"Seraglio" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Nerestan was sent to France for ransom, and on his return presented himself before the sultan, who fancied he perceived a sort of intimacy between the young man and Zara, which excited his suspicion and jealousy. A letter, begging that Zara would meet him in a "secret passage" of the seraglio, fell into the sultan's hands, and confirmed his suspicions. Zara went to the rendezvous, where Osman met her and stabbed her to the heart. Nerestan was soon brought before him, and told him he had murdered his sister, and all he wanted of her ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... you'd make nothing out of it if you went to buying evening clothes. I've thought of that. Mrs. Nathanmeyer has a troop of daughters, a perfect seraglio, all ages and sizes. She'll be glad to fit you out, if you aren't sensitive about wearing kosher clothes. Let me take you to see her, and you'll find that she'll arrange that easily enough. I told her ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... father's lifetime, my mother had been supplied with rich dresses by one of the merchants who was employed by the ladies of the grand seignior's seraglio. My brother had done this merchant some trifling favours, and, upon application to him, he readily engaged to recommend the new scarlet dye. Indeed, it was so beautiful, that, the moment it was seen, it was preferred to every other colour. Saladin's shop was soon crowded with customers; ...
— Murad the Unlucky and Other Tales • Maria Edgeworth
... mercy all the mysteries of the public street. This contrivance, which enables you to see the world without being seen, certainly gives you a tempting advantage over the untimely caller or the impertinent creditor; but it encourages, in my opinion, a habit of vision better adapted to a sultan's seraglio than to the discreet ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... Only in the sphere of christianity does the true idea of home become fully developed. Home with the savage is but a herding, a servitude. Even among many of the Jews it was little better than a Mahommedan seraglio. The most eminent of the heathen world degrade the family by making it the scene of lust, and introducing concubinage and polygamy. Plato, one of the most enlightened of the heathen, had base conceptions of ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... at the signal from Tippoo, the guards of his seraglio advanced to receive the closed litter from the attendants of the Begum. The voice of the old Fakir was heard louder and sterner than before.—"Cursed is the Prince who barters justice for lust! He shall die in the gate by the ...
— The Surgeon's Daughter • Sir Walter Scott
... supercilious pomp of majesty. The images of Asiatic despotism and voluptuousness have scarcely been wanting to crown the exaggerated scene. We have been taught to tremble at the terrific visages of murdering janizaries, and to blush at the unveiled mysteries of a future seraglio. Attempts so extravagant as these to disfigure or, it might rather be said, to metamorphose the object, render it necessary to take an accurate view of its real nature and form: in order as well to ascertain its true aspect and genuine appearance, as to unmask the disingenuity ...
— The Federalist Papers
... for the male members of the race. Merensky says that in Basutoland the elder women begin to practice labial manipulation on their female children shortly after infancy, and Adams has found this custom to prevail in Dahomey; he says that the King's seraglio includes 3000 members, the elect of his female subjects, all of whom have labia up to the standard of recognized length. Cameron found an analogous practice among the women of the shores of Lake Tanganyika. The females of this nation manipulated ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... rest, there is no trace of any oriental seraglio system. The sexes lived together in easy unaffected intercourse. The ladies appeared in society naturally and gracefully, and their chief occupations were household matters, care of clothes and linen, and other domestic arrangements. ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... actual state of the city, the palace and gardens of the Seraglio occupy the eastern promontory, the first of the seven hills, and cover about one hundred and fifty acres of our own measure. The seat of Turkish jealousy and despotism is erected on the foundations of a Grecian republic; but ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... the dominions comprised in them, by the establishment of a satrap or pashaw system of governing the provinces, by an invariable and speedy degeneracy in the princes of the royal house, the effeminate nurslings of the seraglio succeeding to the warrior sovereigns reared in the camp, and by the internal anarchy and insurrections which indicate and accelerate the decline and fall of these unwieldy ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... sincerely attached to her husband, "who dominated the household" like the rest of his "women folk," with the faint consciousness of that division of service which renders the position of the sultan of a seraglio at once so prominent and so precarious. The attitude of John Hale in his family circle was dominant because it had never been subjected to criticism or comparison; and perilous for the ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... saluted as Gholab Bashaw, and the next day set forth amidst great Acclamations, and in sumptuous state, for Constantinople. Arrived there, I was handsomely lodged in a Palace close to the Old Seraglio, and admitted to no less than three solemn Audiences with the Commander of the Faithful, the Caliph Al Islam, the Padishaw of Roum, the Great ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... when speaking of the war of the sexes. For one sentence out of many, though we find it to be but the clever literary clothing of a common accusation: 'Men may have rounded Seraglio Point: they have not ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... galleys for life, if the lieutenant of police could once lay hands upon him. This personage, we may mention, was afterwards raised to the dignified office of keeper of the seals, as a reward for his industry and skill in providing victims for the royal seraglio at Versailles.[82] The man who had ventured to use his mind, was thrown into the dungeon at Vincennes by the man who played spy and pander for the Pompadour. The official record of a dialogue between ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... occasion for their aid. So satisfactory was this that Lord Grey expressed the greatest anxiety that the Russian armament should arrive in time to arrest the progress of the Egyptians. They did arrive—at least the fleet did—and dropped anchor under the Seraglio. At this juncture arrived Admiral Roussin in a ship of war, and as Ambassador of France. He immediately informed the Sultan that the interposition of Russia was superfluous, that he would undertake to conclude a treaty, and to answer for the acquiescence ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... stands at a short distance to the north-east of S. Sophia, in the first court of the Seraglio. Its identity has never been questioned, for the building was too much in the public eye and too near the centre of the ecclesiastical affairs of the city to render possible any mistake concerning its real character. It is always described ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... who could tell tales of the marvels seen in new-found America and the Indies, and, perhaps, like Captain John Smith, could mingle stories of the naive simplicity of the natives beyond the Atlantic, with charming narratives of the wars in Hungary, the beauties of the seraglio of the Grand Turk, and the barbaric pomp of the Khan of Tartary. There were those in the streets who would see Raleigh go to the block on the scaffold in Old Palace Yard, who would fight against ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... three or four other Mosques of great size, and the Seraglio grounds and Palace. In the latter we saw the gates through which the odalisks who had lost the sultan's favor passed beyond to be executed. The passage of this gate made our flesh creep when we thought of all it meant to the unfortunates; but near by, in agreeable contrast, is the "Gate of Felicity," ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... breeze,—all converging to one point, and that CONSTANTINOPLE. When we first caught a glimpse of Top-Hana, Galata, and Pera, stretching from the water's edge to the summit of the hill, and began to sweep round Seraglio Point, the view became most beautiful and sublime. It greatly surpassed all that I had ever conceived of it. We had been sailing along what I should call the south side of the city for four or five miles, and were now entering ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume I. • Rufus Anderson
... scourged with a whip of scorpions, but afterward the thunders of God's wrath pursue it across a boundless desert, beating it with ruin and woe. When you come to paint carnality, do not paint it as looking from behind embroidered curtains, or through lattice of royal seraglio, but as writhing in the agonies of a city hospital. Cursed be the books that try to make impurity decent, and crime attractive, and hypocrisy noble! Cursed be the books that swarm with libertines and desperadoes, ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... Apiarian laws would be a strange Utopia! the bowstring would be used there as unmercifully as it is in the seraglio, to say nothing of the summary mode of bringing down the population to the means of subsistence. But this is straying from the subject. The consequences of defective order are indeed frightful, whether we regard the physical or the moral evils which ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... authorities (no Christian being allowed to see them) the cloak given to the bard by Mohammed is still preserved together with the Khirkah or Sanjak Sherif ("Holy Coat" or Banner, the national oriflamme) at Stambul in the Upper Seraglio. (Pilgrimage, i. 213.) Many authors repeat this story of Mu'awiyah, the Caliph, and Ka'ab of the Burdah, but it is an evident anachronism, the poet having been dead nine years before ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... Vierfuenfsechs-Siebenachtneun offered her his hand, and was condemned by the Kaiser to six months' confinement in his little castle. In Yildiz Kiosk, the tyrant who still throve there conferred on her the Order of Chastity, and offered her the central couch in his seraglio. She gave her performance in the Quirinal, and, from the Vatican, the Pope launched against her a Bull which fell utterly flat. In Petersburg, the Grand Duke Salamander Salamandrovitch fell enamoured ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... the Supreme says, "Thou art not absent from before me for one twinkling of an eye. I am never out of thy heart. And I am contained in nothing but in thy heart, and in a heart like thy heart. And I am nearer unto thee than thou art to thyself." This prince had in his Golden Seraglio three ladies of surpassing beauty, and all four, in this royal monastery, passed their lives, and left the ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... granted him as a reward for his numerous good works. Accordingly he laid aside the title of king and aimed at making himself a god. With this view, and in imitation of Buddha, who, before being advanced to the rank of a divinity, had quitted his royal palace and seraglio and retired from the world, Badonsachen withdrew from his palace to an immense pagoda, the largest in the empire, which he had been engaged in constructing for many years. Here he held conferences with the most learned monks, in which he sought to persuade ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... and low, took up the idea with avidity. Coffee houses increased in number. The demand outstripped the supply. In the seraglio itself special officers (kahvedjibachi) were commissioned to prepare the coffee drink for the sultan. Coffee was ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... of laziness as of love in all those hours which he passed amongst his mistresses, who served only to fill up his seraglio, while a bewitching kind of pleasure, called SAUNTERING, was the sultana queen ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... that overflowed and was not distinguished from the lower part of her body, and no part restrained by stays 80) no wonder that a child dreaded such an ogress, and that the mob of London were highly diverted at the importation of so uncommon a seraglio! They were food from all the venom of the Jacobites; and, indeed nothing could be grosser than the ribaldry that was vomited out in lampoons, libels, and every channel of abuse, against the sovereign and the new court, and chaunted even in their hearing ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... the expenses of their guard-room habits. At Blois, for this kind of expenditure, Guimberteau discharges his obligations by drafts on the proceeds of the revolutionary tax.[32142] Carrier, at Nantes, appropriates to himself the house and garden of a private person for "his seraglio"; the reader may judge whether, on desiring to be a third party in the household, the husband would make objections. At other times, in the hotel Henry IV., "with his friends and prostitutes brought under requisition, he has an orgy;" he allows himself the same indulgence on the galiot ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... at last, beyond all measure Incurred the desperate displeasure Of his Serene and raging Highness: Whether he twitched his most revered And sacred beard, Or had intruded on the shyness Of the seraglio, or let fly An epigram at royalty, None knows: his sin was an occult one, But records tell us that the Sultan, Meaning to terrify the knave, Exclaimed, "'Tis time to stop that breath; Thy doom is sealed, presumptuous slave! Thou stand'st ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... lead us to fulfil the purposes of nature, in preserving the individual, and in perpetuating the species; but to rely on their use as a principal constituent of happiness, were an error in speculation, and would be still more an error in practice. Even the master of the seraglio, for whom all the treasures of empire are extorted from the hoards of its frighted inhabitants, for whom alone the choicest emerald and the diamond are drawn from the mine, for whom every breeze is enriched with perfumes, ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... friends for herself in the parliament, she suppressed the Jesuits; and she afterward exiled the parliament in order to conciliate the clergy. Again, to prevent her royal, but most fickle minded lover, from choosing another mistress out of the ranks of the court ladies, she contrived that seraglio, the notorious Parc-aux-cerfs, "the pillow of Louis the Fifteenth's debaucheries," as Chateaubriand called it; at the last, hated and despised by all France, Madame de Pompadour said to Louis XV., "For mercy's sake, keep me near you: I protect ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... Turkish fleets and forces ready to meet him at Constantinople, his death or capture would seem to be the certain consequence of his fantastic expedition. The strongest imaginable probability is, that instead of wearing the diadem of France, his head would have figured on the spikes of the seraglio. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... in Meliapor a Portuguese gentleman, who lived a debauched and scandalous life. His house was a seraglio, in little; and the greatest part of his business was making a collection of beautiful slaves. Xavier went one day to visit him about dinner time: "Are you willing," said the Father, "that we should ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... honours persons capable of assisting him to kill the time, and who, even when the state was brought by maladministration to the depths of humiliation and to the brink of ruin, could still exclude unwelcome truth from the purlieus of his own seraglio, and refuse to see and hear whatever might disturb his luxurious repose. Later in life, the ill-bred familiarity of the Scottish divines had given him a distaste for Presbyterian discipline, while the heats and animosities between the members of the Established Church and the Nonconformists, ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... and riding to the court, kissed the ground before the Khalif, who rose from the throne, to greet and welcome him, and bade him take his appointed place in the Divan saying, 'O Alaeddin, thou art my guest to-night.' So presently he carried him into his seraglio and calling a slave- girl named Cout el Culoub, said to her, 'Alaeddin had a wife called Zubeideh, who used to sing to him and solace him of care and trouble; but she is gone to the mercy of God the Most High, and now I desire that thou play him an air of thy rarest fashion on the lute, that ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume III • Anonymous
... evidently is a woman) was moaning like mad. No, my dear friend, beyond that I do not know anything about her. She is not, startling as it may seem, my disinherited daughter, or a member of my secret seraglio. But when I hear a human being wailing that she can't get out, and talking to herself like a mad woman and beating on the shutters with her fists, as she was doing two or three minutes ago, I think it ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... oozes from a plumb-tree upon your fingers, because it is vegetable, but if you have any candle-grease, any tallow upon your fingers, you are uneasy till you rub it off. I have often thought, that, if I kept a seraglio, the ladies should all wear linen gowns, or cotton—I mean stuffs made of vegetable substances. I would have no silk; you cannot tell when it is clean: it will be very nasty before it is perceived to be so. Linen detects its ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... abbes who wrote every thing but sermons, and were free from the censure of not practising what they preached since they did not preach at all; generals who fought a campaign as deliberately and ceremoniously as they danced a minuet; statesmen whose diplomacy was more of the seraglio than the council; painters who improved on nature, applying the same tricks of art to the landscape as with powders to their curls; and simpering lips of the Marquise, and poets whose highest flights were a sonnet to Pompadour, or a pastoral to a sheep-tending Phillis. Our casual observations ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... me to help reform ye, And how I'll do't, Miss —— shall inform ye. I keep the best seraglio in the nation, And hope in time to bring it into fashion; No brimstone whore need fear the lash from me, That part I'll leave to Brother Jefferey: Our gallants need not go abroad to Rome, I'll keep a whoring jubilee at home; Whoring's the darling of my inclination; ...
— The True-Born Englishman - A Satire • Daniel Defoe
... that is it was an absolutism, marked by luxury, display, and taxation so heavy as to amount almost to oppression. Its luxuriousness and display are illustrated by his seraglio, which included seven hundred wives (1 Kings xi. 3); and its despotic nature is seen in such acts as his summary and severe punishment of Adonijah, Joab, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... intellectualism about women: but that is because the most brilliant brains can get tired. Meredith's brain was quite tired when it wrote some of its most quoted and least interesting epigrams: like that about passing Seraglio Point, but not doubling Cape Turk. Those who can see Meredith's mind in that are with those who can see Dickens' mind in Little Nell. Both were chivalrous pronouncements on behalf of oppressed females: neither has ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... the rules of etiquette and good breeding, I condescend to introduce you alive into the harem. Can you appreciate the height of your good fortune? H'm! A vigorous old chap like you! Inside the most holy seraglio? Baa! Baa! All those pretty ladies? Baa! Baa! Eh! is that nothing to you? Baa! Baa! (More to the public.) As a rule, we are very particular on this point—absolutely rigorous. As a rule, not even a flea is admitted into the ...
— Turandot, Princess of China - A Chinoiserie in Three Acts • Karl Gustav Vollmoeller
... ev'ry Eye! Thou Torment of every Heart! Thou Intellectual Light! I do not kiss the Dust of thy Feet; because thou seldom art seen out of the Seraglio, and when thou art, thou walkest only on the Carpets of Iran, or on Beds ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire
... tragedy of the seraglio, although the role of the hero is feeble, has virile qualities. The fury of Eastern passion, a love resembling hate, is represented in the Sultana Roxane. In the Vizier Acomat, deliberate in craft, intrepid in danger, Racine proved, as he proved by his Nero and ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... girls, whose complexion hardly separates them from our own race, is most winningly graceful; and Esther, with abated breath, timidly asked my pardon for intruding, while she declared I had made so bitter an enemy of Unga-golah,—the head-woman of the seraglio,—that, in spite of danger, she stole to my quarters with a warning. Unga swore revenge. I had insulted and thwarted her; I was able to thwart her at all times, if I remained the Mongo's "book-man;"—I must soon "go to another country;" but, if I did not, I would quickly find the food of Bangalang ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... said the admiral, "I was not tormented by that old tom cat. D——n me, Sir, that fellow was like the Grand Signior, and he kept his seraglio in the garret, over my bed-room, instead of being at his post in the kitchen, killing the rats that are running ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... absence, not only of the king, but of the flower of the Persian race—and, above all, the tranquil possession of the imperial palace, conspired to favour the deceit. [39] Placed on the Persian throne, but concealing his person from the eyes of the multitude in the impenetrable pomp of an Oriental seraglio, the pseudo Smerdis had the audacity to despatch, among the heralds that proclaimed his accession, a messenger to the Egyptian army, demanding their allegiance. The envoy found Cambyses at Ecbatana in Syria. Neither cowardice nor sloth was the fault of that monarch; he sprang upon his ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... were terrified by the appearance of a fowl of another kind, and infinitely larger than even the rocs which I met in my former voyages; for it was bigger than the biggest of the domes on your seraglio, oh, most Munificent of Caliphs. This terrible fowl had no head that we could perceive, but was fashioned entirely of belly, which was of a prodigious fatness and roundness, of a soft-looking substance, smooth, shining and striped with ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... him, feigned a passionate interest in his melons. And he was taken in, and used to discourse on them by the hour. On fine days he was driven to the green-houses in his pony-chair, and waddled through them, prodding and leering at the fruit, like a fat Turk in his seraglio. When he bragged to me of the expense of growing them I was reminded of a hideous old Lothario bragging of what his pleasures cost. And the resemblance was completed by the fact that he couldn't eat as much as a mouthful of his melons—had ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... find his bones, it proves how long ago he lived. That is the game you've been playing with this Smith affair. Because Smith's head is small for his shoulders you call him microcephalous; if it had been large, you'd have called it water-on-the-brain. As long as poor old Smith's seraglio seemed pretty various, variety was the sign of madness: now, because it's turning out to be a bit monochrome—now monotony is the sign of madness. I suffer from all the disadvantages of being a grown-up person, and I'm jolly well going to get some ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... readiness to serve him. He then observed that his women were very desirous to see me, and requested that I would favour them with a visit. An attendant was ordered to conduct me; and I had no sooner entered the court appropriated to the ladies, than the whole seraglio surrounded me—some begging for physic, some for amber, and all of them desirous of trying that great African specific, BLOOD-LETTING. They were ten or twelve in number, most of them young and handsome, and wearing on their heads ornaments of ...
— Travels in the Interior of Africa - Volume 1 • Mungo Park
... Seraglio are like the walls of Newstead gardens, only higher, and much in the same order; but the ride by the walls of the city, on the land side, is beautiful. Imagine four miles of immense triple battlements, covered ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... their characters that made the fate and doom of the situation. As for the court, Vergennes used an expression which suggests the very keyword of the situation. He had been ambassador in Turkey, and was fond of declaring that he had learnt in the seraglio how to brave the storms of Versailles. Versailles was like Stamboul or Teheran, oriental in etiquette, oriental in destruction of wealth and capital, oriental in antipathy to a reforming grand vizier. It was the Queen, as we now know by incontestable ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 8: France in the Eighteenth Century • John Morley
... castle a woman whom the gazette of the capital described as the Electress Dowager of Hanover. This was the unfortunate Princess Sophia, the wife of George. Thirty-two years of melancholy captivity she had endured, while George was drinking and hoarding money and amusing himself with his seraglio of ugly women. She died protesting her innocence to the last. In the closing days of her illness, so runs the story, she gave into the hands of some one whom she could trust, a letter addressed to her husband, and obtained ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... and voluptuousness) where a plurality of wives are to be found. Every great officer of state has his haram consisting of six, eight, or ten women, according to his circumstances and his inclination for the sex. Every merchant also of Canton has his seraglio; but a poor man finds one wife quite sufficient for all his wants, and the children of one woman as many, and sometimes more, than ...
— 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
... and reaping would go on. The aristocracy are not the farmers who work the land, and raise the produce, but are the mere consumers of the rent; and when compared with the active world are the drones, a seraglio of males, who neither collect the honey nor form the hive, but ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... begged him to postpone the operation. He then observed, that his women were very desirous to see him, and requested that he would favour them with a visit. An attendant was ordered to conduct him, and he had no sooner entered the court appropriated to the ladies, than the whole seraglio surrounded him, some begging for physic, some for amber, and all of them trying that great African specific, blood-letting. They were ten or twelve in number, most of them young and handsome, and wearing ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... her well, Prexaspes. I know them—those Egyptian fillies! They need a hard curb and the lash at times. Beware the tyranny of your own harem. I would not have the satrapies know how certain bright eyes in the seraglio can make the son of Darius play the fool. There is nothing more dangerous than women. It will take all your courage to master them. A hard task lies before you. I have given you one wife, but you know ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... AGHA, a word, said to be of Tatar origin, signifying a dignitary or lord. Among the Turks it is applied to the chief of the janissaries, to the commanders of the artillery, cavalry and infantry, and to the eunuchs in charge of the seraglio. It is also employed generally as a term of respect in addressing wealthy men of leisure, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Clip the wing'd horse, and roll his rider down. But, if empower'd to strike th' immortal lyre, The ardent vot'ry glows with genuine fire, 'Tis yours, while care recoils, and envy flies, Subdued by his resistless energies, 'Tis yours to bid Pierian fountains flow, And toast his name in Wit's seraglio; To bind his brows with amaranthine bays, And bless, with beef and beer, his mundane days! Alas! nor beef, nor beer, nor bays, are mine, If by your looks my doom I may divine, Ye frown so dreadful, and ye swell so big, Your fateful arms, the goose-quill, and the wig: The wig, with wisdom's ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... disastrously in their attempt on Malta, and his successor, Selim II (whom Ottoman historians surname "the Drunkard"), was reported to be a half-imbecile wretch, devoid of either intelligence or enterprise. So Europe breathed more freely. But while the "Drunkard" idled in his seraglio by the Golden Horn, the old statesmen, generals, and admirals, whom Suleiman had formed, were still living, and Europe had lulled itself ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... occurred more than half an hour, when a report was brought that the Suliotes were up in arms, and about to attack the seraglio, for the purpose of seizing the magazines. Instantly Lord Byron's friends ran to the arsenal; the artillery-men were ordered under arms; the sentinels doubled, and the cannon loaded and pointed on the approaches ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... town they carried packages, boxes and articles of barter. At dinner-time the van was rolled under a tree. The lady of the house kindled a fire in the portable stove behind a hedge or in a ditch. The hen-coop was opened, and the sage seraglio with their sultan prudently pecked about for food. At the first appeal they re-entered ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... dungeon, you shall escape, on condition of being my LOCUM TENENS, as we said at the Mareschal-College, until your warder visits his prisoners. But if not, I will first strangle you—I learned the art from a Polonian heyduck, who had been a slave in the Ottoman seraglio—and then seek out a mode ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... morning following, Carlton and Mrs. Downs and her niece, with all the tourists in Constantinople, were placed in open carriages by their dragomans, and driven in a long procession to the Seraglio to see the Sultan's treasures. Those of them who had waited two weeks for this chance looked aggrieved at the more fortunate who had come at the eleventh hour on the last night's steamer, and seemed to think ...
— The Princess Aline • Richard Harding Davis
... inscriptions, every where intermingled with the masonry, it is evident that the fortifications of Constantinople were built of the remnants of the ancient capital. This is peculiarly visible in the neighbourhood of the seraglio, where Irene's palace is supposed to have formerly stood. Facing the water is that portion of the suburbs inhabited by the Armenians, but presenting no attractions to the stranger, being exceedingly crowded and dirty; and along the shore are ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... that extended over Thebes, Argos, Corinth, Delphi, and a part of Thessaly, and was ruled by the family of Accaioli, plebeians of Florence (1384-1456). The last duke of this dynasty was strangled by Mahomet II., who educated his sons in the discipline of the seraglio. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... generally wear, and that the little orange girl, in getting out of a very high coach, showed one of the handsomest legs he had ever seen: but as all this was no obstruction to his designs, he resolved to purchase her at any rate, in order to place her in his seraglio. ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... maharajah, Gungadhura Singh, was prevailed on to assign an ancient palace for the Russian widow's use; and there, almost within sight of the royal seraglio from which she had been ousted, Yasmini had her bringing up, regaled by her mother with tales of Western outrage and ambition, and well schooled in all that pertained to her Eastern heritage by the thousand-and-one intriguers whose delight and livelihood it is to fish the troubled ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... of Venice may be carefully watched by their husbands, they are neither secluded nor guarded in a seraglio like the Turkish women; for during our stay at Venice, a great person spoke to his Majesty of a young and beautiful Greek, who was an enthusiastic admirer of the Emperor of the French. This lady was very ambitious ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... civilization which tries to cheat nature with elegant sophistries. Cheat nature? Bah! One generation may do it, perhaps two, but the third—Can we ever rise above nature or sink below her? Did she not turn on Jerusalem as upon Sodom, upon St. Anthony in his desert as upon Nero in his seraglio? Does she not always cry in brutal triumph: "I am here still, at the bottom of things, warming the roots of life; you cannot starve me nor tame me nor thwart me; I made the world, I rule it, and I ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... 1536, Ibrahim went to the royal seraglio, and, following his ancient custom, was admitted to the table of his master, sleeping after the meal at his side. At least so it was supposed, but none knew save those engaged in the murder what passed on that fatal night; ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... or make good the property which he was proved to have taken, or caused to be taken, from travellers. His house had become filled with girls of all ages, whom he had taken from poor parents, as they passed over this road, and converted into slaves for his seraglio. They were all restored to their parents, with suitable compensation; and the Cawnpoor road has become the most safe, as well as the best, road ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... enchanted musician, reseating himself at the piano. "(Andantino, solo.) Mahomet in his seraglio, surrounded by women, but not happy. Quartette of Houris (A major). What pompous harmony, what trills as of ecstatic nightingales! Modulation (into F sharp minor). The theme is stated (on the dominant E and repeated in F major). Here every delight is grouped ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... a party of Hircanians, who conducted me to their prince's tent, at the very moment that Missouf was brought before him. Thou wilt doubtless be pleased to hear that the prince thought me beautiful; but thou wilt be sorry to be informed that he designed me for his seraglio. He told me, with a blunt and resolute air, that as soon as he had finished a military expedition, which he was just going to undertake, he would come to me. Judge how great must have been my grief. My ties with Moabdar were ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... Diamond of Splendor, Pearl of Price, Ruby of Pure Blood, and other metaphorical descriptions, that, calling up dissonant passions to enhance the value of the general harmony, heightened the attractions of love with the allurements of avarice. A moving seraglio of these ladies always attended his progress, and were always brought to the splendid and multiplied entertainments with which he regaled his Council. In these festivities, whilst his guests were engaged with ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... great deal more gentlemanlike in manner and appearance than most of us who sat at his table, and smoked cool pipes on his house-top, as we looked over the hill and the Russian palace to the water, and the Seraglio gardens shining in the blue. We confronted Misseri, "Eothen" in hand, and found, on examining him, that it WAS "aut Diabolus aut amicus"—but the name is a secret; I will never breathe it, though I am ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... image which preyed upon his mind more than his defeat beneath the Oaks: a figure, on the crude stage of a country tavern; in the manor window, with an aureole around her from the sinking sun; in the grand stand at the races, the gay dandies singling her out in all that seraglio of beauty. ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... near the seraglio? 'Tis no dark cormorants that on the ripple float, 'Tis no dull plume of stone—no oars of Turkish boat, With measured beat along the water ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... is with great regret I find myself obliged to exceed the bounds I have prescribed myself in gaining your heart, but you must now consent either to marry me or publicly abjure your religion; all my power cannot exempt you from the laws which oblige the women of the seraglio to embrace our faith.—-I adore you, and though I ought to compel you to a change so beneficial to you, yet I will not, since it is not your desire.—I promise you the free exercise of your religion in private, ...
— The Princess of Ponthieu - (in) The New-York Weekly Magazine or Miscellaneous Repository • Unknown
... threw up its first trenches in the valley of the Great Salt Lake, as that saline body was then known and recorded. In this salubrious region was planted the analogy of the harem of Mohammed, and the seraglio of Brigham became the center of the sensual system of the Latter-Day Saints. So blatant was the apostle Heber Kimball that he said he himself had enough wives to whip the soldiers of ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... shall, you insolent dogs," exclaimed king and nobles, "we heed not your barking." "You shall," reiterated the Pope, in the portentous thunderings of the Vatican. "You shall," came echoed back from the palaces of Vienna, from the dome of the Kremlin, from the seraglio of the Turk, and, in tones deeper, stronger, more resolute, from constitutional, liberty-loving, happy England. Then was France a volcano, and its lava-streams deluged Europe. The people were desperate. ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... superintendent of the Parc-aux-cerfs, which was said to cost hundreds of thousands of louis a year. Madame de Pompadour did, indeed, try to conceal some of the King's weaknesses, but she never knew one of the sultanas of that seraglio. There were, however, scarcely ever more than two at once, and often only one. When they married, they received some jewels, and four thousand louis. The Parc-aux-cerfs was sometimes vacant for five or six months. ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... he expect it,' said Scythrop, 'when the whole thousand were locked up in his seraglio? His experience is no precedent for a free state of society like ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... chamber assigned to the young ladies seemed half oratory and half sleeping-room, with a strange mingling of the convent in the bare white walls, hung only with crucifixes and religious emblems, and of the seraglio in the glimpses of lazy figures, reclining in the deshabille of short silken saya, low camisa, and dropping slippers. In a broad angle of the corridor giving upon the patio, its balustrade hung with brightly colored serapes and shawls, ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... the way of the good Caliph Haroun Alraschid (let me have the corrupted name again for once, it is so scented with sweet memories!), the usage was highly laudable, and most worthy of imitation. "O, yes! Let us," said the other creature with a jump, "have a Seraglio." ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... on the 21st December, 1775, the Begum complained of a breach of engagements on the part of the Nabob, soliciting your protection for herself, her mother, and for all the women belonging to the seraglio of the late Nabob, from the distresses to which they were reduced; in consequence whereof it was agreed in consultation, 3d January, 1776, to remonstrate with the Vizier,—the Governor-General remarking, that, as the representative of our government has become ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... cafes glittered and rang with noise. Here one little fat burgher was shouting that the town-guard was worth all the red-legs in the trenches; another as loudly was criticising the tactics of Bazaine and comparing him for his invisibility to a pasha in his seraglio; while a third sprang upon a table and announced fresh victories. An army was already on the way from Paris to relieve Metz. Only yesterday MacMahon had defeated the Prussians, any moment he might ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... disguises. After having clad themselves as merchants of Moussul, and tinged their faces of an olive hue, the caliph, accompanied by Giaffar and Mesrour, the latter armed with a scimitar, issued forth from the secret door of the seraglio. Giaffar, who knew from experience the quarter likely to prove most fertile in adventure, led the caliph past the mosque of Zobeide, and crossing the Bridge of Boats over the Tigris, continued his way to that part of the city on the Mesopotamian side of the river which was inhabited ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... large amount was promptly executed in various quarters. The fate which awaited the Mussulman negociator was a lamentable one: he was accused of imbecility or treachery; and his head was taken off his shoulders to decorate the niche over the Seraglio gate: he paid dear for his friendly feelings towards the English. So ended the famed expedition to the Hellespont and the Bosphorus. It broke the spell by which the passage of the Dardanelles had for ages been guarded; but beyond this it was little more than a brilliant bravado, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... lovely as yourself. Of the spoils of this world, all that I crave possession of is you. When we return to Lodore," he added with an air of finality, "I will take you with me and place you with my other women in the Seraglio of the Stars." ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... sold the famous collar in Constantinople for the favorite sultana. "This was a real pleasure to the queen," says Madame Campan; "she, however, expressed some astonishment that a necklace made for the adornment of Frenchwomen should be worn in the seraglio, and, thereupon, she talked to me a long while about the total change which took place in the tastes and desires of women in the period between twenty and thirty years of age. She told me that when she was ten years younger she loved diamonds madly, but ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... shall prompt the sultan, Freed from the tumults of unsettled conquest, To fix his court, and regulate his pleasures, Soon shall the dire seraglio's horrid gates Close, like th' eternal bars of death, upon thee. Immur'd, and buried in perpetual sloth, That gloomy slumber of the stagnant soul, There shalt thou view, from far, the quiet cottage, And sigh for cheerful poverty in vain; There ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... which he arrived at this dignity, really the desire and object of Ali's whole life, occurred also the death of the Sultan Abdul Hamid, whose two sons, Mustapha and Mahmoud, were confined in the Old Seraglio. This change of rulers, however, made no difference to Ali; the peaceful Selim, exchanging the prison to which his nephews were now relegated, for the throne of their father, confirmed the Pacha of Janina in the titles, offices, and privileges which ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - ALI PACHA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... the garment of a slave of the Seraglio, and commanded his daughter to arrange her dress in a more succinct form, and to take in ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... replied the cadi, "for it is not right that the Grand Signor's slave should be seen by any one, much less should she converse with Christians; for you know that when she comes into the Sultan's possession she will be shut up in the seraglio, and must become a Turk whether she will ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... of no principle, who six years earlier had kept a ballet-girl, and who now, thanks to his position, made himself a seraglio with the pretty wives of the under-clerks, and lived in the world of journalists and actresses, became devotedly attentive all the evening to Celestine, and was the last ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... Mrs. CELIA BURLEIGH was the next speaker. She pictured, in a witty, epigrammatic manner, the progress of freedom in womankind. The picture drawn was of an Asiatic seraglio, where the spirit of revolution crept in, and the ladies commenced their incendiarism by walking abroad, and then followed up the direful unsexing of themselves by gradually removing the inviolable veil first from ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Levant, as chief factor for Mr. Willoughby at the Porte. We could easily fill our biography with the pleasant passages which we have heard him relate as having happened to him at Constantinople, such as his having been taken up on suspicion of a design of penetrating the seraglio, etc.; but, with the deepest convincement of this gentleman's own veracity, we think that some of the stories are of that whimsical, and others of that romantic nature, which, however diverting, would be out of place in a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... o' the rock, and come out a' tosh and tidy by the first dawn o' licht, to snuff the mornin' air, and visit the distant farm-house before Partlet has left her perch, or Count Crow lifted his head from beneath his oxter on his shed-seraglio. ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... of slaves: in one particular they were especially so, namely, that on the death of a sovereign they descended, like any other property, to the heir, who added as many of them as he pleased to his own seraglio. Until this was done, the unfortunate women were shut up in close seclusion on the death of their lord, like mourners who retire from the world when suffering any great and ...
— Darius the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... room were a child, kitten, and canary; in the basement was a sewing-machine; while across the entry were a piano, flute, and music-box. But Providence, that ever takes care of its own, did ever prevent all these from performing at once, or the grand seraglio of Satan would have been nothing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... fifteen years of age married Maria, daughter of Stanislas, the dethroned king of Poland. The whole life of Louis was one of idle sensuality. When he was old he established a seraglio of fifteen-year-old girls, the most beautiful that could be bought or kidnapped. On this harem he spent a hundred million francs, or twenty million dollars. It was he who, when warned of the impending ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... with his family to sea on a party of pleasure, are taken prisoners by Carlos and his servants, disguised as Turks. They are carried to a country house, and made to believe they are in the Grand Turk's seraglio. There is also an underplot, in which Isabella, Francisco's proud and vain daughter, is courted by Guilion, a supposed Count, but in reality a chimney-sweep, whose hand she accepts. In the end everything is discovered, and Guilion ...
— The Pretentious Young Ladies • Moliere
... approaching night, And hails with freshened charms the rising light. Veiled, with gay decency and modest pride, Slow to the mosque she moves, an eastern bride, There her soft vows unceasing love record, Queen of the bright seraglio ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... sultan feels that he cannot spare his brave Khan; he made an overture, which Krimgirai gladly accepted. One week before we started on our journey, the Khan was received by the sultan in his seraglio. The heads of forty rebels were displayed as a special honor in front of the seraglio, and, in the presence of the sultan himself, my master was again presented with belt and sword, and again reinstalled as Khan. The sultan also presented him with a ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... taste enough to perch his summer-house out on a conical point of the Hartland Cliffs, now tumbling into the sea, tesselated pavement, baths and all. And strange work, no doubt, went on in that lonely nook, looking out over the Atlantic swell,—nights and days fit for Petronius's own pen, among a seraglio of dark Celtic beauties. Perhaps it could not be otherwise. An ugly state of things—as heathen conquests always must have been; yet even in it there was a use and meaning. But they are past like a dream, those 10,000 stalwart men, who looked far and wide over the Damnonian ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... Next, my habit of a slave; I have made myself as like him as I can, all but his youth and vigour; which when I had, I passed my time as well as any of my holy predecessors. Now, walking under the windows of my seraglio, if Johayma look out, she will certainly take me for Antonio, and call to me; and by that I shall know what concupiscence is working in her. She cannot come down to commit iniquity, there's my safety; but if she peep, if she ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... when he is engaged in occupations not very decorously described. So Sulieman-ben-Daoud gave over all the rest of his time to riotous living and to co-educational enterprises. It was logic, but it led to a most expensive seraglio and to a very unbecoming appearance, and virtually wrecked the man's health. Yes, that was the upshot of one of you being endowed with actual wisdom, just as an experiment, to see what would come of it: so the experiment, of course, has never been repeated. But of living persons, ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... album, with Mademoiselles Georges, Taglioni, and Grisi, and some distinguished actors, such as Frederick Lemaitre, Monrose, Bouffe, Rubini, Lablache, Nourrit, and Arnal; for he knew a set of old fellows brought up in the seraglio, as they phrased it, who ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... Sultanic manner as the disgusting Roxane. I have already observed that Turkey, in its naked rudeness, hardly admits of representation before a cultivated public. Racine felt this, and merely refined the forms without changing the main incidents. The mutes and the strangling were motives which in a seraglio could hardly be dispensed with; and so he gives, on several occasions, very elegant circumlocutory descriptions of strangling. This is, however, inconsistent; when people are so familiar with the idea of a thing, they usually call it ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... three Austrian lire, he can be a Venetian Captain, he can sail in the galleys of the Republic, and conquer the gilded domes of Constantinople. Then he can lounge on the divans in the Seraglio among the Sultan's wives, while the Grand Signor himself is the slave of the Venetian conqueror. He returns to restore his palazzo with the spoils of the Ottoman Empire. He can quit the women of the East for the doubly masked intrigues ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... Charles was more a Frenchman than an Englishman; more a courtier than a king; and fitter to be a page in the seraglio than either. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... popular enthusiasm, and terminated it with general subjection. Napoleon and Louis Philippe are playing the same part as the Suleimans and the Mahmouds. The Chambers are but a second-rate Divan, the Prefects but inferior Pachas: a solitary being rules alike in the Seraglio and the Tuileries, and the whole nation bows to his despotism on condition that they have no other master ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... those who have eyes. I know a good many, and it was a pleasure to look at them in company with my young friend. There were the shrubs and flowers in the Franklin-Place front-yards or borders; Commerce is just putting his granite foot upon them. Then there are certain small seraglio- gardens, into which one can get a peep through the crevices of high fences,—one in Myrtle Street, or backing on it,—here and there one at the North and South Ends. Then the great elms in Essex Street. Then the stately horse-chestnuts in that vacant lot in ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... it tired the brain and fatigued the senses. Scutari, purple and green and gold, blended in the dying light into exquisite harmony of color; Stamboul gathered deeper gloom under her overhanging balconies, behind which lay hidden the loveliest of her women; and in the deserted gardens of the Old Seraglio, beneath the heavy pall of the cypresses, memories of a grand, terrible, barbarous, but most romantic Past crept forth and ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... purchased long ago in the slave-mart at Adrianople for the Emperor of Morocco, then, upon the Emperor's death and the dispersion of his harem, sold to the young Bey Ahmed. Hemerlingue had married her on her exit from that second seraglio, but was unable to induce society to receive her in Tunis, where no woman, be she Moor, Turk, or European, will ever consent to treat a former slave as an equal, by virtue of a prejudice not unlike that which separates the Creole from the most perfectly disguised ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... time he built for her the palace behind Point Demetrius, yet known as the Seraglio. In other words, Mahommed the Sultan abided faithfully by the vows Aboo-Obeidah made for him. [Footnote: The throne of Mahommed was guarded by the numbers and fidelity of his Moslem subjects; but his national policy aspired to collect the remnant ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... time, M. De Legal's secretary set open all the doors of the inquisition, and released the prisoners, who amounted in the whole to 400; and among these were 60 beautiful young women, who appeared to form a seraglio ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... poetic part of this poem; it now remains to investigate in how far it is a real German product, that is to say, such an one as could have been produced only on German soil by a German. Every one will find that it might very easily have been written by some person from the Sultan's seraglio, and used by any people who found themselves in a like situation. Even the French, although it is directed against them, could gain inspiration from it, if their good taste did not preserve them from doing so. Let no one throw the German oaks (strophe four) in ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... the Khedivial Line, plying between Constaninople and Alexandria, have their mooring buoys near the Stamboul side of the Golden Horn, between Seraglio Point and the Galata bridge. During the forenoon, Shelton Bey, R—, and I had taken a caique and sought out from among the crowd of shipping in the harbor the steamship Behera, of the above-mentioned line, on which I have ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... force—in part from the Syrian villages, in part from the wild tribes of Arabia—made his appearance in the field. His light and agile horsemen hovered about the Persian host, cut off their stragglers, made prize of much of their spoil, and even captured a portion of the seraglio of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... Europe; they are very substantial, but of the same superior colours with the bulawan. They are made generally half a yard wide, and three yards long: these sell at Fas, from two to fifty dollars each. The superior kind made for the ladies of the horam[157], or emperor's seraglio, for the ladies of the bashaws, and for those of the great and opulent, are intermixed with a beautiful gold-thread, much superior to any that is manufactured in Europe, insomuch, that the gold-thread imported from ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... I thought I had already told you, that in participation in this world's affairs, more especially in their moral aspects, the Count of Monte Cristo has never ceased to entertain the scruples and even the superstitions of the East. I, who have a seraglio at Cairo, one at Smyrna, and one at Constantinople, preside at ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... great period of the sea-republic, except the fine, and in most parts well-conditioned walls. Here and there a double-arched window, with a bit of fine carving in the capitals, peeps out from the jutting uglinesses of seraglio windows, close latticed and mysterious; one or two fine doorways, neglected and battered as to their ornamentation, some coats of arms, three or four arched gateways, and as many fountains, are all that will catch the eye of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... especially when we consider how grievously he was afflicted with bad health, and how uncomfortable his home was made by the perpetual jarring of those whom he charitably accommodated under his roof. He has sometimes suffered me to talk jocularly of his group of females, and call them his Seraglio. He thus mentions them, together with honest Levett, in one of his letters to Mrs. Thrale: 'Williams hates every body; Levett hates Desmoulins, and does not love Williams; Desmoulins hates them both; Poll* loves none ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... proper kind, including due reference to "obedience" and his "will." This brings down a small pageful of raillery from the young person, who asks "whether this is Turkish gallantry?" suggests that the restrictions of the seraglio involve a fear that "the skies should rain men," and more than hints that she should be very glad if they did. For the moment Soliman, though much taken with her, finds no way of saving his dignity except by a retreat. The next time he sends for her, or rather announces ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... overhanging balconies of old Byzantine houses, beneath which a rider had to stoop the head, where old Turks would lose their way in mazes of the picturesque; and on the shaded Bosphorus coast, to Foundoucli and beyond, some peeping yali, snow-white palace, or old Armenian cot; and the Seraglio by the sea, a town within a town; and southward the Sea of Marmora, blue-and-white, and vast, and fresh as a sea just born, rejoicing at its birth and at the jovial sun, all brisk, alert, to the shadowy islands afar: and as I looked, I suddenly said aloud a wild, mad ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... read in my life—Tully's Residence in Tripoli, written by the sister of the consul, who resided there for ten years, spoke the language, and was admitted to a constant intercourse with the ladies of the seraglio, who are very different from any seraglio ladies we ever before heard of. No Arabian tale is equal in magnificence and entertainment; no tragedy superior in strength of interest to the tragedy recorded in the last ten pages of this incomparable book. Some people ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... feet in diameter. The town, for the greater part, is well built, although the walls of the dwellings, a few palaces excepted, are of mud; but their interior makes amends for the roughness of their external appearance. The Mutsellim resides in a seraglio, on the banks of the river. I enquired in vain for a piece of marble, with figures in relief, which La Roque saw; but in the corner of a house in the Bazar is a stone with ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... escutcheon, for he was descended from King Charles the Second and the fair and frail Frenchwoman Louise Renee de Querouaille, who was commonly known among Englishmen of her day as Madam Carwell. This lady, who was probably the least bad of the unlicensed prostitutes of Charles's seraglio at Whitehall, was for her many virtues created Duchess of Portsmouth. Her descendants, like those of Nell Gwynn and the rest of that frail sisterhood, are reckoned among the great ones of the earth. The Duke whose melancholy fate has just been chronicled was the father of Lady Sarah, spouse ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... he started up, and beheld—not his Sophia—no, nor a Circassian maid richly and elegantly attired for the grand Signior's seraglio. No; without a gown, in a shift that was somewhat of the coarsest, and none of the cleanest, bedewed likewise with some odoriferous effluvia, the produce of the day's labour, with a pitchfork in her hand, Molly Seagrim approached. ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... of the breaking out of the civil war. He pined for the decorous tyranny of the old Whitehall; for the days of that sainted king who deprived his people of their money and their ears, but let their wives and daughters alone; and could scarcely reconcile himself to a court with a seraglio and without a Star-Chamber. By taking this course he made himself every day more odious, both to the sovereign, who loved pleasure much more than prerogative, and to the people, who dreaded royal prerogatives much more than royal pleasures; ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... College, Cambridge, went in 1661 to Constantinople as Secretary to the Embassy. He published in 1668 his Present State of the Ottoman Empire, in three Books, and in 1670 the work here quoted, A Particular Description of the Mahometan Religion, the Seraglio, the Maritime and Land Forces of Turkey, abridged in 1701 in Savages History of the Turks, and translated into French by Bespier in 1707. Consul afterwards at Smyrna, he wrote by command of Charles II. a book on The Present State of the Greek and ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... debauchee, fond of cards, dice, and women; and that in Italy, except two hours in twenty-four allotted to business, he passed the remainder of his time either at the gaming-tables, or in the boudoirs of his seraglio—I say seraglio, because he kept, in the extensive house joining his palace as governor and commander, ten women-three French, three Italians, two Germans, two Irish or English girls. He supported them all in style; but they were his slaves, and he was their sultan, whose ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... of military expeditions, the hunting of wild beasts, and the administration of justice; while the other preferred to confine himself to the role of adviser or benevolent counsellor. Even this precaution, however, was insufficient to prevent disasters. The women of the seraglio, encouraged from without by their relations or friends, plotted secretly for the removal of the irksome sovereign.* Those princes who had been deprived by their father's decision of any legitimate hope of reigning, concealed their ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... Mozart's career as an operatic composer. A few months later he quarreled with the archbishop, and the unpleasant connection came to an end. His second opera, "Die Entfuehrung aus dem Serail" ("The Elopement from the Seraglio"), was produced at Vienna July 16, 1782. This was his first opera in German. In August of this year he was married to Constance Weber, younger sister of her who had first enchanted him. The marriage was congenial in many ways, but as the ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... Median luxury to despise it and those who indulge in it. He has seen his own grandfather with his cheeks rouged, his eyelids stained with antimony, living a womanlike life, shut up from all his subjects in the recesses of a vast seraglio. ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... He had buried two wives, and he had two sons and one daughter. The eldest son, having received his patrimony, had established himself in the city of Salonica, where he was a wealthy merchant; the other was in the seraglio, in the service of the Grand Turk and his fortune was in the hands of a trustee. His daughter, Zelmi, then fifteen years of age, was to inherit all his remaining property. He had given her all the accomplishments which could minister to the happiness of the man whom heaven had destined for her husband. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... untaught the broad and sound principles of life; all that you know of morals are its decencies and forms. Thus you are incapable of estimating the public virtues and the public deficiencies of a brother or a son; and one reason why we have no Brutus, is because you have no Portia. Turkey has its seraglio for the person; but custom in Europe has also a seraglio ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... themselves, the only way women can rise in the world—by marriage. And this desire making mere animals of them, when they marry, they act as such children may be expected to act: they dress; they paint, and nickname God's creatures. Surely these weak beings are only fit for the seraglio! Can they govern a family, or take care of the poor babes whom they bring into ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... Yon may note Romeo's mandolin lying at his feet, while over the whole falls the melancholy light of a full moon rising behind the palace. To suit a less-intelligent class, it would perhaps be described as the escape of a Turkish captive by leaping from the upper floor of the Sultan's seraglio into the arms of her gallant rescuer, who would be American, British, French, German, or Spanish, according to the predominating nationality of my audience. Or it might be called 'A Thrilling Incident of the Great New ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... Barbyses, that ran its meandering course through this verdant scene. It was a princely home, the proudest harem in all this gem of the Orient, for the old Turk had acted not for himself in the purchase he had made, but as the agent of a higher will than his own, and the dumb slave was led to the seraglio of ...
— The Circassian Slave; or, The Sultan's Favorite - A Story of Constantinople and the Caucasus • Lieutenant Maturin Murray
... who made his marches, seated on a throne flashing with gold and rich brocades, and borne on the shoulders of men; while his princesses and favorite begums followed in all the pomp and glory of the seraglio, nestled in delicious pavilions curtained with massy silk, and mounted on the backs of stately elephants ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... toilet, they gathered in groups of four or five, chilled and shivering in their fur mantles, muffs, and triple black veils. Notwithstanding the hasty rouge and powder of the morning, they were unrecognizable, and it required an effort of imagination to find in them a memory of that sublime seraglio of the Parisian theatres, exposed every evening to the desires of several thousand men. On all of these charming types appeared the mark of weariness and age. Some ossified into faded skeletons, others ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... had no special object in view. But she longed to be out in the air, to drive, to see people about her, the waterway, the forest of shipping, the domes and the minarets, the cypresses, the glades stretching towards Seraglio Point, the long, low hills of Asia. She longed, too, to hear voices, hurrying feet, the innumerable sounds of life. She hoped by seeing and hearing to fortify her will. The spirit of adventure was the spirit that held her, was the most vital part within her, and such a spirit needed freedom to ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... from storms, on the north, were the barns and the farm-yard. There stood the broad-wheeled wains and the antique ploughs and the harrows; There were the folds for the sheep; and there, in his feathered seraglio, Strutted the lordly turkey, and crowed the cock, with the selfsame Voice that in ages of old had startled the penitent Peter. Bursting with hay were the barns, themselves a village. In each one Far o'er the gable projected a roof of thatch; and a staircase, Under ...
— The Children's Own Longfellow • Henry W. Longfellow
... could fall like an earthquake upon Van Klopen. Shut up in the sanctum where he composed the numberless costumes that were the wonder and delight of Paris, Van Klopen made as careful arrangements to secure himself from the interview as the Turk does to guard the approaches to his seraglio; and so Andre and Gandelu were accosted in the entrance hall by his stately footmen, clad in gorgeous ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... perfect, their houses are so light and airy of architecture, so brilliant and varied of colour, that they suggest having been called into being by the stroke of a magician's wand to gratify the whim of an Eastern potentate. Surely, they are a vast seraglio, a triple collection of pleasure houses where captive maidens are content and nautch girls dance with feet like larks. Business, commerce, one cannot associate with this enchanting vista; nor cockroaches as long as one's foot, ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... over their once treasures, by night and noon, white-sheeted and faint in the glare of the sun, wan in the moon, blacker shadows in the starless dark, found belief. And there were those who had seen his seraglio;—but few, indeed, had seen him,—a lonely man, in fact, who lived aloof and apart, shunned and shunning, tainted by ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of love, and I would ask if it be conceivable that the abominable calumny prompted by theological virus, that he kept a seraglio, as his friend Leigh Hunt informs us was reported, had any real existence. Shelley was too pure for any such idea as that of promiscuous sexual intercourse to be acted on by himself; his life, which ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... scarcely entered the court, when I was surrounded by the entire seraglio. Some begged me for physic, some for amber, and all were most desirous of trying the great African specific of blood-letting. They are ten or twelve in number, most of them young and handsome, wearing on ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... son, Ghijas-ud-Din, had been for many years his father's right hand, both in council and in the field. But no sooner did he come to the throne in 1469 than he discharged all the affairs of the state on to his own son and retired into the seraglio, where 15,000 women formed his court and provided him even with a bodyguard. Five hundred beautiful young Turki women, armed with bows and arrows, stood, we are told, on his right hand, and, on his left, five hundred Abyssinian ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol |
