toward their decision is received by Americans with such skeptical humor. And Gabriele d' Annunzio in the role! A poet who is popularly supposed to be decadent, if not degenerate, gossipingly known for his celebrated affair with a famous actress, whose novels and plays, when not denounced for their eroticism, are very much caviar to the "wholesome" man, so full are they of a remote symbolism, so purely "literary." "Exotic" ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... 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
... fear and futility, the strong, kindly, imperturbable heart of the land still beat, sanely—if inconspicuously—in the home life of her cottages and her great country houses. Twentieth-century England could not be called degenerate while she counted among her hidden treasures homes of such charm and culture and mutual confidence as those that produced the Grenfells, the Charltons, a Lord Elcho, an Edward Tennant and a Charles Sorley—to pick a few names at random ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... the great House of Malatesta was represented by Pandolfo—Roberto Malatesta's bastard and successor—a degenerate so detested by his subjects that he was known by the name of Pandolfaccio (a contumelious augmentative, expressing the evil repute in which he ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... of destroying insect life. More than half of its food consists of ants. In this country, taken as a whole, Flickers are very numerous, and the millions of individual birds which have yet escaped the guns of degenerate pot hunters constitute a mighty army ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... the European quarter of Cairo," Margaret said. "It seems to me so vulgar and degenerate. The native quarter is just what it sets out to be, no better ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... generally tends. Nothing could be more appropriate than the application of the term to the "infima latinitas" of the Middle Ages; and from "mongrel" the transition to the name of the genus from that of the degenerate species appears to me to be very ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various
... popular flavour and attract the mob, he 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
... may be that alcoholism is merely a symptom of a degenerate stock. In this case the children will be defective, not because their parents drank, but because their parents were defective—the parents' drinking being merely one of ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... these opinions, revived, however, and introduced by [407] degenerate scholasticism, and in the Age of Chimeras, is vague indifference of choice, or real chance, assumed in our souls; as if nothing gave us any inclination unless we perceived it distinctly, and as if an effect could be without causes, when these causes are imperceptible. It is much as some have ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... conviction is, that purgatives, emetics, and blisters, by depressing the patient, sometimes cause ordinary scarlet fever to degenerate ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... the 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
... ultimate perfection of which they are capable. Philosophy and the intellectual sciences, on the contrary, stand like statues, worshiped and celebrated, but not moved or advanced. Nay, they sometimes flourish most in the hands of the first author, and afterwards degenerate. For when men have once made over their judgments to others' keeping, and (like those senators whom they called Pedarii) have agreed to support some one person's opinion, from that time they make no enlargement of the sciences themselves, but fall to the servile office ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... his object being to free himself from a narrow subjectivity and to give scope to his wide human sympathies and to his passion for perfection of utterance. It seemed to him that a plausible originality might degenerate into mere idiosyncrasy, and that universality of appeal should be a musician's highest goal. When he resigned his post and came before the public with his first large work, a concerto for pianoforte and orchestra, the gain made in increased power and resources was evident. ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... rather to 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. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... became necessary for her to sever her legal ties if she wished to marry this other man. I heard of the scandal but not being interested in the woman, and not knowing the man, I paid no attention to the suit. Divorce cases are so common in these degenerate days." Mrs. Courtney sighed again, and showed her disapproval of ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... cold at the calm pride of this degenerate fiend, had it not been boiling at the reference to Helene. He crept nearer to them, along the wall. He lay down on the floor, below the level of the first bullet paths. Then he drew his automatic and the bulb light, ready for ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... 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 ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... more than a relative value. It is no absolute end, lying beyond all other aims of existence and valued above life itself. In this view, there will be nothing to applaud in the forced and extravagant conduct of a Lucretia or a Virginius—conduct which can easily degenerate into tragic farce, and produce a terrible feeling of revulsion. The conclusion of Emilia Galotti, for instance, makes one leave the theatre completely ill at ease; and, on the other hand, all the rules of female honor cannot prevent a ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... young and of a tender age, Yet will I cope with Locrine when he dares. My noble father with his conquering sword, Slew the two giants, kings of Aquitaine. Thrasimachus is not so degenerate That he should fear and tremble at the looks Or taunting words of a ...
— 2. Mucedorus • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... 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 ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... smoke-embrowned spars Dip to the cold clay floor on either side! Her seats bare deal!—her only furniture Some earthen crock or two! Why, sir, a dungeon Were scarce more frightful: such a choice must argue Aberrant senses, or degenerate blood! ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... 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 which bound its stones together had been ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... study at once, on the one hand; and all the instrumentalists at 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 ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... shape, the dead come to life, the history of the world is laid open before you. After countless dynasties of giant creatures, races of fish and clans of mollusks, the race of man appears at last as the degenerate copy of a splendid model, which the Creator has perchance destroyed. Emboldened by his gaze into the past, this petty race, children of yesterday, can overstep chaos, can raise a psalm without end, and outline for themselves the story of the Universe in an Apocalypse ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... 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 ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... 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 testify, but probably ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... the honoured servitor of the noble and illustrious" (here he heaved a sigh, and passed his hairy hand across his eyes) "but in these degenerate days I am become the slave of quack doctors and newspapers. I am driven from pillar to post and hurried up and down, sometimes with stencil-plate and paste-brush to defile the fences with cabalistic legends, and sometimes in grotesque and extravagant character at the behest of some driving journal. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... present time. He believed that the functions are performed by the various organs of the bodies of animals and men as a mechanism, to which in man was added the soul. This soul he located in the pineal gland, a degenerate and presumably functionless little organ in the brain. For years Descartes's idea of the function of this gland was held by many physiologists, and it was only the introduction of modern high-power microscopy that reduced this also to a mere mechanism, and ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... 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 have become jolly dogs in their time, will be drowned! Yes, they'll ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... 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 ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... cannot redeem your heritage; if the foul boar must still wallow in thy sweet vineyard, Israel, at least I will not disgrace you. No! let me perish. The house of David is no more; no more our sacred seed shall lurk and linger, like a blighted thing, in this degenerate earth. If we cannot flourish, 'why, then, we ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... was not degenerate, even in the sense of those who thought he should have called out and shot the younger of the Farleys. It was in him to kill or be killed, quite in the traditional way: that grim gift is in the blood as the wine is in ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... Myrkiarton in the tenth century and took back with him to Norway, was one of this breed. But it was supposed by many to have become extinct soon after the disappearance of the last wolf in Ireland, and it was the endeavour of Captain Graham to demonstrate that specimens, although admittedly degenerate, were still to be found, and that they were capable of being restored to a semblance ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... false show of pleasure, from 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 too frequent returns of so brutal a pleasure, must degenerate into it. ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... waiting twenty years for you, she had said yesterday, and The world would be quite empty if you left it. What would it be while he remained in it a publicly disgraced coward? A coward ridiculed by the effeminate, degenerate Haddock, who had no soul above club-ribbons, and no ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... 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 observations of ways of life in the wild Bush taught ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... spite of herself. She remembered the visit so well, and Lady Augusta's loftily resigned air of discovering, in the passively degenerate new arrival, the culminating point of ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... 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
... instructors as still adhere to the good old principles of the Church of England; in short, daily shaming us, by preserving a living representation of the opinions and habits of better times, as some historical record, which reproaches a degenerate posterity, by exhibiting the worthier deeds of their progenitors. In such a state of things, to what a depth public morals might sink, may be anticipated by those who consider what would then be the condition of society; who reflect ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... But all the earth, though it were full of kind hearts, is but a desolation and a desert place to a mother when her only child is absent. And you, Clement, would leave me for this Virginie,—this degenerate De Crequy, tainted with the atheism of the Encyclopedistes! She is only reaping some of the fruit of the harvest whereof her friends have sown the seed. Let her alone! Doubtless she has friends—it may be lovers—among these demons, who, under the cry of liberty, commit every licence. Let ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the better classes of the inhabitants of the Icelandic capital, our traveller says: "Nothing struck me so much as the great dignity of carriage at which the Icelandic ladies aim, and which is so apt to degenerate into stiffness when it is not perfectly natural, or has not become a second nature by habit. They incline their head very coolly when you meet them, with less civility than we should use towards an inferior or a stranger. The lady of the house never accompanies her guests beyond the door ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... against a rule which he did not approve. In our days there are so many cowardly and degenerate characters, that we cannot too greatly admire those who have the courage to proclaim their opinion in the presence of the mob, especially when those opinions shock the brutalized mob; for my part I admire this man; but what I admire still more is the ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... time, falsest 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 shall bleed ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... 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 black ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... was an important question to be discussed, the soldiers demanded a voice and a share in the solution. These soldiers were called the republican army. Although the Northern troops have not yet become so degenerate, still they never hesitate to disobey the order of their superiors whenever they are ordered to proceed to distant localities. Now we have come to the point when we are deeply satisfied if the army of the Republic does not openly ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... sensation, by a constant repetition of certain sequences, and a recurring exactitude of mathematical relations, keep our fancy clear and fresh, we should fall into an imaginative lethargy. Idealization would degenerate into indistinctness, and, by the dulling of our memory, we should dream a world daily more ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... 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 random attacks ...
— Manual for Noncommissioned Officers and Privates of Infantry • War Department
... "Judith has saved a sum that is wondrous in these degenerate days of maids in silk gowns, and she is wise enough to give 'Master Geoffrey' all the management of it. But if you are surprised now, what will you be by the end of the day? See if his advice is not asked in ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... colonization is to deteriorate.' The first object of Government should therefore be to arrest this impulse, and remedy the evil so far as may be accomplished. If the original settlers degenerate in their moral condition, their children sink still lower. When parents cease to feel the influence of those high and pure principles in which they were themselves brought up, they naturally forget to inculcate them in the minds of their offspring. What, then, are the guides that ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... the 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 that he was. ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... 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 ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... theories, but no government had been previously established for the great purpose of their preservation and enforcement. That which was experimental in our plan of government was the question whether democratic rule could be so organized and conducted that it would not degenerate into license and result in the tyranny of absolutism, without saving to the people the power so often found necessary of representing or destroying their enemy, when he was found in the person of ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... the Danube. The armies of the Roman emperor that tried to check their progress were cut to pieces by them; and Panonia and other provinces south of the Danube were speedily occupied by the victorious cavalry of these new invaders. Not merely the degenerate Romans, but the bold and hardy warriors of Germany and Scandinavia were appalled at the numbers, the ferocity, the ghastly appearance, and the lightning-like rapidity of the Huns. Strange and loathsome legends were coined and credited, which attributed ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... do? Why, she did all her own work, and made grandfather's ruffled shirts besides, with the finest stitching and gathers; and she found exercise enough, I warrant you. Women of this day are miserable, sickly, degenerate creatures." ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... While damned Casca, like a cur behind,/Struck Caesar on the neck] Casca struck Caesar on the neck, coming like a degenerate ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... individual. It is a greatness ill constituted, in which all the material elements are combined, and into which no moral element enters. If a people, like a star, has the right of eclipse, the light ought to return. The eclipse should not degenerate into night. ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... of the present century the property or farm on the opposite 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
... 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 ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... creature, holding little Lucy and cuddling her, while Lucy, shrinking away as far as she was able, kept her big, dark eyes of wonder and fear upon the woman's face. And all around were clustered the Thomas children, unkempt as their mother, a gentle but degenerate brood, all of them believing what their mother said. Viola May had come home again. Silas Thomas was not there; he was trudging slowly homeward from a job of wood-cutting. Jim saw only the mother, little Lucy, and that poor little flock ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... result in the archipelago has been the formation of several tribes of half-breeds numbering considerably more than half a million. Side by side with them, and equally poor and wretched, are the Manthras, a cross between the Negritos and Malays and the degenerate descendants of the Saletes, a warlike tribe conquered by the Malayan Rajah Permicuri in 1411. Then come the Malay Sulus, all Mohammedans and still governed by their Sultan and their datos, feudal lords who, under the suzerainty of the ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis
... Philosophy as his mistress in The Fisher, and in a case where he is in fact judge as well as party, has no difficulty in getting his claim established. He is for ever reminding us that he loves philosophy and only satirizes the degenerate philosophers of his day. But it will occur to us after reading him through that he has dissembled his love, then, very well. There is not a passage from beginning to end of his works that indicates any real comprehension of any philosophic system. ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... in these degenerate days [15] Ignoble themes obtained mistaken praise, When Sense and Wit with Poesy allied, No fabled Graces, flourished side by side, From the same fount their inspiration drew, And, reared by Taste, bloomed fairer as they grew. Then, in this ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... inn, the first thing to be done was to appoint a chairman, who mostly retained his post of honour during the journey. At the breakfast or dinner there was none of that indecorous hurry in eating and drinking which marks our degenerate days. Had the travellers affected such thin potations as tea and soup, there was ample time for them to cool. But they preferred the sirloin and the tankard; and that no feature of a generous reception might be wanting, ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... Armenian, I that even on the confines of Ararat there are a great number who consider that mountain to be lower than the hillocks of Rome; but the greater number of degenerate Armenians are to be found amongst those who have wandered to the west; most of the Haik churches of the west consider Rome to be higher than Ararat—most of the Armenians of this place hold that dogma; I, however, have always stood firm in ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... take the higher title; it was first assumed by his son Okkodai. But there are doubts about this. (See Quatremere's Rashid, pp. 10 seqq. and Pavet de Courteille, Dict. Turk-Oriental.) The tendency of swelling titles is always to degenerate, and when the value of Khan had sunk, a new form, Khan-khanan, was devised at the Court of Delhi, and applied to one of the high ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... any animal capable of service; where nothing is sharper than stone; destitute of grain, and of fruits of any value, could be inhabited only by a wandering race. Their locomotion sharpened their powers of observation, without much increasing their ideas. In such circumstances, mind may degenerate, but it cannot advance. Some colonists were recently startled, by the appearance of a white family from the remote interior: they were found by a surveyor, who at first took them for savages; they had the animal expression of the eye, which is ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... most religious King of Crete, And still how popular the tale is here; And these dull Swine of Thebes boast their descent From the free Minotaur. You know they still 140 Call themselves Bulls, though thus degenerate, And everything relating to a Bull Is popular and respectable in Thebes. Their arms are seven Bulls in a field gules; They think their strength consists in eating beef,— 145 Now there were danger in ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... 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. ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... 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 in ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... 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 ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... being effected, and who can testify that all, or the overwhelming majority, of the beetles born with fairly well-developed wings got blown out to sea, while those alone survived whose wings were congenitally degenerate. Who saw them go, or can point to analogous cases so conclusive as to compel assent from ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... gradual intercourse with the Grecian colonies, which settled along the maritime coast. The little kingdom of Bosphorus, whose capital was situated on the Straits, through which the Maeotis communicates itself to the Euxine, was composed of degenerate Greeks and half-civilized barbarians. It subsisted, as an independent state, from the time of the Peloponnesian war, [98] was at last swallowed up by the ambition of Mithridates, [99] and, with the rest of his dominions, sunk ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... moral depravity with the mantle of the philosopher, he placed another canvas before her—something so unrefined, so animal, so destructive of womanly modesty and of all reserve, that any one looking upon it would instantly know that the man who had painted it was a degenerate demon—an associate of dissolute models, an anarchist in the world of women. It was fit only for the banquet-halls ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... were apt to degenerate into occasions of riot, and in 1432 the following statute was passed with ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... my child 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 little brain. Ah, that thou couldst ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... government 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 ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... other human love like this, which follows the child from the cradle to the grave, never once abandons, never once forsakes him, no matter how unfortunate or degenerate he ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... 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
... political power, the Norman nobles of Chaucer's time had lost something of the traditions of their order. Chivalry had not quite come to an end with the Crusades; but it was a difficult task to maintain all its laws, written and unwritten, in these degenerate days. No laurels were any longer to be gained in the Holy Land; and though the campaigns of the great German Order against the pagans of Prussia and Lithuania attracted the service of many an English knight—in the middle of the century, Henry, ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... hundred and sixty images in the Kaaba. But there were some who were called hanifs, who were serious and earnest, and turned away from idolatrous worship. Besides the Sabian religion of the Persian sun-worshipers, the leading tenets and rites of Christianity and of Judaism, both in the degenerate types which they assumed on the Syrian borders, were not unfamiliar to Arabs dwelling in the caravan routes on the borders of ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... buying blood stock from a successful breeder; for a successful breeder is necessarily a good feeder and a kind handler, and stock may give good results in his hands, and, if removed to starvation and harshness, quickly degenerate. So, too, stock that has been bred on poor pasturage will readily improve if transplanted to richer pastures and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... we should not complain. Of money, there is plenty in America; and, while marquises are in the market, let Shoddy continue to pipe for its own. A fig for Macbeth's philosophy that "blood will have blood." We modify it in these degenerate days to ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 3, April 16, 1870 • Various
... 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
... young Moggs at a city dinner—I think it was the Bottle-makers' Company—when both were some way advanced beyond the initial sobriety of the occasion. This was the grandson of the original Moggs, and a very typical instance of an educated, cultivated, degenerate plutocrat. His people had taken him about in his youth as the Ruskins took their John and fostered a passion for history in him, and the actual management of the Moggs' industry had devolved upon a cousin and a ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... ancestors, ere I learn that my son—my only son—the last hope of my ancient house—the last remnant of the name of Peveril—hath consented to receive obligations from the man on earth I am most bound to hate, were I not still more bound to contemn him!—Degenerate dog-whelp!" he repeated with great vehemence, "you colour without replying! Speak, and disown such disgrace; or, by ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... believe, in short, that varieties can be improved by bud selection. There is, however, but little in either theory or fact to substantiate the belief of those who say that varieties once established can be improved; or, on the other hand, that they degenerate. Present knowledge and experience indicate that heredity is all but complete in varieties propagated from parts of plants. The multitude of grapes in any variety, all from one seed, are morphologically one individual. A few kinds of grapes go back to Christ's time, ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... here is the sort of home you have. This passage is a cutting from the Daily News of Jan. 1, 1907; and its assertions have never been contradicted. It fills one with only the mildest enthusiasm for the return of our degenerate townsmen "back to the land." I came upon it as I read that morning's paper after ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... ugly and sarcastic buffoon of the fourteenth century. Hanswurst was a fat glutton of the fifteenth century who aimed to be clever but made blunders. Pickelhering, in Holland, was of the same type.[2117] In England, in the sixteenth century, Punch began to degenerate. He took away the role of "Old Vice," and became more and more depraved,—a popular Don Juan, a type of physical and moral deformity.[2118] The play was popular. The marionettes, being only dolls and sexless, escaped the ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... lifetime of the chief was to hinder its falling 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
... 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 ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... The modern Indians give no such evidence of labor. For wherever they are found they love to roam in undisputed possession of the forest, and lead an indolent life. Of course I do not assign this as a valid reason for their not being identified with the Mound-builders. An ancient race may have a degenerate offspring. ...
— Mound-Builders • William J. Smyth
... am not one of those who think the age degenerate: but certainly the rigid manly character of old times is melted into one of elegance and comparative softness. Perhaps the change is for the better, as I think no virtue has been lost in the transfusion. ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... class stands for dignified scientific presentation of facts, and obscenity will soon be tabooed in medical and all other reputable literature. Save for occasional emanations privately printed by and for degenerate persons, public obscenity will soon be unknown. Its complete disappearance will have a vast influence upon the ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... efforts. Just as the spirit of independence reached bold utterance Sir William died. He was succeeded in his title, and a part of his estates by his son John. The dreams of Sir William vanished, and his plans failed in the hands of his weak, arrogant, degenerate son. Sir John hesitated, temporized, broke his parole, fled to Canada, returned to ravage the lands of his countrymen, and ended by being driven across ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... 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, ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth
... of such a survey found an eloquent advocate in the late Professor A. N. Whitehead, in his book Science and the Modern World, where, in view of the contradictory nature of modern physical theories, he insists that 'if science is not to degenerate into a medley of ad hoc hypotheses, it must become philosophical and enter upon a thorough criticism ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... whether struggles were not made quite as disgraceful to the strugglers as anything that is done now. You can't alter the men, and you must use them." The younger Duke sat down and sighed over the degenerate ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... from his blind repose, How might we meet his searching questionings, Concerning all the follies, wrongs, and woes, Since his great day whom men call King of Kings, Victorious Agamemnon? How might we Those large, clear eyes confront, which scornfully Would view us as a poor, degenerate race, Base-souled and mean-proportioned? What reply Give to the beauty-loving Greek's heart-cry, Seeking his ancient gods ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... beast-like than any other people. No governor shall do good here,' he said, 'except he show himself a Tamerlane. If hell were open and all the evil spirits abroad, they could never be worse than these Irish rogues—rather dogs, and worse than dogs, for dogs do but after their kind, and they degenerate from ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... of 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, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... of belles and beaux, Of powdered wigs and wondrous hose, Of stately airs and careful grace, Look you at our degenerate race. ...
— When hearts are trumps • Thomas Winthrop Hall
... to observe how customs and ceremonies degenerate. The present Irish cry, or howl, cannot boast of such melody, nor is the funeral procession conducted with much dignity. The crowd of people who assemble at these funerals sometimes amounts to a thousand, often to four or five hundred. They gather as the bearers of the hearse proceed on their ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... are fortunate enough to be bidden to the right houses in Ireland to-day, you will have as much good talk as you are likely to listen to anywhere else in this degenerate age, which has mostly forgotten how to converse in learning to chat; and any one who goes to the Spring Show at Ball's Bridge, or to the Punchestown or Leopardstown races, or to the Dublin horse show, will have ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... 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 ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... beginning's of 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 of the old ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... on a wrong tack there. There is nothing weak-minded or degenerate about Miss Howard. She is an excellent specimen of well-balanced English beef and ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... be sung, have all gone. Pantomimists, and dancing girls with bare faces, have replaced Paulus and Roscius. What would the Athenians of the days of Pericles have said if they had seen a woman on the stage? It is indecent for a woman to appear in public. We must be very degenerate to permit it. It is as certain as that my name is Dorion, that woman is the natural enemy of man, and a ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... require to be replanted in the same way every autumn, as the plants, if they grow well, spread too wide; if the summer prove dry, many of the roots fail, and if they remain undisturbed in the same spot, they will degenerate and become single, notwithstanding Mr. MILLER informs us, that he never ...
— The Botanical Magazine Vol. 7 - or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... gentlemen," cried 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
... 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
... 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
... civilization is always in a process of decay, and would, in a few generations, become emasculated and effeminate were it not for the pure, crystal stream of country youth flowing steadily into and purifying the muddy, devitalized stream of city life. It would soon become so foul and degenerate as to threaten the physical and ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... Imperial Rome. Looking back to Republican Rome, and considering the state of public morals but fifty years before the emperors, we can with difficulty believe that the descendants of a people so severe in their habits could thus rapidly degenerate, and that a populace, once so hardy and masculine, should assume the manners which we might expect in the debauchees of Daphne (the infamous suburb of Antioch) or of Canopus, into which settled the very lees and dregs of the vicious Alexandria. Such extreme changes would falsify all that ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... 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, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... country; it is far more their wisdom, their economy, and, above all, their probity. If ever in the British Islands the useful citizen should lose these virtues, we may be sure that, for England, as for every other country, the vessels of a degenerate commerce, repulsed from every shore, would speedily disappear from those seas whose surface they now cover with the treasures of the universe, bartered for the treasures of the industry ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... be governed by the law of England; but his orders were totally disregarded; many of the unhappy English settlers fled from the country and returned to England; the barons supplied their places with native retainers. Thus the Ersefication of the degenerate Normans became complete; they "donned the saffron"—that is, they adopted the yellow dress of the Celts—abandoned their original language, and gave themselves up to a life of ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... 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 ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... is not between establishment on one hand and toleration on the other, but between those who, being tolerated themselves, refuse toleration to others. That power should be puffed up with pride, that authority should degenerate into rigor, if not laudable, is but too natural. But this proceeding of theirs is much beyond the usual allowance to human weakness: it not only is shocking to our reason, but it provokes our indignation. Quid domini facient, audent cum talia fures? It is not the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... polished surfaces 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 ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... government! Well, I shall do that; but there will be no place left near me for the Bourbons, whom France has spewed out, as one spews out mortal poison. These hated and weak Bourbons shall never attain to power and prestige again. Prance has turned away from them. France abhors this degenerate race of kings; it will erect a new edifice of power and glory, but there will be no room in it for the Bourbons! Mark that, intriguer, and build no air-castles on it. I demand of you an open confession, for I shall accuse yon as ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... went to St. Helena dwelt in a worn-out body, a fat, degenerate perversion of the ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... 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 little brain. ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a country once so famous both for arts and arms, that (however degenerate at present) it still deserves your attention and reflection. View it therefore with care, compare its former with its present state, and examine into the causes of its rise and its decay. Consider it classically and politically, and do not run through it, as too many of your young countrymen ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... 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' ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... 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
... jota is Aragonese; but both are popular in Castile. All are love-songs, most of them of great grace and beauty. Some writers complain that some of these dance-songs are coarse and more or less indecent; others aver that they never degenerate into coarseness. Quien sabe? Perhaps it is a case of Honi soit qui mal y pense. In any case, throughout the length and breadth of Spain, outside the wayside venta, or the barber's shop, in the patios of inns, or wherever holiday-makers congregate, there is ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... time, he was not sorry to see his table relieved of the dull pomposity and brilliant watch-chain of the pillar of Prague society. How mean to hide one's Judaism! What a burden to belong to such a race, degenerate sons of a great but long-vanished past, unable to slough the slave traits engendered by centuries of slavery! How he had yearned as a boy to shake off the yoke of the nations, even as he himself had shaken off ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... 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 riches produce. ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... mere wreck, honeycomb, magni nominis umbra[Lat]; jade, plug, rackabones [obs3][U. S.], skate [U. S.]; tackey[obs3], tacky [U. S.]. V. be worse, be deteriorated, become worse, become deteriorated &c. Adj.; have seen better days, deteriorate, degenerate, fall off; wane &c. (decrease) 36; ebb; retrograde &c. 283- decline, droop; go down &c. (sink) 306; go downhill, go from bad to worse, go farther and fare worse; jump out of the frying pan into the fire. run to seed, go to seed, run to waste swale|, sweal|; lapse, be the worse for; sphacelate: ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... and imaginative man forgets—and rejoices that he can forget—the priests and beggars, the dirty hotels, filthy friars, superstition, unthrift, Jesuitism, which stare ordinary tourists in the face, and all the other disgusting realities which philanthropists deplore so loudly in that degenerate but classical and ever-to-be-hallowed land. For, come what will, in spite of popes and despots it has been the scene of the highest glories of antiquity, calling to our minds saints and martyrs, as well as conquerors ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... washerwoman as to wring my hands; though I might, like some heroines, have fallen to work in a regular blacksmith-way, by examining the lock of the door, and perhaps have succeeded in picking it; but, alas! I live in degenerate days. Oh that I had been born the persecuted daughter of some ancient baron bold instead of the spoiled child of a good natured modern earl! Heavens! to think that I must tamely, abjectly submit to be married in the presence of all my ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... returning to find his descendants—HIS descendants—after the lapse of a few brief generations. His heir and namesake may have not a thousandth part of his heredity, while under some other name, lost to all the tradition and glory of him, enfeebled and degenerate through much intermarriage, may be a multitude of people who have as much as a fiftieth or even more of his quality. They may even be in servitude and dependence to the really alien person who is head of the family. Our founder will go through the spreading record of offspring and ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... am neither Yankee, Jew, nor beef-eater; in fact, I am not a European at all. And since you probably would not guess my nationality, I will tell you that I am a Persian, a pure Iranian, a degenerate descendant of Zoroaster, as you call him, though by religion I follow the prophet, whose name be blessed," he added, with an expression of face I did not then understand. "I call myself Isaacs for convenience in business. There is no concealment about it, as many know my story; but it has ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... 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 ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... destined to go on swallowing, with ever-increasing appetite, to the end of time. The Stronghands were great warriors—of course. They could hardly have developed into a family otherwise. The Reverend Theophilus, however, was a man of peace. We do not say this to his disparagement. He was by no means a degenerate son of the family. Physically he was powerful, broad and tall, and his courage was high; but spiritually he was gentle, and in manner urbane. He drew to the church as naturally as a duck draws to the water, and did not by any means grudge to his elder brothers ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... distances at sea, by a progressive series of ships, vessels, capes, and promontories, that I could not help thinking, I had a distant view of thirty leagues upon the back-ground of the picture. If there is any taste for ingenuity left in a degenerate age, fast sinking into barbarism, this artist, I apprehend, will make a capital figure, as soon ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... the God's interference with the course of events—what does it mean? This is unquestionably the fundamental problem with the earnest student of Homer. Let us observe, then, first, that the poet's principle is not to allow a divine intervention to degenerate into a merely external mechanical act; himself full of the spirit of the God, he puts the divine influence inside the individual as well as outside, and thus preserves the latter's freedom in the providential order. The faithful reader will never let these movements of the ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... the good old sense of the Spanish costumbristas, furnishes a 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
... "spouse," but to set out John Elder's name in full, and at the same time to insert his initials, shews either a misconception of, or disregard for, the principles and usages of the Presbytery. Otherwise, in some respects, this example is almost worthy to be classed with the more degenerate forms of churchyard sculpture in England; the skull, the crown, the hour-glass, the coffin, and the bones being all well-known and conventional signs. The compasses may stand for John Elder's profession, but the figure which ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... 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
... measures 18 inches to 2 feet in diameter, and 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 second, ...
— The Cauliflower • A. A. Crozier
... the misogyne 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.' And again, 'The beauty of the nightingale is its song, ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... conforme your reason by practise, and conuert your practise to the good of your selues and your Country. If I be praise-worthy, esteeme me: if necessary, admit me: if profitable, employ me: so shall you reuoke my death to life, and shew your selues no degenerate issue of such honourable Progenitours. And thus much for Archery, whose tale, if it be disordered, you must beare withall, for she is a woman, ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew
... of the stranger both in his outward seeming and his converse, melted by the warmth of a romantic devotion almost unknown in these degenerate days, though common enough of yore, Miss Almira paused a moment in the proud compliance of one about to gladly bestow an inestimable, but hardly hoped-for gift, and crying, "It can be done, it shall be done," threw ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... that we are some of those that degenerate from the Institutions of our Founder; we ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... cognoscenti were haunted by a fear that Sontag would permit herself to degenerate, like Catalani, into a mere imitator of instrumental performers, and endeavor to astonish instead of pleasing the public by executing such things as Rode's variations. But it was soon observed that, while indulging in almost ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... renders it fruitful on behalf of its species. I have seen the principle strikingly exemplified in the common tobacco plant, when reared in a northern country, in the open air. Year after year it continued to degenerate, and to exhibit a smaller leaf and shorter stem, until the successors of what in the first year of trial had been rigorous plants, of some three to four feet in height, had in the sixth or eighth become mere weeds, of scarce ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... that far greater weight ought to be attached to the finding of this Commission than to the declarations of the complainants, who contradicted one another in nearly every particular, and who caused the whole enquiry to degenerate into ...
— A Century of Wrong • F. W. Reitz
... the cynical and open criminal activity of an Englishman named James Stuart. This man was a degenerate criminal of the worst type, who came into a temporary glory through what he considered the happy circumstances of the time. Arrested for one of his crimes, he seemed to anticipate the usual very good prospects of escaping all penalties. There had been ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... the abundance of degenerate man will, at some spot and moment, reach a point where it breeds the plague which diminishes by depopulation the evil it can not remove by more merciful agencies, so would it seem that in France the demoralization which necessitated a revolution, concentrating itself ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... race and my own and my husband's people, and I had brought up my sons to be honorable and self-respecting men, whatever their failings, and my daughters in the best traditions of American womanhood. They are model wives and mothers, and they have made no weak-kneed concessions to these degenerate times. They bore me but I'd rather they did that than disgrace me. Mary never had even one child, although her husband must have wanted an heir. I have lived a life of duty—duty to my family traditions, my husband, my children, my country, and to Society: she one of self-indulgence ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... just as definitely, can the mind be developed and strengthened. Some are by nature keen, alert, brilliant. They may develop into masterfulness; or they, too, may degenerate, through abuse, or from the effect of body infections, into uselessness. The germ-plasm has foreordained some individuals to psychic disorders; but training and mode of life can modify many of these defects. And the average mind, like the average ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... certainly be so. We moderns bedeck and bedrape us in all sorts of meretricious togas, till a pair of fine eyes and a dashing manner pass for beauty; but when life tries the metal—when nature applies her inevitable test—the degenerate or neurotic ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... it; I could not endure my own solitary wisdom; I could not reconcile it with her former appeal to me as my child-wife. I resolved to do what I could, in a quiet way, to improve our proceedings myself, but I foresaw that my utmost would be very little, or I must degenerate into the spider again, and be for ever lying ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... have 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 ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... a man. He had, or seemed to have, all the high-bred grace of Frank, and yet he was cast in a manlier mould; he had just enough of his nation's proud self-assertion to make a woman bow before him as before a superior, and yet tact enough to let it very seldom degenerate into that boastfulness of which the Spaniards were then so often and so justly accused. He had marvels to tell by flood and field as many and more than Amyas; and he told them with a grace and an eloquence of which modest, ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... destroying insect life. More than half of its food consists of ants. In this country, taken as a whole, Flickers are very numerous, and the millions of individual birds which have yet escaped the guns of degenerate pot hunters constitute a mighty army of destruction ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... would not fret the life out of me whining to go to the city to live, arrange for her here the best I could. Of all the fool, unreliable dogs that ever trod a man's tracks, you are the limit! And you never before failed me! You blame, degenerate pup, you!" ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... you have a heavy hand!" exclaimed one of the least important of beards, one of those that degenerate into side-whiskers as they become conservative. "One ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... can you find No mystery couched in this excess of kindness? Were kings e'er known, in this degenerate age, So passionately fond of noble acts, Where interest shared not more than ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... you bring me," began Mr. Arp, deliberately, "that we folks, modernly, ain't more degenerate ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... melt "With blandish'd soothings? Must the other mute, "With tongue dismember'd stand? Must he exclaim "O, mother!—she, O, sister! never more? "To what a spouse, Pandion's daughter, see "Art thou, degenerate wife, conjoin'd! Thy sin "A spouse like Tereus to have us'd too well." More she delays not, infant Itys drags, Swift as the Indian tiger sweeps the fawn Through shady forests. Then the lofty dome, For rooms remote well search'd, in one arrives, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... their dissatisfaction with the traits inevitably characteristic of the earlier stages of frontier development that they became opposed to all extension of the frontier; when they allowed their liking for the well-ordered society of their own districts to degenerate into indifference to or dislike of the growth of the United States towards continental greatness; then they themselves sank into the position of men who in cold selfishness sought to mar the magnificent destiny of their ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... use our family has found for priests, madam," I said, "has been, I fear, to hunt them like vermin. As a Wheatman of the Hanyards, I'm afraid I'm a degenerate." ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... looked like a Hottentot, but the other!—with that thin upper layer of her short black hair dyed a greenish white, and her haggard degenerate green face. What do they do in Greenwich Village? Is it an ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... had been a decline in public interest for some years before 1691, when the abuses which had grown round the celebration led to its reduction from fourteen to four days: but the fair lingered on in a degenerate state till it was last proclaimed by the Lord Mayor in 1850, and finally ceased in 1855. The live cattle market, so vividly described, with its attendant nuisances, in the twenty-first chapter of "Oliver Twist," was closed ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield • George Worley
... narrow rather than simple, for simplicity is the work of civilization. They did not understand, and could not adopt, the law of the world into which they had come. Yet neither could they, if they would, force their laws upon the conquered inhabitants. Among these the old civilization lingered on in a degenerate form, and with it the Roman law. One of the first things that happened was that the conquerors drew up for their Roman subjects short codes of the Roman law as it survived in a debased form, as they drew up statements of their own law for their followers. For a long time each man, ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... she all alone out in 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 with golden stars as a Hebrew ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... 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
... the "manifest destiny" type seem to imagine oar country necessary to the designs of Providence. So thought the Hebrews, and on far more plausible grounds, of their commonwealth; but, rather than fulfil to such degenerate descendants the promise made to their great ancestor, "God is able," said the divine Teacher. "of these stones to raise up ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... account of nothings paid with loss, Where we poor puppets, jerked by unseen wires, After our little hour of strut and rave, With all our pasteboard passions and desires, 85 Loves, hates, ambitions, and immortal fires, Are tossed pell-mell together in the grave. But stay! no age was e'er degenerate, Unless men held it at too cheap a rate, For in our likeness still we shape our fate. 90 Ah, there is something here Unfathomed by the cynic's sneer, Something that gives our feeble light A high immunity from Night, Something that leaps life's narrow bars 95 To claim its birthright with the hosts ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... not tell him so," interrupted Cornish. "I wish to goodness I could make you understand that cunning can only be met by cunning, not by thumps, in these degenerate days. Old Wade has taken us by the hand, as I tell you. They come to town, by the way, to-morrow, and will be in Eaton Square for the rest of the season. He says that it is his business to meet the low cunning of the small solicitors and the noble ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... 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
... the fluttering fancies that engage The vain pursuits of a degenerate age, . . . Would fain the shade of elder days recall, The Gothick battlements, the bannered hall; Or list of elfin harps the fabling rhyme; Or, wrapt in melancholy trance sublime, Pause o'er the working of some wondrous tale, Or bid the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... amateur poetical models for emulation. Mr. Kleiner has a sense of musical rhythm which few amateur bards have ever possessed, and his choice of words and phrases is the result of a taste both innate and cultivated, whose quality appears to rare advantage in the present degenerate age. This remarkable young poet has not yet fully displayed in verse the variety of thoughts and images of which his fertile brain and well selected reading have made him master, but has preferred ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... Christian devotion is indeed essential in its place and its degree. The life of the spirit languishes if it is not fed. But except these things issue in the practical service of Christ in daily life they are worse than futile. They degenerate either into formalism and hypocrisy, or into spiritual self- indulgence. "Herein is My Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit." "By their fruits ye shall know them." And the "fruits" of Christian living are to be discovered, not in the hours spent in devotion, but in the manifestation ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... fulfilment. This Iona— 135 Well—you know what the chaste Pasiphae did, Wife to that most religious King of Crete, And still how popular the tale is here; And these dull Swine of Thebes boast their descent From the free Minotaur. You know they still 140 Call themselves Bulls, though thus degenerate, And everything relating to a Bull Is popular and respectable in Thebes. Their arms are seven Bulls in a field gules; They think their strength consists in eating beef,— 145 Now there were danger in the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... parent: because, as they say, "nothing can be more virtuous than virtue,—nothing more vicious than vice". And lastly, this stubbornness of opinion affects their personal character. They too often degenerate into austere critics and bitter partisans, and go far to banish from among us love, friendship, gratitude, and all the ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... afford a relaxation which brings no pang, and yields information which may bear them to fortune. It is to them I appeal with confidence, because I feel I am pleading their cause—with confidence, because in them I repose my hopes. When nations fall, it is because a degenerate race intervenes between the class that created and the class that is doomed. Let them then remember what has been done for them. The leaders of their community have not been remiss in regard to their interests. Let them remember, that when the inheritance ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... half a million 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 ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... even this church, which was once so great a praise in the earth is deeply corrupted, and hath "turned aside quickly out of the way," Exod. xxxii. 8. So that this is the Lord's controversy against Scotland. "I had planted thee a noble vine, wholly a right seed? How then art thou turned into the degenerate plant of a strange vine unto me?" Jer. ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... inflammatory exudates become organized at the beginning of this stage, and the air can not enter the air cells. This period lasts several days. Resolution marks the beginning of recovery or convalescence. Toward the end of the second period, the inflammatory exudate in the air cells has begun to degenerate. In the last stage, these exudates undergo liquefaction and are absorbed, or expelled by coughing, in from seven days to two weeks, depending on the extent of the inflammation and the ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... is surrounded by the tribe of the same name, as well as by the Skynses and the Nez Perces; who bring to it the furs and peltries collected in their hunting expeditions. The Wallah-Wallahs are a degenerate, worn-out tribe. The Nez Perces are the most numerous and tractable of the three tribes just mentioned. Mr. Pambrune informed Captain Bonneville that he had been at some pains to introduce the Christian religion, in the Roman Catholic form, among them, where it had evidently taken root; ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... be kept well in hand must never be suffered to degenerate into passion. Passion is always weak, emotion is an element ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... there was something wrong in the social order, which was suggested by the conditions of the time and was to bear fruit in later days. Satire, however, is by its nature negative; it does not present a positive ideal, and tends to degenerate into mere hopeless pessimism. Lofty poetry can only spring from some inner ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... is and depicting the life of a female criminal, has yet considerable character study and gets no small part of its appeal for a present-day reader from the minute description of the fall and final reform of the degenerate woman. It is comparatively crude in characterization, but psychological value is not entirely lacking. However, with Richardson it is almost all. It was of the nature of his genius to make psychology paramount: just there is found his ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... panders of the imperial harem, had raised the standard of revolt, and had been joined by the pasha of Erzroom, Gourdji-Mohammed, (to whose suite the annalist Evliya was then attached,) and by many of the Turkman clans of Anatolia. The Sultana-Walidah herself, who was then at variance with her degenerate son, secretly encouraged the insurgents, who endeavoured to gain over Kiuprili to their party; but as they failed in all their efforts to shake his loyalty, Varvar suddenly marched against him, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... and noble a love as he himself. Now, when honour calls him, when a great monarch solicits his services, shall I consent that he shall give himself up to love-sick dreams with me? that the illustrious warrior shall degenerate into a toying swain? No, Major, follow the call of your ...
— Minna von Barnhelm • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
... are carefully avoided by this Set of Shame-faced People, as what would disparage their Gayety of Temper, and infallibly bring them to Dishonour. This is such a Poorness of Spirit, such a despicable Cowardice, such a degenerate abject State of Mind, as one would think Human Nature incapable of, did we not meet with frequent Instances of it in ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... one hand; and all the instrumentalists at 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 parcel ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... 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 be sufficient ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... Brotherly Examination Re-examined" (I think he would or should have said examined, for this is the first examination of it), I find it more full of railing than of reasoning, of gibing than of gravity; and when polemics do so degenerate, the world is abused not edified. He tells me if I have not work enough I shall have more. I confess the answering of this piece is no great work; and the truth is, I am ashamed I have so little to make answer unto; ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... their rustic presents. This was no doubt the case in former days, when the noble bard wrote his elegant poems—in the happy ancient days! when maidens were as yet generous, and men kindly! Now the degenerate peasantry of the district are much more inclined to ask than to give, and their blue eyes seem to have disappeared ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... controlled by a species of internal theocracy, the sciences, and the sterner kinds of the fine arts, that is, architecture and statuary, grew up together, followed, indeed, by painting, but a statuesque, and austerely idealized, painting, which did not degenerate into mere copies of the sense, till the process for which ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... 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 tumours 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 ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... defeat in some cherished plan, he will seek refuge in the bosom of the grave; he will voluntarily return to his ancestors whom he has worshipped as gods. In the late war between China and Japan, in which China was vanquished, some of her generals committed suicide. It presents, alas, a degenerate side of human nature. It is most pathetic. Better far to live under the smart of defeat and bear its shame, carry the cross, endure the stings of conscience, and meet the frowns of the world, than flee from the path of duty, than dishonour our manhood. The greatest victory is to ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... are to be regarded as degenerate Trichias. Of course, the abnormality is exhibited most markedly by the elaters; nevertheless, the sporangia of some of the species have a peculiar habit of heaping themselves upon ...
— The Myxomycetes of the Miami Valley, Ohio • A. P. Morgan
... as from authority, estimation, etc.; stray in character or conduct; degenerate; disparage ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... looking at him entreatingly. "Don't you know that if you had taken your injury like a man, you'd have gotten a hold on my tenderness and respect that nothing could have destroyed? Sara, I've watched you degenerate for eight years, but I never realized to what a depth you had sunk until you came ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... endeavoured to arrive at and express a better understanding of the legislative work of the Lords. Englishmen have not much more regard for the principle of a quadrennially elected President than Americans have for an hereditary aristocracy; but they do not habitually permit that lack of regard to degenerate into the use of contemptuous language about individual Presidents. Even in contemplating the result of what seems to them so preposterous a system as that of electing a judiciary by popular party vote, Englishmen have generally confined themselves to ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... is 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
... motor-car had not been entirely without foundation, for both Reginald Wrotham and James Brookfield were well known to him. Wrotham's career had been a sufficiently disgraceful one ever since he had entered his teens,—he was a modern degenerate of the worst type, and though his coming-of-age and the assumption of his family title had caused certain time-servers to enrol themselves among his flatterers and friends, there were very few decent houses where so soiled a member of ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... Believers, and, somewhat, too, in fact, by reason of their contact with the Infidel) gather up the pesetas, curse the Unbeliever and his shameless relations, and praise Allah the One who, even in these degenerate days, sends ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... in either fit a captive with the jail-rot upon him, and the impurity of his prison worn into the grain of his soul, he revealed his degenerate state to his affectionate child. No one else ever beheld him in the details of his humiliation. Little recked the Collegians who were laughing in their rooms over his late address in the Lodge, what a serious picture they ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... Tolstoi, art began to degenerate when it separated itself from religion. There must have been dense mist before the Russian sage's mental vision when he fancied this separation possible. Art, especially musical art, is a vital part of religion, and cannot be put asunder from it. Like thought, music, since the bonds of church ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... until they met the haughty shade of Sordello, who clasped Vergil in his arms when he learned he was a Mantuan. Touched by this expression of love for his native land, Dante launched into an apostrophe to degenerate Italy, to that German Albert who refused to save the country groaning under oppression, and to lost Florence, torn by ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... about such things!" observed Chia Cheng with a listless smile. "By my bringing up such a degenerate child of retribution I have myself become unfilial! Whenever I've had to call him to account, there has always been a whole crowd of you to screen him; so isn't it as well for me to avail myself of to-day to put an end to his cur-like existence ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... impious who desire something purer and more perfect. Herein we may discern, that every nation and class is liable to the peculiar illusion of overesteeming the sanctity of its ancestral creed. It is as much our duty to beware of this illusion, as of any other. All know how easily our patriotism may degenerate into an unjust repugnance to foreigners, and that the more intense it is, the greater the need of antagonistic principles. So also, the real excellencies of our religion may only so much the more rivet us in a wrong ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... eighteen. From the hospital she followed her heart directly back to Pierre, who had in the meantime moved out of the Hull-House neighborhood. We knew later that he had degraded the poor child still further by obliging her to earn money for his drugs by that last method resorted to by a degenerate man to whom a woman's devotion ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... objects strive To dull his judgment and pervert his will To their behests: who, were he not so wrapp'd I'the dusky clouds of their dark policies, Would never suffer right to suffer wrong. Fie, Lingua, wilt thou now degenerate? Art not a woman? dost not love revenge? Delightful speeches, sweet persuasions, I have this long time us'd to get my right. My right—that is, to make the senses six; And have both name and power ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... illustrations of this tendency. However, the medical profession as a class stands for dignified scientific presentation of facts, and obscenity will soon be tabooed in medical and all other reputable literature. Save for occasional emanations privately printed by and for degenerate persons, public obscenity will soon be unknown. Its complete disappearance will have a vast influence upon the problem ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... not wholly free from apprehension that you take no interest in any thing but a rice-field. Fame says that you are about to degenerate into a mere planter. If so, it is to be lamented that you have any thing above common sense, and that you have learned any thing more than to read and write, for all above common sense and school ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... 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 ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... troops, his enemies, and his actions. Alexander conquered with the arms of Philip, but the two heroes who preceded Charlemagne bequeathed him their name, their examples, and the companions of their victories. At the head of his veteran and superior armies, he oppressed the savage or degenerate nations, who were incapable of confederating for their common safety: nor did he ever encounter an equal antagonist in numbers, in discipline, or in arms The science of war has been lost and revived with the arts of peace; but his campaigns are not illustrated by any siege or battle of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... 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 ...
— The Edda, Vol. 2 - The Heroic Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 13 • Winifred Faraday
... The iron hand of its sovereignty encased 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 ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... untold advantage in the spread of knowledge, and the means of access to a wealth of intellectual treasures such as our forefathers never dreamed of, but have too often allowed our reading tastes to degenerate into nothing more solid than the newspaper and a few ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... (quos Jupiter perdit, dementat; by subtraction of his 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 ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... 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 ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... (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 ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... royalty and of the nobility is, taken all round, a very lazy one. Exercise is considered a degenerate habit, fit only for people who have to earn a living; and, as for manual labour, a Corean nobleman would much prefer ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... now, because our life is narrower and more monotonous. I know, talking so much over our work, we have terrible temptations to gossip; but I can't bear to think that we should ever lower our standard, ever degenerate into the feeble girlishness we abhor. We never used to talk about young men, Nan, except Dick; and that did not matter. Of course we liked them in their places, and had plenty of fun, and tormented them a little; but you never made such a speech ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... of death that hour, And ate it (not the death that she had 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, Albeit she drew ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... of Tibet. His return was along the skirts of the northern hills; nor could this rapid campaign of one year justify the strange foresight of his emirs, that their children in a warm climate would degenerate into a race ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... Fourth of July, and has Chinese crackers and fiery serpents cast under his heels. One evening, in particular, they asked me to play the game of Comparisons (a proverbially odious game, that could exist only in an effete and degenerate civilization), in which the entire company tried to see how Funny they could be; and because I made stupid answers, I was laughed ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... as to think that good can come of it? 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
... honeycomb, magni nominis umbra [Lat.]; jade, plug, rackabones [U.S.], skate [U.S.]; tackey^, tacky [U.S.]. V. be worse, be deteriorated, become worse, become deteriorated &c Adj.; have seen better days, deteriorate, degenerate, fall off; wane &c (decrease) 36; ebb; retrograde &c 283, decline, droop; go down &c (sink) 306; go downhill, go from bad to worse, go farther and fare worse; jump out of the frying pan into the fire. run to seed, go to seed, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the memory, by losing its force and vivacity, may degenerate to such a degree, as to be taken for an idea of the imagination; so on the other hand an idea of the imagination may acquire such a force and vivacity, as to pass for an idea of the memory, and counterfeit its ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... part I wish 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 gratuitous adoption of European ideas, from which his ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... themselves for a time 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 ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... carefully dripped water over absinthe, he would picture himself wresting from the incumbent, the Crown of Galavia, and would hear throngs shouting "Long live King Louis!" At such moments his stimulated spirit would indulge in large visions, and his half-degenerate face would smile through its gentle but ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... itself in a manner which would have amused a man whose mind was in a healthy condition. Just as soon as we were permitted to leave our cells in the morning and meet in the hall, the most animated discussions, upon all sorts of topics, would begin. These would occasionally degenerate into clamorous and angry debates. The disputants would become as earnest and excited over subjects in which perhaps they had never felt the least interest before, as if they had been considering matters of vital and immediate ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... Savannah, there were just five hundred eighteen people when John Wesley was there. About half of these were degenerate sons of aristocrats, ex-convicts, soldiers of fortune, and religious enthusiasts—the rest were ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... or a country may degenerate! The Grecian people, at one time the first in the world, are now the furthest behind! I was told by everyone that in Greece it was neither safe to trust myself with a guide nor to wander about alone, as I had done in other countries; ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... younger sister, she Who awed the world with her imperial frown— Rome drew the spirit of her race from thee,— The rival of thy shame and thy renown. Yet her degenerate children sold the crown Of earth's wide kingdoms to a line of slaves; Guilt reigned, and we with guilt, and plagues came down, Till the north broke its floodgates, and the waves Whelmed the degraded race, and ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... My sisters that in the heroic dawn Of races sung! To them did destiny give The virgin fire and chaste ingenuousness Of their land's speech; and, reverenced, their hands Ran over potent strings. To me, the hopes Turbid with hate; to me, the senile rage; To me, the painted fancies clothed by art Degenerate; to me, the desperate wish, Not in my soul to nurse ungenerous dreams, But to contend, and with the sword of song ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... a 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 ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... such legislation, except in war, is to an over-degree to strike at the roots of individual initiative. We have secured its execution during the war as to the willing cooeperation of ninety-five per cent of the trades of the country, but under peace conditions it would degenerate into an ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... 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,[76] who carefully attended to this subject, states that "hounds are the most rapid in their decline;" "greyhounds and {38} pointers, also, rapidly decline." But spaniels, after eight or ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... trouble us, because in these pages we all confess what we have never confessed to anyone. Our self-love is outraged, but outraged with that strange accompaniment of thrilling pleasure that means an expiation paid, a burden lightened. Use the word "degenerate" if you will. But in this sense we are all "degenerates" for thus and not otherwise is woven the stuff whereof ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... charge. But in those happy days there were no prisons in Samoa, so that his confinement was not irksome, and his only hard labour was picnics, of which he was the life and soul. All went pleasantly until Mr Pease—a degenerate sort of pirate who made his living by half bullying, half swindling lonely white men on small islands out of their coconut oil, and unarmed merchantmen out of their stores—came to Apia in an armed ship with a Malay crew. From that moment Hayes' life became ...
— By Reef and Palm • Louis Becke
... which to go in quest of a husband, Madonna mia. But where in this degenerate world do you ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... Monstrous! Absurd! It is an effrontery to common sense, philosophy—anything, everything. It is a damned lie, damned bigotry, damned nonsense. The whole animal world will live again; and it will be man—spoilt, presumptuous, degenerate man—who will not participate in another life, ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... less his aim as a reformer was attained. Guided by prophetic intuition, Mapu accomplished a task making for morality and culture. To men given over to a degenerate asceticism, or to a mystic attitude hostile to the present, he revealed a glorious past as it really had been, not as their brains, weighed down by misery and befogged by ignorance, pictured it to have been. He showed them, not the Judea of the Rabbis, of the ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... habitation or to the cathedral 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
... proceeding, my 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 new ones out of goat-skins. 'A stitch in time saves nine,' boys, ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... manner, as I said before. 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
... welfare of the whole of which the thing is a part (bonum suitatis—bonum communionis). The second is not only the nobler but also the stronger; this holds of the lower creatures as well as of man, who, when not degenerate, prefers the general welfare to his individual interests. Love is the highest of the virtues, and is never, as other human endowments, exposed to the danger of excess; therefore the life of action is of more worth than the life of contemplation. By this principle ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... imperial throne. Arians, closely connected by family ties and identical interests, divided the West among them. The seven Popes sat on at the Lateran in the palace which Constantine had given them, and said Mass in the church which he had built for them. Three of his degenerate successors tried every art against them and failed. During twenty years of this time, from 476 to 496, no ruler small or great acknowledged the Catholic faith. The East was Eutychean, the West Arian. At length ...
— 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
... child as the woman slowly, with shapeless red fingers, untied her bonnet-strings and revealed herself as something at once agelessly primitive and most modernly degenerate. The frizzed thicket of coarse hair which broke into a line of tiny, quite circular curls round her low forehead made Ellen remember side-streets round Gorgie and Dalry, which the midday hooters filled with factory girls horned under their shawls with Hinde's curlers; ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... puceron^; vinefretter^, vinegrub^. wreck, mere wreck, honeycomb, magni nominis umbra [Lat.]; jade, plug, rackabones [U.S.], skate [U.S.]; tackey^, tacky [U.S.]. V. be worse, be deteriorated, become worse, become deteriorated &c Adj.; have seen better days, deteriorate, degenerate, fall off; wane &c (decrease) 36; ebb; retrograde &c 283, decline, droop; go down &c (sink) 306; go downhill, go from bad to worse, go farther and fare worse; jump out of the frying pan into the fire. run to seed, go to seed, run to waste swale^, sweal^; lapse, be the worse for; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... 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 ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... must be dispensed with, we shall wish in the great day of account that it had been the latter. The two "keeping-rooms" of the Lamb—which they called the great and little chambers, but which we, their degenerate descendants, might term the dining-room and drawing-room—were filled with this living congregation; and Mr Rose read prayers from the now prohibited Service-Book, and preached the prohibited doctrines. Before all had dispersed, Mr George Ferris made his appearance, and supped ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... the Dakotas are done. The degenerate remnants of that once powerful and warlike people still linger around the forts and agencies of the Northwest, or chase the caribou and the elk on the banks of the Saskatchewan, but the Dakotas of old are no more. The brilliant defeat of Custer, ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... hoisted out of the shadow by his own tongue, the longest and liveliest in Christendom. Had he held it—which he could not have done with both hands—there had been no Bryan. His creation was the unstudied act of his own larynx; it said, "Let there be Bryan," and there was Bryan. Even in these degenerate days there is a hope for the orators when one can make himself a Presidential peril by merely waving the red flag in the cave of the winds and tormenting the circumjacence with a ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... important that institution was for public life is clear from his expressions also. The priests are the spiritual leaders of the people; the reproach that they do not fulfil their high vocation proves in the first place that they have it. Degenerate they are, to be sure; in Hosea's representation they are seen in the same light as that in which the sons of Eli appear as described in 1Samuel ii. 22 seq., from which description one conjectures the author to have derived his colours from a state of matters nearer his own day than the period ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... beggars in the Holy Sepulchre. He would not be hanging fantastic lamps on a pillar peculiar to the Armenians, or peering into the gilded cage that contains the brown Madonna of the Copts. He would not be the dupe of such degenerate fables; God forbid. He would not be grovelling at such grotesque shrines; no indeed. He would be many hundred yards away, decorously bowing towards a more distant city; where, above the only formal and official open place in Jerusalem, ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... important that every evil be resisted. In a normal condition of liberty many temporary evils may arise; yet they are not dangerous—in the glow of a people's freedom they waste and die as disease dies in the sunlight. But where independence is suppressed and a people degenerate, a little evil is in an atmosphere to grow, and it grows and expands; and evils multiply and destroy. That is why men of high spirit working to regenerate a fallen people must be more insistent to watch every little defect and weak tendency that in a braver time would ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... young were drowned, I cry for my babies—I, the Crown Princess of Saxony, who saved your family from dying out, a degenerate, ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... out the ejaculations with the sound of guns popping. His face was red with indignation, his eyes leaping at his degenerate nephew. The next words did ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... 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 girls ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... flowers, but animals of any sort only came in sight occasionally, 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 absolutely ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... 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 would depend wholly upon ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... 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 more sensibly. ...
— A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of - The Inequality Among Mankind • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... 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 insects of brilliant hues that abound ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... distinguished themselves—might have become wealthy at least, who are now in some out of the way parish, with wives and little children, burdened with the cares of life. How they are to struggle on in the future it is sad to think of. They will either give up the profession or die, or degenerate into very commonplace ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... moreover, in the language of Montaigne, of one substance with the author, being the author himself. And yet one could hardly say that this style breaks with tradition. He stops short just at the point at which his idiosyncrasies would degenerate into faults.—From PETIT DE JULLEVILLE, Histoire de ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... now we find them, in further contempt of the modes of honorable warfare, supplying the place of a conquering force by attempts to disorganize our political society, to dismember our confederated Republic. Happily, like others, these will recoil on the authors; but they mark the degenerate counsels from which they emanate, and if they did not belong to a sense of unexampled inconsistencies might excite the greater wonder as proceeding from a Government which founded the very war in which it has been so long engaged on a charge against the disorganizing ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... 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 that the inscription is silent as to his military achievements. Photius (cod. 82) mentions ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... very well that our ancestors the Scythians, and their posterity our kinsmen the Tartars, lived upon the blood, and milk, and raw flesh of their cattle, without one grain of corn; but I confess myself so degenerate, that I am not easy without bread ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... onanism at this period psychically approximates to the 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 ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... nobility of aim. He was the last champion of the Irish aristocracy, and still more the voice of conscience for them, and he spoke to them of their duty to the nation as one might imagine some fearless prophet speaking to a council of degenerate princes. When the aristocracy failed Ireland he bade them farewell, and wrote the epitaph of their class in words whose scorn we almost forget because of their sounding melody and beauty. He turned his ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... the degenerate pack! Waft, western winds! the foreign spoilers back! Enough has been in wild amusements spent, Let British verse and harmony content! No music once could charm you like your own, 5 Then tuneful Robinson,[64] and Tofts were known; Then Purcell touched the strings, while ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... be no doubt that closing up all outlets and barring all openings to a faculty so deep-seated in the nature of man, and moreover so prized by him, creates an unnatural condition favourable to degenerate activity. It is not enough to keep open only the avenues to clerical employment in any comprehensive scheme of Imperial Government—if no road be left for adventurous daring the soul of man will pine for deliverance, and secret passages still be sought, of ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... in it, and degenerate." Anne was speaking. Her cheeks were as pink as her gown. She leaned a little forward. "You don't know all that they have at Crossroads, and Dr. Brooks is too polite to tell you how poor New York seems ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... bible through every family in Britain, and in America. In reading this blessed book, the people will see how Christianity has been corrupted. They will compare the archbishops and dignified clergy of the present degenerate days, with the plainness of our Saviour, and with the simplicity of the holy fishermen, and other of his disciples. Before this book the factitious institutions and gorgeous establishments of the modern priesthood will fade and die, like ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... anguish, who followed with soft serenading Me as the tremulous tide tracks the meandering moon; Climbing as Romeo clomb, peradventure by help of a flower-pot, Where in her balconied bower lay, inexpressibly coy, Juliet, not as the others, supinely, insanely erotic, Pallid and yellow of hue, very degenerate souls, Rioting round with the rapture of palpitant ichorous ardour, But an immaculate maid, 'one,' you may say, 'of the best'! His, I repeat, is the anguish—my journalist, eulogist critic, Strachey, the generous judge, Saintly ...
— The Battle of the Bays • Owen Seaman
... artlessly! whew! [here Miss Rita smiled artfully.] Then he asked me all about you heretics, and he told me you were all going to—be burned up, as soon as you died; for the Inquisition couldn't do it for you in these degenerate days. After a great deal more twaddle like this, I asked him why you heretics all had such hard names, that we others never could speak them? Then he looked mysterious, so! [here Miss Rita diabolically winked one eye,] ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... 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 ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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
... enough to be bidden to the right houses in Ireland to-day, you will have as much good talk as you are likely to listen to anywhere else in this degenerate age, which has mostly forgotten how to converse in learning to chat; and any one who goes to the Spring Show at Ball's Bridge, or to the Punchestown or Leopardstown races, or to the Dublin horse show, will have to confess that the Irishwomen can dispute the ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... nothing to fear for food or mate, or from enemies. But Attaphilas cannot all live in a single nest, and we realize that there must come a crisis, when they pass out into a strange world of terrible light and multitudes of foes. For these pampered, degenerate roaches to find another Atta nest unaided, would be inconceivable. In the big nest which I excavated I observed them on the back and heads not only of the large soldiers, but also of the queens which swarmed in one ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... herself, whose ears, besieged by pernicious flatterers, were thereby rendered inaccessible to the most salutary truths: that it was a mockery to call an assembly a parliament, yet deny it that privilege which was so essential to its being, and without which it must degenerate into an abject school of servility and dissimulation: that as the parliament was the great guardian of the laws, they ought to have liberty to discharge their trust, and to maintain that authority whence even kings themselves ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... and 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 lately been ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... [Footnote: I 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
... mentioned but with the deepest marks of gratitude, love and veneration. Sweet is the remembrance of the virtuous, and happy are the descendants of such a father! they will think on him and emulate his virtues—they will remember him, and be ashamed to degenerate from their ancestor. ...
— The Old English Baron • Clara Reeve
... "intensity" of the war strain, of which he himself had acute experience. "Under such conditions," he wrote, "marksmen may achieve no more than the most erratic shots; the smartest corps may quickly degenerate into a rabble; the easiest tasks will often appear impossible. An army can weather trials such as those just depicted only if it be collectively considered in that healthy state of mind which the term moral implies." It is just that moral which the British Expeditionary Force has been proved ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... who cannot hold their heads under the influence of sudden riches. They immediately begin to degenerate. They have become so used to humble circumstances that wealth is a curse. Here is ...
— Toasts - and Forms of Public Address for Those Who Wish to Say - the Right Thing in the Right Way • William Pittenger
... 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 Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... vindication. They relieve us, as well as trouble us, because in these pages we all confess what we have never confessed to anyone. Our self-love is outraged, but outraged with that strange accompaniment of thrilling pleasure that means an expiation paid, a burden lightened. Use the word "degenerate" if you will. But in this sense we are all "degenerates" for thus and not otherwise is woven the stuff whereof ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... disgracefully easy. Indeed, Adam, that riddle of yours brings back every doubt, for they say—scientists and ologists and learned people, you know—that there is hope for delinquents and defectives, but none for degenerates, and that is an awfully degenerate joke." ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... 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 ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... 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 ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... delight in the black side of humanity, he loves to show the strength of false reasoning, of sophistry antagonistic to truth, and of cold expediency in opposition to the natural feelings of humanity. From a similar reason, his occasional attempts at comedy degenerate into mere farce. We question whether the scene between Death and Apollo in the "Alcestis," could be surpassed in vulgarity, even by the modern school of English dramatists, while his exaggerations in the minor characters are ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... fulfilled this task he is constantly taunted by the old women; his wives, if he be married, would soon quit him; if he is unmarried not a single young woman would speak to him; his mother would constantly cry and lament she should ever have given birth to so degenerate a son; his father would treat him with contempt, and reproaches would constantly be sounded in ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... the Circus. I need not observe, that there were also various abuses of dancing, which they very justly accounted dishonorable to those who practised them, whether in public or private. These, in the degenerate days of Rome, grew to an enormous excess. But I presume no one will judge of an art by the abuse that may be made ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... apologist, "we take no part in your cruel sports nor in the spectacles of the amphitheatre, and we hold that to witness a murder is the same thing as to commit one." And there was another duty almost forgotten, the sense of which Rousseau brought back to the degenerate society of a later age. In an impassioned discourse the sophist Favorinus counsels mothers to suckle their own infants; and there are Roman epitaphs erected to mothers, which gratefully record this proof of natural affection ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... 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
... on two sides of a question is usually a virtue, but it may degenerate into a vice. Thus, a visitor found his bachelor friend glumly studying an evening waistcoat. When inquiry was made, this ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... 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 Allah, and the most pleasing ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... your royal 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
... distant and strange, to the 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 his restless soul ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... given a new turn to affairs, ruling the roast 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... insisted on that) selected to bring him into juxtaposition with the man whose life was to be inexorably mingled with his own from that time henceforward. The actual meeting place was a tin-roofed grog shanty kept by a giant Kaffir woman and a sore-eyed degenerate white man, whose subjection to his black paramour had earned for him among the blacks on the field the terrible sobriquet of "White Harry." Here, one night, Thalassa sat drinking bad beer and planning impossible schemes for returning to his diamonds ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... implored him to ask for prayers for them on earth, and moved on with Vergil until they met the haughty shade of Sordello, who clasped Vergil in his arms when he learned he was a Mantuan. Touched by this expression of love for his native land, Dante launched into an apostrophe to degenerate Italy, to that German Albert who refused to save the country groaning under oppression, and to lost ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... are they? 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 ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... it? Because it's my way. And you're going to marry my niece, and'll have it all some day. But not till I've finished with it—not unless you win it from me at dice or cards.... But no"—something human came into the old, degenerate face—"no more gambling for the man that's to marry Diana. There's a wonder and a beauty!" He chuckled to himself. "She'll be rich when I've done with it. You're a ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... summing up, by pronouncing upon me the verdict of an 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... it be, there are many creatures, among what we sometimes call the 'lower order of creation,' which give promise of great things during the earlier period of their lives, but later degenerate ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... in art it is incomparably beyond it. I was very much gratified to find so much evidence in favor of my theory that the golden age in art is in front of us; that mankind has been advancing, that we did not come from a perfect pair and immediately commence to degenerate. The modern painters and sculptors are far better and grander than the ancient. I think we excel in fine arts as much as we do in agricultural implements. Nothing pleased me more than the painting from Holland, because they idealized and rendered holy the ordinary avocations of life. They ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... her pet dwarf Cenopas. She stood him on a large, round 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 ...
— Vergilius - A Tale of the Coming of Christ • Irving Bacheller
... false, and, as it were, adulterous sons. For we know for certain that He alone was the righteous seed of David; for although Hezekiah and Josiah were legitimate successors, yet, when we look to others, they were, as it were, monsters. Except three or four, all the rest were degenerate and covenant-breakers." The words: "I raise unto David a righteous Branch" are here, as well as in chap. xxxiii. 15, not by any means equivalent to: a righteous Branch of David. On the contrary, David is designated as he to whom the act of raising belongs, for whose ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... of approaching the problem has never been to ask sympathy and co-operation, but to picture us as a degenerate race from whom anything might be gained by playing upon our imagined weakness and cowardice. A nation which attends quietly to its own sober business must, according to their mediaeval notions, be a nation of decadent poltroons. If we fight our battles ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... hospital she followed her heart directly back to Pierre, who had in the meantime moved out of the Hull-House neighborhood. We knew later that he had degraded the poor child still further by obliging her to earn money for his drugs by that last method resorted to by a degenerate man to whom ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... issue of images as simulacra for the text, in order to reiterate his belief that in the long run more than images of pages of particular editions of the text are needed, because just as second-generation photocopies and second-generation microfilm degenerate, so second-generation representations tend to degenerate, and one tends to overstress some relatively trivial aspects of the text such as its layout on the page, which is not always significant, despite what the text critics might say, and slight other pieces of ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly
... who 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 ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... proud persuasions of his mother, to whom anything like commercial pursuits were abhorrent. Clarice d'Orsini's forbears had all been soldiers, Lorenzo's merchants, that made all the difference in Rome's degenerate days. ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... no doubt, but no one can say with certainty anything about it. The degenerate half-breeds who live in this vicinity only keep up the custom from tradition. They are called Christians now, you know, and are quite above such ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... is a lesson for our times. What Shakespeare felt to be true in his own day is equally, nay more, true now—that England, 'set in a silver sea,' is safe from all assaults, save those which she may suffer at the hands of her own 'degenerate ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... benediction from the sanctuary steps. I breathe more freely when I 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 is ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... has been regarded as something in contrast or conflict with justice. It is not really so. Mercy resembles the prerogative of the judge to temper the law to suit individual cases. It must be of a kindred temper with justice, or it would degenerate into mere weakness or folly. A man wants to be certain of his own just inclination before he can dare to handle mercy. But the quality of mercy is, perhaps, not so common in the human heart as to require this ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... 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. ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... the tavern-door where he quartered, or drunk within the house. Though this wicked life he led sometimes moved me to pity him, and to wonder how so well-bred, gentlemanly a man as he once was could degenerate into such a useless thing as he now appeared, yet at the same time it gave me most contemptible thoughts of him, and made me often say I was a warning for all the ladies of Europe against marrying of fools. A man of sense falls in the world and gets up again, and ...
— The Fortunate Mistress (Parts 1 and 2) • Daniel Defoe
... delicate and highly perfumed, and now takes the lead in the market. But honey is honey the world over; and the bee is the bee still. "Men may degenerate," says an old traveler, "may forget the arts by which they acquired renown; manufactures may fail, and commodities be debased; but the sweets of the wild-flowers of the wilderness, the industry and natural mechanics of the bee, will ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... minutes of heated altercation with Mr. McGinnis, whom he threatened with expulsion from the meeting, the mayor finally left the chair and the meeting broke up in disorder which threatened to degenerate into a series ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... can come of it? 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 something worse ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... snow-white hair and stooping back could not entirely remove the sense of fear which she inspired in those around her. Her thoughts and memories went back to harsher times, and she looked upon the England around her as a degenerate and effeminate land which had fallen away from the old standard of ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... industry of a late cure. In this outset, and 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 ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... correspondingly so, and in any discussion that is to be of value we must draw the necessary distinctions. In many scientific contributions to the subject this has already been done. We have identified certain degenerate stocks who display the symptoms of alcoholism. The alcohol may aggravate their degeneracy but it is not the prime cause of it in them, though it may have been so in their ancestors. The children of such persons are degenerate ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... survivors was broken, and they made little resistance to the invaders. Mongrel bands from the interior and the coast settled in the valley after the lapse of years; and, mixing with the surviving Willamettes, produced the degenerate race our own pioneers found there at their coming. These hybrids were, within the memory of the white man, overrun and conquered by the Yakimas, who subjugated all the Indians upon Wappatto Island and around the mouth of ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... Davee, are not afraid to incur her displeasure by informing of their fellows, they reply, that Davee has done her worst in abandoning them. She can inflict no severer punishment, and therefore gives herself no further concern about her degenerate children. This cowardly doctrine is, however, of advantage to the Government that seeks to put an end to the sect, and has thrown a light upon their practices, which could never have been obtained ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... 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 of ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... cot, and not to be conceived by the imagination of the rustic. Here she accumulated a thousand various gratifications; here she wantoned in all the secret and licentious desires of her heart. But her castle was not merely a scene of thoughtless pleasure. Within its circle she held crouds of degenerate shepherds, groveling through the omnipotence of her incantations in every brutal form. Even the spectres and the elves that disobeyed her authority, she held in the severest durance. She compressed their tender forms in the narrowest prison, ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... wilder, the signs of life miserably sparse; about every twenty miles the farmhouse or hut of a degenerate Boer, whose children and slaves pigged together, and all ran jostling, and the mistress screamed in her shrill Dutch, and the Hottentots all chirped together, and confusion reigned for want of method: often they went miles, ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... as a matter of reason, not of pressure, and the more common it is to hear condemnations of those portions of the process at which violence shows through the reasoning as though they were per se perverted, degenerate, and the bearers of ruin. There is, of course, a strong, genuine group opposition to the technique of violence, which is an important social fact; but a statement of the whole legislative process in terms of the discussion forms ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... most 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
... half-wakened black millions? Whither, then, is the new-world quest of Goodness and Beauty and Truth gone glimmering? Must this, and that fair flower of Freedom which, despite the jeers of latter-day striplings, sprung from our fathers' blood, must that too degenerate into a dusty quest of gold,—into lawless lust ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... Venice we have already spoken; his palaces are mainly to be found in his native city, Vicenza. In these structures he displayed great fertility of invention and a profound familiarity with the classic orders, but the degenerate taste of the Baroque period already begins to show itself in his work. There is far less of architectural propriety and grace in these pretentious palaces, with their colossal orders and their affectation of grandeur, than in the designs of Vignola or Sammichele. Wood and plaster, used to ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... and equality were the aims of the instruction. The necessity for education in a constitutional government he saw clearly. "A free constitution," he writes, "which should not be correspondent to the universal instruction of citizens, would come to destruction after a few conflicts, and would degenerate into one of those forms of government which cannot preserve the peace among an ignorant and corrupt people." Anarchy or despotism he held to be the future for peoples who become free without being enlightened. He held it to be a fundamental ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... predominant, looking at one time crisp and perfectly proper, at another time limp and careless, as if the wearer informed the garment or the garment explained the wearer. It is well known that "Fashions are the external expression of the mental states of a country, and that if its men and women degenerate in their character, their fashions become absurd." Surely then, a sympathy which can affect a nation has some influence upon the individual. Sunna had noticed even in her childhood that her dresses were lucky and unlucky, but the why or the wherefore of the circumstance had never troubled ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... proves use-inheritance, why should not the inferiority of the sons of geniuses prove the existence of a tendency which is the exact opposite of use-inheritance? But nobody collects facts concerning the degenerate branches of musical families. Only the favourably varying branches are noticed, and a general impression of rapid evolution of talent is thus produced. Such cases might be explained, too, by the facts that musical ...
— Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? - An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and Darwin • William Platt Ball
... hym, what he iudged of those pictures in the windowes, who sayed he knewe not what to make of them, but that they looked lyke unto our mitred Byshoppes; to whome the olde father replied, yt is true, they are like, but not the same, for oure byshoppes are farr degenerate from them, and withe that, made a large discourse of the Byshoppes and of ...
— Animaduersions uppon the annotacions and corrections of some imperfections of impressiones of Chaucer's workes - 1865 edition • Francis Thynne
... to Egypt. Here they devote themselves to unearthing a temple and find out that among all the gods of Egypt, who seem to have been extremely numerous, it was dedicated to Isis and Horus, the very divinities with whom they recently they had been so intimately concerned if in traditional and degenerate forms. ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... sister, solitude has its assaults, the world has its disorder and uproar; yet in either we must be of good heart, since everywhere heaven is close to those who have confidence in God, and who with humility and gentleness implore His fatherly assistance. Beware of letting your carefulness degenerate into trouble ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... baiting-place, and after mustering in the common room of the inn, the first thing to be done was to appoint a chairman, who mostly retained his post of honour during the journey. At the breakfast or dinner there was none of that indecorous hurry in eating and drinking which marks our degenerate days. Had the travellers affected such thin potations as tea and soup, there was ample time for them to cool. But they preferred the sirloin and the tankard; and that no feature of a generous reception might be wanting, the landlord would not fail to recommend his crowning cup of sack ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... formally, to protect himself from the sort of personality which he dreaded. The whole situation needed the most careful management lest it should degenerate into some degrading and disturbing exhibition such as the scene, which he could never think of without shame, upon the heath among the dead leaves. And yet each sentence brought him relief. He was coming to understand something or other about his own desires hitherto undefined by him, the source ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... creation of 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, ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... Jenssen. "He was not five paces from me when I fired at him. He appears to be an intelligent looking European—and not much more than a lad. There is nothing of the imbecile or degenerate in his features or expression, as is usually true in similar cases, where some lunatic escapes into the woods and by living in filth and nakedness wins the title of wild man among the peasants of the neighborhood. No, this fellow ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... is come, then. Yet John the Baptist broke the slumbers of that degenerate people with the trumpet-call, 'Repent, for the kingdom is at hand.' It is not come, then—but coming. And the Master said, 'If I by the finger of God cast out devils, no doubt the kingdom of God is come nigh unto you.' It is come, then, in Him. This prayer throws it forward again into the future, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... gems of India's gaudy zone, And plunder piled from kingdoms not their own, Degenerate trade! thy minions could despise Thy heart-born anguish of a thousand cries: Could lock, with impious hands, their teeming store, While famish'd nations died along the shore; Could mock the groans of fellow men, ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... instrumentalists at 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 ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... of the universe, who, pursuant to the dictates of his wisdom, dispenses both light and darkness, and knows how to check the impetuous torrent of human passions, would not permit mankind, though abandoned to the utmost corruptions, to degenerate into absolute barbarity, and brutalize themselves, in a manner, by the extinction of the first principles of the law of nature, as is seen in several savage nations. Such an obstacle would have too much retarded the rapid progress, ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... Jefferson, and Madison treated you. We mean to leave you alone, and in no way to interfere with your institutions; to abide by all and every compromise of the Constitution, and, in a word, coming back to the original proposition, to treat you so far as degenerate men, if we have degenerated, may, according to the example of those noble fathers, Washington, Jefferson, ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... lord," answered Herode in his deep, bass voice, "and many there be in these degenerate days who hold their heads very high because of their riches, who would not like to have to confess how they ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... of this party, marching indeed at its head and its one voice in these degenerate days to which men of intelligence pay the smallest attention, Bishop Gore has lost the great influence he once exercised, or began to exercise, on the national life, a moral and spiritual influence which ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... 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 ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... concert-goer begins to appreciate beauties hidden to the uninitiate. He notes with eager anticipation the technical genius of a composition as it unfolds, admiring the craft and skill as well as the vision of the artist. In extreme cases this may, of course, degenerate into mere pedantry. But at its best, it is the satisfaction of the man who, having a keen eye for beauty, is all the more solicitous for its accurate realization. The satisfactions of the connoisseur are merely a refinement of less sophisticated forms of appreciation. To appreciate the bare ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... a country may degenerate! The Grecian people, at one time the first in the world, are now the furthest behind! I was told by everyone that in Greece it was neither safe to trust myself with a guide nor to wander about alone, as I ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... young girl; "I had none to lose." And she smiled a little mischievously, as though she knew by instinct that her companion's sympathy would at once degenerate into suspicion! ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... All Saints' Day (November 1), also seems to have been a survival of a heathen celebration. On this night witches and fairies were supposed to assemble. Hallow Eve does not appear to have been a season for pranks and jokes, as is its present degenerate form. Even the festival of Christmas, coming at the winter solstice, kept some heathen features, such as the use of mistletoe with which Celtic priests once decked the altars of their gods. The Christmas tree, however, is not a relic of heathenism. It seems to have come into ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... 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. And to prevent her hearing from your own lips all you have now told ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... 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 ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... nature, and by its almighty tendency to promote his improvement and perfection; by the light, the life, the blessedness it gives; by the love it kindles; by the glorious transformations which it effects in depraved individuals and degenerate communities; by the peace, the hope, the joy it inspires; and by the courage and strength it imparts both in life ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... picayune in these degenerate days what Dr. Warburton said pro or con a book? It was Warburton (then Bishop of Gloucester) who remarked of Granger's "Biographical History of England" that it was "an odd one." This was as high a compliment as he ever paid a book; those which he did not like he called sad books, ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... generally asked by those who, approaching the stage from the outside, in the light of prejudice and misrepresentation, believe the calling of the actor to be one morally dangerous and intellectually contemptible; one in which it is equally easy to succeed as an artist and degenerate as an individual. She begins by telling me that she has a "fancy for the stage," and has "heard a great many things about it." Now, for any man or woman to become an actor or actress because they have a "fancy for the stage" ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... Venice!" exclaimed the Proveditore, his fine countenance assuming an expression of extreme bitterness, as he gazed mournfully at the portraits of his ancestors, including more than one Doge, which were suspended round the walls of the apartment—"Venice! thou art indeed degenerate, when peril so remote can blanch the cheek ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... British system; its officers are rescued from the dull homes and dull schools of their class while still of tender years, and shaped after a fashion of their own. But M. Bleriot reminds us that we may no longer shelter and degenerate behind these blue backs. And the keenest men at sea are none the worse for having keen men ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... my mother," he said in a voice of heart-broken despair, "that I am an unworthy, degenerate son! Unworthy of you, unworthy of my ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... of to-day is the degenerate son of the conquering warriors of a thousand years ago. Once his name carried terror to the shores of the Midland Sea. Now those who do not like him can say with some truth that he lives the life of an animal, mating rather than ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... consider that, in these cases, the proofs of a pure previous vaccine disease have been satisfactorily established; when vaccination has been carried on for some time, from the same stock of lymph, the disease is apt to degenerate and become spurious, from which cause we require a frequent renewal of lymph from England, in order to keep it in continuous and successful operation; the spurious disease, on the fifth day, generally shews itself in the form of a small globated papula; on the eighth day, it presents ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... last ball. The Rev. Septimus covers his eyes. O wretched Duffer! O thou whose knees are as wax, and whose arms are as chop-sticks in the hands of a Griffin! O egregious Duff! O degenerate son of a noble sire, dost thou dare at such a moment as this to attack thine enemy with ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... 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 ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... 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 converted ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... my god-daughter in hand, or she will be ruined body and soul," observed Malcolm severely. "Babs is already a domestic tyrant, and screams the house down if any of her fads and fancies are resisted. I am thinking of writing a series of essays on degenerate and irresponsible parents, and the cruelty of modern education in the nursery, which out-Herods Herod." Of course they all laughed at this idea, and then David Carlyon crossed the room to shake hands with Malcolm and to introduce ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... and wild adventures their calling made necessary. All these men, the best with the worst, were subject to no will but their own. And all experience goes to prove that a life of perfect liberty is apt to degenerate into a life ...
— Christopher Carson • John S. C. Abbott
... converts to be anarchists in religious matters. There is evidence, in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, that his spiritual presentation of Christianity had already been made an excuse for disorderly licence. The usual symptoms of degenerate Mysticism had appeared at Corinth. There were men there who called themselves "spiritual persons[105]" or prophets, and showed an arrogant independence; there were others who wished to start sects of their own; others ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... of this quarter 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 ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean
... 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 ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... 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 girl ran wilder than ever, until ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 Tong-king ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... ideals, and phrases, the more plausible becomes the interpretation of the legislature's work as a matter of reason, not of pressure, and the more common it is to hear condemnations of those portions of the process at which violence shows through the reasoning as though they were per se perverted, degenerate, and the bearers of ruin. There is, of course, a strong, genuine group opposition to the technique of violence, which is an important social fact; but a statement of the whole legislative process in terms of the discussion forms used by that anti-violence ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... time of life renders me now unfit for much future expectancy from this world, I should be glad to see my son settled in a promising way to acquire an honest livelihood for himself. His behaviour, so far in life, has been irreproachable; and I hope he will not degenerate, in principles or practice, from the precepts and pattern of an indulgent parent. Your Grace's favourable reception of this, from a distant corner of the diocese, and an obscure hand, will excite filial gratitude, and a due use shall be made of ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... procession along the walls and to every threatened gate, never doubting that at the sight of it the Sultan and his unbaptized hordes will be reft of breath of body or take to flight.... This we pray of Your Majesty, that the Mother of God may in these degenerate days have back the honor and worship accorded her by the Emperors and Greeks ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... 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 ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... 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 of the outwardly devout ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... River, where the Borneo Company, whose guest I was, have a gold mine (the clay being 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 to ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... not space to follow M. Thierry in his account of the progress and fall of that strange Gaulish kingdom of Galatia. From the year 241 to the year 190 B.C., it maintained its independence unshaken, amidst the degenerate sons of Greece and the effeminate Asiatics. But the Roman power, beneath which the Gaulish race was ever doomed to bend, overtook them even amidst the mountains of Asia Minor. The Galatians had furnished some troops to Antiochus the Great, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... discharge the mighty river, whose source is far distant among the mountains of Tibet. His return was along the skirts of the northern hills; nor could this rapid campaign of one year justify the strange foresight of his emirs, that their children in a warm climate would degenerate into a race ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... "Moll Flanders," picaresque as it is and depicting the life of a female criminal, has yet considerable character study and gets no small part of its appeal for a present-day reader from the minute description of the fall and final reform of the degenerate woman. It is comparatively crude in characterization, but psychological value is not entirely lacking. However, with Richardson it is almost all. It was of the nature of his genius to make psychology paramount: just there is found his modernity. Defoe and Swift may be said to have added some slight ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... even beastly, was a sight which made a deep and lasting impression upon my mind, and I began to think that my own partial indulgence in the practice of drinking so freely after dinner was an act of great weakness and folly, which, if not checked, was likely to degenerate into one of the worst ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... was some sparring of a very bitter kind between Sir Timothy and Phineas Finn, till at last it seemed that the debate was to degenerate into a war of man against man. Phineas, and Erle, and Laurence Fitzgibbon allowed themselves to be lashed into anger, and, as far as words went, had the best of it. But of what use could it be? Every man there had come into the House prepared to vote for ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... use of the same religious grounds for the enslaving 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 ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... essential in its place and its degree. The life of the spirit languishes if it is not fed. But except these things issue in the practical service of Christ in daily life they are worse than futile. They degenerate either into formalism and hypocrisy, or into spiritual self- indulgence. "Herein is My Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit." "By their fruits ye shall know them." And the "fruits" of Christian living are to be discovered, not ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... 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
... exercised a very considerable influence on the Jesuit teachers in Rome, Ingolstadt, and Prague, was the Dominican, Francis of Vittoria (1480-1546). Realising the necessities of the age better than most of his contemporaries he put to an end the useless discussions and degenerate style of his immediate predecessors, re-introduced the /Summa/ of St. Thomas, insisted on supplementing it by a close study of the Scriptures and the writings of the Fathers, and inaugurated a new style of theological Latinity freed both from the barbarisms ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... listened to his first efforts at the bar, crowded round him, pressing his hands, embracing him almost to suffocation, censuring themselves for having suspected him, the very soul of honor, and pleading in self-justification the degenerate age in which we live—an age in which we daily see those whom we had considered immaculate suddenly yield to temptation. And a murmur of respectful admiration rose from the throng when the excitement had subsided a little, and the guests had an opportunity to observe Mademoiselle Marguerite, whose ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... 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 by the ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... element of foreign competition in these trades, but against what is a far more formidable competition for this purpose—the competition of those employers who habitually undercut them by the worst processes of sweating. I cannot believe that the process of raising the degenerate and parasitical portion of these trades up to the level of the most efficient branches of the trade, if it is conducted by those conversant with the conditions of the trade and interested in it, will necessarily result in an increase of the price ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... an unwillingness to yield to each other's peculiarities, to a weakening of the family ties, to a lax morality. Carry it a trifle farther than it now is in some of the Western States, and marriage will lose all its sacredness, and degenerate into a physical union, not nobler than the crossing of flies ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... and his name was never mentioned but with the deepest marks of gratitude, love and veneration. Sweet is the remembrance of the virtuous, and happy are the descendants of such a father! they will think on him and emulate his virtues—they will remember him, and be ashamed to degenerate from their ancestor. ...
— The Old English Baron • Clara Reeve
... which many, with a parricidal spirit, have assailed the literature of antiquity, were borrowed from its stores; and should their schemes of reform prevail we might fear that other generations, inheriting only their prejudices, without their refinement, would degenerate into comparative barbarism, and with that of learning, that the light also of religion would be extinguished. It is the worst of this spirit that it would seal up the treasures of heavenly wisdom, and take away the armor in which we trust for assailing the enemies of God. ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... no wish to pass either for a great tragic dramatist, or for a great star-gazer, or for a laurel-crowned musical genius, a rival of Mozart and Rossini, and preferred giving his money for walking-sticks—this degenerate Beer enjoyed Hegel's most confidential society; he was the philosopher's bosom friend, his Pylades, and accompanied him everywhere like his shadow. The equally witty and gifted Felix Mendelssohn once sought to explain this phenomenon, by maintaining ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... into being under such conditions, will solve all our problems. But whilst we neglect the first things we shall permanently solve no problem at all. We may seem to do so, but if we dishonour parenthood, if we leave the inferior women to mother the future, the degenerate race that must ensue will find itself in difficulties compared with which ours are trivial, and our solutions ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... for themselves, regardless of their feeling for her; indeed, her indifference on this score was curious. I once heard a lady say to her: "You are one of the few young married ladies whom I dare chaperon in these degenerate days. No degree of admiration or worship ever seems to touch you. Is it real ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... government! In that war England lost much of her old prestige in the eyes of the world, and felt that she had lost it. But nothing would have been more unphilosophical than to have assumed that England was degenerate or decrepit. It was only that her training had been for so long exclusively mechanical and peaceful. The terrible, but glorious, experience of the Indian Rebellion showed that Englishmen still possessed in as full measure ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... assign their motives; because no good motives can be pleaded in favor of their conduct. Upon that case I stand; we are at issue; and I desire to go to trial. This, I am sure, is not loose railing, or mean insinuation, according to their low and degenerate fashion, when they make attacks on the measures of their adversaries. It is a regular and juridical course; and unless I choose it, nothing can compel ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... 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 more sensibly. ...
— A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of - The Inequality Among Mankind • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... psychology on reactions is that it keeps us "close to the ground", and prevents our discussions from sailing off into the clouds of picturesque but fanciful interpretation. Psychology is very apt to degenerate into a game of blowing bubbles, unless we pin ourselves down to hard-headed ways of thinking. The notion of a reaction is of great value here, just because it is so hard-headed and concrete. Whenever we have any human action before us for explanation, we have to ask what the stimulus is ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... turn to affairs, ruling the roast 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
... sobbing or screaming in bed, every new approach to him, every fresh attempt at pacification, renews the force of his opposition in a crescendo of sound. But it is in his refusal of food that the child is apt to find his chief opportunity. Meal-times degenerate into a struggle. There at least he can show his complete mastery of the situation. No one can swallow his food for him, and he knows it. He can clench his teeth and shake his head and obstinately refuse ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... light wheaten biscuits, when Dr. Sheepshanks exclaimed, with an air of amazement, "Is it possible, my friends, that you are willing to violate the natural laws of health by eating dishes at which a child of nature would be horrified! Not for me be so degenerate a meal! I shall lunch on fare such as a wild Indian best loves!" So saying, he tucked up his sleeves, called for some unground corn, and having pounded it in a mortar until it was in coarse bits, he mixed ...
— Funny Big Socks - Being the Fifth Book of the Series • Sarah L. Barrow
... literature of 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 in point of taste to that of Gongora, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... 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 little brain. Ah, that ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... extravagances and gross depths to which bhakti, devotion or faith or love, may degenerate in the excitement of religious festivals—corruptio optimi pessimum. Even, strange to say, we find the grossness of bhakti also deliberately embodied in figures of wood and stone. Passing that over, we repeat ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... was at 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, riches were comparative, and was he not ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... pleading for their lives; not only pleading, but offering a large ransom if they be given up to him. How anxiously they listen for the reply! The king will not hear of it. The spirit of his father complains that he has been neglected; that his nation must have become degenerate; that they have ceased to conquer, since so few captives have been sent to bear him company in the world of shades. Again the strange white chief speaks, and offers higher bribes. Curious that he should take so much trouble ...
— Tales of the Sea - And of our Jack Tars • W.H.G. Kingston
... Nations crow, Thinking this voyce an armed Englishman. Shall that victorious hand be feebled heere, That in your Chambers gaue you chasticement? No: know the gallant Monarch is in Armes, And like an Eagle, o're his ayerie towres, To sowsse annoyance that comes neere his Nest; And you degenerate, you ingrate Reuolts, You bloudy Nero's, ripping vp the wombe Of your deere Mother-England: blush for shame: For your owne Ladies, and pale-visag'd Maides, Like Amazons, come tripping after drummes: Their thimbles into armed Gantlets ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... expression of extreme bitterness, as he gazed mournfully at the portraits of his ancestors, including more than one Doge, which were suspended round the walls of the apartment—"Venice! thou art indeed degenerate, when peril so remote can blanch the cheek of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... are beginning," he told her with emphasis; "we never had an argument that didn't degenerate into this; and ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... theocracy, the sciences, and the sterner kinds of the fine arts, that is, architecture and statuary, grew up together, followed, indeed, by painting, but a statuesque, and austerely idealized, painting, which did not degenerate into mere copies of the sense, till the process for which ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... aid of religion, and by studying the wisdom of the past, to exalt and purify his fallen nature; the other by grovelling in the dust, and mingling with beings yet more sinful and degraded, rapidly debased his mind to a more degenerate and fallen state. ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... 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 religions of the earth are providential, ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... self is a noble form of the passion of rivalry, and has a wide scope in the training of the young. But to veto and taboo all possible rivalry of one youth with another, because such rivalry may degenerate into greedy and selfish excess, does seem to savor somewhat of sentimentality, or even of fanaticism. The feeling of rivalry lies at the very basis of our being, all social improvement being largely due to it. There is a noble and generous kind of rivalry, as well as a spiteful ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... freedom let me draw, When truth stands trembling on the edge of law; Here, last of Britons! let your names be read; 250 Are none, none living? let me praise the dead, And for that cause which made your fathers shine, Fall by the votes of their degenerate line. ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... school, "The riots which complicated the affair of 1830 deprived that great event of a portion of its purity. The Revolution of July had been a fine popular gale, abruptly followed by blue sky. They made the cloudy sky reappear. They caused that revolution, at first so remarkable for its unanimity, to degenerate into a quarrel. In the Revolution of July, as in all progress accomplished by fits and starts, there had been secret fractures; these riots rendered them perceptible. It might have been said: 'Ah! this is broken.' After the Revolution ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... transformed, become suddenly alien and hostile, a crowd of 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
... up the 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 that ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... British public by writing a party pamphlet on a great Imperial question. I have 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 my ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... 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 had reached ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in 1453, the Greek language, which had been gradually declining, became entirely extinct, and a dialect, which had long before sprung up among the common people, took the place of the ancient, majestic, and refined tongue. This popular dialect in turn continued to degenerate until the middle of the last century. Recently institutions of learning have been established, and a new impulse given to improvement in Greece. Great progress has been made in the cultivation of the language, and great care is taken by modern Greek writers to avoid the use of foreign idioms ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... protectress 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 ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... meet on Tuesday. Subject for debate, 'That the present age is degenerate,' moved by A.E. Callander, opposed by T. Winter. Boys from the Senior Fifth are ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... in the genre of the Opera comique, the French stage is 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 into downright ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... Further, he will learn to feel respect for the language in which he writes and thus be saved from any attempt to remodel it by arbitrary and capricious treatment. Without this schooling, a man's writing may easily degenerate into mere chatter. ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... 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 an atmosphere of hatred which a few exceptional characters ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... come; the romantic enterprise of Cyrus and the retreat of the Ten Thousand, the elective trust of Thebes, and the chivalrous glories of her one great man. Demosthenes has yet to prove how vain is the divinest eloquence when poured to degenerate hearts. Agis and Cleomenes have yet to exhibit the spectacle, ever fraught with melancholy interest, of noble natures out of harmony with the present, and spending their energies in the vain attempt to turn back the stream of time and call again into existence the feelings ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... the best familiar poems of his century. As a satirist and humourist, I cannot place him so high as some of his admirers do; and the purely polemical portions of his poems, those in which he puts forth his antagonism to tyrants and religions and custom in all its myriad forms, seem to me to degenerate at intervals ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... 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 ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... religious duties in private and public, sit down here, and have not mind of further progress? They think, if they keep that stance, they are well, and so have few designs or endeavours after more communion with God, or purification from sin. Now this makes them degenerate to formality. They wither and become barren, and are exposed by this to many temptations which overcome them. But, my beloved, is not this really and indeed to say, "we have no sin?" Do not your walking and the posture of your spirits import so much, ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... it is a very refreshing one," he says, in an interested and deeply amused tone, "more especially in these degenerate days when most young ladies can tell one to a turn the precise age, price, and retailer of one's wines. May I ask when was ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... my earlier letters from hence, I hope will be removed, and that I shall be thought not to be totally destitute of political prudence. When that letter was written, I was rather apprehensive I might be censured by some as suffering prudence to degenerate into pusillanimity, for not taking advantage of the impression made by so important an event as the surrender of Lord Cornwallis and his army, and thought it expedient to assign any reasons for not doing it, knowing that we are apt to think ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. VIII • Various
... stretched forth her hand against devoted Germany, and chastened her rulers and her people for the sins and transgressions of many generations. Like those wild sons of the desert, whom in the seventh century, heaven let loose to punish the degenerate Christians of the East, the new Islamite hordes of revolutionary France were permitted by Divine Providence to spread through Germany, as through almost every country in Europe, ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... 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 ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... his position and the effect made upon the populace by his very evident leaning towards this dissipated but well-connected young man accused of a crime so brutal, that he must either have been the sport of most malicious circumstances, or a degenerate of the worst type. The time of Judge Ostrander's office was nearly up, and his future continuance on the bench might very easily depend upon his attitude at the present hearing. Yet HE, without apparent recognition of this ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... Arabic, "Gently! Gently!" as the vehement scuffling seemed about to degenerate into actual fighting at Domini's approach, and hurried forward, followed ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... 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 for ...
— 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
... possible; she was nervous and 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 workshop, well able ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... problem, as a child, he ever remained. He was known as a little demon, of insensate cruelty and viciousness. The family medicos privately adjudged him a mental monstrosity and degenerate. Such few boy companions as he had, hailed him as a wonder, though they were all afraid of him. He could outclimb, outswim, outrun, outdevil any of them; while none dared fight with him. He was too terribly ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... 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 ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... decline. The reign of Philip IV. was the most disastrous in the annals of the country. The Catalan insurrection, the loss of Jamaica, the Low Countries, and Portugal, were the results of his misrule and imbecility. So rapidly did Spain degenerate, that, upon the close of the Austrian dynasty, with all the natural advantages of the country, the best harbors and sea-coast in Europe, the richest soil, and the finest climate, and with the possession of the Indies also, ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... the despairing victims of tyranny in Cuba or of anarchy in Central America, threw himself boldly, with a handful of comrades, into their midst to sow the seeds of civilization and to reconstruct society—was it right for the citizens of the United States, themselves the degenerate sons of filibustering sires, to hurl at him as a reproach what was their ancestors' highest merit ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... 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
... satirized the degenerate descendants and scored the unworthy successors, but his writings may be searched in vain for wholesale charges against the Spanish nation such as Spanish scribblers were forever directing against all Filipinos, past, present ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... Helen looked at her through half-closed lids. "You are quite freakish. I suppose you must be a moral degenerate, or something of the sort." She waited for the insult to sink in, but Dorothy was fairly dazed and bewildered. "Do you want me to call things by ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... 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.
... think I don't understand. [His voice trembles] I fully understand. Had you beaten me like a dog, it would have felt less hard. Don't I understand what I am? I am a rascal, a degenerate, I mean. Forgive me for the Lord's sake. [Sobs, throws the parcel on the table, and goes ...
— The Cause of it All • Leo Tolstoy
... the mantle of the philosopher, he placed another canvas before her—something so unrefined, so animal, so destructive of womanly modesty and of all reserve, that any one looking upon it would instantly know that the man who had painted it was a degenerate demon—an associate of dissolute models, an anarchist in the world of women. It was fit only for the ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... He was also, early or late, to be obedient to others, so that in due time others might obey him. The secret of all success lay in a moderate diet with rare use of wine. A gloomy brow was, however, to be avoided. Rather should the youth give himself to be merry, so as not to degenerate from his father. Above all things should he keep his wit from biting words, or indeed from too much talk of any kind. Had not nature ramparted up the tongue with teeth and the lips with hair as reins and bridles against the tongue's loose use. Heeding this, he must be ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... princesses made the grande tournee through the rooms, and then mingled with the guests; all formal etiquette was now laid aside, and a gay and unembarrassed conversation might be carried on till the beginning of the concert. This seemed to degenerate, on the part of the French officers, to an indiscreet, frenzied levity. They laughed and talked boisterously—they walked arm in arm before the ladies, and remarked upon them so boldly, that crimson blushes, or frightened pallor, was the result. Even the queen ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... turns, she said, "Why does the one employ endearments, {while} the other is silent with her tongue torn from her? Why does she not call her sister, whom he calls mother? Consider to what kind of husband thou art married, daughter of Pandion. Thou dost grow degenerate. Tenderness in the wife of Tereus is criminality." No {more} delay {is there}; she drags Itys along, just as the tigress of the banks of the Ganges {does} the suckling offspring of the hind, through the shady forests. And when they ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... the reckless and criminal disregard of precautions which would prevent her bringing into the world daughters whose future outlook as a career would be prostitution, or sons whose inherited taint of alcoholism would soon drag them down with their sisters to herd with the seething mass of degenerate and criminal humanity that constitutes the dangerous classes of great cities. In all these cases the appeal is from thoughtless, unreasoning prejudice to conscience, and, if listened to, its voice will be heard unmistakably indicating where the ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... friend Egerton. But I grant he is an example that it is never too late to follow. Why, who that had seen you both as youths, notwithstanding Audley had the advantage of being some years your senior—who could have thought that he was the one to become distinguished and eminent, and you to degenerate into the luxurious idler, averse to all trouble and careless of all fame? You, with such advantages, not only of higher fortunes, but, as every one said, of superior talents; you, who had then so much ambition, so keen a desire for glory, sleeping with Plutarch's Lives ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... kingdom, we 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 ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... Wykehamist took his degree with no examination 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 ...
— The Oxford Degree Ceremony • Joseph Wells
... unsatisfactory, the marriage will certainly be so. We moderns bedeck and bedrape us in all sorts of meretricious togas, till a pair of fine eyes and a dashing manner pass for beauty; but when life tries the metal—when nature applies her inevitable test—the degenerate or neurotic type goes ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... had left a fabulous fortune. She herself had suggested her being sheltered under my aunt's roof as a singularly welcome "paying guest." She herself, too, had suggested the visit to Paris and had hired the house from a degenerate Duc de Luynes who preferred the delights of an appartement in the less ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... of the thirteenth century, whilst the enterprises which were still called crusades were becoming more and more degenerate in character and potency, there was born in France, on the 25th of April, 1215, not merely the prince, but the man who was to be the most worthy representative and the most devoted slave of that religious and moral passion which had inspired the ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... on which to go in quest of a husband, Madonna mia. But where in this degenerate world do you look to ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... 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 become ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... greatest of the Puritans—intellectual ancestry of the modern degenerate Prudes—had a wholesome love of the dance, and nowhere is his pen so joyous as in its description in the well known passage from "Comus" which, should it occur to my memory while delivering a funeral oration, I am sure I could not forbear to quote, albeit this, our present argument, ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... of the 'franks' or the free; and who, at the breaking up of the Roman Empire, possessed themselves of Gaul, to which they gave their own name. They were the ruling conquering people, honourably distinguished from the Gauls and degenerate Romans among whom they established themselves by their independence, their love of freedom, their scorn of a lie; they had, in short, the virtues which belong to a conquering and dominant race in the midst of an inferior and conquered one. And thus it came to pass that by degrees the name 'frank' ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... and set them in such a dishonourable light, by giving them a character that even the above-mentioned historians, yea their most avowed enemies, of their own day, would scarcely have subscribed[6]: to such a length is poor degenerate Scotland arrived.—And is it not high time to follow the wise man's advice, Open thy mouth for the dumb, in the cause of all such as are appointed to destruction? ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... no possible advantage to us. Do you expect us to settle down here? Do you suppose I have the least inclination to degenerate out ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... sepulchre of Caius 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 ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... physical or mental. This plan has been quite generally followed. The nomenclature seems to me unfortunate and hardly justified by the facts. I can think of no more potent objection to such inclusive use of the term degenerate, than the fact that Lombroso includes, under the signs of degeneration, the enormous development of the cerebral speech-area in the case of an accomplished orator. If such evolutional spurts are to be deemed degenerative, the fate of the four-leaved ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... remarked 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
... to this celestial King, most Holy Father, that this Lady, His spouse, sends her children whom you see here, who are not of a lower condition than those who came long before them. They do not degenerate; they have the comeliness both of their Father and their mother, since they make profession of the most perfect poverty. There is, therefore, no fear of their dying of poverty, being the children and heirs of the Immortal King, born of a poor mother, ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... Niger, we approach toward the East, the African women degenerate in stature, complexion, sensibility, and chastity. Even their language, like their features, and the soil they inhabit, is harsh and disagreeable. Their pleasures resemble more the transports of fury, than the gentle emotions ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... shows the native lustre with advantage; but if he any way degenerate from his line, the least spot is visible ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... makes his surroundings uninteresting. In the record of his adventures and experiences there is enough of wit and character and invention to make the fortune of a score or more of such novels as the public of these degenerate days would hail with enthusiasm. But his function is to vitiate them all. He is a bore of the first magnitude, and of his eminence in that capacity his history is at once the monument and ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... and 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 ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... a natural grace and ease in their manner, and make excellent wives and mothers. This character must not, however, be taken in an unlimited sense, for we cannot expect this rule to be without its exceptions, and it is true that some of these females do degenerate, and copy after the manners of the creoles, or white natives; but this is only the case when, by their intercourse with the whites, their Indian blood is merged and lost in the European. That part of the population in which is blended the blood of the Chinese ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... 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 that the inscription is silent as to his military achievements. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... allowed to have that sort of dream in these degenerate nights, no man anywhere in the whole world. And here again my art suffers, for my designs in this line were always especially vivid and effective, and pleased the most rigid. Then, too, Gisele is always doing ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... brutal except by intensive training, simple in minds and hearts, chivalrous in instinct, without hatred, adventurous, laughter-loving, and dutiful. That is God's truth, in spite of vice-rotted, criminal, degenerate, and brutal fellows in many battalions, as ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... of the wise man, "He that loveth pleasure shall be a poor man;" he that indulges himself in "wine and oil," that is, in drinking, in feasting, and in sensual gratifications, "shall not be rich." It is one of St. Paul's characters of a most degenerate age, when "men become lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God." And that "fleshly lusts war against the soul," is St. Peter's caveat to the Christians of ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... discussion. Are the children interested in the right things? Are the central truths of the lesson being brought out and applied? Is the discussion centered on topics set for our consideration, or does it degenerate into aimless talk on matters of personal or local interest which have no relation to the lesson? In short, does the recitation period yield the fruitful knowledge we had set as a goal for this lesson? Does it stimulate ...
— How to Teach Religion - Principles and Methods • George Herbert Betts
... ceased; for he said, "Days should speak, and multitude of years should teach wisdom." Young persons sometimes render themselves ridiculous by such unseemly conduct. The prophet Isaiah gives this as one of the marks of a degenerate age, that "the child shall behave himself proudly against the ancient, and ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... interpretation of Luther and the Reformation. Going back still further, we come to the Jesuit Maimbourg, to Witzel, and in Luther's own time to Cochlaeus and Oldecop, all of whom strove to convince the world that Luther was a moral degenerate and a reprobate. The book of Mgr. O'Hare, which has made its appearance on the eve of the Four-hundredth Anniversary of Luther's Theses, is merely another eruption from the same mud volcano that became active in Luther's lifetime. ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... 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
... didst not thou And thy degenerate train, By mankind's Saviour's body vow To me thy sovereign, To make me the most glorious king That e'er o'er England reign'd; That me and mine in everything By you should ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... minds were sufficiently dormant. How was it with their bodies? Were they sturdier men? Did they stand heavier on their feet than their descendants? It is a familiar fact that the armor which inclosed them will not hold those whom we call their degenerate children. A friend tells me that in the armory of London Tower there are preserved scores, if not hundreds, of the swords of those terrible Northmen, those Vikings, who, ten centuries ago, swept the seas and were the dread of all Europe, and that scarcely one of them has ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... Violence, distain'd with crimes, Rousing elate in these degenerate times; View unsuspecting Innocence a prey, As guileful Fraud points out the erring way; While subtle Litigation's pliant tongue The life-blood equal sucks of Right ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... been trampled. The sepulchre of Christ is possessed by the heathen, the sacred places dishonoured by their vileness. Oh, brave knights and faithful people! offspring of invincible fathers! ye will not degenerate from your ancient renown. Ye will not be restrained from embarking in this great cause by the tender ties of wife or little ones, but will remember the words of the Saviour of the world himself, 'Whosoever loves father and mother more than me is not worthy of me. ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... times. Monsters in vice and crime had filled the throne, till their morals and manners had infected those of all the people. The state was distracted, and apparently on the eve of dissolution. The public taste, like the general conscience, was perverted. The fountains of education were poisoned. Degenerate Grecian masters were inspiring their Roman pupils with a relish for a false science, a frivolous literature, a vitiated eloquence, an Epicurean creed, and a ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... is the recollection, by a degenerate race, of a vast, mighty, and highly civilized empire, which in a remote past covered large parts of Europe, Asia, ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... Eggleston's The Hoosier Schoolmaster and The Circuit Rider (1874) are so true to a real phase of American life that a thoughtful reader must wonder why they are not better known. They are certainly refreshing to one who tires of our present so-called realism with its abnormal or degenerate characters. ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... wholesome, simple country, here is the sort of home you have. This passage is a cutting from the Daily News of Jan. 1, 1907; and its assertions have never been contradicted. It fills one with only the mildest enthusiasm for the return of our degenerate townsmen "back to the land." I came upon it as I read that morning's paper ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... Cabinet advised it because of its possible effect on the Legal Tender Law. Yet this foolish and dirty charge has found extensive credit. I read it once in the London Times. It was, however, in a communication written by a degenerate and recreant American who was engaged in reviling his own country. It was also referred to by Mr. Bryan in his book on the United States. I sent him a copy of a pamphlet I prepared on the subject, and received from him a letter expressing his satisfaction that the story was ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... of a maniac, and pushing him backwards against the balustrade, and holding him there transfixed, while, with eyes seething with wrath beneath the blanched, and big, umbrageous brows, and showing like a sudden opening of the infernal pit, he cried: "Demon, degenerate dog, where hast thou been walking to and fro in the earth? whom helping to devour? Ah, son of Satan, ah! ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... For me, degenerate modern wretch, Though in the genial month of May, My dripping limbs I faintly stretch, And think ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... to theatre parties; she must 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 a ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... to a wedded life which brought nothing but unhappiness with it and which gave to the world some of the most degenerate women (in addition to a son who was almost an idiot) ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... hands. "That any reputable woman should have nocturnal appointments with gentlemen in the back garden, and beguile her own grandmother into an odious marriage! I protest, Captain Audaine, the degenerate world of to-day is no longer a suitable residence ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... in a night, a harvest of strange taxes sprang up on every hand. The list of excisable articles was increased. The tax on houses and windows, that had been so unpopular in the preceding reign, was again introduced, and a new appraisement was made of all the real estate in the kingdom. A degenerate age might take exceptions to some of the other taxes now instituted. An act was passed placing a tax upon bachelors and widowers, fixing, at the same time, 'certain rules and duties on marriages, births, and burials, for the term of five years, for the carrying on the war against ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... peoples of the delirious Pacific of whom you have read and dreamed—Arab, Hindoo, Malayan, Chink, Jap, South Sea Islander—a mere catalogue of the names is a romance. Here are pace and high adventure; the tang of the East; fusion of blood and race and creed. A degenerate dross it is, but, do you know, I cannot say that I don't prefer it to the well-spun gold that is flung from the Empire on boat-race nights. Place these fellows against our blunt backgrounds, under the awful mystery of the City's ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... not confined to medicine and the physical sciences. He was also considered eminent as a philologist and philosopher. Physiology, however, with its various branches and degenerate offshoots, was the idol of the scholars of that age, and of Faustus among the rest. A passionate desire to fathom the mysteries of Nature, to dive into the most hidden recesses of moral and physical creation, had ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... 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 bard takes ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... 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 of woman. Milton, ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... naturally suggested the prolongation of earthly life by artificial means; hence the search for an elixir, carried on through many centuries by degenerate disciples of Taoism. But here we must pass on to consider some of the speculations on God, life, death, and immortality, indulged in by Taoist philosophers and others, who were not fettered, as the Confucianists were, by traditional reticence on the subject of spirits ...
— Religions of Ancient China • Herbert A. Giles
... have sounded absurd, but, to-day, some forms of heart disease are known to be the regular sequences of some particular form of kidney disease, just as some form of pneumonia attends an affected heart and that some forms of pneumonia degenerate into phthisis. When the blood change is an established fact, it is only a question as to which is the weak organ, and the organism of the individual will decide whether it will be a simple sick-headache or the beginning of a pneumonia ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... very remarkable boundary-stone at Dowth, with the engraving of suns on it, to the vases from Millares, province d'Almerie, which are ornamented with raised circles, these in their turn being derived from a degenerate form of the idol. ...
— The Bronze Age in Ireland • George Coffey
... now not the neighbouring Samnite wastes with fire, but a Carthaginian foreigner, who has advanced even thus far from the remotest limits of the world, through our dilatoriness and inactivity? What! are we so degenerate from our ancestors as tamely to see that coast filled with Numidian and Moorish foes, along which our fathers considered it a disgrace to their government that the Carthaginian fleets should cruise? We, who erewhile, indignant ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... 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 descendant of one. ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... committee may interfere with your plans," rejoined Atwater, shaking his head. "We don't want fighting to degenerate into the appearance of bullying oppression ...
— Dick Prescott's First Year at West Point • H. Irving Hancock
... briefly designated. One of his rooms was directly above the street-door of the house; such a dormitory, when it is so exiguous, is called in the nomenclature of New York a "hall bedroom." The sitting-room, beside it, was slightly larger, and they both commanded a row of tenements no less degenerate than Ransom's own habitation—houses built forty years before, and already sere and superannuated. These were also painted red, and the bricks were accentuated by a white line; they were garnished, on the first floor, with balconies covered with small tin roofs, striped in different ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... well as trouble us, because in these pages we all confess what we have never confessed to anyone. Our self-love is outraged, but outraged with that strange accompaniment of thrilling pleasure that means an expiation paid, a burden lightened. Use the word "degenerate" if you will. But in this sense we are all "degenerates" for thus and not otherwise is woven the stuff whereof ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... of 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 ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Lewis and Clark expedition than by the tale of Jason. John Colter, wandering three years in the wilderness and discovering the Yellowstone Park, is infinitely more heroic to me that Theseus. Alexander Harvey makes AEneas look like a degenerate. It was Harvey, you know, who fell out with the powers at Fort Union, with the result that he was ordered to report at the American Fur Company's office at St. Louis before he could be reinstated in the service. This was ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... wit nor gaiety nor conversation worth the name. Prejudices and pruderies, respect of persons, reverence of sentiments, and consideration for the corns of the dull are fatal. On such terms even fun and high spirits soon degenerate to buffoonery and romps. There must be no closed subjects at the mention of which faces lengthen, voices become grave, and the air thickens with hearty platitudes: the intellect must be suffered to play freely about everything and everybody. Wit is the very salt and essence of society, and ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... and darken all the strand. Contented Toil, and hospitable Care, And kind connubial Tenderness, ate there; And Piety with wishes placed above, And steady Loyalty, and faithful Love. And thou, sweet Poetry, thou loveliest maid, Still first to fly where sensual joys invade; Unfit in these degenerate times of shame To catch the heart, or strike for honest fame; Dear charming nymph, neglected and decried, My shame in crowds, my solitary pride; Thou source of all my bliss, and all my woe, That found'st me poor at first, and keep'st ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... 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 ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... left no room for it, and hence the bracing quality of their literature compared with that of recent times, its tonic property, that seems almost too astringent to palates relaxed by a daintier diet. The first great example of the degenerate modern tendency was Petrarch, who may be said to have given it impulse and direction. A more perfect specimen of the type has not since appeared. An intellectual voluptuary, a moral dilettante, the first ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... promises a greater social happiness and contentment, has a eugenic [xxiii] significance. So long as there exists an unsupported mother or a suffering child; so long as we rely on hospitals and prisons, penitentiaries and the police, to minister to the correction and regeneration of the unfit and degenerate; so long as we tolerate grafting politicians and deprive the poor of breathing spaces, sanitary appliances, and a hygienic environment; so long as war and pestilence deprive posterity of the best of the race for parenthood; so long as we emphasize rescue rather than prevention, so long must the ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... of excisable articles was increased. The tax on houses and windows, that had been so unpopular in the preceding reign, was again introduced, and a new appraisement was made of all the real estate in the kingdom. A degenerate age might take exceptions to some of the other taxes now instituted. An act was passed placing a tax upon bachelors and widowers, fixing, at the same time, 'certain rules and duties on marriages, births, ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... called over, and only forty-five monks presented themselves. By order of the viceroy, the five who had broken through the rules, were never again admitted into the convent. Alas! could his Excellency have lived in these our degenerate days, and beheld certain monks of a certain order drinking pulque and otherwise disporting themselves! nay, seen one, as we but just now did from the window, strolling along the street by lamplight, with an Yntida (Indian girl) tucked ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... limits are forced in such a reckless manner, and when you expend as much breath for a few lines of a song as a correctly educated singer would require for a whole aria? How long will it be before your voice, already weakened, and almost always forced beyond the limits of beauty, shall degenerate into a hollow, dull, guttural tone, and even into that explosive or tremulous sound, which proclaims irremediable injury? Is your beautiful voice and your talent to disappear like a meteor, as others have done? or do you hope that the soft air of Italy ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck
... Robber indeed! My noble Ruperto the purest of patriots, purer than any in this degenerate ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... conducted with equal spirit and sagacity — My uncle is extremely fond of the institution, which will certainly be productive of great advantages to the public, if, from its democratical form, it does not degenerate into cabal and corruption — You are already acquainted with his aversion to the influence of the multitude, which, he affirms, is incompatible with excellence, and subversive of order — Indeed his detestation of the mob has been heightened by fear, ever since he fainted in the room at ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... 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
... society, whose characteristic discrimination and humorous exuberance, for instance, we admire in Hogarth, but which, like the fleeting passions of the day, every hour contributes something to obliterate, which soon become unintelligible by time, or degenerate into caricature, the chronicle of scandal, the history-book of the vulgar." It seems, strangely enough, to have been the fashion among the, in comparison with Hogarth, puny academicians of that day, to underrate that great ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... so artlessly, yes, so artlessly! whew! [here Miss Rita smiled artfully.] Then he asked me all about you heretics, and he told me you were all going to—be burned up, as soon as you died; for the Inquisition couldn't do it for you in these degenerate days. After a great deal more twaddle like this, I asked him why you heretics all had such hard names, that we others never could speak them? Then he looked mysterious, so! [here Miss Rita diabolically winked one eye,] and said he: 'I will tell you, per Bacco! ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... 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 is ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... founder might be carried out by his successors; but, as it is, the present worthy possessor once laid beneath the turf, the object of all his pains-taking and labour will, in all probability, be cut up into small farms, or be allowed once more to degenerate into forest, as may appear most profitable ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... 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 are in Buffon's ...
— A Trip to Paris in July and August 1792 • Richard Twiss
... 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 ...
— 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
... War, rendered an account of his department up to date, which amazed even the House of Commons, and will surely stir the minds of men throughout the British Empire with a just and reasonable pride. The "effete" and "degenerate" nation ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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 ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... 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 ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... invent: the beam-ends were sculptured into queer little crouching figures of monkeys or angels, and all sorts of diableries decorated the cornices that ran beneath the windows; there were no panes of glass, such as we boast of in these degenerate times, but narrow latticed lights to let in the day, and the wind, and the cold; while the roofs were covered commonly with shingles, or, in the houses of the wealthy, with sheets of lead. Between each gable came forth a long water-spout, and poured down a deluge into the gutter beneath; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... 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 anecdotes are but one rolling ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... 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 ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... their depredations. There was no longer any need for them to commit crime. They merely changed with changing conditions. A smaller number of criminals was put into hospitals and cured. And the remnant of the hopelessly criminal and degenerate was segregated. And the courts in all countries were likewise decreased in number again and again. Ninety-five per cent. of all civil cases had been squabbles over property, conflicts of property-rights, lawsuits, contests of wills, breaches of contract, ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... 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 ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... of bodily organs will enable them to be photographed will bring all such morbid growths as tumours 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 benefit thereby, how ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... question was clearly due to the fear that such objects might degenerate amongst Christians, as they afterwards did, into little better than idols. And if the sign or figure of the cross did not mainly remind the early Christians of the death of Jesus, it must have mainly ...
— The Non-Christian Cross - An Enquiry Into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion • John Denham Parsons
... world. But there is a danger that, in his first enthusiasm, he may not recognize the proportions or limitations to which his truth is subjected; he does not see how far he has given birth to a truism, or how that which is a truth to him is a truism to the rest of the world; or may degenerate in the next generation. He believes that to be the whole which is only a part,—to be the necessary foundation which is really only a valuable aspect of the truth. The systems of all philosophers require the criticism of 'the morrow,' when ...
— Philebus • Plato
... the pressure and the faculties no longer ensue. Yes? Withdraw the pressure, and the faculties decay. Sightless moles, their environment demands not the sight; nor of the fishes that inhabit the streams of your Mammoth Cave. Your aristocrats between the sleeve-of-the-shirt periods likewise degenerate. There is no need to work, they lose the power. No need to sustain themselves, they become helpless. They are as animals grown in an environment that demands no struggle of them. Yet their environment is artificial. They live on stored energy, stored by another. ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... protest aloud against a rule which he did not approve. In our days there are so many cowardly and degenerate characters, that we cannot too greatly admire those who have the courage to proclaim their opinion in the presence of the mob, especially when those opinions shock the brutalized mob; for my part I admire this man; but what I admire still more is the woman who has dared to put her hand in his, ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... of wisdom are generally most unfortunate, but chiefly in their children; Nature, it seems, so providently ordering it, lest this mischief of wisdom should spread further among mankind. For which reason it is manifest why Cicero's son was so degenerate, and that wise Socrates' children, as one has well observed, were more like their mother than their father, ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... belief in Germany that the French nation was degenerate and corrupt and unprepared for war. This belief became conviction when, in the debates of the French Senate, Senator Humbert, early in 1914, publicly exposed what he claimed to be the weakness and unpreparedness ...
— My Four Years in Germany • James W. Gerard
... observed Green, "that we should be spending our energies on the West and East Coasts of Africa, and all the time that these degenerate descendants of Spaniards out here in the Pacific should be endeavouring to drag our fellow-creatures into a far worse slavery than the Africans have to endure. These poor islanders, accustomed to the perfect freedom of the breezes ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... matter of indifference to him whether this is so or not. Only, if it is so, he has a fine instrument ready to his hand; and in due proportion to the completeness of his indifference to it is the strength and beauty of his personal self. This is readily seen; a garden flower becomes a mere degenerate copy of itself if it is simply neglected; a plant must be cultivated to the highest pitch, and benefit by the whole of the gardener's skill, or else it must be a pure savage, wild, and fed only by the earth ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... as sadly patient as a mother with a degenerate child, kept steady watch on him, with enough other women close at hand to prevent an outbreak. He had no weapons, and well knew that all his strength was of small avail ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... now. There was a glow on his cheek, and a steady fire in his eye, the lines about the mouth sharply drawn, and indicating not only masterly strength, but a kind of pitying patience, that would never degenerate into sentimentality. It was a very manly, trusty face; and his sterling honesty impressed Miss McLeod, long trained to reading faces, while his sturdy good ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... attract the mob, he 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
... process which was 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 ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the rags of conquest: The lust of gold, unfeeling and remorseless! The last corruption of degenerate man. 132 DR. JOHNSON: ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... leaped to the fine perverse conception of the decorated pyjama, this garment had enjoyed the fullest correctness. Now, after perhaps forty years in the cupboards of Mrs. Maldon, it seemed to recall the more excellent attributes of an already forgotten past, and to rebuke what was degenerate in the present. ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... a snare and a delusion!" continues Miss Majendie, who has now mounted her hobby, and will ride it to the death. "Who can tell the age of any man in this degenerate age? We look at their faces, and say he must be so and so, and he a few years younger, but looks are vain, they tell us nothing. Some look old, because they are old, some look ...
— A Little Rebel • Mrs. Hungerford
... emotion must be kept well in hand must never be suffered to degenerate into passion. Passion is always weak, emotion is an element ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... to the result so gratifying to the fusionists, George Opdyke defeated Fernando Wood by a small plurality for mayor of New York. Wood had long been known as a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He talked reform and grew degenerate; he proclaimed patriotic views and held disloyal sentiments; he listened respectfully to public opinion, and defied it openly in his acts. He did not become a boss. It was ten years later before William M. Tweed centralised Tammany's power in one man. But Wood developed the system that ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... indulging in these alone; 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 ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... Provost Haswell's, 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 ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... ill-omened opening to a wedded life which brought nothing but unhappiness with it and which gave to the world some of the most degenerate women (in addition to a son who was almost an idiot) who ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... 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 ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... "The Duchess of Malfy"; and being no less apparently ignorant, and incapable of understanding, that as there is no poet morally nobler than Webster so is there no poet ignobler in the moral sense than Euripides: while as a dramatic artist—an artist in character, action, and emotion—the degenerate tragedian of Athens, compared to the second tragic dramatist of England, is as a mutilated monkey to a well-made man. No better test of critical faculty could be required by the most exacting scrutiny of probation than is afforded by the critic's professed or professional estimate of those great ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... key, and evil Chance the distribution of the contents. In his function of Lender (which, however, is one of administration, not use, as far as he is himself concerned), the capitalist takes, indeed, a more interesting aspect; but even in that function, his relations with the state are apt to degenerate into a mechanism for the convenient contraction of debt;—a function the more mischievous, because a nation invariably appeases its conscience with respect to an unjustifiable expense, by meeting it with borrowed funds, expresses its repentance of a foolish ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... watch over the preservation of armies in the interval of a long peace, for then they are most likely to degenerate. It is important to foster the military spirit in the armies, and to exercise them in great maneuvers, which, though but faintly resembling those of actual war, still are of decided advantage in preparing them for ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... to-day as when it was written. Mr. Gallatin condemned paper currency as an artificial stimulus, and the ultimate object of his essays was to annihilate what he termed the "dangerous instrument." He admitted its utility and convenience, when used with great sobriety, but he deprecated its tendency to degenerate into a depreciated and irredeemable currency. This tendency the present national banking law arrests, but the law rather invites than prohibits the stimulus of increased issues. The last word has not yet been said on national currency, which, though the basis of all commercial ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... inhabitants of all the countries in that district are fierce and warlike, and they are so fond of war and battle that he who is slain in battle is accounted the happiest of men, while those who die a natural death are reproached as degenerate ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... 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 ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... 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 is ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... 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 operation. Among ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... necessary to the understanding of the New Testament, it is to the poet matter of regret that "loveless learning" should leave its proper work, and make such havoc in that which belongs not to it. But while he sits "talking with his mind," his mood begins to degenerate from sympathy with that which is good to indifference towards all forms, and he feels inclined to rest quietly in the enjoyment of his own religious confidence, and trouble himself in no wise about the faith of his neighbours; for doubtless all are partakers of the ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... 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
... established in various parts of Italy, each under the controul of a lanis'ta, or fencing-master, who instructed them in martial exercises. The victims were either prisoners of war, or refractory slaves, sold by their masters; but in the degenerate ages of the empire, freemen, and even senators, ventured their lives on the stage along with the regular gladiators. Under the mild and merciful influence of Christianity these combats were abolished, and human blood was no longer shed to gratify ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... they had intended for the others, 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 ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... reconcile it with her former appeal to me as my child-wife. I resolved to do what I could, in a quiet way, to improve our proceedings myself, but I foresaw that my utmost would be very little, or I must degenerate into the spider again, and be ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... 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. halls to which ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... the interpretation of the legislature's work as a matter of reason, not of pressure, and the more common it is to hear condemnations of those portions of the process at which violence shows through the reasoning as though they were per se perverted, degenerate, and the bearers of ruin. There is, of course, a strong, genuine group opposition to the technique of violence, which is an important social fact; but a statement of the whole legislative process in terms of the discussion forms used by that anti-violence ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... such a Christmas in these degenerate times, when rain is nearly always the order of the day. All the Christmas shopping was done during Christmas week. The fancy goods stores of those days were few—"Hibben & Carswell," "The London Bazaar," and David Spencer. The former ...
— Some Reminiscences of old Victoria • Edgar Fawcett
... break in to it. It's a great thing when he's 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 over a desk and swilling whiskey... and, ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... 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 the ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... hypnotic influence of Rasputin, the smart little woman, who often called at the house and whom I sometimes met at the palace, was quickly transformed from a steady tradesman's wife into a giddy, pleasure-loving and intriguing degenerate, perhaps even more vicious than the rest. Indeed, it was this very fact which caused the Empress to look upon her with favour. Thus she soon had the run of the private apartments, and became upon friendly terms with both ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... of type two are normal in appearance, but the pollen-mother-cells degenerate before pollen grains are formed. A comparison of the degenerate pollen-mother-cells of this plant with ...
— Growing Nuts in the North • Carl Weschcke
... was murdered in his own cathedral, to which we shall hereafter refer at length. The comparison will impress us with the difference between religion and superstition, between the purity of primitive Christian worship, and the unhappy corruptions of a degenerate age. "To God and the Blessed Mary, and Saint Dionysius, and the holy patrons of this Church, I commend myself and the ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... length to the issue of images as simulacra for the text, in order to reiterate his belief that in the long run more than images of pages of particular editions of the text are needed, because just as second-generation photocopies and second-generation microfilm degenerate, so second-generation representations tend to degenerate, and one tends to overstress some relatively trivial aspects of the text such as its layout on the page, which is not always significant, despite what ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly
... the Hudson and under Jersey City as I lit my cigar and settled comfortably into the green plush. When we emerged from the tunnel on the other side of the long ridge (which is a degenerate spur from the Palisades farther north) a crescent of sun was just fringing the crest with fire. Another moment and we flashed onto the Hackensack marshes and into the fully minted gold of superb morning. The day ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... ten hours of the day half asleep on a bench at the tavern-door where he quartered, or drunk within the house. Though this wicked life he led sometimes moved me to pity him, and to wonder how so well-bred, gentlemanly a man as he once was could degenerate into such a useless thing as he now appeared, yet at the same time it gave me most contemptible thoughts of him, and made me often say I was a warning for all the ladies of Europe against marrying of fools. A man of sense falls in the world and gets up again, and a woman has some chance for ...
— The Fortunate Mistress (Parts 1 and 2) • Daniel Defoe
... masters of 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 ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... the criminal an abnormal being driven by an irresistible atavistic impulse to commit anti-social acts, but many had observed (cases of the kind were too frequent to escape notice) the existence of certain individuals, nearly always members of degenerate families, who seemed from their earliest infancy to be prompted by some fatal impulse to do evil to their fellow-men. They differed from ordinary people, because they hated the very persons who ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... one of those lowering fellows, the kind that seems to be at outs with mankind. Just the material to become sulky in any but the most skillful hands, the sort to degenerate into a positive brute, in such blundering hands as Mrs. ...
— How to Cook Husbands • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... no cure for them in this world. Nor yet for their damned and doomed offspring—while the individual liberty shibboleths endure, while mere numbers rule, or while our degenerate fear of every form of compulsion lasts. And the present tendency is, not merely to stipulate for complete freedom of action for the poor wretches, but to invite them to govern, by count of heads. So ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... 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 was of God's gift to whom he gave Supremacy of merit—the sole means ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... 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 seventeenth and the greater part of the eighteenth ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... Heretic in his edifying agony - I say I suspect (says the plate) that some such fancy was pretty strong upon you when you went out into the air, and blessed God for the bright spring day and the degenerate times! ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... an idea of the memory, by losing its force and vivacity, may degenerate to such a degree, as to be taken for an idea of the imagination; so on the other hand an idea of the imagination may acquire such a force and vivacity, as to pass for an idea of the memory, and counterfeit its effects ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... bestow them," said Mr Escot, "in confounding them with those of the sons of little men, the degenerate dwarfs of later generations; you will well bestow them in giving them to me: for I will have this illustrious skull bound with a silver rim, and filled with mantling wine, with this inscription, NUNC TANDEM: signifying that that pernicious liquor has at length found its proper receptacle; ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... English working-man with his flatteries of either party. He blundered and blustered at home, while the Empire, its services and its defences, by which alone all this pullulating "street folk" existed for a day, were in danger of starvation and hindrance abroad, to meet the unreasonable fancies of a degenerate race. A deep hatred of mob-rule rooted itself in Tressady, passing gradually, during his last three months in India, into a growing inclination to return and take his place in the fight—to have his say. "Government to the competent—not to the many," might have ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... at 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 two of these hands ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... 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 of the outwardly devout ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... language and methods used in the redoubtable old English periodicals forty years ago. We were interested in seeing how exactly this sort of criticism that slew our literary fathers was revived now for the execution of their degenerate children. And yet it was not exactly the same. We used to call it "slang-whanging." One form of it was a blank surprise at the pretensions of American authors, and a dismissal with the formula of previous ignorance of their existence. This is modified ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... an Englishman war is evil, war is immoral. On the contrary, to the German war is essentially moral. Indeed, it is the source of the highest morality, of the most valuable virtues, and without war the human race would speedily degenerate. It is the mainspring of national progress. There are three causes which have ensured the present greatness of the German Empire: moral virtue in the individual, political unity, and economic prosperity. If we were ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... Godless, is 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 ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... must say what it will do," states The Daily Mail. Waiting for The Daily Mail to say it first must not be allowed to degenerate into ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 12, 1919 • Various
... garret a chest containing a quantity of papers and parchments, and the beautifulest dust. No such dust is made in these degenerate days. Some of these MSS. bore recent dates, and were easily legible, though not so easily intelligible, being written as Gratiano spake.* The writers had omitted to put the idea'd words into red ink, so they had to be picked out with infinite difficulty from the multitude ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... Blessed Life"; "so robust an intellect, a soul so calm," says Carlyle, "so lofty, massive, and immovable, has not mingled in philosophic discussion since the time of Luther ... the cold, colossal, adamantine spirit, standing erect and clear, 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 ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... 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 ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... 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 ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 5 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... rolled a cigarette. "Oh, I'm not whining. I can take my medicine all right, all right; but I'm just decently ashamed of myself, that's all. Here I am, on top of a dirty thirty miles, as knocked up and stiff and sore as a pink-tea degenerate after a five-mile walk on a country turn-pike. Bah! It makes me sick! Got a match?" "Don't git the tantrums, youngster." Bettles passed over the required fire-stick and waxed patriarchal. "Ye've gotter 'low some for the breakin'-in. ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... who are 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 and as one ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... mist 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 summoning me is sounded. I cannot much longer ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... statement of a somewhat remote, 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
... 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
... resumed the father, "I have found you a man of sense and refinement! If you had been tutor to this degenerate boy, the worst trouble of my life would not ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... I should smile! You know me. Say, you may talk of the realistic drama of these degenerate days—why, they aren't one, two, nine with the shows of days gone by. Oh, you may laugh about stage realism and chin about real race-horses in racing scenes, and real society women to play real ladies, real burglars to crack unreal property safes, and real prize-fighters to do their ...
— A Pirate of Parts • Richard Neville
... depraved idiocrasy, incident to captivity and poor health. But now another and most unexpected feature developed itself; for, on attempting to remove the last web by placing against it a large wire ring, and cutting the guy-lines, I found that this most degenerate spider had not only failed to make her house perpendicular, but had so far departed from the traditions of our ancestors as to have the centre thereof decidedly eccentric, and four times as near the upper as the lower border of the web, so that its upper portion was only a confused array of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... speaking of this same subject, that "the current opinion of Indian character is too apt to be formed from the miserable hordes which infest the frontiers, and hang on the shirts of settlements. These are too commonly composed of degenerate beings, corrupted and enfeebled by the voice of society, without being benefited by ...
— Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, and History of the Tuscarora Indians • Elias Johnson
... sail from Toulon, with 40,000 tried and victorious soldiers and a magnificent fleet, all were filled with vague and unbounded expectations of almost fabulous glories. He swept away as it were the degenerate Knights of St. john from their rock of Malta, and sailed for Alexandria in Egypt, in the latter ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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 ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... upon a par with each other, as not to afford the best subjects between whom to graft a habit of entire, unalterable affection. In the scenes of vulgar and ordinary society, a permanent connection between persons of opposite sexes is too apt to degenerate into a scene of warfare, where each party is for ever engaged in a struggle for superiority, and neither will give way. A penetrating observer, with whom in former days I used intimately to converse, was accustomed to say, ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... customs, a man may spend half his life in the insane asylum or in the penitentiary, and still be the father of a dozen children with degenerate tendencies. There should be no reproduction from convicted criminals, insane persons, and other degenerates. Thieves, grafters, bribers and bribe-takers all belong in the same class, and it should not be left possible for them to reproduce their kind. They are a burden upon the public which ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... 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 ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... that the people of such a complexion were of a different species from the rest, it is probable that his own descendants, if removed to the climate to which this complexion is peculiar, would, in the course of a few generations, degenerate into the same colour. ...
— An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African • Thomas Clarkson
... 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
... identical ring that we put into the singing of "Ein'feste Burg ist unser Gott" and "Deutschland, Deutschland ueber Alles," is something that cannot be found among the other peoples, because they lack the freshness of national feeling, because they are degenerate.—K. ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... 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 ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... in the archipelago has been the formation of several tribes of half-breeds numbering considerably more than half a million. Side by side with them, and equally poor and wretched, are the Manthras, a cross between the Negritos and Malays and the degenerate descendants of the Saletes, a warlike tribe conquered by the Malayan Rajah Permicuri in 1411. Then come the Malay Sulus, all Mohammedans and still governed by their Sultan and their datos, feudal lords who, under the suzerainty ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis
... where are they? 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 ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... 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
... very aspect of those primitive and rugged trees, there was, methinks, a tanning principle which hardened and consolidated the fibres of men's thoughts. Ah! already I shudder for these comparatively degenerate days of my native village, when you cannot collect a load of bark of good thickness,—and we no longer produce ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... 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
... "sovereignty" fiction for getting a national convention, contained a careful definition of representative government. It showed that government by democracy—i.e. by popular meeting, suitable enough for small and primitive societies—must degenerate into hopeless confusion in a large population; that monarchy and aristocracy which sprang from the political confusion of the people must degenerate into incapacity. A representative government ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... the superior merits of his cause; and to excel, not only in the arts of war, but in those of composition. His epistle to the senate and people of Athens seems to have been dictated by an elegant enthusiasm; which prompted him to submit his actions and his motives to the degenerate Athenians of his own times, with the same humble deference as if he had been pleading, in the days of Aristides, before the tribunal of the Areopagus. His application to the senate of Rome, which was still permitted to bestow the titles of imperial power, was agreeable to the forms of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... features and intolerant dark eyes, even her snow-white hair and stooping back could not entirely remove the sense of fear which she inspired in those around her. Her thoughts and memories went back to harsher times, and she looked upon the England around her as a degenerate and effeminate land which had fallen away from the old standard ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... comique, the French stage is 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 into downright ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... instinct of procreation was strong within them. True, the assignable lands in Japan continued to grow smaller, but what reason was there for stifling the reproductive instincts of a vigorous people in a great unused world half populated by a degenerate humanity? ...
— In the Clutch of the War-God • Milo Hastings
... self-defence developed a Roman populace more fierce and savage and degenerate, while the growing importance of their pope beyond the city's walls brought wealth and splendor to his office. The result was that some very unsaintly popes were elected amid unseemly squabbles. The conditions surrounding the high office became so bad ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... 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
... rum, and send to them in exchange for their poor commodities? What about introducing new diseases, the offspring of vice, into the South Sea Islands, decimating and all but destroying the population? Is it not true that, as the prophet wailed of old about a degenerate Israel, we may wail about the beach-combers and other loafers that go amongst savage lands from England—'Through you the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles.' A Hindoo once said to a missionary, 'Your Book is very good. If you were ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... leads to temporary physical and mental suffering and is very prejudicial to the morals, but does not commonly result in permanent injury except in the degenerate. Children at an early age—three to four years—should be taught not to touch, handle, rub, or irritate their sexual organs in any way whatsoever except so far as is necessary in urination or in the ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various
... city of Savannah, there were just five hundred eighteen people when John Wesley was there. About half of these were degenerate sons of aristocrats, ex-convicts, soldiers of fortune, and religious enthusiasts—the rest ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... revived, however, and introduced by [407] degenerate scholasticism, and in the Age of Chimeras, is vague indifference of choice, or real chance, assumed in our souls; as if nothing gave us any inclination unless we perceived it distinctly, and as if an effect ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... of no little value, to such instructors as still adhere to the good old principles of the Church of England; in short, daily shaming us, by preserving a living representation of the opinions and habits of better times, as some historical record, which reproaches a degenerate posterity, by exhibiting the worthier deeds of their progenitors. In such a state of things, to what a depth public morals might sink, may be anticipated by those who consider what would then be the condition of society; who reflect how bad principles ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... us to be French pirates," answered Lord Foxham. "In these most troublesome and degenerate days we cannot keep our own shores of England; but our old enemies, whom we once chased on sea and land, do now range at pleasure, robbing and slaughtering and burning. It is the pity and reproach ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Boston, Mass., for instance, as there is but very little difference in the "rabble" of that city and the immoral degenerate class that infests the densely populated ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... scientific attitude no good 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 will glance through ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... forcing that herd of calves on old Dave at that scandalous price—after all, that's what really gaffed me the worst! My stars! If I could have seen that degenerate old crook again that night—but of course a trade's a trade, and I'd said it. Ain't I ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... canst never storm, but first Shall fall, thou and thy brother, blood-imbrued. Such curse I lately launched against you twain, Such curse I now invoke to fight for me, That ye may learn to honor those who bear thee Nor flout a sightless father who begat Degenerate sons—these maidens did not so. Therefore my curse is stronger than thy "throne," Thy "suppliance," if by right of laws eterne Primeval Justice sits enthroned with Zeus. Begone, abhorred, disowned, no son of mine, Thou vilest of the vile! ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... it, unless you intervene. This beautiful work of Art, that stands on the supposed site of the mythical Temple Bar, is to come down. What would our ancestors say if they were here? Would they not frown at their degenerate descendants? Every student of history knows that this Griffin was put up by universal consent, and considered one of the finest works of art of the nineteenth century. As, indeed, it was. It is full of historic memories. It was here that WELLINGTON met NAPOLEON after Waterloo; and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 22, 1892 • Various
... 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 ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... Pomaree who officiated as nurse to her children. According 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 ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... which may bear them to fortune. It is to them I appeal with confidence, because I feel I am pleading their cause—with confidence, because in them I repose my hopes. When nations fall, it is because a degenerate race intervenes between the class that created and the class that is doomed. Let them then remember what has been done for them. The leaders of their community have not been remiss in regard to their interests. Let them remember, that when the inheritance devolves upon them, they ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... permanently fill the office 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
... revive my courage. Do you remember that passage in Bacon, 'Mark what a courage a dog will put on when sustained by a nature higher than its own'? That is how it is with us women—those of the strong-minded tribe excepted; man is to us a kind of melior natura, without whose sustaining aid we degenerate ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... Or, boudoir-bred degenerate, If ne'er he knew the nobler state, The birk-clad brae, the roaring spate, The tod's dark lair, Too spiritless to grin ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 13, 1914 • Various
... 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
... of Eloquence; and he was not destitute of the qualifications of a fine orator, a good voice, graceful gesture, and forcible elocution. Warburton justly remarked, "Sometimes he broke jests, and sometimes that bread which he called the Primitive Eucharist." He would degenerate into buffoonery on solemn occasions. His address to the Deity was at first awful, and seemingly devout; but, once expatiating on the several sects who would certainly be damned, he prayed that the ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... into inefficiency. By taking away what the phrenologists call combativeness, we could doubtless stop prize-fight, but we might have a springless society. The only safe way is that taught by horticulture, to feed a fruit-tree generously, so that it has vigor enough to throw off its degenerate tendencies and its enemies, or, as the doctors say in medical practice, bring up the general system. That is to say, there is more hope for humanity in stimulating the good, than in directly suppressing the evil. It is on something like this line that the greatest advance has been ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... girl in the slums at home who had refused to be uplifted. "Aw, one fellow ain't enough. A plain ham is all right for some, but I want a club-sandwich." She shuddered now at the memory of the girl's words, and shrank together on her bed. Was she another of that sort, abnormal, degenerate, whose life must find its level at last in the sordid riot of promiscuity, disguising itself as love? If Claire had never touched the bed-rock of self-abasement before, she was doing it now, there ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... country Sunday; and think, if keeping 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 subjects, hear their duties explained ...
— The De Coverley Papers - From 'The Spectator' • Joseph Addison and Others
... sceptre, as if he had fallen into lunacy; and it was therefore natural for the people to have recourse to the same remedy: that the election of one king was a precedent for the election of another; and the government, by that means, would either degenerate into a republic, or, what was worse, into a turbulent and seditious monarchy: that the case was still more dangerous, if there remained a prince who claimed the crown by right of succession, and disputed, on so plausible ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... him with his confession of moral worthlessness and vows of unnatural perfection, and was too simple and earnest and good himself to realise that such states of the youthful mind are not unfrequently merely morbid and hysterical, and too often degenerate into ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... faith and leave others to enjoy theirs in peace. Cease to look upon yourselves as better than the rest of the world. I wish you well, for a pride founded on self-respect is pleasing in mine eyes; but take heed lest pride degenerate into vainglory. Farewell! rest assured ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... subordinate to that of availability. We have in our history too many instances of such intrigues and their dangerous consequences, to admit of their success at the present time, though they come in the seductive form of military glory. The degenerate system of party strategy culminated seven years ago in the election of James Buchanan. In pursuance of the secret and treacherous preparations for the present infamous rebellion, the people were ignorantly ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... destiny give The virgin fire and chaste ingenuousness Of their land's speech; and, reverenced, their hands Ran over potent strings. To me, the hopes Turbid with hate; to me, the senile rage; To me, the painted fancies clothed by art Degenerate; to me, the desperate wish, Not in my soul to nurse ungenerous dreams, But to contend, and with the sword of song ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... exactly pretty perhaps, but then she had such a sweet smile and her manner was so bright 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 neighbours ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... policeman is 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 ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... is to deteriorate.' The first object of Government should therefore be to arrest this impulse, and remedy the evil so far as may be accomplished. If the original settlers degenerate in their moral condition, their children sink still lower. When parents cease to feel the influence of those high and pure principles in which they were themselves brought up, they naturally forget to inculcate them in the minds of their ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... 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 ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... sufficiently 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 of miles—and a few days ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... that I was 'solemn' that day! I made my agonized protest on the spot, but it fell unheeded, and with satisfied sneer Eliza knit on, and the young Californian continued making the rosebuds. I gazed into space, and, when alone, wept for my degenerate countrywoman. I not only was 'solemn' that day, but I am profoundly 'solemn' whenever I think of that queenly woman and that cotton wash rag. (One can buy a whole dozen of these useful appliances, with red borders and fringed, for twenty-five cents.) Oh, Eliza, ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... been 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 it's folly to ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... adaptation to man's nature, and by its almighty tendency to promote his improvement and perfection; by the light, the life, the blessedness it gives; by the love it kindles; by the glorious transformations which it effects in depraved individuals and degenerate communities; by the peace, the hope, the joy it inspires; and by the courage and strength it imparts both in ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... Wayne, "at least not to this boy. I will never give my consent to putting a child of her age in the power of a degenerate little ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... head. "You degenerate beast!" he said. He said it evenly, without passion, and immediately withdrew his features from ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... various parts of this book (see index)—shows not only how selfish, but how shallow, fondness is. There are thousands of mothers in our modern cities who have not risen above this condition. An Italian, Ferriani, has written a book on degenerate mothers (Madri Snaturate), and I have in my note-books a statement of the London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children referring to a record of 2,141 cases of proved cruelty in the one month of August, 1898; which ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... be a better description of the greyhound of the present day; but it would not do for the antagonist of the wolf. The breed had probably begun to degenerate, and that process would seem to have slowly progressed. Towards the close of the last century, Lord Orford, a nobleman enthusiastically devoted to coursing, imagined, and rightly, that the greyhound of his day was deficient in courage and perseverance. He bethought himself how ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... others, 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 ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of so unnatural a distance as a Company will interpose between his sacred majesty and us his subjects from whose immediate protection we have received so many royal favours and gracious blessings. For, by such admissions, we shall degenerate from the condition of our birth, being naturalized under a monarchical government and not a popular and tumultuary government depending upon the greatest number of votes of persons of ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... and dry, and dull, and dead-alive, in the most comfortable office. And Wick itself had in those days a note of originality. It may have still, but I misdoubt it much. The old minister of Keiss would not preach, in these degenerate times, for an hour and a half upon the clock. The gipsies must be gone from their cavern; where you might see, from the mouth, the women tending their fire, like Meg Merrilies, and the men sleeping off their coarse potations; and where in winter gales, the surf would beleaguer them closely, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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, usually situated in a spot, selected for the beauty of the scene which ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 271, Saturday, September 1, 1827. • Various
... result of neglect to 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 ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... by the frontier line, were the broken fragments of Indians defeated in the era of King Philip's War, restrained within reservations, drunken and degenerate survivors, among whom the missionaries worked with small results, a vexation to the border towns,[46:3] as they were in the case of later frontiers. Although, as has been said, the frontier towns had scattered garrison houses, and palisaded ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... 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 could not be ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... our degenerate times, not only the great ones generally profess the neglect and contempt of so necessary a duty, both in their own persons and in the use of chaplains; but the great part of the commons are altogether strangers to it; many performing no part of the family worship ...
— The Auchensaugh Renovation of the National Covenant and • The Reformed Presbytery
... the fallacy of the photographic method; and from this fallacy arise the tedious minuteness of George Eliot in her more pedestrian moments, the interminable tea-cups of Anthony Trollope, and the mire of the imitators of Zola. Realism latterly, especially in France, has shown a tendency to degenerate into so-called "naturalism," a method of art which casts the unnatural emphasis of photographic reproduction upon phases of actual life which are base in themselves and unsignificant of the eternal instinct which leads men ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... pronunciation, Mudemmes. A legend says that, before the days of Pharaoh (always he of Moses), the Egyptians lived on pistachios which made them a witty, lively race. But the tyrant remarking that the domestic ass, which eats beans, is degenerate from the wild ass, uprooted the pistachio-trees and compelled the lieges to feed on beans which made them a heavy, gross, cowardly people fit only for burdens. Badawis deride "beaneaters" although they do not loathe the pulse like onions. The principal-result of a bean diet ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... are 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
... 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 ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... ancestors nor exhibit the superstitions known as "animism." It has been argued that these characteristics, taken together, indicate a primitive condition of humanity. On the other hand, many writers regard them as degenerate offshoots of negro-like races of larger stature and ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... seemest disposed to push an unguarded expression to extremity. I said equalling certain parts, meaning always, too, in certain things. Now it is known in philosophy, that the stature of man hath degenerated, and must degenerate in these regions, in obedience to established laws of nature; therefore it is meet that allowance should be made for some ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... writers, 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 of the predatory, disgusting animal, ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... have to 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 pure love of God (a fact which does not, ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... 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 ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... best rider among them, and the deadliest shot; and he soon became an oracle at the billiard-table, and a hero in the racquet-court. His refined education, however, fortunately preserved him from the fate of many other lively youths: he did not degenerate into a mere hero of sports and brawls, the genius of male revels, the arbiter of roistering suppers, and the Comus of a club. His boyish feelings had their play; he soon exuded the wanton heat of which a public school would have ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... an election in these degenerate later days is but a tame affair compared with those which took place during my first years of labor in political matters. As all know, the island was given away on one day to certain individuals, on conditions of which nothing more may be said here than that one was, ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... villages were destroyed by flames. Order and law had given way to savage power; and from the walls of many a ruined house of God the wooden image of the Saviour looked down with a face of anguish on the horrors of the degenerate times. ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... doing, she had occasion to speak with what she considered undue severity to one of the parties, she would immediately apologise with tears, and in the humblest manner entreat forgiveness. This extreme sweetness of disposition, however, did not degenerate into weakness; and she could testify the utmost displeasure, and reproved with energy when offences were committed against God. It was intolerable to her that His Divine Majesty should be insulted in her abode; and she, the gentlest and ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... Beatrice, "Judith has saved a sum that is wondrous in these degenerate days of maids in silk gowns, and she is wise enough to give 'Master Geoffrey' all the management of it. But if you are surprised now, what will you be by the end of the day? See if his advice is not asked in at least ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... shock, as if cold water had been dashed over him. Somehow it had not once occurred to him that the man could be one of the educated degenerate vicious for whom no power to help lay in any hands— yet he was not the common vagrant—and he was plainly on the point of producing an excuse ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... duty as well as privilege to perfect our constitution, and see that it does not wear out too soon, that we are not prematurely called away from our duties. And I bring it as serious charge against modern systems of education, that they tend to degenerate mankind, to impair the constitution and to shorten life. That we should not submit to this, but should all aspire to live a century or longer, if we have a fair opportunity, I seriously maintain, and that my readers may be inspired with a ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... unequalled power and in an exaggerated form the conviction that there was something wrong in the social order, which was suggested by the conditions of the time and was to bear fruit in later days. Satire, however, is by its nature negative; it does not present a positive ideal, and tends to degenerate into mere hopeless pessimism. Lofty poetry can only spring from some inner ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... and the tourist, with more convenience, will no longer be able to see the Ireland of centuries ago. The language is rapidly dying out. Not a word of Irish did I hear in Athlone, even on market day. The Westporters know nothing about it. The tongue of the brutal Saxon is everywhere heard. The degenerate Irish of these latter days cannot speak their own language. They preach, teach, quarrel, pray, swear, mourn, sing, bargain, bless, curse, make love in English. They are sufficiently familiar with the British vernacular to lie with the easy grace of a person speaking his mother-tongue. They ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... she answered, gaily, for she was before her time inasmuch as she was what is known in these days of degenerate speech as cock-sure. ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... ship in mid sea, and you 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 work hard ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... a close examination of his good and bad qualities; his probable motives for now behaving as he was doing, and the influence of the present tragedy upon his future as a painter. It would either destroy him or it would be the fire out of which he would rise a master; he would degenerate into a heartless worldling, which he might very well do, for he was fond of society, or he might become a gloomy recluse, and produce pictures which the multitude would never know were painted with tears and blood. ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... 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 alone ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... of the expansive phase. Often, indeed, it is disgraced by the characteristics of a slavish populace, a mean selfishness, a mad frivolity, and fawning adulation on the ruler who dispenses panem et circenses. Such has been the course of many a political reaction, from the time of degenerate Athens and imperial Rome down to the decay of Medicean Florence and the orgies of ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... With the ten million Ottoman Turks this will form a nation of fifty millions, advancing towards a great civilisation which may perhaps be compared to that of Germany, in that it will have the strength and energy to rise even higher. In some ways it will be even superior to the degenerate French and ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... 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
... notwithstanding the denomination they assume. But these last cannot stand the touch-stone of truth; there are mean plebeians, who sweat and struggle to maintain the appearance of gentlemen; and, on the other hand, there are gentlemen of rank who seem industrious to appear mean and degenerate; the one sort raise themselves either by ambition or virtue, while the other abase themselves by viciousness or sloth; so that we must avail ourselves of our understanding and discernment in distinguishing those persons, ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Latins left in Palestine had proved a most unsuccessful experiment; the climate enervated their constitutions; the poulains, as those were called who were born in the East, had all the bad qualities of degenerate races, and were the scorn, and derision of Arabs and Europeans alike; nor could the defence have been kept up at all, had it not been for the constant recruits from cooler climates. Adventurous young men tried their swords in ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... a rude child as the woman slowly, with shapeless red fingers, untied her bonnet-strings and revealed herself as something at once agelessly primitive and most modernly degenerate. The frizzed thicket of coarse hair which broke into a line of tiny, quite circular curls round her low forehead made Ellen remember side-streets round Gorgie and Dalry, which the midday hooters filled with factory girls horned under their shawls with Hinde's curlers; ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... suspected was at 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
... 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 vast tracts ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... 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
... agree with you. I think it is the business of imagination to project things as they really are. I don't want to slip out from under reality and see only beauty. Beware, Madeline, or you will degenerate into a mere optimist." ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... Mexico, whither he had traveled in his early youth. In his eyes, these Christians were base idolaters; for such was the impression made on him by the images and crucifixes that he beheld, and the marks of veneration that were paid to these idols of wood and stone, by the superstitious and degenerate Spaniards of that district. When, therefore, he heard Henrich endeavoring to inculcate the worship of Jesus, as the Son of God, on Oriana and Jyanough, he not unnaturally regarded him as a believer in all the deities whose images ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... Mendoza presents to the amateur of breathing sculpture failed to interest him. He was thinking of a far-off village on the other side of the equator, and of the wild girl with whom he used to play and quarrel, a creature of a different race from these degenerate mongrels. ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... met for the purpose of enrolling the new levies before each season of war, in order that the youths who were to fight the battles of Rome might realise the presence of Rome's great protecting deity. Even in the most degenerate days of the Roman religion, though Jupiter had suffered from the ridicule of playwrights or the speculations of philosophers, an orator's appeal to the Best and Greatest looking down on the Forum from his seat above it, could not fail to move the hearers; "Ille, ille Iuppiter restitit," cried ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... 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 at least show it just what a horrid little ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... been beautiful"—"he has 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 to hear ...
— Poems of Sentiment • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... conceive that I am at liberty even to you, Lucy, to mention circumstances that may cast a stain upon high integrity and spotless innocence, so long as it is possible the proofs I speak of may fail. In the latter case, so far at least as the world is concerned, justice would degenerate into scandal, whilst great evil and little good must be the consequence. I think I am bound in honor not to place old age, venerable and virtuous, on the one hand, and unsuspecting innocence on the other, in a contingency ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... different parts of the country. Despite the effort of the commissioners, the present method develops a public insistence that the commissioners are specially charged with supervision of radio affairs in the zone from which each is appointed. As a result there is danger that the system will degenerate from a national system into five regional agencies with varying practices, varying policies, competitive tendencies, and consequent failure to attain its utmost capacity for service to the people ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Herbert Hoover • Herbert Hoover
... 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 ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... 3dly. Because the 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, in ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... instead of a President, without reflecting they have no American citizens to support that Constitution... If they have the good sense to give the nobles, as nobles, some portion of the national power, this free constitution will probably last, But otherwise it will degenerate either into a pure monarchy, or a vast republic, or a democracy. Will the latter last? I doubt it. I am sure that it will not, unless the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... life should set before themselves. In medio tutissimus ibis is eminently true of the cultivation of character, and some of its best elements become pernicious in their extremes. Thus prudent forethought, which is one of the first conditions of a successful life, may easily degenerate into that most miserable state of mind in which men are perpetually anticipating and dwelling upon the uncertain dangers and evils of an uncertain future. How much indeed of the happiness and misery of men may be included under those two ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... be to secure the natural rights of man; and that when the government degenerates from the promotion to the destruction of that end, the right and the duty accrues to the people to dissolve this degenerate government and to institute another. The signers of the Declaration further averred, that the one people of the United Colonies were then precisely in that situation—with a government degenerated into tyranny, and called upon by the laws of nature and of nature's ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... our lanterns upon his yellow face that he inwardly cursed us all for Giaours, and wondered that Allah in His providence permitted us to exist. In fact, the Anatolian Turk is still a good Mohammedan of the time of Solyman, and not one of the degenerate race of Stamboul. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... British railway porter if you gave him a shilling. He said he was glad to leave England, it was demoralising to live there; you lost your sense of the dignity of labour, and in the course of time you were almost bound to degenerate into a swell. He expressed a good deal of sympathy with the aristocracy on this account, concentrating his indignation upon those who, as it were, made aristocrats of innocent human beings against their will. It was more than he would ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... truth of her made his brain whirl. To a man young and clean and fit to count as in the lists, to have heard her say the thing of a rival would have been hard enough, but base, degenerate, and of the world behind her day, to hear it while frenzied for her, was intolerable. And it was Mount Dunstan she bore herself so highly for. Whether melodrama is out of date or not there are, occasionally, some fine melodramatic touches in the ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... in a healthy body does not degenerate. The brain, though apparently unstable, is one of the most stable parts of ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... certain susceptibility of temper, that sometimes accompanies the pride of virtue, which indicates a quick sense of shame, and warm feelings of affection; in whatsoever manner this may be shown, it appears amiable and graceful. And if this sensibility degenerate into irritability, a lover pardons it in his mistress; it is her prerogative to be haughty; and if he be dexterous to seize "the moment of returning love," it is often his interest to promote quarrels, for the sake of the pleasures of reconciliation. ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... soldiers. Whenever there was an important question to be discussed, the soldiers demanded a voice and a share in the solution. These soldiers were called the republican army. Although the Northern troops have not yet become so degenerate, still they never hesitate to disobey the order of their superiors whenever they are ordered to proceed to distant localities. Now we have come to the point when we are deeply satisfied if the army of the Republic does not openly mutiny! We cannot expect any more ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... our public at a period when the growing spirit of eclecticism has prepared many ingenious and honest minds to listen to all new doctrines with a candor liable to degenerate into weakness. It is not impossible that the pretended evolution of great and mysterious virtues from infinitely attenuated atoms may have enticed a few over-refining philosophers, who have slid into a vague belief that matter subdivided grows less material, and approaches nearer to a spiritual ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... "Rights of Man," while relying on the popular "sovereignty" fiction for getting a national convention, contained a careful definition of representative government. It showed that government by democracy—i.e. by popular meeting, suitable enough for small and primitive societies—must degenerate into hopeless confusion in a large population; that monarchy and aristocracy which sprang from the political confusion of the people must degenerate into incapacity. A representative government was the control of a nation by persons ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... manipulating the mechanical resources of the stage, and in addition to these minor indispensable talents he was endowed with a lofty philosophic imagination and a wealth of poetic diction. Naturally, he had the defects of his great qualities; his ingenuity is apt to degenerate into futile embellishment; his employment of theatrical devices is the subject of his own good-humoured satire in No hay burlas con el amor; his philosophic intellect is more interested in theological mysteries than in human passions; and the delicate beauty ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... the lagoon of Campoma renders the north-west wind, which blows frequently after sunset, very pernicious to the inhabitants of the little town of Cariaco. Its influence can be the less doubted, as intermitting fevers are observed to degenerate into typhoid fevers, in proportion as we approach the lagoon, which is the principal focus of putrid miasms. Whole families of free negroes, who have small plantations on the northern coast of the gulf of Cariaco, languish in their hammocks from the beginning of the rainy season. These intermittent ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... universal appeal; that they might be as effective psychologically for the modern Englishman as for the ancient Jew. And he sees in this collection of ancient Oriental literature a corrective for some of the worst tendencies of a degenerate contemporary poetry. ...
— 'Of Genius', in The Occasional Paper, and Preface to The Creation • Aaron Hill
... 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 ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... 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 ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... tradition, education, or precedent, she had the Western girl's confidence in all things being possible, which made them so often probable. Mr. Mulrady looked at his daughter with mingled sentiments of pride and awe. Was it possible that this delicate creature, so superior to him that he seemed like a degenerate scion of her remoter race, was his own flesh and blood? Was she the daughter of her mother, who even in her remembered youth was never equipped like this? If the thought brought no pleasure to his simple, ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte
... but first Shall fall, thou and thy brother, blood-imbrued. Such curse I lately launched against you twain, Such curse I now invoke to fight for me, That ye may learn to honor those who bear thee Nor flout a sightless father who begat Degenerate sons—these maidens did not so. Therefore my curse is stronger than thy "throne," Thy "suppliance," if by right of laws eterne Primeval Justice sits enthroned with Zeus. Begone, abhorred, disowned, ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... are left without a vital, character building religion they will, because of their volatile natures, degenerate into the grossest perversions of morality. In such an event the Monroe Doctrine itself would become a menace. Unless we give these people the gospel it will be far better to annul the Monroe Doctrine and permit the stronger nations of Europe to enter for the sake of good government ...
— Brazilian Sketches • T. B. Ray
... sighed at us as degenerate Winslows, and Emily reserved to herself the right of believing that the daughter was 'a ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... surfaces 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 ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... 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 religious bigotry ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... 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, independence of character ...
— The Social Work of the Salvation Army • Edwin Gifford Lamb
... search of exploits, so did not care a jot which way he rode. In former days, he told me, there used to be a tournament in every town each Friday, where any stranger knight might show his prowess, winning honour and renown. But in these degenerate times it was necessary for the would-be champion to cry his challenge in some public place, or else arrange the fight beforehand meanly in some tavern. I should have been delighted with him on the whole, if he had not been quarrelsome ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... whom will be voters, while virtually all will have demonstrated their readiness to fight their country's battles with weapons far deadlier than bullets.... This assumes the legion will fulfill the part it has undertaken to play in the country's life. If it should degenerate into a selfish protective body, it will be worse than useless. But there is little reason to fear it will fall so far below its ideals while there is every reason to hope it will be a powerful factor in helping the country to ...
— The Story of The American Legion • George Seay Wheat
... Rome. Looking back to Republican Rome, and considering the state of public morals but fifty years before the emperors, we can with difficulty believe that the descendants of a people so severe in their habits could thus rapidly degenerate, and that a populace, once so hardy and masculine, should assume the manners which we might expect in the debauchees of Daphne (the infamous suburb of Antioch) or of Canopus, into which settled the very lees and dregs of the vicious Alexandria. ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... in her own opinions, was something of a philosopher in her attitude toward the contrary-minded, and even where her own children were concerned she never allowed her influence to degenerate into tyranny. When she found Madge, at the age of sixteen, more eager than ever before to study art, and nothing else, she told her husband that they might as well make up their minds to it, and, at the word, their minds were ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... of the legislature's work as a matter of reason, not of pressure, and the more common it is to hear condemnations of those portions of the process at which violence shows through the reasoning as though they were per se perverted, degenerate, and the bearers of ruin. There is, of course, a strong, genuine group opposition to the technique of violence, which is an important social fact; but a statement of the whole legislative process in terms of the discussion forms used by that anti-violence interest group ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... followed up his words by forming the alliance against which his father had warned him, Mr. Sealy, in his anger, determined to carry out his threat, and cut his son off without a cent. But when he found he was likely, if left much longer with his present surroundings, to degenerate into a dissipated loafer, he relented, and now determined to offer it to him if he ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... 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 very ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... The practice of snuff-taking has made the sneezing at anything a mark of contempt, in these degenerate days.] ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 • Various
... Placide! it 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 ...
— 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
... improvement; they have a natural grace and ease in their manner, and make excellent wives and mothers. This character must not, however, be taken in an unlimited sense, for we cannot expect this rule to be without its exceptions, and it is true that some of these females do degenerate, and copy after the manners of the creoles, or white natives; but this is only the case when, by their intercourse with the whites, their Indian blood is merged and lost in the European. That part of the population in which is blended the blood of the Chinese and Tagalogs is ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... for his work. But, not content with this, he began to ordain young men who knew no Latin, and even criminals, setting forth the view that ordination was a sort of second baptism, which purged all crimes — a most convenient theory, and one which is not half enough insisted on in these degenerate days. ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... "—a degenerate—a dope addict whose greatness lay only in the realms of his sensual dreams. A weak, pitiful figure bereft of followers, cringing ...
— The Clean and Wholesome Land • Ralph Sholto
... 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 ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... 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 at once he finds the second phase in a crescendo ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... every threatened gate, never doubting that at the sight of it the Sultan and his unbaptized hordes will be reft of breath of body or take to flight.... This we pray of Your Majesty, that the Mother of God may in these degenerate days have back the honor and worship accorded her by the Emperors and Greeks of ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... creels." The stranger is puzzled by this surprising tongue, but the fisher is proud of it. No words can express his scorn for a boy who learns to talk "Massingem" (which is the fisher's word for English): he scouts that degenerate boy and refuses to consort with him. When the fisher-lad gets measured for his first oilskins he is very proud. To "get away Norrad" is the right of men; and he feels himself manly as he sits amidships while the coble skims out into the bay. He is usually sent ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... one has a subject, and I certainly seem to have hit upon yours, Amy. There, you little thing, I was only in fun,' dabbing her sister's forehead; 'but don't you be a silly puss, and don't you think flightily and eloquently about degenerate impossibilities. There! Now, I'll go ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... "they call this man as good as me," Bacon, in one of his finest antitheses, draws a contrast between the love of Excellence and the love of Excelling. Carlyle is possessed by both; he had none of the exaggerated caution which in others of his race is apt to degenerate into moral cowardice: but when he thought himself trod on he became, to use his own figure, "a rattlesnake," and put out fangs like those of the griffins curiously, if not sardonically, carved on the tombs of his family in the churchyard ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... off the shore, and we found ourselves again in the great stalwart roast-beef world; the stout British steamer bearing out of the bay, whose purple waters had grown more purple. The sun had set by this time, and the moon above was twice as big and bright as our degenerate moons are. ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... mean speculation—although speculation when it does not degenerate into mere gambling has a proper and legitimate place in the scheme of things economic. Finance most emphatically does not mean fleecing the public, nor fattening parasitically off the industry ...
— High Finance • Otto H. Kahn
... Roughly speaking, the Catholics stood for the defence of religious interests, more especially in the domain of education and relief, the Liberals for the supremacy of a nominally neutral State in all public matters. It is easy to realize how this purely political quarrel could degenerate into a conflict of ideals, some ultramontanes distrusting the motives of "atheists" and ignoring the public spirit of men who did not share their creed, while some agnostics, steeped in the narrow doctrines of Voltaire and Diderot, ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... pit act of that degenerate, Bosco, who ate living snakes, and whose act gave rise to the well-known barkers' cry HE EATS 'EM ALIVE! If the reader wishes further description of this creature's work, he must find it in my book, The Unmasking ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... 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
... 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, ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... fine arts were lost, and their productions literally buried in the wreck. The minds of the composite nations that arose in Europe had no guide. Men were left to their own instincts, only faintly aided by the ruins and traditions of degenerate Rome; and each series of countries had its own style of art, framed or adopted by the genius of the people. During the middle ages, the style most general in Northern Europe was the Gothic; and by that term ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... 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 walked ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... and revolutionary refrain which on days of riot had been uttered by the lips of jeering workmen. On this occasion he deplored the moral degeneration of the army, and thought with a bitter smile that his old comrade Greatauk, the head of this degenerate army, basely exposed him to the malice of an unpatriotic government. And he promised himself that he would make ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... the liberality of others, and thereby sanctioning the stimulating of Christian liberality, in the same way as other graces may legitimately be stimulated, by example. That is delicate ground to tread on, and needs caution if it is not to degenerate into an appeal to rivalry, as it too often does, but in itself is perfectly legitimate and wholesome. But, passing from that incitement, Paul rests his plea ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... their varying phases of cosmogonic thought, there had been ever present the idea that past times were not as recent times; that in remote epochs the earth had been the scene of awful catastrophes that have no parallel in "these degenerate days." Naturally enough, this thought, embalmed in every cosmogonic speculation of whatever origin, was appealed to in explanation of the destruction of these hitherto unimagined hosts, which now, thanks to science, rose from their abysmal slumber as incontestable, but also ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... with particular reference to Basque women, in which I maintained that they sacrificed natural kindliness and sympathy on the altars of honour and religion, whereupon the Daughters of Mary of San Sebastian made answer, charging that I was a degenerate son of their city, who had robbed them of their honour, which was absolutely contrary to the fact. In passing, they suggested to the editor of the Nuevo Mundo that he should not permit me to write again for ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... shiftless, thriftless life and seems satisfied merely to exist. He has, unfortunately, inherited more of the baser than the better qualities of his ancestors, and, to all appearance, is destined to further degenerate. The American is the last comer and has already pushed civilization and commerce into the remotest corners and, as ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... intense paganism of the city, the absence of all earnestness of character and true religious life. He was disappointed, as afterward Augustine was when he went to Rome. He expected to find intellectual life at least, but the pretenders to superior knowledge in that degenerate university town merely traded on the achievements of their ancestors, repeating with dead lips the echo of the old philosophies. They were marked only by levity, mockery, sneers, and contemptuous arrogance; idlers were they, in quest of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... the great purpose of their preservation and enforcement. That which was experimental in our plan of government was the question whether democratic rule could be so organized and conducted that it would not degenerate into license and result in the tyranny of absolutism, without saving to the people the power so often found necessary of representing or destroying their enemy, when he was found in the person ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... on that) selected to bring him into juxtaposition with the man whose life was to be inexorably mingled with his own from that time henceforward. The actual meeting place was a tin-roofed grog shanty kept by a giant Kaffir woman and a sore-eyed degenerate white man, whose subjection to his black paramour had earned for him among the blacks on the field the terrible sobriquet of "White Harry." Here, one night, Thalassa sat drinking bad beer and planning impossible schemes for ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... repassed before the window—Sorenson's figure, of course. Brute, coward, degenerate he was, and to be dealt with as such. Not only as such, indeed, but as a wretch who had dared to touch Janet Hosmer against her will, to drag her from her home to this lonely spot by violence for ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... 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 ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... 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 ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... sublime of the ridiculous. Whatever is the order of the day, the highest ton among the whites is instantly adopted, with the most ludicrous exaggeration, by the blacks: if small brims be worn by the beaus of the former, they degenerate to nothing on the skulls of the latter; if width be the order of the day, the coloured gentlemen rush out in unmeasurable umbrellas of felt, straw, and gossamer. A long-tailed white is, in comparison, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... than briefly mention the minor sculptors of this group would be impossible. Mino di Giovanni, called Da Fiesole, was characterised by grace that tended to degenerate into formality. The tombs in the Abbey of Florence have an almost infantine sweetness of style, which might be extremely piquant, were it not that Mino pushed this quality in other works to the verge of mannerism.[104] Their architectural features are the same as those ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... retrograding as to produce a further advance. Were there no 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 ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... the question of questions; the one thing needful to be understood both by the leaders of thought and the rulers of men. Unless correct and rational views are entertained on this subject, internal legislation will be perpetually at fault, external policy in a false direction. Reform will degenerate into revolution, conquest into desolation. The greatest calamities, both social and foreign, recorded in the history of the last half century, have arisen from a neglect of the maxims of Montesquieu, as to the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... Margraviate of Reisenburg, with an increased territory and population, and governed with consummate wisdom, began to be considered the most flourishing of the petty states in the quarter of the empire to which it belonged. On the contrary, our princely and patriotic friend, mortified by the degenerate condition of his country and the prosperity of his rival house, quitted Little Lilliput, and became one of those emigrant princes who abounded during the first years of the Revolution in the northern courts of Europe Napoleon soon appeared upon the stage; ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... Dorris! What would not I—I, your great-granddaughter, in this degenerate year of 1885—give to see you just as you looked then, thinking over this and that in a manner not so very unlike the maidens of this generation! Ah, well! I must perforce content myself with that miniature of you as "Madam," in your lavender brocade, with the feathers ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 5, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 5, May, 1886 • Various
... satirist and humourist, I cannot place him so high as some of his admirers do; and the purely polemical portions of his poems, those in which he puts forth his antagonism to tyrants and religions and custom in all its myriad forms, seem to me to degenerate at intervals into ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... voice, which had what, in the satirical writings of the last century, used to be called "an aristocratic drawl," and his pronunciation was archaic. Like other high-bred people of his time, he talked of "cowcumbers" and "laylocks"; called a woman an "oo'man," and was much "obleeged" where a degenerate race is content to ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... his sister and her husband. But I must not distress you with sordid details. Suffice it to say, I turned at last like the proverbial worm. I applied for a divorce ten months ago. It was granted, provisionally as I say. He is a degenerate. He was unfaithful to me in every sense of the word. But in spite of all that, the court in granting me the separation, took occasion to placate national honour by giving him the child during the year, pending ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... pulpit, I shall abstain from planning his battles. Patience is the armour of a nation; and in our desire for peace, let us never be willing to surrender the Constitution bequeathed us by fathers at least as wise as ourselves, (even with Jefferson Davis to help us,) and, with those degenerate Romans, tuta et presentia quam ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... 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 ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... the general 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 ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
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