"Decadency" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in history, especially in that of France, that each race has its point of departure, its culmination, and its decadence. Look at the direct line of the Capets; starting from Hugues Capet, they attained their highest grandeur in Philippe Auguste and Louis XI., and fell with Philippe V. and Charles IV. Take the Valois; starting with Philippe VI., ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... political influence in that section, and tended directly and indirectly to the subservience of Serbia to Austria-Hungary, the political and territorial isolation of Montenegro, and the isolation and political decadence ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Cosmetics appeared in the pages of an important London Quarterly, sets of which are still occasionally to be found in booksellers' catalogues at a high price, though the American millionaire collector has made it one of the rarest of finds. These were the days of his youth, the golden age of 'decadence.' For is not decadence merely a fin de siecle literary term synonymous with the 'sowing his wild oats' of our grandfathers? a phrase still surviving in agricultural districts, according to Mr. Andrew Lang, Mr. ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... shrouded under a forest growth. The mechanical city will be neglected, tumbled into ruins, buried beneath the silt of the passing centuries. The sun will slowly rise—a giant dull red ball, burning out, cooling. And the Earth will cool. Humans, perhaps, will have passed decadence and reverted to savagery. Perhaps the polar ice-caps will again come down, and ice slowly cover the dying world. All nature will be struggling and dying, with the sun a red ball turning dark ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... repetitions of others, and selected those which would be serviceable for the inculcation of propriety and righteousness. Ascending as high as Hsieh and Hu-k, and descending through the prosperous eras of Yin and Ku to the times of decadence under kings Y and L, he selected in all 305 pieces, which he' sang over to his lute, to bring them into accordance with the musical style of the Sho, the W, the Y, and ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... University, by Doctor Koopman, Librarian of that University, with approval, and gives it a meaning of the greatest social helpfulness. In his view it is not a misfortune that society is being to so great an extent recruited from the so-called "lower classes." If there are signs of decadence anywhere, he thinks, they are not in the "proletariat;" they are among the "pampered rich," not ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... the danger threatening their dominion, and I went in detail through the various trades wherein this danger was apparent, showing how great they had been and what was their condition to-day. In different trades the decadence had begun at different periods; to take the same starting year of comparison in each case would, therefore, have been a stupid error. "Made in Germany" is a call to arms, not an academic disquisition on ...
— Are we Ruined by the Germans? • Harold Cox
... anger did not last long, although his distrust remained fixed. Talleyrand's pride underwent numerous eclipses. Commencing, however, from that day, the separation between them became irreparable; and when the emperor's decadence began, Talleyrand was already gained over to other hopes, and ready to ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... sometimes because of their mitres, sometimes because of their crowns; lastly, fashions, even more grotesque and foolish, which, since the anarchical and splendid deviations of the Renaissance, have followed each other in the necessary decadence of architecture. Fashions have wrought more harm than revolutions. They have cut to the quick; they have attacked the very bone and framework of art; they have cut, slashed, disorganized, killed the edifice, in form as in the ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... glass, and it makes the view no clearer, but rather dimmer—how can the two diminutive circular panes carried before the eyes produce any other effect? Besides, their sight as a rule is good when they are young, and as they progress in life they are not conscious of decadence in it; from infancy to old age the world looks, they imagine, the same; the grass as green, the sky as blue as ever, and the scarlet verbenas in the grass just as scarlet. The man lives in his sight; it is his life; ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... their country might be free? the name of her people great? In the former they lost, as the ends for which they fought and died were never consummated. To-day, after nearly a half century has passed, when we look around among the young and see the decadence of chivalry and noble aspirations, the decline of homage to women, want of integrity to men, want of truth and honor, individually and politically, are we not inclined, at times, to think those men died in vain? We gained the shadow; have we the substance? We gained an unparalleled ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... a catholic taste, is interested in all forms of art; but he finds beauty where it truly exists and does not allow the nightmare of imagination to mislead him. That which is not beautiful from one point of view or another is not art, but decadence. That which is technical to the exclusion of other elements remains technique pure and simple, workmanship—the bare bones of art. A thing is not art simply because it is fantastic. It may be interesting as showing to what degree some imaginations can become diseased, but it is not pleasing ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... which he wasted no small time. It was to his neighbour, as he was fond of calling him, Sir Robert Hazlewood of Hazlewood, the head of an ancient and powerful interest in the county, which had in the decadence of the Ellangowan family gradually succeeded to much of their authority and influence. The present representative of the family was an elderly man, dotingly fond of his own family, which was limited to an only son and daughter, and stoically ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... and on May tenth, 1774, the old King had died; Louis XVI now reigned. The inertia which marked the brilliant decadence of the Bourbon monarchy was finally overcome. The new social forces were partly emancipated. Facts were examined, and their significance considered. Bankruptcy was no longer a threatening phantom, but a menacing reality of the most serious nature. Retrenchment and ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... either the color part is bound eventually to drive out the local part or the local drive out all color. Here a process of cancellation or destruction is going on—a kind of "compromise" which destroys by deadlock; a compromise purchasing a selfish pleasure—a decadence in which art becomes first dull, then dark, then dead, though throughout this process it is outwardly very much alive,—especially after it is dead. The same tendency may even be noticed if there is over-insistence upon the national in art. Substance tends to create affection; manner ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... have been propounded as to the decadence of the church, which has become painfully apparent when great moral issues have been at stake. That the church could stamp out the liquor traffic has often been said, and yet although general conferences and assemblies have met year after year, and passed resolutions declaring that "the ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... enormous agricultural improvement which you will in Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, or the Lothians, yet you shall see enough to-day to settle for you the question whether we old-country folk are in a state of decadence and ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... artistic purity of a novel depicting the life of bawds. Some of the signatories were among the greatest names in contemporary literature, or the most austere of critics. A domestic poet, bourgeois and a Catholic, gave his blessing as an artist to a detailed description of the decadence of the Greeks. There were enthusiastic praises of novels in which the course of Lewdness was followed through the ages: Rome, Alexandria, Byzantium, the Italian and French Renaissance, the Age of Greatness ... Nothing was omitted. Another cycle of studies was devoted to the various countries ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... supports," said Madame de Stael; and what more sure support in the decadence which threatens us, than a positive science deduced from irrefragable law! I say irrefragable with conviction. Though human laws be subject to change, the laws of nature are shown to be immutable, at least so far as the observations of learned men of all ages ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... super-favourite, five arch-favourites and fifteen favourites, and cheering them again and again, and sending the curtain up and down and up and down time after time. He could not bear that what he detested should be deliriously admired. He went so far as to form views about the decadence of the theatre as an institution. Most of all he was disgusted because his beloved Eve was not disgusted. Eve said placidly that she did not think much of the affair, but that she had thoroughly ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... slanted upward from its crest—red debris that had once been steel. A launching catapult for the last space ships built by the gods in exodus, perhaps it was—half a million years ago. Man was gone from the Earth. Glacial ages, war, decadence, disease, and a final scattering of those ultimate superhumans to newer worlds in other solar ...
— The Eternal Wall • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... appreciated the blessings of war much less than does Gen. von Bernhardi, and they valued peace, not war, as a means to civilization and culture. They had not learned in the school of Treitschke that peace means decadence and war ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... people are capable of receiving, teaching ever the same morality, inculcating the use of similar means, employing the same significant symbols. The savage religions—animism and the rest—are degenerations, the results of decadence, distorted and dwarfed descendants of true religious beliefs. Sun-worship and pure forms of nature-worship were, in their day, noble religions, highly allegorical but full of profound truth and ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... that masterpiece? Who could rival Arthur Golding's rendering of the Metamorphoses of Ovid, or Francis Hicke's masterly rendering of Lucian's True History? But eternal life means endless change and in nothing is this truth more strikingly manifest than in the growth and decadence of living languages and in the translation of dead tongues into the ever changing tissue of the living. Were it not for this, no translation worthy of the name would ever stand in need of revision, except in instances ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... the main, free from the abuses and miseries of the stage in English-speaking lands, and, above all, from that all-pervading lubricity and pornographic stench which have made the French theater of the last half of the nineteenth century a main cause in the decadence of the French people. In most German towns of importance one finds the drama a part of the daily life of its citizens—ennobling in its higher ranges, and in its influence ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... above all things to be absorbed in the daily consumption of butter, and the children's clothes, or is she absorbed in these things because the man who was to have widened the horizon of her life only limits it by his own decadence? ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... Europe as represented by the State, therefore, or by the industrial powers of wealth, or by the alluring charms of decadence in art and literature, or by missionary and educational institutions, would I have you turn for light and guidance. No: from these plagues of civilisation protect us, Allah! No: let us have nothing to do with that practical ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... mortal to the im- 244:27 mortal, from evil to good, or from good to evil. Such admissions cast us headlong into darkness and dogma. Even Shakespeare's poetry pictures age as infancy, as 244:30 helplessness and decadence, instead of assigning to man the everlasting grandeur and immortality of development, power, ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... orders were hardly more reputable. A great number of these had sprung up in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; their reputation for sanctity soon stimulated the liberality of the faithful, and thus fatally brought about their own decadence. Few communities had shown the discretion of the first monks of the Order of Grammont in the diocese of Limoges. When Stephen de Muret, its founder, began to manifest his sanctity by giving sight to a blind man, his disciples took alarm at the thought of the wealth and notoriety which was likely ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... has nothing else and higher to offer; so, when it fails to imitate, we call it trash. But the theory of Aeschylean Tragedy is the illumination of life. Illumination of life, through a medium quite unlike life. Art begins on a spiritual plane, and works down to realism in its decadence; then it ceases to be art at all, and becomes merely copying what we imagine to be nature,—nature, often, as seen through a diseased ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... who could only have been developed in the rottenness of a decadence. Fancy an able-bodied, attractive fellow living with ease from day to day without doing a stroke of honest labour. He keeps clear of the police; he gratifies every want, yet he has the intellect of a flash ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... should think it worth while to write—a species which he contrasted in strong terms with the productions of illustrious but overrated authors in this branch. Pepin's romance was to present the splendours of the Roman Empire at the culmination of its grandeur, when decadence was spiritually but not visibly imminent: it was to show the workings of human passion in the most pregnant and exalted of human circumstances, the designs of statesmen, the interfusion of philosophies, the rural relaxation and converse of immortal poets, the majestic ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... insecurity of ignorance and fear pervade the world in which they move. Maeterlinck is perhaps one of the first prophets, one of the first artistic reformers and seers to herald the end of the decadence just described. The gloom of the spiritual atmosphere, the terrible, but all-guiding hand, the sense of utter fear, the feeling of having strayed from the path, the confusion among the guides, all these are clearly felt in his works.[Footnote: To the ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... eyes of the natural primitive man, believing what he saw. He had seen in Carley Burch the paraded charm, the unashamed and serene front, the woman seeking man. Haze Ruff had been neither vile nor base nor unnatural. It had been her subjection to the decadence of feminine dress that had been unnatural. But Ruff had found her a lie. She invited what she did not want. And his scorn had been commensurate with the falsehood of her. So might any man have been justified in his insult to her, in his rejection of her. Haze Ruff had found ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... ceases to tread with feathery feet, and the years grow self-asserting, italicize themselves in passing; and across the dial of woman's beauty the shadow of decadence falls aslant. But although Mrs. Orme had offered sacrifice to that inexorable Terminus, who dwells at the last border line of youth, the ripeness and glow of her extraordinary loveliness showed as yet no ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... bed rock, and in the tropics this decomposition is more rapid than in temperate climes. In Guayaquil, "notwithstanding the fact that the same soil has been cropped consecutively for over a hundred years, there is as yet no sign of decadence, nor does a necessity yet arise for artificial manure."[1] However, manures are useful with all soils, and necessary with many. Happy is the planter who is so placed that he can obtain a plentiful supply of farmyard or pen manure, ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... power which prepares a grave for its possessor, for there is not a prophet who hath not in his lifetime witnessed the decadence of four kings; as it is said (Isa. i. 1), "The vision of Isaiah ... in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah" (see also Hosea ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... mining has been an important source of wealth in Milo from the time of the ancient Greeks. Up to the end of last century the sulphur was chiefly extracted at Kalamo, but since that time it has only been mined on the east coast of the island. The decadence of Zephyria has nearly corresponded to this transference. The sulphurous emanations no longer reach the place, their passage being blocked by the mountain mass. Once more, on the west side of the marshy and fever-infested plain of Catania, traversed by the Simeto, is a sulphur mine, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... judgments fall short of acuteness and if its standards of achievement are low. It needs but a quickening spirit upon the throne, always the traditional centre of its respect, to rise from even the appearance of decadence. There is a new quality seeking expression in England like the rising of sap in the spring, a new generation asking only for such leadership and such emancipation from restricted scope and ungenerous hostility as a King alone can ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... Rashi and the Biblical Movement in France—The Commentary on the Pentateuch by Samuel ben Meir-His Disciples-Joseph Kara and Joseph Bekor-Shor-Their Rational Exegesis-Decadence of Biblical Exegesis-The Tossafot on the Pentateuch; Chief Collections; their Character-Rashi and Christian Exegesis- Nicholas de Lyra and Luther-Decadence of French Judaism from the Expulsion of ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... accumulating in the hands of the powerful. The separation of power and riches kept the distribution of the latter more nearly equable. Professor Dill, the author of "Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire," has brought afresh to our mind that one cause of the decadence of the Roman Empire, was the permission given to the nobility to engage in trade, and the consequent monopoly of wealth and power by a minority of ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... part," went on Sir Charles in a somewhat disappointed tone, "I am one who views with regret the decadence of a ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... sixteen months immediately preceding the death of Louis XV., Madame du Barry (originally a courtesan,) had drawn from the royal treasury no less than 2,450,000 francs, or equal to about L200,000 of our present money. ["Histoire de la Decadence de la Monarchie Francaise," par Soulavie l'Aine, iii. 330.] "La corruption," says Lacretelle, "entrait dans les plus paisibles menages, dans les familles les plus obscures. Elle [Madame du Barri] etait ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... Even were the Persians be blotted out of existence as a nation, even though Tehran, and Meshed, and Shiraz were to share the fate of Persepolis and Susa, it would yet remain as a portrait of unrivalled humour and accuracy of a people who, though now in their decadence, have played an immense and still play a not wholly insignificant part in the complex drama of Asiatic politics. It is the picture of a people, light-hearted, nimble-witted, and volatile, but subtle, hypocritical, ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... my interest in such things is merely academic—you will then lead me hither and yon, as your whim lists, and show me how Paris amuses itself in these days of its nocturnal decadence. You will dutifully pretend to drink much more champagne than is good for you and to be enjoying yourself as you seldom have before. If I discover an interest in people I may chance to see, you will be good enough to tell ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... sentimentality which vitiates practically all Anglo-Saxon art. And I have stood in the streets of New York, as I have stood in the streets of London, and longed with an intense nostalgia for one hour of Paris, where, amid a deplorable decadence, intellectual honesty is widely discoverable, and where absolutely straight thinking and talking is not mistaken ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... restrictions even upon the most high-spirited. At that moment Madame de Vallorbes was ripe for the commission of atrocities. Had she been—as she coveted to be—a lady of the Roman decadence it would have gone hard with her waiting-woman, who might have found herself ordered for instant execution or summarily deprived of the organs of speech. But, latter-day sentiment happily forbidding such active expressions of ill-feeling on the part of the employer ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... at last it becomes clear to you. But you are dying, and it is too late for wisdom to come to the Jivros. Once you set your feet on the path to greatness; but when you did evil, your feet naturally turned to the downward path of decadence. Evil is not a way of life, it is a way ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... lightsome! The brewers and distillers who put the mirth-inspiring beverages into the market receive more consideration, and a great deal more money, than an average European prince;—and yet the poor dry-rotted unfortunate whose decadence we are tracing is like a leper in the scattering effects which he produces during his shaky promenade. He is indeed alone in the world, and brandy or gin is his only counsellor and comforter. As to character, ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... assumption that "Philaster" was earlier than "Cymbeline," we find Professor Thorndike asserting that "Cymbeline" "shows a puzzling decadence" in style, "an increase in the proportion of double endings," "a constant deliberate effort to conceal the metre"; "the verse constantly borders on prose"; "Shakspere's structure in general is like Fletcher's, particularly in the use of parentheses and contracted ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... other, their faces gravely troubled, aghast, as though they had glimpsed the end of civilized society, as though they felt that they had lived too long into an age of decadence and open shame. Constance's face showed despair—she might have been about to be pitched into the gutter without a friend and without a shilling—but Sophia's had the ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... dissipation and excess, and ever hope to make up their losses by rigid surveillance in later years." "The sins of youth are expiated in age," is a proverb which daily examples illustrate. In proportion as puberty is precocious, will decadence be premature; the excesses of middle life draw heavily on the fortune of later years. "The mill of the gods grinds slow, but it grinds exceedingly fine," and though nature may be a tardy creditor, she is found at last to be ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... of Respectability, but the end is still far distant. We are now in a period of decadence growing steadily more and more acute. The old gods are falling about us, there is little left to raise our hearts and minds to, and amid the wreck and ruin of things only a snobbery is left to us, thank heaven, deeply graven in the English heart; the snob is now ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... modern romantic love in connection with marriage seems to be found in the late Greek world under the Roman Empire.[72] That is commonly called a period of decadence. In a certain limited sense it was. Greece had become subjugated to Rome. Rome herself had lost her military spirit and was losing her political power. But the fighting instinct, and even the ruling spirit, are not synonymous with civilization. The "decline and fall" of empires ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... usual caution, I lamented to my friend F—— of the neglect in which readers held me, to which the above experience in a library was a rare exception. F—— offered me such consolation as he could, deplored the general taste and the decadence of the times, and said that as praise was sweet to everyone, he, as far as he himself was able, offered it anonymously to those who merited it. He was standing recently in a picture gallery, when a long-haired man who stood before one of the pictures was pointed out ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... Hodgson was told that the Bonpo sect still possessed numerous and wealthy Vihars (or abbeys) in Tibet. But from the information of the Catholic missionaries in Eastern Tibet, who have come into closest contact with the sect, it appears to be now in a state of great decadence, "oppressed by the Lamas of other sects, the Peunbo (Bonpo) think only of shaking off the yoke, and getting deliverance from the vexations which the smallness of their number forces them to endure." In June, 1863, apparently from ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... confirmations; the analyst from this material formed the due equation of high birth; the philosopher traced the course of aristocracy, from its primeval rise in crude strength or subtlety, through centuries of power, to picturesque decadence, and the beginnings of its last stand. Even the artist might here, perchance, have seized on the dry ineffable pervading spirit, as one visiting an old cathedral seems to scent out the constriction of ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of duty waning? The alarmists say it is and point to the increase of divorce, falling off in church attendance, and the unrest among the laboring classes as evidence that there is a decadence. Pleasure is sought, excitement is the goal, and sober, solid duty is "forgotten." They point out a resemblance to the decadent days of Rome, in the rise of luxury and luxurious tastes, and indicate that duty ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... maintain a barbarian religion stricken with moral decadence were in vain. On the very spot on which the last taurobolia took place at the end of the fourth century, in the Phrygianum, stands to-day the basilica ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... part of their year, or else suffer in deeper ways than death. The City will do for those younger-souled peoples that have not had their taste of its cruel order and complicating pressures; for the Mediterranean peoples already touched with decadence; for the strong yet simple peasant vitalities of Northern Europe, but the flower of the American entity has already remained too long in the ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... "a famine of the word of the Lord" in England, and now men and women came hungering and ready to be fed. Perhaps, if we had borne eight years' famine, we should not quite so readily cry out that the provisions are too abundant. An outcry for short sermons has always hitherto marked the spiritual decadence of a nation. "Behold, what a weariness is it!" There is another inscription on the reverse side of the seal. "I have no pleasure in you, saith ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... sing well never speak or sing the vowel sound ah otherwise than mixed, and only the neglect of this mixture could have brought about the decadence of the Italian teaching of song. In Germany no attention is paid to it. The ah, as sung generally by most Italians of the present day, quite flat, sounds commonplace, almost like an affront. It can range itself, that is connect itself, with no other vowel, ...
— How to Sing - [Meine Gesangskunst] • Lilli Lehmann
... close of the great series of tragedies of blood and revenge, in which "The Spanish Tragedy" and "Hamlet" are landmarks, but before decadence can fairly be said to have set in. He, indeed, loads his scene with horrors almost past the point which modern taste can bear; but the intensity of his dramatic situations, and his superb power of flashing in a single line a light into the ...
— The Duchess of Malfi • John Webster
... men and women, are didactic exhibitions of the author himself, projected into various personages, and all bearing an unmistakable family resemblance—this it is that is at the bottom of the sudden decadence into which the writings of one or two of our more prolific romancers have fallen, past all redemption; and this is the great fault of Mr. JAMES. 'To be successful in the exact delineation of character,' says the reviewer, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... valuable parts of Burke's just published "Anecdotes of the Aristocracy," are a species of essay on the fortunes of families. The following is from a chapter on their decadence: ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... away and dumped into the Red Sea; or the innocuous but highly frivolous tales of Miss Laura Jean Diplodocus—they would hardly accept from me as worthy of serious attention such admonitions as I am constantly giving them on the subject of the decadence of literature when I find them poring over the novels of the day. Consequently even this usual solace of old age is denied to me, ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... produce such exaggerated notions of what constitutes hardship, which leads men and women to cherish such a degree of ease, makes inevitably for inefficiency, a decline in the capacity to endure and to achieve, and for a general social decadence. ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... history of chariot racing. One marvels at the man who, in such a period, preserved this mood of liberal leisure. His style is perfectly suited to the matter; diffuse, ornate, amusingly affected; altogether a precious mode of writing, characteristic of literary decadence. When the moment demands it, he is pompously grandiloquent; in dealing with a delicate situation, he becomes involved and obscure. We perceive in him a born courtier, a proud noble, a statesman of high purpose and no little sagacity; ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... purpose of raising a barrier against the advance of the warlike men of the North. They further planted a colony of veterans in the Black Forest neighbourhood in order that invasion might be resisted from that side. But as the Empire began to exhibit signs of decadence the barbarians were quick to recognize the symptoms of weakness in those who barred their advance to the wealthy South, the objective of their dreams, hurled themselves against the boundary, now rendered feeble by reason of the withdrawal of its most ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... makes the earth rest upon the tortoise, but does not tell us on what the tortoise rests. We may still ask what northern reservoir supplied this incessant stream of daring adventurers. Montesquieu's solution of the problem will, I think, hardly be admitted, (Grandeur et Decadence des Romains, c. 16, p. 187.) * * * The whole difficulty, however, is at once removed, if we apply to the German nations, at that time, a fact which is so generally known to have occurred in America, and suppose that, when not checked by wars and famine, they increased ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... knew personally most of the great men who had latterly played leading parts. On English politics it was characteristic of the man to have a tremendous belief in the present. For instance, I said something about the decadence of Parliament and Parliamentary speaking. He at once burst out: 'You are quite wrong. The men of to-day are much greater than their predecessors'; and then he went through all our prominent politicians and compared them with the men of the past. The only comparisons I remember are Winston Churchill ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... sounded on the stage, and the unhappy singer, bereft of romance, his career finished, decadence and old age staring him in the face, went to answer the call. But suddenly his face changed; a brightness, an alertness came into it and even, mysteriously, into all his body. There was a woman at the other end of the wire, and she was young and pretty, and she was asking ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... cruel; as to the promoting the torture of a bull for the amusement of her young neighbours, it need hardly be said that Miss Thorne would be the last to think of it. And yet there was something so charming in the name. A bull-ring, however, without a bull would only be a memento of the decadence of the times, and she felt herself constrained to abandon the idea. Quintains, however, she was determined to have, and had poles and swivels and bags of flour prepared accordingly. She would no doubt have been anxious for something ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... meaning in the representations on Greek vases. Attempts to portray the Deities of the Mysteries scarcely count as works of art. Such figures as Sabazius, Isis, Mithras, only come into ancient art in its decadence. I would not maintain that the modern world, with its infinitely varied emotions, or the higher aspirations of religions like the Christian or the Buddhist, could be satisfied with such simple schemes as those of Greek sculpture, ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... way, our dream-life touches that childish condition of the intelligence which marks the decadence of old age and the encroachments of mental disease. The parallelism between dreams and insanity has been pointed out by most writers on the subject. Kant observed that the madman is a dreamer awake, and more recently Wundt has remarked that, ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... with any eminent characteristics. A volume of short stories, entitled "Wild and Tame," partakes very much more of the latter adjective than of the former. The first of the tales, "Inclined Planes," is a discursive family chronicle, showing the decadence of a fishing village under the influence of city boarders. The second, "Love and Despatches," inculcates a double moral, the usefulness of economy and the uselessness of mothers-in-law; and the third, "The Cutter Wild Duck," is a shudderingly insipid composition about a village lion who ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... the last half century. Mrs. Josephine K. Henry was introduced as "the daughter of Kentucky," and the Constitution said the next day: "If the spirit of old Patrick Henry could have heard the eloquent plea of his namesake, he would have had no reason to blush for a decadence of the oratory which gave the name to the world." In considering Woman Suffrage in ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... stained glass. Their arches are moulded, but the splay is left plain. The roof-shafts, which are in clusters of three and have fillets upon them, spring from semi-octagonal corbels, and where each cluster passes the string-course there is an angel holding a shield. A sign of decadence may be found, perhaps, in the way in which the hood-moulds of the windows intersect with these shafts. Though the two sides of the nave are not quite of the same date, they are almost alike, but for some ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ripon - A Short History of the Church and a Description of Its Fabric • Cecil Walter Charles Hallett
... places the real: that he know how to dispose our mind for ideas. Provided the point from which we see and judge be elevated, it matters little if the object be low and far beneath us. When the historian Tacitus depicts the profound decadence of the Romans of the first century, it is a great soul which from a loftier position lets his looks drop down on a low object; and the disposition in which he places us is truly poetic, because it is the height ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... time: but one need not confine oneself to politics. At the end of the nineteenth century France has enjoyed the blessings of social equality, enforced by compulsory division of estates, for a hundred years and more. Perhaps equality has nothing to do with the decadence of her literature, with that state of morals which Mr Arnold himself deplored with almost Puritan emphasis, with the state of religion which he holds up as an awful example, fit to warn England to flee to the refuge of ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... General William Heath, is a striking example of the decadence of the New England hill towns, its population having fallen from eleven hundred and ninety-nine in the year 1830, to five hundred and sixty-eight at present. The site of old Fort Shirley is in the township. Fifty years ago, the town afforded an unusual proportion of its population to the ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1886 - Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 3, March, 1886 • Various
... curse of our age is pessimism, a result and a cause of the materialistic spirit. Science, which really involves an infinite hope, has been misinterpreted by Socialists in the most foolish way, until we get a miserable languid fatalism, leading to decadence and despair. The essential of progress is Faith, and Faith can only be established ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... close of his career as a wine merchant, he returned to Paris to resume his regular profession, and was appointed director of the Grand Opera, but he failed to rescue the opera from its state of decadence, and, finding the duties too arduous for one of his age and state of health, he retired on a small pension. In 1822 he returned once more to England, where he passed the remainder ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... society. He was assiduous in his attentions to the King, without importuning him for audiences that were unnecessary; and by all his conduct, he gave reason for believing that he suspected Madame des Ursins' decadence in our Court, and sought to gain esteem and confidence, so as to become by the support of the King, prime minister in Spain; but as we shall soon see, his ultramontane hobbies hindered the accomplishment of his measures. All the success of his journey consisted in hindering Brancas from ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... these vast changes came about in the course of one generation. Just as a sentiment in favor of liberty will be perpetuated in a people from one generation to another, and increase with the lapse of years, so this feeling of independence of parental control and this decadence of natural affection were transmitted from one set of children to the next, and matters grew from bad ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... rite is merely the selection of nominal fathers for their children.[315] Throughout the careful study which we now possess, thanks to Dr. Rivers, of this people, there is the dominant note of dairy economy superimposing itself upon all else, and even religion seems to be in a state of decadence.[316] I do not know that anywhere else could be found a stronger example of the results of extreme specialisation upon the social and mental condition of a people. As a rule such specialisation does not ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... disease or sickness, or withdrawal from daily duties, or decadence of mental powers, or physical disability, he made up his mind that he was about to die. Closing his telescopes, putting his achromatic glasses in their several grooves, locking the doors of his laboratories, destroying the papers he deemed useless, and arranging those ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... nicely it did it too, but by the time we were ready to come back to earth the perfect servants, who had been taking such good care of themselves, and our two daft selves into the bargain, were found to be sadly demoralized. The discovery came upon us gradually. I think my husband noticed the decadence as soon as I did, but I wasn't going to invite his attention to the fact; and he, I suppose, thought that I thought that everything was ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... of all opinion worth attention that century was, in the two European literatures which were equally free from crudity and decadence—French and English—the very palmiest day of the art. Everybody wrote letters, and a surprising number of people wrote letters well. Our own three most famous epistolers of the male sex, Horace Walpole, Gray, and Cowper—belong wholly to it; ...
— How to Write Letters (Formerly The Book of Letters) - A Complete Guide to Correct Business and Personal Correspondence • Mary Owens Crowther
... it in the hands of these bards, scalds and minstrels of northern Europe. The Aryans who crossed into India do not seem to have had it. Nor did the Greeks, nor the Romans. We find it for a while in Asia, but only in civilizations derived from that of Egypt, already in their decadence when they come under our observation. Inasmuch as there are no data existing whereby we can determine whether these people discovered the harp anew for themselves or derived it from some other nation, and greatly improved it, either supposition is allowable. Upon ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... of the black or African race, since the decadence and destruction of the cities of North Africa and the Nile Delta and the loss of prestige of the peoples who held sway in them, has been shrouded and obscured, and hence gratuitous arguments are made ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... pocketed, the world's work is not done. Heroes have gone out; quacks have come in. Accordingly, what Century, since the end of the Roman world, which also was a time of scepticism, simulacra and universal decadence, so abounds with Quacks as that Eighteenth! Consider them, with their tumid sentimental vapouring about virtue, benevolence,—the wretched Quack-squadron, Cagliostro at the head of them! Few men were without quackery; they had got to consider it a necessary ingredient and amalgam for ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... unless humanity's supposition of a life beyond this life, and of the existence of spiritual powers and beings to whom we are related, holds good. No nation has ever conducted its life on the basis of pure materialism, save in those last stages of its decadence which preluded its downfall. ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... genial physiognomy, seem grouped to make more elevated, by comparison, the noble abstraction of Flaxman. Talleyrand resembles a keen, selfish, humorous and gentlemanly man of the world, in an unexceptionable white wig. Richelieu is piquant and Madame de Stael impassioned and Amazonian. What decadence even in the warlike notabilities is hinted by glancing from Soult to Oudinot! I thought of the French fleet in the memorable storm off Newport, as I recognized the portrait of the Count d'Estaing; and ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... always be taken into consideration along with chinquapin questions. According to authorities on the subject of decadence, we do not care very much about the children in these days. If some old-fashioned folks still remain, and if these old-fashioned folks do not take any particular personal interest in the beautiful garden and lawn trees that America has held out ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Seventh Annual Meeting • Various
... them, can we suppose that they were composed by the great delineator, of or toward a person under or much below thirty? They imply that the person addressed was not so far below middle life that a statement of the decadence that would come after his fortieth year presented a remote or far-off picture. Besides, if his friend was below thirty years, while it might be well to urge him to marry, hardly would the poet have used language implying that his marrying days were waning. To put it roughly, ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... pointing out how London lags behind other great cities in the matter of shop-window dressing. There would seem to be no limit to our decadence. Even our shop-windows ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 11, 1914 • Various
... was grown about this place, and the people told us that sugar thrived, but the plantations of it were small and ill-kept, and everything had a look of poverty and decadence. They said that twenty years ago there was no bush growing around their house. The country was then open grassed savannahs, and there was less fever. Now the bush grows up to their very doors, and they will not take the trouble to cut it down even to ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... through many introductions that evening; and, in the next fortnight, received ample and daily proofs of the proverbial hospitality of Baltimore. There are residents—praisers of the time gone by, who cease not to lament the convivial decadence of the city; but such deficiency is by no means ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... pulled out the card, which I happened to have in my pocket.—'Are you the person here addressed?' he said, staring at me.—'I am'.—'I beg your pardon, there is a mistake: I meant it for your father, the painter of the "Decadence des Romains."'—'I am the painter of the "Decadence," but I am not my father.'—'You ought to be an older man.'—'I should have been, monsieur, had I been born sooner.'—At that moment a friend, overhearing the conversation and divining the cause, came and explained ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... The younger set comes into our society fresh and unspoiled with each generation, and in its way contributes something of freshness, something of vigor to keep the social world from going down hill on a grade of decadence. The story deals with a man who, although still young, feels that his life is practically over because his marriage, through no fault of his own, has proved a failure and ended in divorce. He meets ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... had been something similar, but showing the causes of decadence in their aristocratic and not their plebeian forms. They, too, had sent their shoots to the wars; but their positions had been different and they had often attained honour—for without flaw they were gallant, and brave deeds ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... man, leave his tent and his old wife of an evening, and thrust himself into society which could well dispense with him. 'Brother,' said Mr. Petulengro the other day to the Romany Rye, after telling him many things connected with the decadence of gypsyism, 'there is one Gorgiko Brown, who, with a face as black as a tea-kettle, wishes to be mistaken for a Christian tradesman; he goes into the parlour of a third-rate inn of an evening, calls for rum-and-water, and attempts to enter into conversation with the company ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... but in the hunting-field! By your experiments, from age to age, to have discovered variety in diet; to have practised it, to the great advantage of your race, and to end up with uniformity, the cause of decadence; to have known the excellent and to repudiate it for the middling: oh, my Sphex-wasps, it would be stupid if the ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... reduced to a mere question of money, and a nation which has grown tired of the responsibilities of empire, and careless of the acquisitions of its past and of its greatness in the future, would indeed have entered into a period of inevitable decadence. Happily we have not yet come to this. I believe the overwhelming majority of the people of these islands are convinced that an England reduced to the limits which the Manchester school would assign to it would be ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... for a copy of your sketch of your father which vividly recalls him to me as I remember him in my Concord days long ago. I recollect that when I saw in Paris Couture's famous picture of the Decadence of the Romans, it was your father that I thought of as I saw the figures of the older Romans gazing reproachfully upon the revels. So he may have felt of his ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... opportunity to examine; and among these I have paid special attention to the American varieties, of which I find here several singular examples. The two most remarkable are a young man who presents all the characteristics of a period of national decadence; reminding me strongly of some diminutive Hellenised Roman of the third century. He is an illustration of the period of culture in which the faculty of appreciation has obtained such a preponderance over ...
— A Bundle of Letters • Henry James
... him and his correspondence into the motor, and he had the decency to ask whether he had been unpolished over-night. I replied that I waited an apology. This he made excuse for renewed arguments, and used wayside shows as illustrations of the decadence of England. ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... which is described for us in the Homeric poems; but it was not until the treasures of Knossos and Phaestos began to be revealed in 1900 and the subsequent years that it became manifest that what was known as the Mycenaean civilization was itself only the decadence of a far richer and fuller culture, whose fountain-head and whose chief sphere of development had been in Crete. And it has been in Crete that exploration and discovery have led to the most striking illustration of many of the statements in the legends and traditions, and have ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... for art's sake" doctrine, carried to extremes, results in mere decadence or triviality. It produces at best exquisite decorative trifles rather than works of a large and serious beauty. Music seems to be the art where sheer beauty of form is its own justification, for music can hardly be used as a specific medium of communication. Those ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... there is not room and food in the world at any one time for more than a certain relatively small number of gigantic species. Each great group of animals has had successively its rise, its zenith, its decadence, and its dotage; each at the period of its highest development has produced a considerable number of colossal forms; each has been supplanted in due time by higher groups of totally different structure, which have killed off their predecessors, not ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... time is summarized in Pope; and the easy neatness of his verses is quaintly representative of the Georgian peace. Defoe and Swift had both done their work; and the latter had withdrawn to Ireland to die like a rat in a hole. Bishop Berkeley, indeed, was convinced of the decadence of England; but his Essay towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain (1721) shows rather the effect of the speculative mania which culminated in the South Sea Bubble upon a noble moral nature than ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... than ever. I feel like a good-for-nothing, a cow, damned, antique, deliquescent, in short calm and moderate, which is the last term in decadence. ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... to deal fully with this subject it is necessary to discuss another important phase in the worship of sex. We refer to the decadence or degeneracy of this worship, which occurred after people had outgrown these simple religious conceptions. The decadence of sex worship is observed during the early centuries of Christianity and traces of it are seen throughout the middle ages. In the decadence of sex worship we are able to observe how an important motive in the race finds expression in the thoughts and conduct of people after ...
— The Sex Worship and Symbolism of Primitive Races - An Interpretation • Sanger Brown, II
... this decadence natural selection may in time bring forward better strains, and with normal conditions of security and peace nature may begin again her ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... European civilization, Egypt was, therefore, in process of decadence, gradually becoming less and less able to resist its own interior causes of destruction, or the attempts of its Asiatic rivals, who eventually brought it to ruin. At the first historical appearance ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... Florence. While Michelangelo was obscurely working at the library of San Lorenzo, the great age of art was drawing to its close; Raphael and Leonardo were dead, and their pupils were already hurrying on to a rapid decadence. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... their youth, and who have never since been able to point out the sunrise to others. It is no extravagance of language to say that diacritical marks lead to the cocaine habit; nor that the ethics of metaphysics points the way to the Higher Foolishness. There are many links in the chain of decadence, but ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... gold wave reached its zenith in 1853. What more natural than that the army of miners, with the decadence of the California fields, ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... absorbed, and so absolutely that any household knowledge ended then and there, with no further possibility of its acquisition. It was this state of things, with its accumulated results, which, a generation or so later, faced the few investigators who puzzled over the decadence of morals, the enfeebled physiques, the general helplessness of the young women who married, and the whole series of natural consequences. So startling were the facts developed, that it became at once ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... men, I skipped the parliamentary intelligence and turned to the "By the Way" column. I remember distinctly there was only one amusing paragraph therein, and I was about to throw the paper aside, with the customary lament as to the decadence of British humour, when my attention was arrested by a paragraph at the bottom of the next column. The heading was "Strange Highway Robbery." This ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... pertinaciously insists, that he employs the word no less than three times in the brief paragraph just quoted, is he really unaware of the nature of this mildew? Is he to be told that it is one of the many classes of fungus, of which the most ordinary feature is its upspringing and decadence within twenty-four hours? ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Indeed the novel, in its view of the decay of the Border, the ruined Laird, the frivolous foolish society of the Well, taking the place of sturdy William of Deloraine, and farmers like Scott's grandfather, makes a picture of decadence as melancholy as "Redgauntlet." "Not here, O Apollo, are haunts meet for thee!" Strangely enough, among the features of the time, Scott mentions reckless borrowings, "accommodation," "Banks of Air." His own business was based on a "Bank of Air," "wind-capital," as Cadell, Constable's ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... He can see no decadence of the vigour, the enterprise and the courage which, since the occupation of the Cape Peninsula by the early Dutch settlers, have resulted in the extension of European control and occupation to the limits now reached. Moreover, artificial restrictions ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... book the first reading, and it is well if it gets a chance of a second." From him "Pride and Prejudice" got a chance of three readings at least. This generous universality of taste, in addition to all his other qualities of humour and poetry, enabled Scott to raise the novel from its decadence, and to make the dry bones of history live again in his tales. With Charles Edward at Holyrood, as Mr. Senior wrote in the "Quarterly Review," "we are in the lofty region of romance. In any other hands than those of Sir Walter Scott, the language and conduct of ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... together this batch, written when the first novelty of the novels was long over, and before there was any decadence, one obtains, as well perhaps as from any other division of his works, an idea of their author's miraculous power. Many novelists since have written as much or more in the same time. But their books for the ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... Imperial." He had a very distinguished talent, but he was too distinctly clever—clever to the point of sophistication. In this respect he was distinctly a man of the nineteenth century. His great work, "Romains de la Decadence," created as fine an effect at the Centenary Exhibition of the Paris World's Fair in 1889 as it does in the Louvre, whence it was then transferred, but it was distinctly a decorative effect—the effect of a fine panel in the general mass of color and design; it made a fine centre. It remains his ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... Gorgiko Brown, the gypsy man, leave his tent and his old wife, of an evening, and thrust himself into society which could well dispense with him. "Brother," said Mr. Petulengro the other day to the Romany Rye, after telling him many things connected with the decadence of gypsyism, "there is one Gorgiko Brown, who, with a face as black as a teakettle, wishes to be mistaken for a Christian tradesman; he goes into the parlour of a third-rate inn of an evening, calls for rum and water, and attempts to enter into conversation with the company about politics and ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... colored people bade fair to be at least eight or ten per cent. of our total population in 1900. As a matter of fact the proportion was in 1900 11.6 per cent. These decreasing proportions did not, of course, necessarily imply any positive decadence in the black race, as they might be accounted for by greater prolificacy or vitality on the part of the whites, or in part by immigration. The subject will be resumed in ...
— History of the United States, Volume 4 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... well-groomed figure of Blanch, the accomplished woman of the world, with eyes intoxicating as wine and a glowing wealth of golden hair, tempting and alluring as the luxuriance of old Rome at the height of her triumphs before her decadence set in—the last fair breath of her ancient glory—the best and fairest that modern civilization had produced. She had no need of the artificial head-gear and upholstery with which the modern society belle ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... all the other Nueva Vizcaya towns we had seen or were to see, shows signs of decadence. It has a good church and convento, a great plaza, and is surrounded by a fertile country, but something is missing. After dinner, I went over and called on the padre, one of the Belgians, whom we had met the day before. He informed me that ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... the tragedy which hovered over her future sister-in-law's life. Somehow or other, Philippa had seemed, even to her, so far removed from that strenuous world of over-drugged, over-excited feminine decadence, to whom the changing of a husband or a lover is merely an incident in the day's excitements. Philippa, with her frail and almost flowerlike beauty, her love of the wholesome ways of life, and her strong affections, represented other things. Now, for the first ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... few merchants, or craftsmen, or philosophers, work transformations in culture and bring about uniformities, of which language, or cult-edifices give us no indication at all, or at best an aftermath of decadence. ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... Awful in themselves, more awful from such lips, but surely most awful as making the second-step in the moral decadence of Troy! ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... conclusion of the War of American Independence,[1] and the peculiar importance of this set of articles therefore is, that in them we have the first known example of those stereotyped Fighting Instructions to which, as all modern writers seem agreed, was due the alleged decadence of naval tactics in ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... something like despair her white skin assuming the yellow tones which proclaim maturity. A slight down on her upper lip, about the corners, began to spread and darken like a trail of smoke; her temples grew shiny; decadence was beginning! It was authentic in Alencon that Mademoiselle Cormon suffered from rush of blood to the head. She confided her ills to the Chevalier de Valois, enumerating her foot-baths, and consulting ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... overcome its northern neighbor, Samnium now turned to attack Lucania, the country to the south, which reached as far as the Tarentine Gulf, just under the great heel of Italy. Magna Grcia was then in a state of decadence, and Lucania was an ally of Rome, which took its part against Samnium, not as loving Samnium less, but as loving power more. The struggle became very general. The Etruscans had begun a new war ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... term Renascence cannot be applied to the movement that asserted itself in Hebrew literature at the end of the fifteenth century, as little as the term Decadence can be applied to the epoch ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... opportunities for early education. Their children, rising through the generations, had returned from the state universities of Texas or Ohio or Mississippi, talking of Browning, and the binominal theorem, and the survival of the fittest, and the grandeur and decadence of the Romans, and the entassus of Ionic columns, and the doctrine of laissez faire; and now their elders had set out to endeavor to catch up with them. This discovery touched me with both reverence ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... discontent, and attracts no affection. Political talent, which for many years was at least as abundant among Irishmen as in any equally numerous section of the people, has been steadily declining, and marked decadence in this respect among the representatives of the nation reflects but too truly the absence of ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... soared towards heaven, but alas! its wings, like those of Icarus, melted in the sun and it fell to earth again. Instead of wax it needed the strong "eagle pinions of faith" which revelation only can supply. The decadence is strongly marked both in the Epicurean and Stoic schools. They both express the feeling of exhaustion, disappointment, and despair. The popular theology had lost its hold upon the public mind. The gods no longer visited ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... some rash critics fancy that she may be termed effete. But this is far from the truth. The absence of military burdens, rendered needless by the intelligent selfishness, if not the conscience, of the rest of Europe, implies no decadence of masculine spirit in the Dutch. In no department of enterprise, commercial ability, or intellectual energy are they inferior to any of their contemporaries, or to their own great progenitors. "Holland," says Professor Thorold ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... the expression of sincere and vital feeling; the material thing, picture, statue, poem, which the artist conjures into being is only a means. The moment art is worshiped for its own sake, that moment decadence begins. "No one," says Leonardo, "will ever be a great painter who takes as his guide the paintings of other men." In general the history of art exhibits this course. In the beginning arises a man of deep and ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... newspaper press has sounded of late years, again and again, the note of alarm, dwelling in scathing articles on signs of decadence in the nation's whilom pride,—the army. It has pointed out the growing spirit of luxury in its ranks, the wholesale abuse of power by the officers and sergeants, the looseness of discipline, the havoc wrought by "army usurers," the "money marriages," ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... vegetarianism, and with the ferment of youth working headily within him he could hardly escape the charge of being a crank, but "a crank, if a little thing, makes revolutions," and Brooke's youthful extravagances were utterly untinged with decadence. He took his classical tripos in 1909, and after spending some time as a student in Munich, returned to live near Cambridge at the Old Vicarage in "the lovely hamlet, Grantchester." "It was there," writes Mr. Raglan H. E. H. Somerset in a letter I am privileged to quote, "that ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... West, under the name anti-Semitism, among the dregs of European society. But in its earliest abode it was and is still met with an abrupt rebuff on the part of the most intelligent circles, those whom even the present age of decadence has not succeeded in robbing of belief in lofty moral ideals. Anti-Semitism in the West is in anima vili. Its cult is confined to a certain party, which enjoys a rather scandalous reputation. But there are countries in which this ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... this tabloid "story of a woman" has, ever since my first discovery of it, been a source of anger to me; and I do not think that such resentment should be reckoned as a manifestation of modern decadence. The hustling out of sight of that "lovely hoyden" is unworthy of a poet; poet's eyes should rest longer upon beauty so irrecoverable—for though the wife and mother be the happiest that ever was, she can never be ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... and comedy as well as seriousness. We are a young people, but only in the sense of healthy-mindedness. There is no real taste among us for the erotic or the decadent. It is foreign to us because, as a people, we have not felt the corroding touch of decadence. Nor is life here all drab. Hence I expect lights as well as shadows ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... still occasionally to be found in booksellers' catalogues at a high price, though the American millionaire collector has made it one of the rarest of finds. These were the days of his youth, the golden age of 'decadence.' For is not decadence merely a fin de siecle literary term synonymous with the 'sowing his wild oats' of our grandfathers? a phrase still surviving in agricultural districts, according to Mr. Andrew Lang, Mr. Edward Clodd, and ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... commonly taken toward the practice of lying in bed is hypocritical and unhealthy. Of all the marks of modernity that seem to mean a kind of decadence, there is none more menacing and dangerous than the exultation of very small and secondary matters of conduct at the expense of very great and primary ones, at the expense of eternal ties and tragic human morality. If there is one thing worse than the ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... not speak German; and remembered somewhat late in the day that two young ladies had no business to accept breakfast at the hands of German officers: and, if they did, at least they might see that they got it. She appeared to be willing to talk about decadence of modern manners to almost any extent, but the subject of the hairdresser, and how to get rid ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome |
