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More "Degenerate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I wish the excellent and gifted young man every success; I trust that his youthful idealism and impulse towards the ideas of the people may never degenerate, as often happens, on the moral side into gloomy mysticism, and on the political into blind chauvinism—two elements which are even a greater menace to Russia than the premature decay, due to misunderstanding and gratuitous ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... highly satisfactory occupation of destroying insect life. More than half of its food consists of ants. In this country, taken as a whole, Flickers are very numerous, and the millions of individual birds which have yet escaped the guns of degenerate pot hunters constitute a mighty army of destruction to ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... is unworthy of the name and can, therefore, claim from us no further consideration; it is mere naked rudeness and selfishness, ill-disguised by the gaudy rays of outward decency; a mere cherishing of the sensual nature which, left to itself, would soon degenerate into monstrous barbarism, of which we already ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... demoralise us,' have they no redeeming value; can they not be altered to serve better; must they of necessity be thrown to the dogs? The truth is, Teufelsdroeckh, though a Sansculottist, is no Adamite; and much perhaps as he might wish to go forth before this degenerate age 'as a Sign,' would nowise wish to do it, as those old Adamites did, in a state of Nakedness. The utility of Clothes is altogether apparent to him: nay perhaps he has an insight into their more recondite, and almost mystic qualities, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... The bow should never degenerate into a nod; this is both ungracious and ungentlemanly. The hat should be lifted sufficiently to clear the head, and the bow, in the reception room, should slightly incline the body also. Ladies should incline their heads gracefully and smile ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... and repassed before the window—Sorenson's figure, of course. Brute, coward, degenerate he was, and to be dealt with as such. Not only as such, indeed, but as a wretch who had dared to touch Janet Hosmer against her will, to drag her from her home to this lonely spot by violence for his ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... hypnotic influence of Rasputin, the smart little woman, who often called at the house and whom I sometimes met at the palace, was quickly transformed from a steady tradesman's wife into a giddy, pleasure-loving and intriguing degenerate, perhaps even more vicious than the rest. Indeed, it was this very fact which caused the Empress to look upon her with favour. Thus she soon had the run of the private apartments, and became upon friendly terms ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... outrageously and more hardly than it beseemed men. Acknowledge my service, honour my wit, give me the throne if I have earned it; for you have in me one who has done you a mighty service, and who is no degenerate heir to his father's power; no fratricide, but the lawful successor to the throne; and a dutiful avenger of the crime of murder. It is I who have stripped you of slavery, and clothed you with freedom; I have restored your height of fortune, and given you ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... its lowest point of condescension, even to the heart of fallen man. John, in speaking of Jesus as the life-giver, calls him "he that cometh from above" (3: 31); and Jesus, in speaking to the degenerate sons of Abraham, says: "Ye are from beneath, I am from above" (John 8: 23). It has been the constant dream and delusion of men that they could rise to heaven by the development and improvement of their natural life. Jesus by one stroke ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... genre of the Opera comique, the French stage is far superior to the Italian. In the French comedy everything is graceful and natural; the Italians cannot catch this happy medium, so that their comedies and comic operas are mostly outre, and degenerate into ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... century. As a satirist and humourist, I cannot place him so high as some of his admirers do; and the purely polemical portions of his poems, those in which he puts forth his antagonism to tyrants and religions and custom in all its myriad forms, seem to me to degenerate ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... in their warres swerde, bowe, launce, slinge, and battle ax. The rable of helhoundes (whom we calle Sarasines) that pestilent murreine of mankinde, came of this people. And as it is to be thoughte, at this daye the great parte of Arabia is degenerate into that name. But thei that dwell towarde Egipte, kepe yet their olde name, and lyue by butin, [Footnote: Booty, from the French "Butin."] like prickers of the bordre, wherin, the swiftenes of their ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... class have come to a turning point—they have come to the age when resolves may be made for life, and kept. The good third-class girl is very unlikely to degenerate as she passes through the second and first classes. On the other hand, there is very little hope that the idle or mischievous third-class girl will mend her ways as she goes ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... have been a better man had he been less painfully good. When he came to the parish of Dour he found that he had to succeed a man who had allowed his people to run wild. Dour was a garden filled with the degenerate fruit ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... death that she had dared); He ate it knowing. Then divisions came. She, like a spirit strayed who lost the way, Too venturesome, among the farther stars, And hardly cares, because it hardly hopes To find the path to heaven; in bitter wise Did bear to him degenerate seed, and he, Once having felt her upward drawing, longed, And yet aspired, and yearned to be restored, Albeit she drew ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... travel much longer with two such learned and philosophical scholars, I shall inevitably degenerate into ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... exhalations from reeking coach-horses, the usual furniture of a tea-table was displayed in neat and inviting order, flanked by large joints of roast and boiled, a tongue, a pigeon pie, a cold fowl, a tankard of ale, and other little matters of the like kind, which, in degenerate towns and cities, are generally understood to belong more particularly to solid lunches, stage-coach ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... desirable, not only for restoration of physical vigour, but also, for a recementing of domestic and social ties and for a renewed contact with and a new inspiration from the Church of God in the West. Life in all its aspects has a tendency to degenerate in the tropics; and one needs occasional returns to northern climes for the blessings which they alone ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... so that there is no need to fear for the position of a Yugoslav Rieka based solely—omitting Hungary and the Ukraine altogether—on her Yugoslav hinterland. Rieka without Yugoslavia would be ruined and would degenerate into a fishing village, with a great past and a miserable future. This could very well be seen during the spring of 1919 when the communications were interrupted between Rieka and Yugoslavia. At Rieka during April eggs were ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... mother, and family specially attend public worship, to bless God for his mercies, and to beseech grace that they may train up the child for heaven. Such is the practice among the Baptists. But even in this, watchfulness is requisite, lest it degenerate into ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... marriage are likely to be unsatisfactory, the marriage will certainly be so. We moderns bedeck and bedrape us in all sorts of meretricious togas, till a pair of fine eyes and a dashing manner pass for beauty; but when life tries the metal—when nature applies her inevitable test—the degenerate or neurotic type goes ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... birth and breeding had returned upon him; something instinctive and inherited had reappeared; and the gentlemanly, easy-going father, who yet, as Doris remembered, when matters were serious "always got his way," was there—strangely there—in the degenerate son. ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... capricious; the sorts degenerate and require much care to keep them true. As to its time of flowering it is commonly considered a spring and summer flower; but I think one of its chief charms is that there is scarcely a day in the whole year in which you might not ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... he went on, "though trained to eat kept moss, hay, and even bread, thrive only when they are free to roam about; they cannot be kept all the time in their stables. They must wander over the snow and eat it. Otherwise they are sure to degenerate and become ...
— The Land of the Long Night • Paul du Chaillu
... Eastern climates the abundance of degenerate man will, at some spot and moment, reach a point where it breeds the plague which diminishes by depopulation the evil it can not remove by more merciful agencies, so would it seem that in France the demoralization which necessitated a revolution, concentrating itself in one family, produced ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... being thus the unconscious precursor of the Spiritual), and to show how the religion which bore his name was fitted at once to predispose its nobler votaries to Christianity and to infuriate against it those who but valued their faith for what it contained of degenerate. It seemed also expedient to select for treatment not only those records most abounding in the picturesque and poetic, but likewise others useful as illustrating the chief representatives of a many-sided society; the pagan king and the British warrior, the bard of Odin and the prophetess ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... and sincere in disbelief based on rational grounds. He had found those who evaded and some who were indifferent, many who compromised, never before a sweeping denial. He could not picture an atheist as other than a perverted monster, a moral degenerate, the personification of all evil. This was his conception of such as denied his God. Blasphemers. Foredoomed to hell. Yet he had found MacLeod hospitable, ready with kindly advice, occupying a position of trust in the service of a great company. Was it after all possible that the essence of Christianity ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... area bounded by the frontier line, were the broken fragments of Indians defeated in the era of King Philip's War, restrained within reservations, drunken and degenerate survivors, among whom the missionaries worked with small results, a vexation to the border towns,[46:3] as they were in the case of later frontiers. Although, as has been said, the frontier towns had scattered garrison houses, and palisaded enclosures similar to the ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... the barriers, and scattered the burning brands. A great scene of confusion ensued, and the performance came abruptly to an end. One of the blacks remarked, not without reason, "Me tink dis white fellows' corrobboree." It is a painful thing to see a race so degenerate as to be willing to show themselves for money before their supplanters, and to see the former "lords of the soil" begging a copper from the passer-by. One cannot but desire that their extinction in these parts, which is certain, may be also speedy. I cannot easily imagine two more pitiable ...
— Six Letters From the Colonies • Robert Seaton
... of potted plants on the river's bank, drinking tea, flirting their fans, and doubtless talking over the latest Court gossip. Nearby is a willow, not the stiff, ugly tree now seen upon tame and degenerate imitations of real old China pottery, but a graceful weeping-willow, whose drooping branches sweep the opposite shore, as sublimely indifferent to distance ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... routine ways of acting, or degenerate into ways of action to which we are enslaved just in the degree in which intelligence is disconnected from them. Routine habits are unthinking habits: "bad" habits are habits so severed from reason that they are opposed to the conclusions of conscious deliberation ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... the day; he was very agreeable, but spoke too lightly, I thought, of veal soup. I took him aside, and reasoned the matter with him, but in vain; to speak the truth, Luttrell is not steady in his judgments on dishes. Individual failures with him soon degenerate into generic objections, till, by some fortunate accident, he eats himself into better opinions. A person of more calm reflection thinks not only of what he is consuming at the moment, but of the soups of the same ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... trampled. The sepulchre of Christ is possessed by the heathen, the sacred places dishonoured by their vileness. Oh, brave knights and faithful people! offspring of invincible fathers! ye will not degenerate from your ancient renown. Ye will not be restrained from embarking in this great cause by the tender ties of wife or little ones, but will remember the words of the Saviour of the world himself, 'Whosoever loves father and mother more than me is not worthy of me. Whosoever ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... weak voice, his eyes starting from his head. "Life cannot be unchequered by the frowns of fate, but death must bring dumbness to my lips. Caution, when besmeared in blood, is no longer virtue, or wisdom, but wretched and degenerate cowardice; no, never let him that was born to execute judgment secure his honours by cruelty and oppression. Hath not thy Koran told thee that fear and submission is a subject's tribute, yet mercy ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... problem, as a child, he ever remained. He was known as a little demon, of insensate cruelty and viciousness. The family medicos privately adjudged him a mental monstrosity and degenerate. Such few boy companions as he had, hailed him as a wonder, though they were all afraid of him. He could outclimb, outswim, outrun, outdevil any of them; while none dared fight with him. He was ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... a relative value. It is no absolute end, lying beyond all other aims of existence and valued above life itself. In this view, there will be nothing to applaud in the forced and extravagant conduct of a Lucretia or a Virginius—conduct which can easily degenerate into tragic farce, and produce a terrible feeling of revulsion. The conclusion of Emilia Galotti, for instance, makes one leave the theatre completely ill at ease; and, on the other hand, all the rules of female honor cannot prevent a certain sympathy with Clara in Egmont. ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... and Exigencies of the Receiver, but even out-run his Wishes: Tis this happy manner of Behaviour which adds new Charms to it, and softens those Gifts of Art and Nature, which otherwise would be rather distasteful than agreeable. Without it, Valour would degenerate into Brutality, Learning into Pedantry, and the genteelest Demeanour into Affectation. Even Religion its self, unless Decency be the Handmaid which waits upon her, is apt to make People appear guilty of Sourness and ill Humour: But this shews Virtue in her first original Form, adds a Comeliness ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... in family quarrels and insurrections of pretenders. None indeed of the states founded by the successors of Alexander were free from such attempts, or from the other horrors which absolute monarchy in degenerate times brings in its train; but in the kingdom of Asia these evils were more injurious than elsewhere, because, from the lax composition of the empire, they usually led to the severance of particular portions from it for longer or ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... way due to use-inheritance? If, too, the superiority of geniuses proves use-inheritance, why should not the inferiority of the sons of geniuses prove the existence of a tendency which is the exact opposite of use-inheritance? But nobody collects facts concerning the degenerate branches of musical families. Only the favourably varying branches are noticed, and a general impression of rapid evolution of talent is thus produced. Such cases might be explained, too, by the facts that ...
— Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? - An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and Darwin • William Platt Ball
... far beyond the level of any motives existing under pagan moralities; and, on the other hand, he traduces great men like Caesar, whose natures were beyond his scale of measurement, by tracing their policy to petty purposes entirely Plutarchian. But he was a Greekling in a degenerate age of Grecians. As to the French Memoirs, which are often so exceedingly amusing, they purchase their liveliness by one eternal sacrifice of plain truth. Their repartees, felicitous propos, and pointed anecdotes are but one rolling fire ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... these kind of men that are so given up to the study of wisdom are generally most unfortunate, but chiefly in their children; Nature, it seems, so providently ordering it, lest this mischief of wisdom should spread further among mankind. For which reason it is manifest why Cicero's son was so degenerate, and that wise Socrates' children, as one has well observed, were more like their mother than their father, that is to ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... charm; naked small boys marching solemnly like their elders; camel trains from far-off Abyssinia or Somaliland under convoy of white-clad turbaned grave men of beautiful features; donkey safaris in charge of dirty degenerate looking East Indians carrying trade goods to some distant post-all these and many more, going one way or the other, drew one side, at the sight of our white faces, to ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... worthiest predecessors. The tendency of the age is to lower, not to elevate, the standard set up by our ancestors for the attainment of preeminence. That our giants may not be stunted in their growth—that the legal stock may not hopelessly degenerate—Chief Justice Campbell does well to impress upon his brethren the patient and laborious course—the high and admirable qualities—by which Chief Justice Mansfield secured his ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... of this militant, even defiant, attitude is self-protection, those who are long compelled to maintain it conceive a contempt for the law, which they find inadequate to guard them, and not infrequently degenerate into bandits. ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... as good as me," Bacon, in one of his finest antitheses, draws a contrast between the love of Excellence and the love of Excelling. Carlyle is possessed by both; he had none of the exaggerated caution which in others of his race is apt to degenerate into moral cowardice: but when he thought himself trod on he became, to use his own figure, "a rattlesnake," and put out fangs like those of the griffins curiously, if not sardonically, carved on the tombs of his family in ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... There is scarcely a young man here who does not hope to be a husband and a father; nor a young woman who does not expect to be a wife and a mother. But who does not revolt at the idea of perpetuating a race inferior to ourselves? For myself I could not desire a degenerate family. I would not wish for a race which would not be head and shoulders above what I had been. Let me say to men, select women worthy to be wives. The world is overstocked with these mis-begotten children of undeveloped mothers. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... schools were, established in various parts of Italy, each under the controul of a lanis'ta, or fencing-master, who instructed them in martial exercises. The victims were either prisoners of war, or refractory slaves, sold by their masters; but in the degenerate ages of the empire, freemen, and even senators, ventured their lives on the stage along with the regular gladiators. Under the mild and merciful influence of Christianity these combats were abolished, and human blood was no longer shed to gratify ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... they went forth to conquer infidels, to establish the true faith, to recover the blessed land, hallowed by the Redeemer's footsteps, from the power of the cruel followers of the false prophet of Mecca. How degenerate are we Christians of the present generation! Who among us dreams of expelling the Turks from Syria? On the contrary, our statesmen devote their energies to keep them there. I really believe that were Peter the Hermit to rise ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... hours, that it seemed as if days must have passed since I left home. I tried to reconcile what I had heard with what I had seen of my father; but I could not identify the magnificent artist, the man of genius and of feeling, with the degenerate being from whom I had recoiled one hour ago. Could a long career of guilt and shame thus deface and obliterate that divine and godlike image, in which man was formed? He must have loved my mother. Desperation for her loss had plunged him into the wildest excesses of dissipation. From my soul ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... comparatively rudimentary and somewhat stupid senses like these, the sense of motion, with the average civilised man, is so blunt that he needs to be rushed along at seventy miles an hour to have the feeling that he is moving, and his sense of mass is so degenerate that he needs to live with hundreds of thousands of people next door to know that he is not alone. He is seen in his most natural state,—this civilised being,—with most of his civilisation around him, ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... hardly dared to lift her eyes in Mary Pidwall's presence. For Mary knew not only the sum of her lies, but also held—or so Laura believed—that she came of a thoroughly degenerate family; thanks to Uncle Tom. And the early weeks spent at close quarters with her bore out these fears. The looks both M. P. and her friend bent on Laura said as plainly as words: if we are forced to tolerate this obnoxious ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... or a country may degenerate! The Grecian people, at one time the first in the world, are now the furthest behind! I was told by everyone that in Greece it was neither safe to trust myself with a guide nor to wander about alone, ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... absinthe, he would picture himself wresting from the incumbent, the Crown of Galavia, and would hear throngs shouting "Long live King Louis!" At such moments his stimulated spirit would indulge in large visions, and his half-degenerate face would smile through its ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... of officials. The 91st article of his code puts the matter thus plainly, even as regarded the Shogunate: "When punishments and executions abound in the Empire, it is a proof that the military ruler is without virtue and degenerate." He devised particular enactments to protect the peasantry and the poor from the cruelty or the rapacity of powerful lords. The great daimyo were strictly forbidden, when making their obligatory journeys to Yedo, ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... always acts through great, universal things, instincts and impulses, that must serve for all, but under which the individual must often suffer. His laws are good, good for us all, but not perfect, any more than human laws. Cannot all impulses degenerate? Are not all our tendencies full of danger? Is not our body full of defects? Must we not help and improve continuously? And nevertheless is not everything again compiled with an ingenuity incomprehensible to us? Think what it means to heal a slight wound ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... Conservation cast his gaunt shadow. It was in June, the year of America's Great Step, that Emma, examining her household, pronounced it fattily degenerate, with complications, and performed upon it a severe and skilful surgical operation. Among ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... explain his knowledge in black and white. He examined and tested the plant, but it did not belong to his system of botany, nor could he possibly find out to what class it did belong. "It must be some degenerate species," said he; "I do not know it, and it is not mentioned in ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... castle of Stanesland was but a small house as castles, or even mansions, go, almost devoid of architectural ornament and evidently built in a sterner age simply for security, and but little embellished by the taste of more degenerate times. As a specimen of a small early 15th Century castle it was excellent; as a home it was inconvenience incarnate. How so many draughts found their way through such thick walls was a perennial mystery, and how to convey dishes from the kitchen to the ...
— Simon • J. Storer Clouston
... driven out by a wretched tribe, which certainly must likewise have belonged to the Aryan race, for upon the round terra-cottas I still very frequently find the tree of life, and the simple cross and double cross with the four nails. In these depths, however, the forms of the whorls degenerate. Of pottery, however, much less is found, and all of it is considerably less artistic than that which I have found in the preceding strata. With the people to whom these strata belonged—from 13 to 6-1/2 feet below the surface—the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... broad-shouldered man riding in from distant fields; she saw herself waiting to greet him with an armful of fresh-cut roses from the bushes which flanked the little rustic gate before her. All this was gone, vanished into the past, wiped out by the torches and bullets and hatred of these hideous and degenerate men. With a stifled sob, and a little shudder, Jane Clayton turned back into her tent and sought the pile of unclean blankets which were her bed. Throwing herself face downward upon them she sobbed forth her misery until kindly ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... inaugurated by the new government, and housed in an abomination of pink stucco with Moorish towers at the four corners. He might even have been elected president of the new Academy, and have presided over the Italian sculptors and degenerate French painters imported to instruct and "civilize" modern Japan. Stiff graphite pencils, making lines as hard and sharp as those in the faces of foreigners themselves, were to take the place of the soft charcoal flake whose stroke was of satin and young leaves. Horrible brushes, fashioned of ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... viages by sea, and other some worse courses, tending to dissolutnes & the danger of their soules, to y^e great greefe of their parents and dishonour of God. So that they saw their posteritie would be in danger to degenerate & be corrupted. ...
— Bradford's History of 'Plimoth Plantation' • William Bradford
... If, in the sixteen years during which the negroes have enjoyed their freedom, they have made less progress in civilization than their philanthropic champions have promised or anticipated, let the want I have suggested receive some consideration. It may be that even a white peasantry would degenerate under such influences. Reverse this, and when the negro has cropped his sugar or his coffee, create a demand for his labour in the mills and manufactories of which nature has invited the establishment ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... expected to show you in a few minutes is the very same one which my wife fought against for two weeks, before she let me put it into operation peacefully!" Hawkins burst out. "There's where the connection comes in between your degenerate little wits and those of the ...
— Mr. Hawkins' Humorous Adventures • Edgar Franklin
... his plays? What necessity is there at times to put one piece into another? Are not his discussions and monologues too long? Does not his own exuberant genius become a fatigue to himself and to his readers? Are not, perhaps, his characters too real? and do they not often degenerate, without motive, from the sublime into the ridiculous? Would Hamlet have appeared less interesting or less mad had he not spoken indelicate and cruel words to Ophelia? Would Laertes have seemed less grieved on hearing of the death of his ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... Everything was plain to the Masons, and if it had not been clear, the way in which the writer emphasized his hatred of the Jesuits would have told it all. It was a Jesuit[140] plot hatched in Rome to expose the secrets of Masonry, and making use of the dissolute and degenerate Mason for that purpose—tactics often enough used in the name of Jesus! Curiously enough, this was further made evident by the fact that the order ceased to exist in 1738, the year in which Clement ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... utter licentiousness and depravity of Imperial Rome. Looking back to Republican Rome, and considering the state of public morals but fifty years before the emperors, we can with difficulty believe that the descendants of a people so severe in their habits could thus rapidly degenerate, and that a populace, once so hardy and masculine, should assume the manners which we might expect in the debauchees of Daphne (the infamous suburb of Antioch) or of Canopus, into which settled the very lees and dregs of the vicious Alexandria. ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... four years' service in the prison in Naples. He gives as the reason for this unusually high percentage of cases observed by him the fact that two-thirds of the inmates of the prison belonged to the Camorra, an organization whose members are gleaned from the lowest and most degenerate stratum of society, and in whom the tendency for deception and fraud in ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... beguiled by these light wizards of our degenerate age, I dreamed away most of my school life, utterly deaf to the voices of the older enchanters—Homer, Horace, Virgil—whom I was sent to school on purpose to make friends with; a deafness I lived to deplore, like other dunces, ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... not afford to buy a new one. No one applauded him. Think of the man who had originally caught the lion! He went out alone and trapped a lion, simply that his rude boys might be amused at the spectacle. In our degenerate days, we give our children a Teddy Bear. But in those strenuous times, the father said to his boys, "Come out into the back yard, and see the present I've got for you!" They came eagerly, and found a live lion. That man and his children were a hardy family. How they would ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... Instead of "effects," say "labours"—"degenerate" will do, will it? Mr. Betty is no longer a babe, therefore the line cannot be personal. Will ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... subordinate officers had to obey their soldiers. Whenever there was an important question to be discussed, the soldiers demanded a voice and a share in the solution. These soldiers were called the republican army. Although the Northern troops have not yet become so degenerate, still they never hesitate to disobey the order of their superiors whenever they are ordered to proceed to distant localities. Now we have come to the point when we are deeply satisfied if the army of the Republic does not openly ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... instruction, and extended to her most heartfelt aid and approbation in all her noble work, as they were in those days wont to do in behalf of the aspiring Colored girls who sought for education, withholding themselves from such work only when a depraved and degenerate public sentiment upon the subject of educating the Colored people had compelled them to a more rigid line of demarcation between the races. Ellen Simonds and others conducted the school a few years, but with the ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... colors of the skeletons and long, fuzzy, exaggerated lines of the accompanying worms. The effect was thrilling. Every sound save the soft swish of the ghastly robes and the delicate footfall of ghostly feet ceased. Not a whisper from a sap-headed youth or a yap from an aged degenerate or a giggle from a silly woman broke ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... a subject and thus to challenge comparison with Dumas's immortal musketeers; but the result justifies the boldness.... The plot is admirably clear and strong, the diction singularly concise and telling, and the stirring events are so managed as not to degenerate into sensationalism. Few better novels of adventure than this have ever been written."—OUTLOOK, ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... which grow in darkness are perfectly white, languid, and unhealthy, and that to make them recover vigour, and to acquire their natural colours, the direct influence of light is absolutely necessary. Somewhat similar takes place even upon animals: Mankind degenerate to a certain degree when employed in sedentary manufactures, or from living in crowded houses, or in the narrow lanes of large cities; whereas they improve in their nature and constitution in most of the country labours which are carried ...
— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier
... my best, ma'am, but can't get much higher, I'm afraid, as six feet is about all men can do in these degenerate days," responded the young gentleman, whose head was about level with ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... of things that "ain't so" about the health of country children as compared with city children, of private-school children as compared with public-school children. Where do we find more degenerate men, physically and morally, than in so-called "American settlements," where, for generations, children have had all outdoors to play in, except when in homes and schoolhouses that are seldom cleansed ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... this race that intermarriages with the following sub-races failed to modify the type, which still remained essentially Toltec; and hundreds of thousands of years later we find one of their remote family races ruling magnificently in Mexico and Peru, long ages before their degenerate descendants were conquered by the fiercer Aztec tribes from the north. The complexion of this race was also a red-brown, but they were redder or more copper-coloured than the Tlavatli. They also were a tall race, averaging about eight feet during the period of ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... these considerations aside, was it laudable to grasp at wealth and power even when they were within our reach? Were not these the two great sources of depravity? What security had he, that in this change of place and condition, he should not degenerate into a tyrant and voluptuary? Power and riches were chiefly to be dreaded on account of their tendency to deprave the possessor. He held them in abhorrence, not only as instruments of misery to others, but to him on whom they ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... proper, at another time limp and careless, as if the wearer informed the garment or the garment explained the wearer. It is well known that "Fashions are the external expression of the mental states of a country, and that if its men and women degenerate in their character, their fashions become absurd." Surely then, a sympathy which can affect a nation has some influence upon the individual. Sunna had noticed even in her childhood that her dresses were lucky and unlucky, but the why or the wherefore of the circumstance had ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... others with our two English friends, from whom we gained a good deal of information. From all I heard, I should not at all like to live in Mexico. The descendants of the fierce conquerors have become a most degenerate race, without religion, without morality—each man ready to destroy his neighbour for the sake of getting into his place. That object seems to be the only end and aim of all their politics. As to patriotism, it does not ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... into four or five feet of water, and you have to step gingerly lest you slip on the slime. At the end of the wall a solid stairway cut in the hillside leads up to the temple. It was formerly used daily by thousands of worshipers, but in this degenerate age nobody but tourists ever climb it. Every boat load that lands is greeted by a group of bright-eyed children, who follow the sahibs (gentlemen) and mem-sahibs (ladies) up the stairs, begging for backsheesh and offering for sale curios beetles and other insects ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... on board. Searching for the degenerate captain, he stepped on something soft, and a hollow groan issued from beneath the sail-cloth. He threw it back, and dislodged the palpitating Hooliam with a vigorous foot. The breed struggled to ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... projects, were uttered. One blasphemous toast will show the animus of the assembly, and of its orators. It was delivered by M. Saint Just:—"To the men strong, courageous, and valiant in the cause of humanity. To those whose names serve as a guide, a support, and an example to the degenerate beings—to all those whom history calls heroes!... To Brutus, to Catiline, to Jesus Christ, to Julian the Apostate, to Attila!... To all the thinkers of the middle age.... To unfortunate thinkers!... To Jean Jacques Rousseau, and his pupil, Maximilian Robespierre!" This enumeration ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... baggage, and renounce her for ever as an alien to my blood. She has, for some months, been solicited in marriage by an honest citizen, a thirty thousand pound man; and instead of listening to such an advantageous proposal, she hath bestowed her heart upon a young fellow not worth a groat. Ah! you degenerate hussy, this comes of your plays and romances. If thy mother were not a woman of an unexceptionable life and conversation, I should verily believe thou art no child of mine. Run away with a beggar! ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... talk about such things!" observed Chia Cheng with a listless smile. "By my bringing up such a degenerate child of retribution I have myself become unfilial! Whenever I've had to call him to account, there has always been a whole crowd of you to screen him; so isn't it as well for me to avail myself of to-day to put an end to his cur-like existence and ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... certain that He alone was the righteous seed of David; for although Hezekiah and Josiah were legitimate successors, yet, when we look to others, they were, as it were, monsters. Except three or four, all the rest were degenerate and covenant-breakers." The words: "I raise unto David a righteous Branch" are here, as well as in chap. xxxiii. 15, not by any means equivalent to: a righteous Branch of David. On the contrary, David is designated as he to whom the act of raising belongs, for whose sake it is undertaken. ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... manner in which the victim surveyed his tormentors only exasperated them still further. By the threat of the bayonet he was compelled to stand up in front of these degenerate members of the human race and the girl behind the counter, whose laughter could now be heard ringing above the frantic shrieks ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... for emulation. Mr. Kleiner has a sense of musical rhythm which few amateur bards have ever possessed, and his choice of words and phrases is the result of a taste both innate and cultivated, whose quality appears to rare advantage in the present degenerate age. This remarkable young poet has not yet fully displayed in verse the variety of thoughts and images of which his fertile brain and well selected reading have made him master, but has preferred to concentrate most of his powers upon delicate amatory lyrics. While some of his readers ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... for my intelligence and zeal with a smile of approbation and a word of encouragement, the captain gave me a look which petrified me for a time, and would have killed me on the spot if looks could kill in those degenerate days. Seizing me roughly by the shoulder, he addressed me in a hissing, hoarse voice, yet so low that his words, although terribly intelligible to me, could be distinctly heard by no other person: "Mind your own business, my lad, and ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... nature. Each advance was the outgrowth of his own observation and the colony's necessities, and while the corner-stone of the community was religion, he stood himself for religious liberty, and never permitted the zeal of his associates to degenerate into intolerance and persecution. While other of the early American colonies were narrow, bigoted, and vindictive, it is to the credit of the Pilgrim colony of Plymouth that the cargo of the Mayflower contained no seeds of persecution, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... is often a snare to us. It calls us to certain occupations that dissipate the mind, and that may degenerate into mere amusement. It is for this reason that St. Chrysostom says that nothing is so important as to keep an exact proportion between the interior source of virtue and the external practise of it; else, like the foolish virgins, we shall find that the oil in our lamp ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... of slavery and dark beginnings in the experimental pens of the older race, continued to insist that across the sea—on the unknown western continent—Those Others still held onto the remnants of a degenerate civilization. Thus the explorers from Homeport went out by ones and twos and used the fauna of the land as a means ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... of adorning graves with flowers prevails in other countries besides England. Indeed, in some it is much more general, and is observed even by the rich and fashionable; but it is then apt to lose its simplicity and to degenerate into affectation. Bright, in his travels in Lower Hungary, tells of monuments of marble and recesses formed for retirement, with seats placed among bowers of greenhouse plants, and that the graves generally are covered with the gayest flowers of the season. He gives ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... let me remind you that frankness has its limits: exceeding these, it is apt to degenerate into impertinence. Be good enough to conduct me to ...
— Five Little Plays • Alfred Sutro
... Harald, "the contempt of pain and death, this noble contempt, so universal amongst the men of that time, deprived cruelty of its sting. Our degenerate race has scarcely a conception of the strength which made the men of past times find a pleasure even in pains, since they spurred their courageous souls to the highest pitch of heroism; since in such moments they felt themselves able to ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... equally elderly dames congregated together in the capacious oriel windows, and, with the tapestry curtains drawn aside, talked of the good old times of "Bluff King Hal," and pointed out with pride of superiority of their own happy age to these degenerate days. Middle-aged matrons sat proudly watching their offspring as they flitted to and fro, and noted with much satisfaction the matchless beauty of their own daughters, and the mediocrity of the rest; ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... dull, and dead-alive, in the most comfortable office. And Wick itself had in those days a note of originality. It may have still, but I misdoubt it much. The old minister of Keiss would not preach, in these degenerate times, for an hour and a half upon the clock. The gipsies must be gone from their cavern; where you might see, from the mouth, the women tending their fire, like Meg Merrilies, and the men sleeping off their coarse ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not confined to medicine and the physical sciences. He was also considered eminent as a philologist and philosopher. Physiology, however, with its various branches and degenerate offshoots, was the idol of the scholars of that age, and of Faustus among the rest. A passionate desire to fathom the mysteries of Nature, to dive into the most hidden recesses of moral and physical creation, had seized men of real learning, and seduced ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... valuable thought, but to preserve it as well. Further, he will learn to feel respect for the language in which he writes and thus be saved from any attempt to remodel it by arbitrary and capricious treatment. Without this schooling, a man's writing may easily degenerate ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... all the Indians, and their degenerate children no longer dwell in garrisoned houses nor hear any war-whoop in their path. It would be well, perchance, if many an "English Chaplin" in these days could exhibit as unquestionable trophies of his valor as did "good young Frye." We have need to be as sturdy pioneers still as Miles ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... once, on the one hand; and all the instrumentalists at once, on the other. Deplorable errors, innumerable mistakes, are thus committed—particularly in the intermediate parts—errors which the chorus-master and the conductor do not perceive. Once established, these errors degenerate into habits, and become part and ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... to think that good can come of it? Nothing but evil upon evil can accrue from such a system,—and those who have prophetic eyes to see through the veil of events can perceive, even now, the not far distant end—namely, the ruin of the country that has permitted itself to degenerate into a mere nation of shopkeepers, —and something worse ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... which was a complete surprise to the Great General Staff. They believed that France was degenerate, torn by scandals, and that a sudden assault would land the German army in Paris. In this connection it was another great error for the Germans to have sought Paris, important from a sentimental but not a military point of view. They might better have occupied first the north ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... his mouth, politely made a collection among the audience. They gained their livelihood. The wolf was lettered, likewise the man. The wolf had been trained by the man, or had trained himself unassisted, to divers wolfish arts, which swelled the receipts. "Above all things, do not degenerate into a man," his friend would say ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... of a certain savage delight in scenes of grotesque and exaggerated terror. No one who has read "Les Miserables" can deny the existence in him of a vein of lovely tenderness that, with a little tiny push over the edge, would degenerate into maudlin sentiment of the ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... all the gods above, below, That our degenerate sons and heirs Must let their Greek and Latin go! Forbid, O Fate, we loud implore, A dispensation harsh as that; What! wipe away the sweets of yore; The ...
— A Handbook for Latin Clubs • Various
... period should be shortened for the sake of the elect believers, otherwise no flesh of Israel would be saved alive. Multitudes were to fall by the sword; other hosts were to be led away captive, and so be scattered amongst all nations; and Jerusalem, the pride and boast of degenerate Israel, should be "trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled." In every frightful detail was the Lord's prediction brought ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... Pantomimists, and dancing girls with bare faces, have replaced Paulus and Roscius. What would the Athenians of the days of Pericles have said if they had seen a woman on the stage? It is indecent for a woman to appear in public. We must be very degenerate to permit it. It is as certain as that my name is Dorion, that woman is the natural enemy of man, and a ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... their own country that they have in view; for they are "patriots," which means that the fall of the birth-rate in all other countries but their own is a source of much gratification. "Woe to us," they exclaim in effect, "if we follow the example of these wicked and degenerate peoples! Our nation needs men. We have to populate the earth and to carry the blessings of our civilised culture all over the world. In executing that high mission we cannot have too much cannon-fodder in defending ourselves against the jealousy ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... so, are these unworthy specimens of their sex worth tears? The vast majority of women bear the discomforts of gestation and the actual perils and pangs of birth with exemplary fortitude: and it is a gross slander for anyone to maintain that a few cowardly and degenerate individuals really represent that devoted sex. But these writers are indeed well out of the ruck of ordinary humanity, because they tell us that "whatever the means employed, and whether righteous or not, the propensity to limit the highest form of life operates silently and steadily ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... pride, when he introduced Reed Opdyke to his mother. Mrs. Brenton might lack certain social frills and furbelows; but no one could look into her honest face above the trim little black lace tucker, without realizing that she was of good, old-fashioned stock which never would degenerate. No one but a lady born could take herself so simply. Scott read Opdyke's approval in his eyes, the while he himself stood apart ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... amid the fastnesses of the Great Northern Forest, he must spend the winter if he would see the Indian at his best. There he is a beggar no longer. There, escaped from the civilization which the white man is ever forcing upon the red—a civilization which rarely fails to make a degenerate of him—he proves his manhood. There, contrary to the popular idea, he will be found to be a diligent and skilful worker and an affectionate husband and father. There, given health and game, no toil and no hardship will hinder him from procuring fur enough to ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... are grave perils in worshipful services corresponding to their supreme values. Mystical preaching has the defects of its virtues and too often sinks into that vague sentimentalism which is the perversion of its excellence. How insensibly sometimes does high and precious feeling degenerate into a sort of religious hysteria! It needs then to be always tested ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... Iona— 135 Well—you know what the chaste Pasiphae did, Wife to that most religious King of Crete, And still how popular the tale is here; And these dull Swine of Thebes boast their descent From the free Minotaur. You know they still 140 Call themselves Bulls, though thus degenerate, And everything relating to a Bull Is popular and respectable in Thebes. Their arms are seven Bulls in a field gules; They think their strength consists in eating beef,— 145 Now there were danger in the precedent If ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... of the sinful, but also the fact that they have fallen from a higher. In such cases, however, there is some danger lest the beauty and appropriateness of the conception should entice us to receive it on insufficient evidence. The fact that some plants in certain adverse circumstances tend to degenerate, and in certain favourable circumstances to attain a higher type, is well known in natural history; but it seems questionable whether these changes ever take place to such an extent, and in such a uniform method, as must be assumed if we take ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... or whether on this occasion there was a special selection of the best, of this we have no information. Certain only it was that men and instruments were as excellent in their kind as honesty and skill could make them; and, however degenerate the patricians and corrupt the legislature, there was sound stuff somewhere in the Roman constitution. No exertion, no forethought on the part of a commander could have extemporized such a variety ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... and express a better understanding of the legislative work of the Lords. Englishmen have not much more regard for the principle of a quadrennially elected President than Americans have for an hereditary aristocracy; but they do not habitually permit that lack of regard to degenerate into the use of contemptuous language about individual Presidents. Even in contemplating the result of what seems to them so preposterous a system as that of electing a judiciary by popular party vote, Englishmen have generally confined themselves to a complimentary expression of ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... individual, though in some respects they certainly seem to be so. If they are parts of an individual, plants also are subject to considerable changes during their individual lives. Most florist-flowers if neglected degenerate, that is, they lose some of their characters; so common is this, that trueness is often stated, as greatly enhancing the value of a variety{188}: tulips break their colours only after some years' culture; some plants become double and others single, by neglect or care: these characters ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... worth while, in this world, and I purpose to write briefly of a man, who, though living in these, our own, so-called, degenerate days, would have found a perfect setting in "the spacious times of great Elizabeth." He would have been a worthy companion of Raleigh, half-pirate and half-poet. He had in his time but one soul-kinsman, and that man was at once England's ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... celerity of wild-fire through the city of Florence. At first the report was received with contemptuous incredulity; but by degrees—as circumstances tended to confirm it—as affrighted peasants came flying into the town from their country homes, bearing the dread tidings, the degenerate and voluptuous Florentines gave way to all the terrors which, in such cases, were too well adapted to fill the hearts of an emasculated people ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... have assuredly justified the saying. Indeed, the Levant has helped antithetically to preach the same lesson, in showing us by its own fatal example that the improper study of mankind is woman, and that they who but follow the fair will inevitably degenerate. ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... nearly all writers on moral theology. The Jansenists, however, in their eagerness to damage the reputation of their Jesuit opponents charged them with having introduced this novel and lax system of morals with the object of catering for the depraved tastes of their degenerate clients, and this charge when presented in a popular and telling style by their opponents created a distinctly unfavourable impression against the Society. The condemnation of Probabilism by the University of Louvain (1655) and the outcry raised against it by the Rigorist party ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... series of ships, vessels, capes, and promontories, that I could not help thinking, I had a distant view of thirty leagues upon the back-ground of the picture. If there is any taste for ingenuity left in a degenerate age, fast sinking into barbarism, this artist, I apprehend, will make a capital figure, as soon as his works ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... genial influence! Such is thy boast, Refinement. But deep dyes Oft mar the splendour of thy noontide skies: 230 Then Fancy, sick of follies that deform The face of day, and in the sunshine swarm; Sick of the fluttering fopperies that engage The vain pursuits of a degenerate age; Sick of smooth Sophistry's insidious cant, Or cold Impiety's defying rant; Sick of the muling sentiment that sighs O'er its dead bird, while Want unpitied cries; Sick of the pictures that pale Lust inflame, And flush the cheek of Love with deep, deep shame; 240 Would ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... unjustifiably affable, and of the inexcusable abasement of a British railway porter if you gave him a shilling. He said he was glad to leave England, it was demoralising to live there; you lost your sense of the dignity of labour, and in the course of time you were almost bound to degenerate into a swell. He expressed a good deal of sympathy with the aristocracy on this account, concentrating his indignation upon those who, as it were, made aristocrats of innocent human beings against their will. It was more than he would have ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... next to them the Marcomanians and Quadians. Amongst these the Marcomanians are most signal in force and renown; nay, their habitation itself they acquired by their bravery, as from thence they formerly expulsed the Boians. Nor do the Nariscans or Quadians degenerate in spirit. Now this is as it were the frontier of Germany, as far as Germany is washed by the Danube. To the times within our memory the Marcomanians and Quadians were governed by kings, who were natives of their own, descended from the noble line ...
— Tacitus on Germany • Tacitus
... yes, and then sink to his level if you walk as his equal in physical contact with him. His race is not an infant; it is a degenerate—older than yours in time. At last we are face to face with the man whom slavery concealed with its rags. Suffrage is but the new paper cloak with which the Demagogue has sought to hide the issue. Can we assimilate the negro? The ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... and landscape painting, all showing the same conventional black grease. The works reeked of uniform mediocrity, they were characterised by a muddy dinginess of tone, despite their primness—the primness of impoverished, degenerate blood. And the friends quickened their steps: they ran to escape from that reign of bitumen, condemning everything in one lump with their superb sectarian injustice, repeating that there was nothing in the place worth looking ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... never doubted that her sister had often been with Burke Lawson in the Hollow. When he disappeared, she believed Nella-Rose was with him, but she had supported and embellished her father's story concerning them because it secured her own self-respect and covered the tracks of the degenerate pair with a shield that they in no wise deserved, but which put their defenders ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... by pronouncing upon me the verdict of an acquittal—inasmuch as he told me to make myself as comfortable as I could in his house, and to enjoy myself thoroughly in it for the next fortnight to come, at the very least. It may have been that, in considering my faults as those of the degenerate age in which I lived—which age, however, be it known, lived afterwards to recover its character, and to be held up as a model of propriety and virtue to the succeeding generation—the merciful doctor was willing to merge my chastisement in that which he bestowed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... you bring me," began Mr. Arp, deliberately, "that we folks, modernly, ain't more degenerate than the ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... in The Fisher, and in a case where he is in fact judge as well as party, has no difficulty in getting his claim established. He is for ever reminding us that he loves philosophy and only satirizes the degenerate philosophers of his day. But it will occur to us after reading him through that he has dissembled his love, then, very well. There is not a passage from beginning to end of his works that indicates any real comprehension of any philosophic system. The external characteristics of the philosophers, ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... all the proofs in the world were introduced on the other side, I would set them at nought as undeserving my attention. If these three reasons be not sufficient to satisfy every burgher of this ancient city, all I can say is they are degenerate descendants from their venerable Dutch ancestors, and totally unworthy the trouble of convincing. Thus, therefore, the title of Hendrick Hudson to his renowned discovery ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... cannot be," exclaimed Barere, "that men really attached to liberty will imitate the most frightful excesses of despotism!" He proved to the Convention, after his fashion, out of Sallust, that such arbitrary courts may indeed, for a time, be severe only on real criminals, but must inevitably degenerate into instruments of private cupidity and revenge. When, on the tenth of March, the worst part of the population of Paris made the first unsuccessful attempt to destroy the Girondists, Barere eagerly called for vigorous measures of ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... he watches like a good son? And listen! one last example. Your brother, Maxime, committed a great fault when he had by a servant that poor little Charles, and it is certain, besides, that the unhappy child is of unsound mind. No matter. Will it please you if they tell you that your nephew is degenerate; that he reproduces from four generations back, his great-great-grandmother the dear woman to whom we sometimes take him, and with whom he likes so much to be? No! there is no longer any family possible, if people begin to lay bare everything—the ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... of Tibet. His return was along the skirts of the northern hills; nor could this rapid campaign of one year justify the strange foresight of his emirs, that their children in a warm climate would degenerate into ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... 9-12. The three orders of divinely called rulers, upon whom the life or death of the Congregation was depending,—the princes, the priests, and the prophets (compare remarks on Zech. x. 1),—have become so degenerate, that they are not at all concerned for the glory of God, but only for their own interest. And while they have thus inwardly apostatized from Jehovah, they are strengthened in their false security by the promises which God has given ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... to give his money freely, to display hospitality, to assist his tenants, and relieve the poor. Family pride, and filial pride—for he is very proud of what his father was—have done this. Not to appear to disgrace his family, to degenerate from the popular qualities, or lose the influence of the Pemberley House, is a powerful motive. He has also brotherly pride, which, with some brotherly affection, makes him a very kind and careful guardian of his sister, and you will hear him generally ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... their most boasted institutions appeared in my eyes; it seemed to me as if I saw the kingdoms of the earth through an inverted spy-glass, or rather that, being myself grown and elevated, I looked down on the rest of my degenerate race with the eye ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... distinct race. The first or golden race lived in perfect happiness on the fruits of the untilled earth, suffered from no bodily infirmity, passed away in a gentle sleep, and became after death guardian daemons of this world. The second or silver race was degenerate, and refusing to worship the immortal gods, was buried by Jove in the earth. The third or brazen race, still more degraded, was warlike and cruel, and perished at last by internal violence. The fourth or heroic race was ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the "theory of degeneration." Granting the affinity, they turned the whole evolutionary theory upside down, and boldly contended that "man is not the most highly developed animal, but the animals are degenerate men." It is true that man is closely related to the ape, and belongs to the vertebrate stem; but the chain of his ancestry goes upward instead of downward. In the beginning "God created man in his own image," as the prototype of the perfect vertebrate; ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... cooerdinate with tribes of men. All of these gods have invisible duplicates—spirits—and they have often visited the earth. All of the wonderful things seen in nature are done by the animal-gods. That elder life was a magic life; but the descendants of the gods are degenerate. Now and then as a medicine-man by practicing sorcery can perform great feats, so now and then there is a medicine-bear, a medicine-wolf, or a ...
— Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians • John Wesley Powell
... Frank, and yet he was cast in a manlier mould; he had just enough of his nation's proud self-assertion to make a woman bow before him as before a superior, and yet tact enough to let it very seldom degenerate into that boastfulness of which the Spaniards were then so often and so justly accused. He had marvels to tell by flood and field as many and more than Amyas; and he told them with a grace and an eloquence of which modest, simple, old Amyas possessed nothing. ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... the Indians who have come more intimately into contact with the whites. You can see them hanging about the depots and the grogeries and rum shops of the railway towns, degenerate, diseased, reduced to beggary and petty thievery. And you do not have to go to the railway towns to see the effect of your civilization upon them. Follow the great trade rivers! From source to mouth, their ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... classes of men are hopeless: those who think to prevail by fraud and the contrivances of indirection, and those whose minds and characters have begun to disintegrate, or degenerate, if you like the latter word better. There is every reason why character should each day get a truer bearing, why the mind each day should become more ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... Ferdinand for yielding his confidence to those idle alarms, which he said were the suggestions of a timid imagination. 'Alarms,' continued he, 'which will readily find admittance to the weak mind of a woman, but which the firmer nature of man should disdain.—Degenerate boy! Is it thus you reward my care? Do I live to see my son the sport of every idle tale a woman may repeat? Learn to trust reason and your senses, and you will then be worthy ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... A lanky and degenerate youth (who before the war had been unlovingly known throughout Europe as the "White Rabbit" and who now was mentioned in dispatches as the "Crown Prince") had succeeded in leading some half-million fellow-Germans into a "pocket" that had lately ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... breaking its early promise, had failed to dissipate. Thus, amid showers alternating with sunbeams, we proceeded unto Rome (381 miles). An Ohio village, this Rome, and so fallen from its once proud estate that its postoffice no longer bears the name—it is simply "Stout's," if, in these degenerate days, you would send ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... a man whose character is unstained by any low or degenerate vices, or even feelings," said Julia, with a little more than her ordinary enthusiasm; "whose courage is as natural as it is daring; who is above fear, except of doing wrong; whose person is an index of his mind, and whose ...
— Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart • James Fenimore Cooper
... plan, he will seek refuge in the bosom of the grave; he will voluntarily return to his ancestors whom he has worshipped as gods. In the late war between China and Japan, in which China was vanquished, some of her generals committed suicide. It presents, alas, a degenerate side of human nature. It is most pathetic. Better far to live under the smart of defeat and bear its shame, carry the cross, endure the stings of conscience, and meet the frowns of the world, than flee from the path of duty, than dishonour our manhood. The ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... for them in this world. Nor yet for their damned and doomed offspring—while the individual liberty shibboleths endure, while mere numbers rule, or while our degenerate fear of every form of compulsion lasts. And the present tendency is, not merely to stipulate for complete freedom of action for the poor wretches, but to invite them to govern, by count of heads. So ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... surrounded by so many luminaries, Giovanni Bernardone! [106] And what music! Other tunes were heard by your followers after your death! But, venerable and humble founder, if you were to come back to life now you would see only degenerate Eliases of Cortona, and if your followers should recognize you, they would put you in jail, and perhaps you would share the ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... Serbia, too, would now take her part, so that there is no need to fear for the position of a Yugoslav Rieka based solely—omitting Hungary and the Ukraine altogether—on her Yugoslav hinterland. Rieka without Yugoslavia would be ruined and would degenerate into a fishing village, with a great past and a miserable future. This could very well be seen during the spring of 1919 when the communications were interrupted between Rieka and Yugoslavia. At Rieka during April eggs were 80 centimes apiece, while at Bakar, a few miles away, they cost 25 centimes; ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... 'guiding the heart.' Other forms of self-restraint in regard to animal appetites are spoken of in the context, but here the two of drunkenness and gluttony are bracketed together. They are similarly coupled in Deuteronomy xxi. 20, in the formula of accusation which parents are to bring against a degenerate son. Allusion to that passage is probable here, especially as the other crime mentioned in it—namely, refusal to 'hear' parental reproof—is warned against in verse 22. The picture, then, here is that of a prodigal ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... justification. It is the supreme crime of the ages; a blow at the very throat of civilization. The three nations which began it, Austria, Russia and Germany, are governed, the first by a doddering imbecile, the second by a weak-minded melancholic, and the third by an epileptic degenerate, drunk upon the vision of himself as the war lord of Europe. Behind each of These men is a little clique of blood-thirsty aristocrats. They fall into a quarrel among themselves. The pretext is that Serbia instigated ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... consider individual cases; and that is the relation of the "favoured function"—say movement, vision, hearing, etc.—to Habit. It is a common enough observation, that habit renders functions easy, and that habits are hard to break; indeed, all treatment of habits is likely to degenerate into the commonplace. But, when looked at as related to the attention, certain truths emerge from ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... can we repay The debt thou claim'st in this exhausted age? Thou givest our lyres a theme, that might engage Those that could send thy name o'er sea and land, While sea and land shall last; for Homer's rage A theme; a theme for Milton's mighty hand - How much unmeet for us, a faint degenerate band! ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott
... effrontery of young girls regarding marriage particularly revolted her. Eager for wealth and social position, they offered themselves with brazen effrontery in the matrimonial market, immodestly displaying their charms to the lecherous, covetous eyes of blase, degenerate men. Any question of attachment, love, affection was never for a moment considered. The idea that a man could be even considered unless he were able to provide a fine establishment was laughed to scorn. The girls were all men hunters but they hunted only rich men. They called ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... side; he moved his head continually, listening for the beating of her heart. Her face was of a type every one knows, and had a certain half-pathetic prettiness; the features were small, and the chin was degenerate but delicately modelled. The rather colourless fair hair was elaborately done; her thin cheeks were dreadfully white, and her thin neck shrank painfully each time she breathed out, though it grew smooth and full ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... only politician of later ages, is of three kinds: the government of one man, or of the better sort, or of the whole people; which, by their more learned names, are called monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. These they hold, through their proneness to degenerate, to be all evil. For whereas they that govern should govern according to reason, if they govern according to passion they do that which they should not do. Wherefore, as reason and passion are two things, so government by reason is one thing, and the corruption ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... of the turbulent Goths, or Gauls, or Gael, from afar off. Doubtless the white-headed and red-headed, hungry, breekless savages had the same propensity to invade the civilized, wealthy land, that their posterity had to descend on degenerate Rome. ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... marks an important era in Roman history. Large treasures were obtained from this and other Greek cities in Southern Italy. Luxury became more fashionable; morals began to degenerate. Greed for wealth obtained by plunder began to get possession of the Romans. From now on the moral tone of the people continued to degenerate in proportion as ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... Eugenius III. that his old preceptor, St. Bernard, composed at his disciple's request, his famous book "de Consideratione;" in which the subject handled is, on the duties of a pope; and in which is given such a graphic description of the degenerate character of the Romans, as also of the Roman clergy in that age. The following extract will not be out ...
— Pope Adrian IV - An Historical Sketch • Richard Raby
... itself adrift from the great national parties and pursues a purely Socialistic Labour policy. "A member of an Imperial Parliament is an Imperialist in spite of himself. A party which concerns itself with sectional interests only will soon cease to be a party; it will degenerate into a group, and as such it cannot hope to receive serious backing ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... forefathers have exterminated all the Indians, and their degenerate children no longer dwell in garrisoned houses nor hear any war-whoop in their path. It would be well, perchance, if many an "English Chaplin" in these days could exhibit as unquestionable trophies of his valor as ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... To-night—if she had one regret it was that she had struck so feebly: not that she desired his death, but that she knew it was now her life or his. She knew the man too well to flatter herself that he would rest before he had compassed such revenge as the baseness of his degenerate soul would deem adequate. Half the world were not too much to put between them if she were now to sleep of nights in comfortable consciousness of security from his ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... book filled with inhuman characters, you have taken the measure of the man who wrote it, you have seen a reflection of the author's soul. Furthermore, when people exclaim: "What's the matter with the movies?" The answer is: Nothing . . . save that the screens too often reflect the degenerate ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... which defy description. In the early stages of phthisis, and especially when the patient is young and active-minded, struck down by overwork or sudden exposure, this cheering influence is most beneficial. It is of great importance that, while taking the needful care of himself, he should not degenerate at an early age into a hopeless valetudinarian, especially as an every-day increasing mass of evidence warrants us in believing that under the influence of medicine and climate a large number of these patients ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... they have in view; for they are "patriots," which means that the fall of the birth-rate in all other countries but their own is a source of much gratification. "Woe to us," they exclaim in effect, "if we follow the example of these wicked and degenerate peoples! Our nation needs men. We have to populate the earth and to carry the blessings of our civilised culture all over the world. In executing that high mission we cannot have too much cannon-fodder in defending ourselves against the jealousy and aggression ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... manifestation of life is a song; every sound is a song. But inflections must not be multiplied, lest delivery degenerate into a perpetual sing-song. The effect lies entirely in reproducing the same inflection. A drop of water falling constantly, hollows a rock. A mediocre man will employ twenty or thirty tones. Mediocrity is not the too little, but the too much. The art of making a profound impression ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... one endeavoring by the aid of religion, and by studying the wisdom of the past, to exalt and purify his fallen nature; the other by grovelling in the dust, and mingling with beings yet more sinful and degraded, rapidly debased his mind to a more degenerate and ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... to roam in undisputed possession of the forest, and lead an indolent life. Of course I do not assign this as a valid reason for their not being identified with the Mound-builders. An ancient race may have a degenerate offspring. ...
— Mound-Builders • William J. Smyth
... the property or farm on the opposite side of the Almond, above Caerlowrie, was designated by a name, having apparently the Celtic "battle" noun as a prefix in its composition—viz., Cat-elbock. This fine old Celtic name has latterly been changed for the degenerate ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... Island schools has been continued from the Auckland office by means of extended loans. Under this system the schools receive an original bulk loan which they check annually, reporting losses and returning damaged and worn books for replacement, wherever possible, by new titles, so that loans will not degenerate into collections of old books. The schools concerned were listed in last year's annual report. The desirability of extension of this ...
— Report of the National Library Service for the Year Ended 31 March 1958 • G. T. Alley and National Library Service (New Zealand)
... wife he so fondly cared for; the children he so deeply cherished. Sycophants are to fill, in a measure, the place of friends, the money which now flows in so freely is to entangle and ensnare him; the lofty aspiration which now inspires him is to degenerate into a presidential ambition which will eat into his soul. But to-day let us, as long as we may, see him as he is in the height of his powers. Let us walk with him under the trees which he planted. Those large elms, gracefully silhouetted against the house, were placed there ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... had been unhappy in trying it; I could not endure my own solitary wisdom; I could not reconcile it with her former appeal to me as my child-wife. I resolved to do what I could, in a quiet way, to improve our proceedings myself, but I foresaw that my utmost would be very little, or I must degenerate into the spider again, and be for ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... the grande tournee through the rooms, and then mingled with the guests; all formal etiquette was now laid aside, and a gay and unembarrassed conversation might be carried on till the beginning of the concert. This seemed to degenerate, on the part of the French officers, to an indiscreet, frenzied levity. They laughed and talked boisterously—they walked arm in arm before the ladies, and remarked upon them so boldly, that crimson blushes, or frightened pallor, was the result. ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... you have to step gingerly lest you slip on the slime. At the end of the wall a solid stairway cut in the hillside leads up to the temple. It was formerly used daily by thousands of worshipers, but in this degenerate age nobody but tourists ever climb it. Every boat load that lands is greeted by a group of bright-eyed children, who follow the sahibs (gentlemen) and mem-sahibs (ladies) up the stairs, begging for backsheesh and offering for sale curios beetles and other insects of ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... cent. of starch; while five pounds of the variety called Captain Hart, yields 12 ounces of starch, and the Moulton White nearly as much, the Purple Red give only 81/2, the Ox Noble 81/4. There is much more profit in cultivating the former than the latter sorts; but even the best kinds degenerate, and new sorts must be procured, as if to stimulate the ingenuity of man, by preventing his enjoying the gifts of God, without constant exertion, and observation of the laws which the Creator has impressed upon his productions. See the Observations of Thomas Andrew Knight, and the experiments now ...
— The Church of England Magazine - Volume 10, No. 263, January 9, 1841 • Various
... in similar circumstances, began to degenerate into a pretty sharp altercation, when they heard the steps of two persons mounting the stairs. As the three individuals who had appointed a meeting at D'Harmental's were all assembled, Brigaud, who, with his ear always ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... to a certain extent directly modifies the forms of dogs. We have lately seen that several of our English breeds cannot live in India, and it is positively asserted that when bred there for a few generations they degenerate not only in their mental faculties, but in form. Captain Williamson (1/75. 'Oriental Field Sports' quoted by Youatt 'The Dog' page 15.), who carefully attended to this subject, states that "hounds are the most rapid in their decline;" "greyhounds and pointers, also, rapidly ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... in hand, or she will be ruined body and soul," observed Malcolm severely. "Babs is already a domestic tyrant, and screams the house down if any of her fads and fancies are resisted. I am thinking of writing a series of essays on degenerate and irresponsible parents, and the cruelty of modern education in the nursery, which out-Herods Herod." Of course they all laughed at this idea, and then David Carlyon crossed the room to shake hands with Malcolm ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... look further for victims. I believe that only a small proportion of the women who are in the houses of ill-fame—only a small proportion—make their way there of their own volition, and that small proportion are of the degenerate class who are born with a screw loose somewhere. From their babyhood they who are born with this taint—and we could, perhaps, trace that taint back—but born with that taint, they gradually go into that life—but they make a small proportion. The rest of them ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... virtuous peers, who shall point them out? Yet Pope is said by Ruffhead to have told Warburton that "Young had much of a sublime genius, though without common sense; so that his genius, having no guide, was perpetually liable to degenerate into bombast. This made him pass a FOOLISH YOUTH, the sport of peers and poets: but his having a very good heart enabled him to support the clerical character when he assumed it, first with ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... little for you. But your thoughts belong to heaven; and it is to that height that they must rise, it is there that in solitude and silence they must be rekindled, and enlarged, and calmed, if even activity and public spirit are not to degenerate into a fatal forgetfulness of the true purpose of your calling—a forgetfulness of the infinite tenderness and delicacy, of the unspeakable sacredness, of the mysterious issues, which belong to ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... incredulity in which the boy was groveling; he who so clung to life—the life which the angel had made so fair—who so loved it, that he would have stooped to baseness merely to live; he, the pleasure-loving scapegrace, the degenerate d'Esgrignon, had even taken out his pistols, had gone so far as to think of suicide. He who would never have brooked the appearance of an insult was abusing himself in language which no man is likely ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... laboriously endeavouring to assimilate the shells of knowledge along with the oysters, others instinctively use their powers of secretion to better purpose. Remember also that in Elizabethan times school-boy study was a far more strenuous matter than it is in these degenerate days, and that it was ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... In considering the policy to be adopted for suppressing the insurrection I have been anxious and careful that the inevitable conflict for this purpose shall not degenerate into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle. I have therefore in every case thought it proper to keep the integrity of the Union prominent as the primary object of the contest on our part, leaving all questions which are ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... own, but whose superiority in war and civil government is at present so decided as to reduce any efforts of opposition to the mere outbursts of hopeless petulance. In that golden land, however, even the Anglo-Saxon race can not increase and multiply; the children of English parents degenerate or perish under its fatal sun. No permanent settlement or infusion of blood takes place. Neither have we effected any serious change in the manners or customs of the East Indians; on the other hand, we have rather assimilated ours to theirs. We tolerate their various religions, ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... money on this petty war; the Duke's purse was shorter, and the mercenary troops he was obliged to use, proved worthless in the field. Spaniards, for the most part, pitted against Spaniards, they suffered the campaigns to degenerate into a guerilla warfare of pillage and reprisals. In 1517 the duchy was formally ceded to Lorenzo. But this Medici did not live long to enjoy it, and his only child Catherine, the future Queen of France, never ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... study my face without speech, his hand still on the button of the bell-rope, his eyes in mine; this was the decisive heat. My face seemed to myself to dislimn under his gaze, my expression to change, the smile (with which I had began) to degenerate into the grin of the man upon the rack. I was besides harassed with doubts. An innocent man, I argued, would have resented the fellow's impudence an hour ago; and by my continued endurance of the ordeal, I was ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... parts of the country. Despite the effort of the commissioners, the present method develops a public insistence that the commissioners are specially charged with supervision of radio affairs in the zone from which each is appointed. As a result there is danger that the system will degenerate from a national system into five regional agencies with varying practices, varying policies, competitive tendencies, and consequent failure to attain its utmost capacity for service to ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Herbert Hoover • Herbert Hoover
... had been joined by the pasha of Erzroom, Gourdji-Mohammed, (to whose suite the annalist Evliya was then attached,) and by many of the Turkman clans of Anatolia. The Sultana-Walidah herself, who was then at variance with her degenerate son, secretly encouraged the insurgents, who endeavoured to gain over Kiuprili to their party; but as they failed in all their efforts to shake his loyalty, Varvar suddenly marched against him, routed the troops which he had collected, and made him prisoner, with two ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... degraded type of man I had yet met on my travels, a typical degenerate, dirty, drunken, diseased. He had three suits of underclothing, which he never washed. He would wear through all three in succession, and when the last got too dirty for words he would throw it under his trunk and sorrowfully go back to the first, keeping up ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... faithful character of this young gentleman, in a more particular manner, whose virtues and extraordinary qualities, the former not lost, the latter acquired with much travels at few years, do no whit degenerate from the nobility of his blood, and active loyalty of his progenitors; my duty to your Majesty, as well as my affection to his person, obliging me ex officio to this short testimony of his merits unrequested, to the end so hopeful a branch of that house may not want even this ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... threatened gate, never doubting that at the sight of it the Sultan and his unbaptized hordes will be reft of breath of body or take to flight.... This we pray of Your Majesty, that the Mother of God may in these degenerate days have back the honor and worship accorded her by the Emperors ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... all times have lived in a condition the least ideal that can be imagined. The usual course of socialistic communities has been to start out with a great flourish, to quarrel and divide after a few months, and then to decrease and degenerate until a final dispersion by general consent ended the attempt. During the short existence of nearly all such communities the members have lived in want of the ordinary comforts of life, in dispute about their respective rights and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... which occupied a pure and healthy physique. In a word he was well made and fully endowed with all the physical and mental forces necessary to the whole journey of his life. Now a question arises: "When did he begin to degenerate physically and mentally?" Let us reason some on this line, which seems to be a rather solid foundation, and as history is young itself, and has imperfectly recorded only such events as have transpired during a few centuries, with records ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... we shall, first, keep subjecting ourselves more and more, transferring the major portion of our productiveness to armaments; and, secondly, by killing in mutual wars the best physically developed men, we must become more and more degenerate ...
— "Bethink Yourselves" • Leo Tolstoy
... Omar in a weak voice, his eyes starting from his head. "Life cannot be unchequered by the frowns of fate, but death must bring dumbness to my lips. Caution, when besmeared in blood, is no longer virtue, or wisdom, but wretched and degenerate cowardice; no, never let him that was born to execute judgment secure his honours by cruelty and oppression. Hath not thy Koran told thee that fear and submission is a subject's tribute, yet mercy is the attribute of Allah, and the most ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... a slender mother was holding a crying baby, two small children huddling beside her. In the seat in front of him slouched a mulatto of the new era—the degenerate descendant of two races that mix only to decay. Further off there were several men returning from business trips, and across from them sat a pretty girl, asleep, her hand resting on a gilded cage containing a startled canary. At intervals ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... whiteness and silky texture, that on the tail is three or four inches long; these cats frequently spread their tails on their backs, as squirrels do. The colour is generally white, but sometimes light brown; they do not catch mice. This beautiful species does not degenerate speedily, and it appears to thrive better in Paris than in any other part of Europe. The figures of both these animals are in Buffon's ...
— A Trip to Paris in July and August 1792 • Richard Twiss
... weavers was to produce a fabric not too thick, flexible rather—for was it not meant to hang in folds?—and of an engagingly even surface. It was not too fine, yet had none of the looseness associated with the coarse, hurried work of later and degenerate times. It was more like the even fabric we associate with machine work, yet as unlike that as palpitating flesh is like a graven image. It was the logical production of honest workmen who counted time well spent if spent ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... hair, went hand in hand to the flowery mead to weave garlands for their lambkins. If by chance some rude, uncivil fellow dared to molest them, or attempted to throw thorns in their path, there was sure to be a knight-errant not far off ready to rush forward in their defence. But alas! in these degenerate days it is not so. Should a harmless cottage-maid wander out of the highway to pluck a primrose or two in the neighbouring field, the haughty owner sternly bids her retire; and if a pitying swain hasten to escort her back, he is perhaps seized ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... the mob, "down with the assassin." And the secretary saw them seize a degenerate-looking wretch and begin pounding him with their fists. After a little while he was thrown to the ground, but was dragged up again and at last, as the chauffeur was guiding his car backwards through the crowd, the secretary heard ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... the Mediterranean, died only a Viscount! But the house of Marney had risen to high rank; counted themselves ancient nobility; and turned up their noses at the Pratts and the Smiths, the Jenkinsons and the Robinsons of our degenerate days; and never had done anything for the nation or for their honours. And why should they now? It was unreasonable to expect it. Civil and religious liberty, that had given them a broad estate and a glittering coronet, to say nothing ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... no supremer test of character. Eleven years of hotel housekeepership guarantees a knowledge of human nature that includes some things no living being ought to know about her fellow men. And inevitably one of two results must follow. You degenerate into a bitter, waspish, and fault-finding shrew; or you develop into a patient, tolerant, and infinitely understanding woman. Martha Foote dealt daily with Polack scrub girls, and Irish porters, and Swedish chambermaids, and Swiss waiters, and Halsted Street bell-boys. Italian tenors ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... conceding either the poet's deliberate indulgence in sin, or his pitiable moral frailty. If one were tempted to believe that this defensive portrayal of the sinful poet is in any sense a major conception in English poetry, the volley of repudiative verse greeting every outcropping of the degenerate's self-exposure would offer a sufficient disproof. In the romantic movement, for instance, one finds only Byron (among persons of importance) to uphold the theory of the perverted artist, whereas a chorus of contradiction greets each expression ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... were about to rush upon one another, and this incoherent discussion was threatening to degenerate into a battle, ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... it. It began with "Dear Fanny," and it ended with "yours truly." "—Yours truly—mine truly—and how kind to write at all!" Now it so happened that Vaudemont, having never merged the art of the penman into that rapid scrawl into which people, who are compelled to write hurriedly and constantly, degenerate, wrote a remarkably good hand,—bold, clear, symmetrical—almost too good a hand for one who was not to make money by caligraphy. And after Fanny had got the words by heart, she stole gently to a cupboard and took ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 5 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... whose power alone he himself falsely created; and in this world he was the dupe of his own home-born phantoms. Out of this conspiracy of marsh and mirage, what vile things might not issue! Over such a chaos the devil has power all but creative. He cannot in truth create, but he can with the degenerate created work moral horrors too hideous to be analogized by any of the horrors of the unperfected animal world. Such are being constantly produced in human society; many of them die in the darkness in which they are generated; ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... luxuriousness, for it implies that he in some measure emulate their heroes, and consecrate morning hours to their pages. The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have. The modern cheap and ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... the money I have lost that makes me mad," sez Locals. "It's finding out that a man can become so degenerate that he will impose upon the very ones who save his life—deceive ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... years, but that the interval between one session and another should not exceed that period. But this wise law, which had passed by acclamation during the reign of Charles I., and for which even Clarendon had voted, was regarded by Charles II. as subversive of the liberty of his crown; and a supple, degenerate and sycophantic parliament gratified ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... upon me the verdict of an acquittal—inasmuch as he told me to make myself as comfortable as I could in his house, and to enjoy myself thoroughly in it for the next fortnight to come, at the very least. It may have been that, in considering my faults as those of the degenerate age in which I lived—which age, however, be it known, lived afterwards to recover its character, and to be held up as a model of propriety and virtue to the succeeding generation—the merciful doctor was willing to merge my chastisement in that which he ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... tabby-cat of modern Arabic), gave her name to Bubastis (Pi-Bast, the city of Bast). From the Osiric term (Bass) the learned Egyptologist would derive Bacchus and his priests, the Bacchoi and the Bacchantes, whose dress was the leopard's skin. Could Osiris have belonged to the race whose degenerate descendants are the murderous Somal of ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... mean speculation—although speculation when it does not degenerate into mere gambling has a proper and legitimate place in the scheme of things economic. Finance most emphatically does not mean fleecing the public, nor fattening parasitically off the industry and commerce ...
— High Finance • Otto H. Kahn
... period (1500-1200 B.C.): degenerate polished red and painted white ware; wheel-made white ware with painted ornament in glazed black or brown, of the 'Late Minoan' or 'Mycenaean' style introduced from the Aegean; various hand-made wares of foreign styles, probably from Syria ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... sir? [Exit. Caes. O, that profaned name!—- And are these seemly company for thee, [To Julia. Degenerate monster? All the rest I know, And hate all knowledge for their hateful sakes. Are you, that first the deities inspired With skill of their high natures and their powers, The first abusers of their useful light; Profaning thus their dignities ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... been built by the same kind of people who cut their rock houses in some of the canons in Mexico," said Briscoe; "only those are a degenerate set, and their cells or dwellings are very rough and primitive. These people must have been greatly in advance. There: I want to get to work again. There must be a way into that temple place from ...
— Old Gold - The Cruise of the "Jason" Brig • George Manville Fenn
... detail, and lavish in quantity,—but the perfect forms exist in comparatively few churches, generally in portions of the church only, and are always connected, and that closely, either with the massy forms out of which they have emerged, or with the enervated types into which they are instantly to degenerate. ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... degenerate times, not only the great ones generally profess the neglect and contempt of so necessary a duty, both in their own persons and in the use of chaplains; but the great part of the commons are altogether strangers to it; many performing no part of the family worship at all, others only singing ...
— The Auchensaugh Renovation of the National Covenant and • The Reformed Presbytery
... glorious crimson bound coat of the first eleven. He did not care in the least. He had lapsed hopelessly. No urchin in the lower school, brewing cocoa over a form room fire, ladling out condensed milk with the blade of a penknife, would have been more dead to the decencies of life than this degenerate hero ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... island of Ceylon in the beginning of the year 1819, when one morning my servant called me an hour or two before the usual time with, 'Master! master! people sent for master's dogs; tiger in the town!' Now my dogs chanced to be very degenerate specimens of a fine species called the Poligar dogs. I kept them to hunt jackals, but tigers are very different things. This turned out to be a panther; my gun chanced not to be put together, and while my servant was doing it the collector and two medical men, who had recently arrived, came ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... particularly necessary to watch over the preservation of armies in the interval of a long peace, for then they are most likely to degenerate. It is important to foster the military spirit in the armies, and to exercise them in great maneuvers, which, though but faintly resembling those of actual war, still are of decided advantage in preparing them ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... life, and to their own remote traditions for every political or religions custom or institution; uninformed by science; unimproved by education; in short, a fit soil from whence a careful observer could collect facts for forming a judgment, how far unassisted human nature will be apt to degenerate, and in what respects it can ever be able to excel. Who could have thought, that the brutal ferocity of feeding upon human flesh, and the horrid superstition of offering human sacrifices, should be found to exist amongst the natives lately discovered in the Pacific Ocean, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... ages all persons likely to occupy an important position in the history of the world had their horoscopes erected; but in these degenerate days neither the casting of nativities nor the art of ruling the planets flourishes as it should do. Our Zadkiels and Raphaels publish, indeed, the horoscopes of kings and emperors, princes and princesses, and ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... manner, as I said before. Howsoever, it may be perceived what manner of life there would be, where there were no common power to fear, by the manner of life which men that have formerly lived under a peaceful government used to degenerate into ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... was thrown out by his enemies, that he himself was infected with the very crime against which his inquiries were directed;—now Maenius, I say, in order that he might, in a private capacity, meet the imputation, abdicated the dictatorship. I expect not such moderation in you; you will not degenerate from your family, of all others the most imperious and assuming; nor resign your office a day, nor even an hour, before you are forced to it. Be it so: but then let no one exceed the time limited. It is enough to add a day, or a month, to the censorship. But Appius says, ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... soon as they find a leader who is enterprising but is excluded from the honors of office by his poverty, institute the rule of violence; and now uniting their forces massacre, banish, and plunder, until they degenerate again into perfect savages and find once ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... come, what more probable than the presence of the Indians at his speech, because such attractions are rare in Belleville, and the Indian would come to see what it is that stirs up so much his white friend and brother. Of course, the Indian in his degenerate days, would take the chance to get drunk, and, being in a whiskey stupor, he naturally supposed that Mr. Grayson was chanting a chant of victory, and quite as naturally he chanted in return his own chant, and ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... alms extend to those alone, Whom common faith more strictly made their own; A sort of Doves[131] were housed too near their hall, Who cross the proverb, and abound with gall. Though some, 'tis true, are passively inclined, The greater part degenerate from their kind; 950 Voracious birds, that hotly bill and breed, And largely drink, because on salt they feed. Small gain from them their bounteous owner draws; Yet, bound by promise, he supports their cause, As corporations ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... trouble is that you, both of you, are fifty years behind the times. You're old American. How you ever got here in the thick of modern conditions is a miracle. You're Rip Van Winkles. Who ever heard, in these degenerate times, of a young man and woman of the city putting their blankets on their backs and starting out in search of land? Why, it's the old Argonaut spirit. You're as like as peas in a pod to those who yoked their oxen and held west to the lands ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... coloured with purple veins down the sides of his nose and his rather podgy hands trembled. Nevertheless, it was his father. When the red dressing-gown spoke it was in a kind of travesty of that old sharp voice, those cutting icy words—a thickened and degenerate relation: ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... pleasure in being able to answer your correspondent's query, as I hope that my reply may be the means of introducing to his notice one of the most delightful authors that has ever yet written: one who deserves far more attention than he appears to receive from general readers in this degenerate age, and from whom many of his literary successors have borrowed some of their brightest thoughts. I need not go far ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.04.06 • Various
... understanding, that as there is no poet morally nobler than Webster so is there no poet ignobler in the moral sense than Euripides: while as a dramatic artist—an artist in character, action, and emotion—the degenerate tragedian of Athens, compared to the second tragic dramatist of England, is as a mutilated monkey to a well-made man. No better test of critical faculty could be required by the most exacting scrutiny of probation than ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... where it meets the robustness of temperament which I have pointed out, a ferocity which gives them a reality more exact still because the half-civilized person is often impulsive and, in consequence, the physical easily predominates. There, as elsewhere, the degenerate is everywhere a degenerate who gives the impression of being an ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... particular reference to Basque women, in which I maintained that they sacrificed natural kindliness and sympathy on the altars of honour and religion, whereupon the Daughters of Mary of San Sebastian made answer, charging that I was a degenerate son of their city, who had robbed them of their honour, which was absolutely contrary to the fact. In passing, they suggested to the editor of the Nuevo Mundo that he should not permit me to write again for ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... evidence of the date at which they were made. And as, according to Dr. Ingleby, "the primal evidence of the forgery lies in the ink writing, and in that alone," with that alone we shall at present concern ourselves. As the careless, half-formed hand of the present day, degenerate from "the round hand of the school-master," appears only in the pencil writing, we have therefore to deal but with the first three styles of writing enumerated by Mr. Hardy; and as he himself admits that "it is perfectly possible that any two of these hands in succession may have been practised ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... a despot—but had these latter countries kept alive one spark of that patriotism which so much endears to us the memories of Greece and Rome—had they not, in a great measure, become disunited by factions, we might, even in these days, however degenerate, have witnessed something like that national energy which was displayed in the bay of Salamis, and ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... knavery;" and in his Father Hubburd's Tales, we find "like an old cunning bowler to fetch in a young ketling gamester:" see Middleton's Works, v. 543, 589, ed. Dyce. Keistrels are hawks of a worthless and degenerate breed. ...
— Kemps Nine Daies Wonder - Performed in a Daunce from London to Norwich • William Kemp
... in the method of finding and establishing systems of means for himself and by himself. If, however, we lay the emphasis on the mere imparting of the garnered experiences of the ages, the danger to be feared is lest our teaching degenerate into mere dogmatism or mere cram. If, on the other hand, we lay too much emphasis on the ability to self-find and self-establish systems, we are in danger of losing sight of the social purpose of all knowledge—of forgetting that the only justification for establishing a system of knowledge ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... upon the general organism of dejection and resentment at meals. Prisoners more than men in any other condition need abundance to eat and good cheer while eating; but the food they get, and the circumstances in which they get it, causes them to degenerate physically, and the body affects the mind. Physical disease breeds the disease of evil thoughts and impulses. Criminals might be generated by prison food alone, without taking account of their ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... manner, as I said before. Howsoever, it may be perceived what manner of life there would be, where there were no common Power to feare; by the manner of life, which men that have formerly lived under a peacefull government, use to degenerate into, in a ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... are accustomed to the horse as a slave, cannot know him as a freeman. That docked thing standing by the curb is a long bred-out degenerate. In the Hills a horse was born and bred up to be a freeman. When the time came, he yielded to a sort of human suzerainty, but he yielded as a cadet of a noble house yields to the discipline of a commandant, with the spirit in him and as one ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... Prue came home late to supper after a session at Bertha Appleby's. An informal gathering had convened under the disguise of a church-society meeting, only to degenerate into a dancing-bee after a few ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... both before and since the Committee commenced its sittings, has focussed public attention more strongly upon the necessity for immediate action in regard to the more adequate treatment of this class of degenerate than upon the much larger and relatively more important class of mental defective covered by the first section of ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... critics in these days of criticism may regard it as a corrupt civilisation. But its enemies in the day of battle only regarded it as civilisation. Saladin, the greatest of the Saracens, did not call Greek bishops degenerate dreamers or dingy outcasts, he called them, with a sounder historical instinct, "The monks of the imperial race." The survival of the word merely means that even when the imperial city fell behind them, they did not ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... and in that age when the novel was in its infancy, there was merit in doing even no more than this. He is very hard upon the old mediaeval romances, which it is true he seems to have known only through the abridged and degenerate texts circulated in his time, for the amusement of idle readers. He readily endorses the moral views of Ascham about them, adding however, what is more interesting for us, some literary criticism: "What els ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... universe, which, according to our original intention, has now been brought down to the creation of man. Completeness seems to require that something should be briefly said about other animals: first of women, who are probably degenerate and cowardly men. And when they degenerated, the gods implanted in men the desire of union with them, creating in man one animate substance and in woman another in the following manner:—The outlet for ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... was sufficient to make a degenerate of a Mohammedan; and to devour the flesh of cows converted ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... profession, whether we meet with the concurrence, or suffer the opposition, of our dearest friends. Timidity is natural to the female mind; but religion requires even the youngest and the weakest of the sex, not to suffer even natural delicacy to degenerate, by excessive indulgence, into criminal shame. It does more, it enables women to become heroes and martyrs! Inflamed with the love it inspires, they have learned to see no lions, to fear no dangers, to feel no pains in the path of duty; not only evincing patience, ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... a bit of a bully can scarcely be denied. It is difficult to combine the offices of Gabbai and Town Councillor without a self-satisfaction that may easily degenerate into dissatisfaction with others. Least endurable was S. Cohn in his religious rigidity, and he could never understand that pietistic exercises in which he found pleasure did not inevitably produce ecstasy in his son and heir. ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... never seen them. The vilest inclinations, the basest actions, succeeded my amiable amusements and even obliterated the very remembrance of them. I must have had, in spite of my good education, a great propensity to degenerate, else the declension could not have followed with such ease and rapidity, for never did so promising a Caesar ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... compromise him in nothing, he would certainly say he did not know; and if he were expostulated with, he would reply rudely, arrogantly. This is worthy of notice, for what was special in his character was the combination it afforded of degenerate weakness and pride, complicated with a towering sense of self-sufficiency. Youth's illusions would not pass from him easily; in his eyes and heart the hawthorn would always be in bloom, young girls ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... be separated from them again, because it injures ewes to be teased while they are pregnant. Ewe lambs should never be bred before they are two years old, as they cannot earlier produce strong lambs, but will themselves degenerate: indeed, it is better to keep them until the third year. To this end some shepherds protect their ewe lambs from the ram by tying baskets made of rushes or something of that kind over their rumps, but it is better to feed ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... existence of an independent character. But when, God alone knows at the cost of what efforts and of what happy accidents, a vigorous and original personality has been able to unfold, nothing is rarer than not to see it degenerate into a mere personage. History teaches us that men exceptional in will and energy almost always become obstructive and mischievous. They commence by serving a cause and end by taking possession of it so completely ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... the dignified Sophy is not the sort of girl to allow any kind of familiarity. Yet virtue has its bounds like everything else, and she is rather to be blamed for her severity than for indulgence; even her father himself is sometimes afraid lest her lofty pride should degenerate into a haughty spirit. When most alone, Emile dare not ask for the slightest favour, he must not even seem to desire it; and if she is gracious enough to take his arm when they are out walking, a favour which she will never permit him to claim as a right, it is only occasionally that ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... portion of its purity. The Revolution of July had been a fine popular gale, abruptly followed by blue sky. They made the cloudy sky reappear. They caused that revolution, at first so remarkable for its unanimity, to degenerate into a quarrel. In the Revolution of July, as in all progress accomplished by fits and starts, there had been secret fractures; these riots rendered them perceptible. It might have been said: 'Ah! this is broken.' After the Revolution of July, one was sensible only ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... "Lohengrin" in time, he was not sorry to see his table relieved of the dull pomposity and brilliant watch-chain of the pillar of Prague society. How mean to hide one's Judaism! What a burden to belong to such a race, degenerate sons of a great but long-vanished past, unable to slough the slave traits engendered by centuries of slavery! How he had yearned as a boy to shake off the yoke of the nations, even as he himself had ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... HISTORY OF SAMOA for the last eight or nine years; and while I was unavoidably delayed in the writing of this, awaiting material, put in one-half of DAVID BALFOUR, the sequel to KIDNAPPED. Add the ordinary impediments of life, and admire my busyness. I am now an old, but healthy skeleton, and degenerate much towards the machine. By six at work: stopped at half-past ten to give a history lesson to a step- grandson; eleven, lunch; after lunch we have a musical performance till two; then to work again; bath, 4.40, ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... take the higher title; it was first assumed by his son Okkodai. But there are doubts about this. (See Quatremere's Rashid, pp. 10 seqq. and Pavet de Courteille, Dict. Turk-Oriental.) The tendency of swelling titles is always to degenerate, and when the value of Khan had sunk, a new form, Khan-khanan, was devised at the Court of Delhi, and applied to one of the ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... floating beneath him. A little group of high- born Chinese ladies in holiday attire are seated in a garden of potted plants on the river's bank, drinking tea, flirting their fans, and doubtless talking over the latest Court gossip. Nearby is a willow, not the stiff, ugly tree now seen upon tame and degenerate imitations of real old China pottery, but a graceful weeping-willow, whose drooping branches sweep the opposite shore, as sublimely indifferent to distance as ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... there are several early types developed. In the Pelecypods (or Lamellibranchs—the mussel, oyster, etc.) the animal retires wholly within its fortress, and degenerates. The Gastropods (snails, etc.) compromise, and retain a certain amount of freedom, so that they degenerate less. The highest group, the Cephalopods, "keep their heads," in the literal sense, and we shall find them advancing from form to form until, in the octopus of a later age, they discard the ancestral shell, and become the aristocrats of ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... they inhabit the north island, and are only in small numbers, and degenerate in this, so may be passed over unnoticed. The only effectual policy in dealing with them is to show a bold front, and, at the same time, do them a good turn whenever you can be quite certain that your kindness ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... used to be called "an aristocratic drawl," and his pronunciation was archaic. Like other high-bred people of his time, he talked of "cowcumbers" and "laylocks"; called a woman an "oo'man," and was much "obleeged" where a degenerate race is content to ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... Eunuch of the "Queen of the South[107]," or of Abyssinia, who was a Jew, and converted by Philip to Christianity. There is therefore no manner of difficulty in accounting for the presence of these corrupt degenerate black Jews, amongst ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... it with their bodies? Were they sturdier men? Did they stand heavier on their feet than their descendants? It is a familiar fact that the armor which inclosed them will not hold those whom we call their degenerate children. A friend tells me that in the armory of London Tower there are preserved scores, if not hundreds, of the swords of those terrible Northmen, those Vikings, who, ten centuries ago, swept the seas and were the dread of all Europe, and that scarcely one of them has a hilt large enough ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... delay in my promotion to worldly dignities; that the influence of authors, both poets and historians, has long since ceased; that the respect paid to literature vanished with literary princes; and that in these degenerate days very different paths lead to honours and opulence. I allow all this, I readily allow it, and acquiesce in the truth. For the unprincipled and covetous attach themselves to the court, the churchmen ...
— The Description of Wales • Geraldus Cambrensis
... bound up with the question of social leadership, and unless the college, as it used to be in the days when the religious hierarchy it created was a real power, can be made once more a breeding place for a natural aristocracy, it will inevitably degenerate into a school for mechanical apprentices or into a pleasure resort for the jeunesse doree (sc. the "gold coasters"). We must get back to a common understanding of the office of education in the construction of society, and must discriminate ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... literature of its golden age is the subject of attack, and a perverted and fantastic style of writing assigned to an epoch remarkable for the severity and precision of its taste? If Spain is meant, the attack is perfectly intelligible, as the epoch is exactly that when Spanish taste began to degenerate, and the style of Spanish writers to become vicious, inflated, and fantastic, in imitation of Gongora, who did so much to ruin the literature of his country; as other writers of much less ability, but who addressed themselves ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... great-great-grandmother. It was currently reported that every forest had one within its precincts, who ruled over the woodmen, and exacted tribute from them in the shape of little blocks of wood ready hewn for the fire of his underground palace,—such blocks as are bought at shops in these degenerate days, ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... much to contend with. In the first place, being a sheepman, he was absolutely without caste in the cattle country, where men who went in for the "woolly idiots," as someone has aptly called them, was considered for the most part as a degenerate, and only fit for target practice. This side of the matter troubled ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... of basing our psychology on reactions is that it keeps us "close to the ground", and prevents our discussions from sailing off into the clouds of picturesque but fanciful interpretation. Psychology is very apt to degenerate into a game of blowing bubbles, unless we pin ourselves down to hard-headed ways of thinking. The notion of a reaction is of great value here, just because it is so hard-headed and concrete. Whenever we have any human action before us for explanation, we have to ask what the stimulus ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... motives; because no good motives can be pleaded in favor of their conduct. Upon that case I stand; we are at issue; and I desire to go to trial. This, I am sure, is not loose railing, or mean insinuation, according to their low and degenerate fashion, when they make attacks on the measures of their adversaries. It is a regular and juridical course; and unless I choose it, nothing can compel me to ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... not interfere with, much less shock or oppose the Motions and Revolutions of the greater; they constantly keep the Distances first prescribed them, and all move regularly to their respective Ends. The most verdant and fragrant Meadows may, from the too frequent Irruption of muddy Waters, degenerate into noxious Marshes, if some Care was not taken to divert those impure Gushings into their proper Channels. Hence it may be inferred, that laying open the most honorary, as well as important and useful Professions of Society, to the Intrusion, or rather pyratical Invasions, of ...
— An Essay on the Antient and Modern State of Ireland • Henry Brooke
... endeavoured to arrive at and express a better understanding of the legislative work of the Lords. Englishmen have not much more regard for the principle of a quadrennially elected President than Americans have for an hereditary aristocracy; but they do not habitually permit that lack of regard to degenerate into the use of contemptuous language about individual Presidents. Even in contemplating the result of what seems to them so preposterous a system as that of electing a judiciary by popular party vote, Englishmen have generally confined themselves to a complimentary ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... "labours"—"degenerate" will do, will it? Mr. Betty is no longer a babe, therefore the line cannot be ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... sacrifice, and they do not worship ancestors nor exhibit the superstitions known as "animism." It has been argued that these characteristics, taken together, indicate a primitive condition of humanity. On the other hand, many writers regard them as degenerate offshoots of negro-like races of larger stature and more ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... doubt, but no one can say with certainty anything about it. The degenerate half-breeds who live in this vicinity only keep up the custom from tradition. They are called Christians now, you know, and are quite above such ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... disturbances which had arisen in England, and was much inclined to favor John in his pretensions. He had no hopes of retaining and extending his newly acquired superiority over that kingdom, but by supporting so base and degenerate a prince, who was willing to sacrifice every consideration to his present safety; and he foresaw that if the administration should fall into the hands of those gallant and high-spirited barons, they would vindicate the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... bringing garments and food to their half-famished inmates; but she has been slow to learn that fresh air is just as essential to life as food or clothing. Care should be taken by the public authorities of every city, that its tenement houses do not degenerate into foul hovels, like those of the poor English laborer, so graphically portrayed by Dickens. But ill-ventilated rooms are not found exclusively in the abodes of the poor. True, in the homes of luxury, the effect of vitiated air is modified by food, etc. Men of wealth give far more attention ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... closes round! my life draws to its end! Nay, weep not, child! were it not for thee I would long ere this have prayed the gods my masters to remove me from my sojourn among the degenerate sons of our noble fathers; but I trembled for thy fate, sweet one!" These last words were almost inexpressibly tender. "I dared not trust thy slight frame to battle unsheltered with the storm. Now the blast summoning me is sounded. I cannot much longer disobey, though I may crave for brief ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... they are commonly of a palish blue, or rather of a colour somewhat approaching to livid, and are surrounded by an erysipelatous inflammation. These pustules, unless a timely remedy be applied, frequently degenerate into phagedenic ulcers, which prove extremely troublesome[2]. The animals become indisposed, and the secretion of milk is much lessened. Inflamed spots now begin to appear on different parts of the hands of the domestics employed in milking, and sometimes ...
— An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae • Edward Jenner
... it were, adulterous sons. For we know for certain that He alone was the righteous seed of David; for although Hezekiah and Josiah were legitimate successors, yet, when we look to others, they were, as it were, monsters. Except three or four, all the rest were degenerate and covenant-breakers." The words: "I raise unto David a righteous Branch" are here, as well as in chap. xxxiii. 15, not by any means equivalent to: a righteous Branch of David. On the contrary, David is designated as he to whom the act of raising belongs, for ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... comments by his neighbors; I think partly because they are felt to be representative of what is latent in other men, and partly because he is surrounded by others more alert. Such men are the outcropping of a vein of degenerate will. It is not immoral degeneracy, but its weakness is incapacity for action of any kind, inability to see and do the specific task. This degenerate will does not extend to traditional morals, and does not always affect whole families. ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... to a period of good government, and the composition of which is ascribed mainly to the duke of Ku, come to an end; and those that follow are the 'changed' Major Odes of the Kingdom, or those belonging to a degenerate period, commencing with this. Some among them, however, are equal to any of the former class. The Min Lo has been assigned to duke M of Sho, a descendant of duke Khang, the Shih of the Sh, the reputed author of the Khan , and was directed against king ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... plentiful and easily caught that the blackfellows scarcely trouble to get them, which is rarely the case elsewhere. The Australian native is a man with an unknown history whether he is an improvement on his remote ancestors or a degenerate descendant it is impossible to ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... individual shrub or quadruped, so as to threaten its vitality, renders it fruitful on behalf of its species. I have seen the principle strikingly exemplified in the common tobacco plant, when reared in a northern country, in the open air. Year after year it continued to degenerate, and to exhibit a smaller leaf and shorter stem, until the successors of what in the first year of trial had been rigorous plants, of some three to four feet in height, had in the sixth or eighth become mere weeds, of scarce as many ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... Bengal's misfortune that its people received Brahminism in a corrupt and degenerate form. According to legend, King Adisur, who reigned there in the ninth century of our era, imported five priests from Kanauj to perform indispensable sacrifices. From this stock the majority of Bengali Brahmins claim descent. The immigrants were attended by five ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... from far lands, such as Russia. And this business formed the governor-general of Canada. As a boy in his teens he was sent into the counting-house, an apprentice to commerce, and so he escaped the 'education of a gentleman' in the brutal public schools and the degenerate universities of the time. Business in those days had a sort of sanctity and was governed by punctilious—almost religious—routine. In the interests of the business he travelled, while young and impressionable, to Russia, and mixed to his advantage with the cosmopolitan ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... of Eleanor's aunt did not prevent her from being an agreeable acquaintance. Although she believed in the intellectual capacity of woman, she did not look upon herself as a representative of the class: her admiration of her sex did not degenerate into self-laudation, and her enthusiasm was not tainted by egotism. Hers was not a strong-mindedness that showed itself in ungainly coiffures and tasteless attire. It was content with desiring and claiming for woman whatever is best, noblest and most lovely in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... smile, 'There is hope till forty-five.' He spoke also of Tennyson and Carlyle as the two men connected with literature in England who were most satisfactory to meet, and better than their books. His respect for literature in these degenerate days is absolute. It is religion and life, and he reiterates this in every possible form. Speaking of Jones Very, he said he seemed to have no right to his rhymes; they did not sing to him, but he was divinely led to them, and they always ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... evil hypnotic influence of Rasputin, the smart little woman, who often called at the house and whom I sometimes met at the palace, was quickly transformed from a steady tradesman's wife into a giddy, pleasure-loving and intriguing degenerate, perhaps even more vicious than the rest. Indeed, it was this very fact which caused the Empress to look upon her with favour. Thus she soon had the run of the private apartments, and became upon friendly terms with ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... universal harmony of twain making one. That love should be capable of ending in such vermiculate results as too often appear, is no more against the loveliness of the divine idea, than that the forms of man and woman, the spirit gone from them, should degenerate to such things as may not be looked upon. There is no plainer sign of the need of a God, than the possible fate of love. The celestial Cupido may soar aloft on seraph wings that assert his origin, or fall down on the belly of a ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... nation was, (and nobody had done more than Caesar to corrupt it,) what could even Cicero, Cato, Brutus, have done, had it been referred to them to establish a good government for their country? They had no ideas of government themselves, but of their degenerate Senate, nor the people of liberty, but of the factious opposition of their tribunes. They had afterwards their Tituses, their Trajans, and Antoninuses, who had the will to make them happy, and the power to mould their government into a good ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... of the thirteenth century, whilst the enterprises which were still called crusades were becoming more and more degenerate in character and potency, there was born in France, on the 25th of April, 1215, not merely the prince, but the man who was to be the most worthy representative and the most devoted slave of that religious and moral passion which had inspired the crusades. Louis IX., though born to the purple, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... the Eleusinian family of the Kerykes, and held the offices of archon basileus and eponymus in Athens. When the Heruli overran Greece and captured Athens (269), Dexippus showed great personal courage and revived the spirit of patriotism among his degenerate fellow-countrymen. A statue was set up in his honour, the base of which, with an inscription recording his services, has been preserved (Corpus Inscrr. Atticarum, iii. No. 716). It is remarkable that the inscription is silent as to his military ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... Laura had hardly dared to lift her eyes in Mary Pidwall's presence. For Mary knew not only the sum of her lies, but also held—or so Laura believed—that she came of a thoroughly degenerate family; thanks to Uncle Tom. And the early weeks spent at close quarters with her bore out these fears. The looks both M. P. and her friend bent on Laura said as plainly as words: if we are forced to tolerate this obnoxious little insect about us, we can at least show it just what a horrid ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... The Gospel, doubtless, enjoins upon all Christians the most patient submission to legally constituted authority. Its success is to be won by the display of faith and obedience. But concession may degenerate into cowardice, and submission into craven subserviency. Obedience to a tyrant is rebellion against the king whom he defrauds of his authority, his revenues, and his reputation; and treason against God, ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... place in a future world, and if not all, why should those who are specially attached to man be deemed worthy of any exceptional privilege? When we reason about such a subject, almost at once we degenerate into nonsense. It is a passing thought which has no real hold on the mind. We may argue for the existence of animals in a future state from the attributes of God, or from texts of Scripture ('Are not two sparrows sold for one farthing?' etc.), but the truth is that we are only ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... Not merely the Anarchist, but every man of Anarchistic tendencies, all violent and disorderly people, all people of bad character, the incompetent, the lazy, the vicious, the physically unfit, defective, or degenerate should be kept out. The stocks out of which American citizenship is to be built should be strong and healthy, sound in body, mind, and character. If it be objected that the Government agents would not always select well, the answer is that they would certainly select better than do the ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Turnbull as a sobriquet conferred for some feat of strength and daring on a stalwart Borderer. We find the corresponding Tornebeuf in Old French, and Turnbuck also occurs. Trumbull and Trumble are variants due to metathesis followed by assimilation (Chapter III), while Tremble is a very degenerate form. In Knatchbull we have the obsolete verb knatch, which in Mid. English meant to strike on the head, fell. Crawcour is Fr. Crevecoeur, breakheart, which has also become a local name in France. With Shacklock, shake-lock, and Sherlock, ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... slaves, turn'd tyrants, offer crowns to sale, And each fall'n nation's melancholy tale. Lo! where of late the Book of Martyrs stood, Old pious tracts, and Bibles bound in wood; There, such the taste of our degenerate age, Stand the profane delusions of the STAGE: Yet virtue owns the TRAGIC MUSE a friend, Fable her means, morality her end; For this she rules all passions in their turns, And now the bosom bleeds, and now it burns; Pity with weeping eye surveys her bowl, ...
— The Library • George Crabbe
... of these various degenerate and illiterate attempts at book-work we have only to watch the last expiring gleams of classic art beneath the ruthless footsteps of the barbarian invaders of the ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... holy the seventh day were only[82] a human institution, it would be the best method that could have been thought of for the polishing and civilising of mankind. It is certain the country people would soon degenerate into a kind of savages and barbarians, were there not such frequent returns of a stated time, in which the whole village meet together with their best faces, and in their cleanliest habits, to converse with one another upon indifferent ...
— The De Coverley Papers - From 'The Spectator' • Joseph Addison and Others
... the experiment would not have been left untried so long. In-and-in breeding is a mistake, and can only commend itself, and that for selfish reasons, to the Aztec in physique and the imbecile in mind. The families which take most pride in their purity are the most degenerate; the stock which is the most robust and handsome is that which has in it a liberal infusion of foreign bloods. In my opinion, the coming man, the highest form of well-balanced qualities—moral, intellectual, and masculine—the nearest ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... and several of his successors there is little of interest to record. The twenty-fifth emperor, Muretsu (A.D. 499), who was a son of the emperor Ninken, was chiefly notable for his cruelty. Some of the acts recorded of him can only be equalled by those of the degenerate occupants of the imperial throne of Rome in its worst days. He reigned eleven years and died without children. The twenty-sixth emperor was Keitai Tenno, who was the fifth descendant from Ojin Tenno. The only noticeable events ...
— Japan • David Murray
... admirers of Miss Becraft, gave her instruction, and extended to her most heartfelt aid and approbation in all her noble work, as they were in those days wont to do in behalf of the aspiring Colored girls who sought for education, withholding themselves from such work only when a depraved and degenerate public sentiment upon the subject of educating the Colored people had compelled them to a more rigid line of demarcation between the races. Ellen Simonds and others conducted the school a few years, but with the loss of its original teacher it began to fail, and finally ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... co-religionists in that they abjured the strict garb and the "thee" and "thou" of those who followed George Fox to unfashionable lengths, whilst their children studied music and dancing. More zealous brethren called the Gurneys "worldly," and shook their heads over their degenerate conduct; but, all unseen, Mrs. Gurney was training up her family in ways of usefulness and true wisdom; while "the fear of the Lord," as the great principle of life and action, was constantly set before them. With ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... subjection have killed the pride which still lingers in the face and bearing of the poorest Arab; the Egyptian peasant does not wear the collar of Gurth, but he is a slave of the soil whose day of freedom is afar off. Yet these degenerate people are seen against a background of the most imposing ruins in the world. Luxor and Karnak and the tombs of the kings near old Thebes contain enough remains of the splendor of ancient Egyptian life to permit study for years. The mind is appalled ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... said before. Howsoever, it may be perceived what manner of life there would be, where there were no common Power to feare; by the manner of life, which men that have formerly lived under a peacefull government, use to degenerate into, ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... Age," and "The Way to the Blessed Life"; "so robust an intellect, a soul so calm," says Carlyle, "so lofty, massive, and immovable, has not mingled in philosophic discussion since the time of Luther ... the cold, colossal, adamantine spirit, standing erect and clear, like a Cato Major among degenerate men; fit to have been the teacher of the Stoa, and to have discoursed of Beauty and Virtue in the groves ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... an attempt to appeal to my instinct for the preservation of my social self, I can face them without flinching. When that pompous old boy with the sandy mustache who has always looked upon me as a member of the degenerate Juke family tries to tell me that if I don't take the five-dollar cravat he won't be responsible for the way in which decent people will receive me when I go out on the street, I will reach across the counter and playfully pull his own necktie out from his waistcoat and scream, "I know you, ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... charity is often a snare to us. It calls us to certain occupations that dissipate the mind, and that may degenerate into mere amusement. It is for this reason that St. Chrysostom says that nothing is so important as to keep an exact proportion between the interior source of virtue and the external practise of it; else, like the foolish virgins, ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... great burnished mirror, wrought about With cunning imagery of twisted vines. He scarcely knew those sunken, red-rimmed eyes, For his who in the flush of manhood rode Among the cliffs, and followed up the crags The flying temptress; and there fell on him A horror of her beauty, a disgust For his degenerate and corrupted life, With irresistible, intense desire, To feel the breath of heaven on his face. Then as Fate willed, who rules above the gods, He saw, within the glass, behind him glide The form of Venus. Certain of her power, She had laid ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... town to the wholesome, simple country, here is the sort of home you have. This passage is a cutting from the Daily News of Jan. 1, 1907; and its assertions have never been contradicted. It fills one with only the mildest enthusiasm for the return of our degenerate townsmen "back to the land." I came upon it as I read that morning's paper ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... rough bark with a draw-knife, and to scarify them when bark-bound, brushing them over with the composition. It is also advised to plant quince trees at a proper distance from apple and pears, as bees and the wind may mix the farina, and occasion the apples and pears to degenerate. These trees may be raised from the kernels of the fruit sown in autumn; but there is no depending on having the same sort of good fruit from seedlings, nor will they soon become bearers. But the several varieties may be continued the same by cuttings and layers; also ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... concerning Esau. He was a man intent upon immediate physical enjoyment; an idle drifter without spiritual ideals. From his character and that of the Edomites, his descendants, there is taught the lesson that such an unambitious man or nation will always become degenerate and prove a failure. God himself cannot make a man out ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... others, as soon as they find a leader who is enterprising but is excluded from the honors of office by his poverty, institute the rule of violence; and now uniting their forces massacre, banish, and plunder, until they degenerate again into perfect savages and find once more a ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... breeding-stables—which is in France a branch of the civil service—opposed this innovation, and contended that the only pure type of horse was the primitive Arab, and that every departure from this resulted in the production of an animal more or less degenerate and debased. The reply of the Jockey Club was, that the English thoroughbred is, in fact, nothing else than a pure Arab, modified only by the influences of climate and treatment, and that it would be ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... other Yugoslav territories. Serbia, too, would now take her part, so that there is no need to fear for the position of a Yugoslav Rieka based solely—omitting Hungary and the Ukraine altogether—on her Yugoslav hinterland. Rieka without Yugoslavia would be ruined and would degenerate into a fishing village, with a great past and a miserable future. This could very well be seen during the spring of 1919 when the communications were interrupted between Rieka and Yugoslavia. At Rieka during April eggs were 80 centimes apiece, while at Bakar, a few ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... Shelley, Keats and Salvator Rosa! The Palace of the Cassars looked even more mournful in the pale, slant sunshine, and the yellow Tiber, as he flowed through the "marble wilderness," seemed sullenly counting up the long centuries during which degenerate slaves have trodden his banks. A leaden-colored haze clothed the seven hills, and heavy silence reigned among the ruins, for all work was prohibited, and the people were gathered in their churches. Rome never appeared so desolate and melancholy ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... and exceptional care; and that with high feeding and artificial appliances comes vastly increased liability to disease, which may practically annihilate the race. But then the race, like the bursted boiler, could not be said to wear out, while if left to ordinary conditions, and allowed to degenerate back into a more natural if less useful state, its hold on life would evidently be ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... to command, to take up positions on that road, as if they had still armies at their beck. One of them made the observation to him with some degree of asperity, and was beginning an enumeration of his losses; but Napoleon, determined to reject all reports, lest they should degenerate into complaints, warmly interrupted him with these words: "why then do you wish to deprive me of my tranquillity?" and as the other was persisting, he shut his mouth at once, by repeating, in a reproachful manner, "I ask ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... great nations. In world-politics, the others are negligible. Well, let us see. France, a nation of peacocks, excitable, impressionable, easily angered, making much of trifles, jealous of their dignity, a dying nation which grows smaller and weaker every year. England, also a degenerate nation, soaked in gin, where a hundred thousand men are unemployed, and where no better remedy for pauperism can be found than universal pensions, which only make more paupers. Russia, an ignorant nation, whose ruling class is composed of men without morals and without ideals—thieves ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... together, sometimes with the doctor or Mr Renshaw, and at others with our two English friends, from whom we gained a good deal of information. From all I heard, I should not at all like to live in Mexico. The descendants of the fierce conquerors have become a most degenerate race, without religion, without morality—each man ready to destroy his neighbour for the sake of getting into his place. That object seems to be the only end and aim of all their politics. As to patriotism, it does not exist. The nearest ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... late period (1500-1200 B.C.): degenerate polished red and painted white ware; wheel-made white ware with painted ornament in glazed black or brown, of the 'Late Minoan' or 'Mycenaean' style introduced from the Aegean; various hand-made wares of foreign styles, probably from Syria ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... see how it is, Marian; these people must be descendants of the old Philistines, all degenerate ...
— The Dingo Boys - The Squatters of Wallaby Range • G. Manville Fenn
... changed in our degenerate days, and it is now possible for any one to find any other person with the simple key of street ...
— A Hundred Years by Post - A Jubilee Retrospect • J. Wilson Hyde
... till the meal was done To pledge a health? Degenerate son Of friendly sires! a health thrice-told Each guest had pledged to fellowships old,— Untarrying eager mouth to wipe, And across the board with hearty gripe Joining rough hands,—ere the meal was o'er:— Hearts ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... breathing air and with limbs for locomotion on the land. Most of the Carboniferous amphibians were shaped like the salamander, with weak limbs adapted more for crawling than for carrying the body well above the ground. Some legless, degenerate forms were ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... to this celestial King, most Holy Father, that this Lady, His spouse, sends her children whom you see here, who are not of a lower condition than those who came long before them. They do not degenerate; they have the comeliness both of their Father and their mother, since they make profession of the most perfect poverty. There is, therefore, no fear of their dying of poverty, being the children and heirs of the Immortal ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... services, to bestow on him five hundred English pounds, making my just excuse, I had it not before within my power to reward him. [Lays down the paper.] And was it then for this I sought his life? Oh base, degenerate Spaniard! Hadst thou done it, thou hadst been worse than damned: Heaven took more care of me, than I of him, to expose this paper to my timely view. Sleep on, thou honourable Englishman; I'll sooner ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... as thus related by descent or cognation, do not always agree in sense; for it is incident to words, as to their authours, to degenerate from their ancestors, and to change their manners when they change their country. It is sufficient, in etymological enquiries, if the senses of kindred words be found such as may easily pass into each other, or such as may both be referred to one ...
— Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language • Samuel Johnson
... greatness is, that it is for the most part in pitiful want and distress. What a wonderful thing is this, unless it degenerate into avarice, and so cease to be greatness. It falls perpetually into such necessities as drive it into all the meanest and most sordid ways of borrowing, cozenage, and robbery, Mancipiis locopules, eget ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... of velvet collars, in which the town followed the lead of the younger man. My uncle, who was not born to be second to any one, retired instantly to St. Albans, and announced that he would make it the centre of fashion and of society, instead of degenerate London. It chanced, however, that the mayor and corporation waited upon him with an address of thanks for his good intentions towards the town, and that the burgesses, having ordered new coats from London for the occasion, were all ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... fellows had not the bare necessaries of life, and it was only by great exertion that I was able to procure them, as I have described, for myself and a few of my more intimate friends. I had not supposed that so degenerate a race of Frenchmen existed, for when they saw us all rapidly sickening and advancing towards the grave, instead of relaxing their system of tyranny, they only increased their ill-treatment, and made us believe that they really ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... sixpenny cigars, and brandy and water in buckets. It is, of course, good policy to keep a company of buyers in good humour, but I think it has long since been recognized that hospitality was carried a little too far in those times of prosperity, and, in these degenerate if more business-like days, extravagance is much less evident, though there is a hearty welcome and abundance ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... somewhat cracked within the ring. To be sure, in those days every gentleman took his pipe with him; and the fragrant clouds would be some consolation in the eyes, or rather in the noses, of some of us. But still,—almost six hours of tragedy! It is too much of a good thing for these degenerate days; and we must allow the prompter to use his pencil on the actors' copy of "Hamlet," though he strike out page ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... traditions for every political or religions custom or institution; uninformed by science; unimproved by education; in short, a fit soil from whence a careful observer could collect facts for forming a judgment, how far unassisted human nature will be apt to degenerate, and in what respects it can ever be able to excel. Who could have thought, that the brutal ferocity of feeding upon human flesh, and the horrid superstition of offering human sacrifices, should be found to exist amongst the natives lately discovered in the Pacific Ocean, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... gratitude, love and veneration. Sweet is the remembrance of the virtuous, and happy are the descendants of such a father! they will think on him and emulate his virtues—they will remember him, and be ashamed to degenerate from ...
— The Old English Baron • Clara Reeve
... are commonly of a palish blue, or rather of a colour somewhat approaching to livid, and are surrounded by an erysipelatous inflammation. These pustules, unless a timely remedy be applied, frequently degenerate into phagedenic ulcers, which prove extremely troublesome[2]. The animals become indisposed, and the secretion of milk is much lessened. Inflamed spots now begin to appear on different parts of the hands of ...
— An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae • Edward Jenner
... can be pleaded in favor of their conduct. Upon that case I stand; we are at issue; and I desire to go to trial. This, I am sure, is not loose railing, or mean insinuation, according to their low and degenerate fashion, when they make attacks on the measures of their adversaries. It is a regular and juridical course; and unless I choose it, nothing can compel ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... hair and beard were somewhat long, and had a way of twisting themselves as though blown by the wind. When the light of the summer morning shone through the panes of clean glass upon this family at breakfast, it was obvious that the son was physically somewhat degenerate. Athletics had not then come into fashion; Caius was less in stature than might have been expected from such parents; and now, after his years of town life, he had an appearance of being limp in sinew, nor was there the same strong will and alert ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... is surrounded by the tribe of the same name, as well as by the Skynses and the Nez Perces; who bring to it the furs and peltries collected in their hunting expeditions. The Wallah-Wallahs are a degenerate, worn-out tribe. The Nez Perces are the most numerous and tractable of the three tribes just mentioned. Mr. Pambrune informed Captain Bonneville that he had been at some pains to introduce the Christian religion, in the Roman Catholic form, among them, where it had ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... 18 inches to 2 feet in diameter, and makes a donkey load. The gigantic cauliflower is not distinct from our European species, but is solely produced by a cultivation which necessity has dictated. Being one of the Northern vegetables that degenerate or bear no seed if not annually procured from Europe, it is propagated by cuttings. After the heads are gathered the stubs are allowed to throw out new shoots, which are again planted and have to grow two years, producing the second, the ...
— The Cauliflower • A. A. Crozier
... weekly tenants. The cottages let by the week look shabby, slovenly, dingy; the hedges of the gardens are neglected, broken down, stopped up with anything that comes to hand. If it were not for the fruitful and well-tended vegetable plots, one might often suppose the tenants to be ignorant of order, degenerate, brutalized, materialized, so sordid and ugly are ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... faith, and desire, will subside into a condition of spiritual tedium, unnoticing routine; or else, the imaginative element dying out, while the sexual element retains or perhaps even exaggerates its force, love will degenerate into lust. These three results depict the real union subsisting between three classes of husbands and wives, when the hymeneal glow has passed, and fixed realities assert their sway. The first is a hideous association of enemies, a yoked animosity; the second, a lukewarm connection of colleagues, ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... Christian converts to be anarchists in religious matters. There is evidence, in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, that his spiritual presentation of Christianity had already been made an excuse for disorderly licence. The usual symptoms of degenerate Mysticism had appeared at Corinth. There were men there who called themselves "spiritual persons[105]" or prophets, and showed an arrogant independence; there were others who wished to start sects of their own; others who carried antinomianism into the sphere of morals; others who prided ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... they watched the starry flocks hurtling about them. The birds wheeled around, fled away, and again returned. There were winged serpents; might which would put to flight the degenerate eagle; plumage before which the birds of paradise would show dull as clay. These wings dipt in the dawn flashed ceaselessly. Ah, what plumage of white fire rayed out with pinions of opalescent glory! What feathered sprays of burning amethyst! What crests of scarlet and gold, ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... is the natural tendency, as all experience shows, that any college independent of all inspection, control, or competition in wealth—all its officers securely paid by the state, independent of exertion or success—will in a short time, as a general rule, degenerate into inactivity, indifference, and extravagance. In collegiate institutions, as well as in the higher and elementary schools, and in other public and private affairs of life, competition is an important ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... seperate from the Minds of the People the Idea of unfortunate from that of the Want of some necessary soldierly Quality. At best the unfortunate General has Pity only as the Reward of his Services; and how soon does Pity degenerate into Contempt. Cicero if I mistake not some where tells us, that when a General is fortunate it matters not whether it is ascribd to his being a Favorite of the Immortal Gods, or to certain good Qualities in him which others are incapable of ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... disobeyed his orders and to the rascally contractor who supplied his army with inferior stores. Yet he habitually kept his temper under control. Steadfast in purpose, he was never overwhelmed by misfortune and never yielded to factious opposition. And strong as his will was, it did not degenerate into obstinacy; he would gladly listen to the advice of others, and in military matters was sometimes too ready to act upon it. At first he made mistakes in generalship, but his military skill grew with his ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... manner, he observed that one of his grandsons, for his better accommodation, had rolled a large snow-ball, and placed it below his head. The wrath of the ancient chief was awakened by a symptom of what he conceived to be degenerate luxury. 'Out upon thee,' said he, kicking the frozen bolster from the head which it supported, 'art thou so effeminate as to need a pillow?' The officer of engineers, whose curious Letters from the Highlands have ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... questions. In his Lives of the Novelists he shows that he thought manners and morals had improved in the previous hundred years; and none of his reviews exhibits the feeling so common among men of letters in all ages, that their own times are intellectually degenerate. It is true that he looked back to the days of Blair, Hume, Adam Smith, Robertson, and Ferguson, as the "golden days of Edinburgh,"[27] but those golden days were no farther away than his own boyhood, and he had felt the exhilaration ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... a country may degenerate! The Grecian people, at one time the first in the world, are now the furthest behind! I was told by everyone that in Greece it was neither safe to trust myself with a guide nor to wander about alone, as I had done in other countries; indeed, I was warned here ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... plain frieze of simplicity, thou mayest finely couch the wrought velvet of knavery;" and in his Father Hubburd's Tales, we find "like an old cunning bowler to fetch in a young ketling gamester:" see Middleton's Works, v. 543, 589, ed. Dyce. Keistrels are hawks of a worthless and degenerate breed. ...
— Kemps Nine Daies Wonder - Performed in a Daunce from London to Norwich • William Kemp
... tree from which he was extracted? These are the disagreeable, prying, inquisitorial, I may even say insulting, questions with which a modern man of science is ready to assail the truthful and reputable gentlemen who venture to assert their discovery, in these degenerate days, of the ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... La Vendee, about 800,000, were well-to-do, and had suffered less from degenerate feudalism than the east of France. They lived on better terms with the landlords, and had less cause to welcome the Revolution. Therefore, too, they clung to the nonjuring clergy. At heart, they were royalist, aristocratic and clerical, uniting anti-revolutionary motives that acted separately ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... that I endeavored to avoid their company, and from that time have never seen them. The vilest inclinations, the basest actions, succeeded my amiable amusements and even obliterated the very remembrance of them. I must have had, in spite of my good education, a great propensity to degenerate, else the declension could not have followed with such ease and rapidity, for never did so promising a Caesar ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... deeds abstain, From lawless riots and from pleasure's vain; If not regarding of thy own degree, Yet in behalf of thy posterity. For we are docible to imitate. Depraved pleasures though degenerate. Be careful therefore least thy son admit By ear or eye things ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 404, December 12, 1829 • Various
... child will grow out of her little heretic prejudices, and learn to love her mother's staunch friends, the champions of Holy Church, and the representatives of true knighthood in these degenerate days. Ah, child! couldst thou but see a true Spanish caballero, or again, could I but show thee my noble cousin of Guise, then wouldst thou know how to rate these gross clownish English mastiffs who now turn thy silly little ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and is one of the most powerful ingredients in the Circean potion which transforms many of the most promising young men into the beastly forms which, in sluggish idleness, feed upon the labors of others. The degenerate sentiment, I hope, will never obtain admission in my mind; and, if my mind should be loitered away in stupid laziness, it will be under the full conviction of my conscience that I am basely bartering the greatest benefits with which human beings ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... Sir,—Degenerate as human nature is said to be—and in many instances worthless and unprincipled it is—still there are bright examples to the contrary: examples that, even in the eyes of superior beings, must shed a lustre ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... in the disguise of truth: justice, unbiassed either by favour or interest, which now so fatally pervert it, was equally and impartially dispensed; nor was the judge's fancy law, for then there were neither judges nor causes to be judged. The modest maid might then walk alone. But, in this degenerate age, fraud and a legion of ills infecting the world, no virtue can be safe, no honour be secure; while wanton desires, diffused into the hearts of men, corrupt the strictest watches and the closest retreats, which, though as intricate, and unknown as the ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... to have the representations of the historical facts related in the Bible, in order that those believers who were unable to read might in this way instruct themselves in sacred history, but that great care must be taken that such a practice might not degenerate into idolatry. ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... Germany that the French nation was degenerate and corrupt and unprepared for war. This belief became conviction when, in the debates of the French Senate, Senator Humbert, early in 1914, publicly exposed what he claimed to be the weakness and unpreparedness ...
— My Four Years in Germany • James W. Gerard
... common complaint in these degenerate days that we live harder than our fathers did. Whatever we do we rush at. We bolt our food, and run for the train; we jump out of it before it has stopped, and reach the school door just as the bell rings; we "cram" for our examinations, and "spurt" for our ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... to the wall. We must be like wolves to make anything we can save for a rainy day. But any girl or man who'll consent to act the spy on others—there's a way to earn money, lots of it. A few are tempted. They must degenerate more and more, I think! And there are other things that drive some of us—the women, I mean—to desperation. But I can't tell you about them. You must find out ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... breeding had returned upon him; something instinctive and inherited had reappeared; and the gentlemanly, easy-going father, who yet, as Doris remembered, when matters were serious "always got his way," was there—strangely there—in the degenerate son. ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... occupations, and too little to the acquisition of the corporeal powers indispensable to make the former practically useful. If the present system does not undergo some change, I much apprehend we shall see a degenerate and sinking race, such as came to exist among the higher classes in France before the Revolution, and such as now deforms a large part of the noblest families in Spain;[5] but if the spirit of improvement, so happily awakened, continues—as ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... good-humoured Christmas Chapter, containing an Account of a Wedding, and some other Sports beside: which although in their Way even as good Customs as Marriage itself, are not quite so religiously kept up, in these degenerate Times ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... Aphis, plant louse, puceron^; vinefretter^, vinegrub^. wreck, mere wreck, honeycomb, magni nominis umbra [Lat.]; jade, plug, rackabones [U.S.], skate [U.S.]; tackey^, tacky [U.S.]. V. be worse, be deteriorated, become worse, become deteriorated &c Adj.; have seen better days, deteriorate, degenerate, fall off; wane &c (decrease) 36; ebb; retrograde &c 283, decline, droop; go down &c (sink) 306; go downhill, go from bad to worse, go farther and fare worse; jump out of the frying pan into the fire. run to seed, go to seed, run to waste swale^, sweal^; lapse, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... be; but a careful Admonition is of that Moment, that Paul accounts it imputable to Mothers, if the Children degenerate from Piety. But in the last Place, if you do what is in your Power, God will add his ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... in Edwin's earldom, or at least in that of his brother Morcar. And even the local leaders were not over-well obeyed. The reckless spirit of personal independence, especially among the Anglo-Danes, prevented anything like discipline, or organized movement of masses, and made every battle degenerate into ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... literal versions, are full of eloquence and pathos. The "great law" has become old, and has lost its force. Its authors have passed away, and have carried it with them into their graves. They have placed it as a pillow under their heads. Their degenerate successors have inherited their names, but not their mighty intellects; and in the flourishing region which they left, naught but a desert remains. A trace, and not a slight one, of the mournful sublimity ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... glorious as the rainbow. We have engraven it there, on the blue table of the cold vault, in letters tall enough for the reading of the nations. And why has the far South not read and believed before this? Because a steam has gone up—a fog—from New England's pulpit and her degenerate press, and hidden the beaming revelation from its vision. The Northern hierarchy and ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... necessary to the understanding of the New Testament, it is to the poet matter of regret that "loveless learning" should leave its proper work, and make such havoc in that which belongs not to it. But while he sits "talking with his mind," his mood begins to degenerate from sympathy with that which is good to indifference towards all forms, and he feels inclined to rest quietly in the enjoyment of his own religious confidence, and trouble himself in no wise about the faith of his neighbours; for doubtless all are partakers of the central light, though ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... conception of love refines this sentiment and purifies it to such an extent that it loses all its pettiness, and it is pettiness which so often causes it to degenerate, even in its most loyal forms. The social work in common of a man and woman united by true affection, full of tenderness and devotion for one another, mutually encouraging each other to perseverance and to action, will easily triumph ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... time they lose! ... There are dozens of men I know who are far less presentable than this highly coloured and robust young human being; and yet they are part of the accomplished scheme of things—like degenerate horses, you know—always pathetic to me; but they're still horses, for all that. Quid rides? Species of the same genus can cross, of course, but I had rather be a donkey than a mule. ... And if I were a donkey I'd sing and cavort with my own kind, and let horses ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... that at least certain aspects of Biblical style were of universal appeal; that they might be as effective psychologically for the modern Englishman as for the ancient Jew. And he sees in this collection of ancient Oriental literature a corrective for some of the worst tendencies of a degenerate contemporary poetry. ...
— 'Of Genius', in The Occasional Paper, and Preface to The Creation • Aaron Hill
... want to—the sooner the better;" and, with this parting adjuration, and an extra shake, the old mountain man, who had drank barrels of alcohol himself with comparative immunity from harm, turned his back upon this younger degenerate victim of modern whisky, and strode out of the room and the house, without stopping to reply to the renewed entreaties of his friends to remain and "make ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... glass works, her aniline dyes, her toys, and her production of a thousand and one articles (like lamps) of household use, she was showing a splendid record—better in some ways than England. For while England was losing ground, Germany was gaining all the time. England was becoming degenerate and lacking in enterprise. The Zeiss glassworks at Jena have now become the centre of the optical-glass industry of the world. Carl Zeiss, the founder, tried hard at one time to get the English glass-makers to ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... not through its fault, But his who fills it basely, he besought, No dispensation for commuted wrong, Nor the first vacant fortune, nor the tenth), That to God's paupers rightly appertain, But, 'gainst an erring and degenerate world, Licence to fight, in favour of that seed, From which the twice twelve cions gird thee round. Then, with sage doctrine and good will to help, Forth on his great apostleship he far'd, Like torrent bursting from a lofty ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... she was nervous and self-reproachful, yet the singing and the uproar gave her a certain pleasure. There was nothing in the talk around her and the songs that were sung that made it a shame for her to be present. Plebeian good-humour does not often degenerate into brutality at meetings of this kind until a late hour of the evening. The girls who sat with glasses of beer before them, and carried on primitive flirtations with their neighbours, were honest wage-earners ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... apathy under tribute to a foreign church, the heavenly song still murmured in a few true hearts amidst the vain and vicious lays of carnal mirth. It survived even when people and priest alike seemed utterly degenerate and godless. The voice of Walter Bute (1372) rang true for the religion of Jesus in its purity. Brave John Oldcastle, the martyr, (1417) clung to the gospel he learned at the foot of the cross. William Wroth, clergyman, saved from fiddling at a drunken ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... strain when her naively insolent drawl would jar on the nerves, like the talk of a spoiled child too intent on holding the attention of a visitor averse to precocity. And her disdain of the practical would degenerate into untidiness, and her clinging-ivyness, if it clung too much, would probably remind a man in his reactionary moments of ennui that there are subtler pursuits than being a wall, even though it's ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... like Jo, and in a very few years they will so degenerate that they will lose even their bark—but not ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... have briefly designated. One of his rooms was directly above the street-door of the house; such a dormitory, when it is so exiguous, is called in the nomenclature of New York a "hall bedroom." The sitting-room, beside it, was slightly larger, and they both commanded a row of tenements no less degenerate than Ransom's own habitation—houses built forty years before, and already sere and superannuated. These were also painted red, and the bricks were accentuated by a white line; they were garnished, on the first floor, with balconies covered with ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... assertions of the moral elevation and loveliness of Germany; of the insuperable excellences of German Kultur, the Kaiser, and Crown Prince, and so forth; abuse of the "treacherous" English who allied themselves with the "degenerate" French and the "barbaric" Russians; nonsense about "the freedom of the seas"—the emptiest phrase in history—childish attempts to sow suspicion between the Allies, and still more childish attempts to induce neutrals and simple-minded pacifists of allied nationality to save the face ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... she had never seen such a man. He had, or seemed to have, all the high-bred grace of Frank, and yet he was cast in a manlier mould; he had just enough of his nation's proud self-assertion to make a woman bow before him as before a superior, and yet tact enough to let it very seldom degenerate into that boastfulness of which the Spaniards were then so often and so justly accused. He had marvels to tell by flood and field as many and more than Amyas; and he told them with a grace and an eloquence of which modest, simple, old Amyas possessed nothing. ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... the outside, in the light of prejudice and misrepresentation, believe the calling of the actor to be one morally dangerous and intellectually contemptible; one in which it is equally easy to succeed as an artist and degenerate as an individual. She begins by telling me that she has a "fancy for the stage," and has "heard a great many things about it." Now, for any man or woman to become an actor or actress because they have a "fancy for ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... forth her hand against devoted Germany, and chastened her rulers and her people for the sins and transgressions of many generations. Like those wild sons of the desert, whom in the seventh century, heaven let loose to punish the degenerate Christians of the East, the new Islamite hordes of revolutionary France were permitted by Divine Providence to spread through Germany, as through almost every country in Europe, terror ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... farm for agricultural training. He started it because they needed bricks with which to build buildings in which to live, just as he started the farm to raise food upon which to live. He saw to it, however, that the brickyard was used as an instrument of education and was never allowed to degenerate into a mere brickyard and nothing more, just as he saw to it that the farm was used as a means of education and was not allowed to degenerate into a mere farm and nothing more. It was even more difficult to persuade the students that ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... Signor Podesta," said the lieutenant, briskly; "they are all you think them; and any one can see that at a glance. Degenerate Englishmen, we ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... you will only act, we will stand by you; it would be unnatural for us to change, and never should we meet with such a congenial ally. For these reasons choose the right course, and endeavour not to let Peloponnese under your supremacy degenerate from the prestige that it enjoyed ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... measure of seed pearl. I was of opinion, at the time—and am so still— that we might have obtained considerably more than we did of the last, but for the eagerness with which we prosecuted our search for the larger gems, which caused our search for the smaller seed pearls to degenerate into a ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... want "Americanism" to degenerate into a mere "protective coloration" for politicians who want to hide their reaction and ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... our little hour of strut and rave, With all our pasteboard passions and desires, Loves, hates, ambitions, and immortal fires, Are tossed pell-mell together in the grave. But stay! no age was e'er degenerate, Unless men held it at too cheap a rate, For in our likeness still we shape our fate. 90 Ah, there is something here Unfathomed by the cynic's sneer, Something that gives our feeble light A high immunity from Night, Something that leaps life's narrow bars To claim its birthright ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... an opportunity of braving insult for the sake of a preacher to whom they were attached on personal as well as doctrinal grounds. Miss Pratt spoke of Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, and observed that the present crisis afforded an occasion for emulating their heroism even in these degenerate times; while less highly instructed persons, whose memories were not well stored with precedents, simply expressed their determination, as Mr. Jerome had done, to 'stan' by' the preacher and his cause, believing it to be the ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... shall prevail upon wit and sense. And, to speak the truth, I do very much apprehend, by some of the last winter's productions, which had their sets of admirers, that our posterity will in a few years degenerate into a race of punsters: at least, a man may be very excusable for any apprehensions of this kind, that has seen acrostics handed about the town with great secresy and applause; to which I must also add a little epigram called the "Witches' Prayer," ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... would fight with a cannon if necessary, and he will. Aramis is degenerate. He observed that it would require consideration. Then the count said: 'The captain's ideas are certainly somewhat original, and why not leave it to M. Greville and me and such ...
— A Diplomatic Adventure • S. Weir Mitchell
... in the second dog-watch, the boys, I found, were allowed to skylark about the upper deck and aloft, playing 'follow my leader' up and down the rigging, without any interference or interruption from the officers and instructors, save when it seemed to them the larking might degenerate into horseplay. ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... Degenerate Douglass! thou unworthy Lord Whom mere despite of heart could so far please, And love of havoc (for with such disease Fame taxes him) that he could send forth word To level with the dust a noble horde, A brotherhood ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... minutes of heated altercation with Mr. McGinnis, whom he threatened with expulsion from the meeting, the mayor finally left the chair and the meeting broke up in disorder which threatened to degenerate into ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... Jupiter has dominion in the heavens: Augustus shall be esteemed a present deity the Britons and terrible Parthians being added to the empire. What! has any soldier of Crassus lived, a degraded husband with a barbarian wife? And has (O [corrupted] senate, and degenerate morals!) the Marsian and Apulian, unmindful of the sacred bucklers, of the [Roman] name and gown, and of eternal Vesta, grown old in the lands of hostile fathers-in-law, Jupiter and the city being in safety? The prudent mind of Regulus had provided against this, dissenting from ignominious terms, ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... world seems to have gone wild—Oscar Wilde! How the Oscars have thriven there since the first of them went to jail!—a degenerate dynasty!—hiding the stench of spiritual rot with the perfume of faultless rhetoric, speaking the unspeakable with the tongues of angels and of prophets! And mostly, my boy, they have thriven on the dollars of American women under the leadership of ...
— 'Charge It' - Keeping Up With Harry • Irving Bacheller
... Drinking is a vice, the disposition to which grows with its gratification; most other avocations (for drinking in moderation is only such) have no tendency of the sort. Those enjoyments which have a tendency to degenerate into vice should be kept under some check; those which have no such tendency ought to be encouraged; for, where the main and general mass of the population of a country is corrupted, it is impossible to prevent its decline. If it remains uncorrupted, ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... upper table; ale, medd, (mead,) and spirits for the other; and after all came the friendly contest at some manly game—wrestling, racing, pitching the bar, or the like. At a period somewhat later, these boisterous pastimes began to degenerate; and the Welsh squire became more polished, but not, perhaps, more happy. Still the custom of inordinate potation fondly clung to him. Immediately contiguous to every mansion of any magnitude was erected a summerhouse, usually situated in a spot, selected for the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 271, Saturday, September 1, 1827. • Various
... must not, from the faithful narrator, degenerate into the partial eulogist. Well, full well, do I know that Dr. John was not perfect, anymore than I am perfect. Human fallibility leavened him throughout: there was no hour, and scarcely a moment of the time I spent with him that in act or speech, or look, he ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... of TARENTUM marks an important era in Roman history. Large treasures were obtained from this and other Greek cities in Southern Italy. Luxury became more fashionable; morals began to degenerate. Greed for wealth obtained by plunder began to get possession of the Romans. From now on the moral tone of the people continued to degenerate in proportion ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... of inviting you urgently and cordially to Kessin, which, you may know, has fifteen hundred summer guests every year, and ships with all kinds of flags, and even a hotel among the dunes. But if I show so little hospitality it is not because I am inhospitable. I am not so degenerate as that. It is simply because our residence, with all its handsome and unusual features, is in reality not a suitable house at all; it is only a lodging for two people, and hardly that, for we haven't even a dining room, which, as you can well imagine, ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... of the depths of doubt, despair, and incredulity in which the boy was groveling; he who so clung to life—the life which the angel had made so fair—who so loved it, that he would have stooped to baseness merely to live; he, the pleasure-loving scapegrace, the degenerate d'Esgrignon, had even taken out his pistols, had gone so far as to think of suicide. He who would never have brooked the appearance of an insult was abusing himself in language which no man is likely to hear ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... the largest gains in country life and will not only raise the standards of living, but will be a potent incentive for better agricultural methods. There can be no progress without a certain amount of dissatisfaction. Contentedness has its virtues, but it may degenerate into inertia and the death of all desire for ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... in life. It leads to hasty, ill-assorted matches, to an unwillingness to yield to each other's peculiarities, to a weakening of the family ties, to a lax morality. Carry it a trifle farther than it now is in some of the Western States, and marriage will lose all its sacredness, and degenerate into a physical union, not nobler than the crossing ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... tendency to similar morbid changes in other parts, and no infiltration elsewhere. There is little or no edema with ainhum. In ainhum there is, first, simple hypertrophy, then active hyperplasia The papillae degenerate when deprived of blood supply, and become horny. Meanwhile the pressure thus exerted on the nervi vasorum sets up vascular changes which bring about epithelial changes in more distant areas, the process advancing anteriorly, that is, in the direction ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... and causes him to degenerate physically and morally. [1] Strong drink is unquestionably an evil, and evil cannot be used temperately: its slightest use is abuse; hence the only temperance is total abstinence. Drunkenness is sensuality let loose, in whatever form it is ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... his delay, would further weaken him and enslave him to his melancholy still more. Thus the speculative habit would be one indirect cause of the morbid state which hindered action; and it would also reappear in a degenerate form as one of the symptoms of this ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... more than once, that Gordon's military career reminds one of the great soldier Cromwell, who did so much to rescue England from the degenerate condition into which it had fallen under the miserable rule of the Stuarts. In the same way the six years spent by Gordon at Gravesend, very forcibly remind us of the great religious philanthropist, Lord Shaftesbury, who did perhaps more than any other man of this nineteenth century, or any ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... of "head hunting," accumulating the ghastly visages of their victims in their huts.39 The Caribs have a sort of sensual paradise for the "brave and virtuous," where, it is promised, they shall enjoy the sublimated experience of all their earthly satisfactions; but the "degenerate and cowardly" are threatened with eternal banishment beyond the mountains, where they shall be tasked and driven as slaves by their enemies.40 The Hispaniolians locate their elysium in a pleasant valley ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... have done anything so like a washerwoman as to wring my hands; though I might, like some heroines, have fallen to work in a regular blacksmith-way, by examining the lock of the door, and perhaps have succeeded in picking it; but, alas! I live in degenerate days. Oh that I had been born the persecuted daughter of some ancient baron bold instead of the spoiled child of a good natured modern earl! Heavens! to think that I must tamely, abjectly submit to be married in ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... vitality, renders it fruitful on behalf of its species. I have seen the principle strikingly exemplified in the common tobacco plant, when reared in a northern country, in the open air. Year after year it continued to degenerate, and to exhibit a smaller leaf and shorter stem, until the successors of what in the first year of trial had been rigorous plants, of some three to four feet in height, had in the sixth or eighth become mere weeds, of scarce as many inches. But while the as yet undegenerate plant had merely ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... and create energy in others: to descend to their position is less noble, but practicable with ease. If I may be allowed the metaphor, one partakes of the nature of redemptive power; the other of that self-abased and degenerate will, which 'flung from his splendors' the ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... sponge and pumice-stone for erasures; the horns for black and red ink lay with the scissors and rulers on the little upper shelf of his desk. There were the pigments also there, which he had learnt to grind and prepare, the crushed lapis lazuli first calcined by heat according to the modern degenerate practice, with the cheap German blue beside it, and the indigo beyond; the prasinum; the vermilion and red lead ready mixed, and the rubrica beside it; the yellow orpiment, and, most important of all, ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... an intellect, a soul so calm," says Carlyle, "so lofty, massive, and immovable, has not mingled in philosophic discussion since the time of Luther ... the cold, colossal, adamantine spirit, standing erect and clear, like a Cato Major among degenerate men; fit to have been the teacher of the Stoa, and to have discoursed of Beauty and Virtue in the groves of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... for the defence of religious interests, more especially in the domain of education and relief, the Liberals for the supremacy of a nominally neutral State in all public matters. It is easy to realize how this purely political quarrel could degenerate into a conflict of ideals, some ultramontanes distrusting the motives of "atheists" and ignoring the public spirit of men who did not share their creed, while some agnostics, steeped in the narrow doctrines of Voltaire and Diderot, made the Church the ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... despairs, that even this argument will have any force with our abominable clergy, because, to use his own words, "They are an insensible and degenerate race, who are thinking of nothing but their present advantages; and so that they may now support a luxurious and brutal course of irregular and voluptuous practices, they are easily hired to betray their religion, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... beginning's of these various degenerate and illiterate attempts at book-work we have only to watch the last expiring gleams of classic art beneath the ruthless footsteps of the barbarian invaders ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... religious matters. There is evidence, in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, that his spiritual presentation of Christianity had already been made an excuse for disorderly licence. The usual symptoms of degenerate Mysticism had appeared at Corinth. There were men there who called themselves "spiritual persons[105]" or prophets, and showed an arrogant independence; there were others who wished to start sects of their own; others who carried antinomianism into the ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... threats aloud! the Greeks with longing eyes Behold at distance, but forbear the prize. Then fierce Tydides stoops; and from the fields Heaved with vast force, a rocky fragment wields. Not two strong men the enormous weight could raise, Such men as live in these degenerate days:(147) He swung it round; and, gathering strength to throw, Discharged the ponderous ruin at the foe. Where to the hip the inserted thigh unites, Full on the bone the pointed marble lights; Through both the tendons broke the rugged stone, ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... there is no need to fear for the position of a Yugoslav Rieka based solely—omitting Hungary and the Ukraine altogether—on her Yugoslav hinterland. Rieka without Yugoslavia would be ruined and would degenerate into a fishing village, with a great past and a miserable future. This could very well be seen during the spring of 1919 when the communications were interrupted between Rieka and Yugoslavia. At ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... tolerate, things that fill them, therefore, with envy and perplexity—such things as pleasure, beauty, delicacy, leisure. In the cant of modern talk you will find them call everything that is not crude and forcible in life "degenerate." But back to the very earliest writings, in the most bloodthirsty outpourings of the Hebrew prophets, for example, you will find that at the base of the warrior spirit is hate for more complicated, for more refined, for more beautiful ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... advanced season, and on the bathers who had left too soon. They often spoke with visible enthusiasm, and tender and compassionate respect, of a young stranger, a lady, who had remained at the baths in a weak and languid state of health, which it was feared would degenerate into slow consumption. She had lived alone with her maid for the last three months, in one of the most retired apartments of the house, taking her meals in her own rooms; and was never seen except at her window that looked towards the garden, or on the stairs when she returned from ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... source is far distant among the mountains of Tibet. His return was along the skirts of the northern hills; nor could this rapid campaign of one year justify the strange foresight of his emirs, that their children in a warm climate would degenerate into a ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... there being nothing eminent, in that case, to compensate for the want of them, or preserve the person from our severest hatred, as well as contempt. A high ambition, an elevated courage, is apt, says Cicero, in less perfect characters, to degenerate into a turbulent ferocity. The more social and softer virtues are there chiefly to be regarded. These are always good and amiable [Cic. de ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... slippers, on letter cases, on braces, on photograph frames, on luggage straps, on fine pocket handkerchiefs. If she is expert and possesses the true sentiment she will embroider things for him with her hair. In these degenerate days she does not make her own outfit. Formerly, when a German girl left school she began to make stores of body and house linen for future years. But in modern cities the Braut gets everything at one of the big "white" shops, from her own laces and muslins to the saucepan holders for the ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... by a hero, a man whose character is unstained by any low or degenerate vices, or even feelings," said Julia, with a little more than her ordinary enthusiasm; "whose courage is as natural as it is daring; who is above fear, except of doing wrong; whose person is an index of his mind, and whose mind is filled with ...
— Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart • James Fenimore Cooper
... during his stay at Miss Vane's he had taken much council with himself as to whether he ought not to get a new suit with his first money instead of sending it home. Now he had solved the question, after sending the money home, by the discovery of a place on a degenerate street, in a neighbourhood of Chinese laundries, with the polite name of Misfit Parlours, where they professed to sell the failures of the leading tailors of Boston, New York, and Chicago. After long study of the window of the Parlours, ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... of all trouble, when these two interests came into ill-tempered controversy, was the conduct of the coureurs de bois. These roving traders taught the savages all the vices of French civilization in its most degenerate days. They debauched the Indian with brandy, swindled him out of his furs, and entered into illicit relations with the women of the tribes. They managed in general to convince the aborigines that ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... children; and, with their virile outdoor life, the instinct of procreation was strong within them. True, the assignable lands in Japan continued to grow smaller, but what reason was there for stifling the reproductive instincts of a vigorous people in a great unused world half populated by a degenerate humanity? ...
— In the Clutch of the War-God • Milo Hastings
... bedeck and bedrape us in all sorts of meretricious togas, till a pair of fine eyes and a dashing manner pass for beauty; but when life tries the metal—when nature applies her inevitable test—the degenerate or neurotic type goes to ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... verge, men too often overshoot the mark, and frustrate the object they have most at heart, by eagerness to accomplish it. For though to a reasonable extent and in certain circumstances, all enjoyments are harmless, they degenerate into crimes, when excessively indulged, and particularly when the imagination is overstrained to improve their zest, or to refine or exalt them beyond the limits which Nature and sobriety prescribe. But this can no more be alledged as a reason for renouncing the moderate use of the enjoyment, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... do, that sort. ... As though the trouble they took could ever be worth the time they lose! ... There are dozens of men I know who are far less presentable than this highly coloured and robust young human being; and yet they are part of the accomplished scheme of things—like degenerate horses, you know—always pathetic to me; but they're still horses, for all that. Quid rides? Species of the same genus can cross, of course, but I had rather be a donkey than a mule. ... And if I were a ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... cattle seem to be entirely immune. It runs a variable course and usually produces the death of the animal affected with it. It is characterized by the formation of neoplasms, or nodules, of connective tissue, which degenerate into ulcers, from which exude a peculiar discharge. It is accompanied with a variable degree of fever, according to the rapidity of its course. It is subject to various complications of the lymphatic glands, of the lungs, of the testicles, of the internal organs, and ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... were attached on personal as well as doctrinal grounds. Miss Pratt spoke of Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, and observed that the present crisis afforded an occasion for emulating their heroism even in these degenerate times; while less highly instructed persons, whose memories were not well stored with precedents, simply expressed their determination, as Mr. Jerome had done, to 'stan' by' the preacher and his cause, believing it to be ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... by drainage, the floods were much less sudden, because the morasses and swampy grounds gave out water gradually, and thus the river took longer to rise, and continued fuller for a greater length of time than in these degenerate days, to the increased ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... halting steps the little old man came shambling along. He looked neither to the left nor to the right. His eyes were fixed and yet unseeing, his features were pale and bony. There was no gleam of life, not even in the stone-cold eyes. Like some machine-made man of a new and physically degenerate age, he took his exercise under the eye of his doctor, a strange and ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... skins and furs for rum and such strong liquors. They kindly received me as well as the English, who were few before the people concerned with me came among them. I must needs commend their respect to authority, and kind behaviour to the English. They do not degenerate from the old friendship between both kingdoms. As they are people proper and strong of body, so they have fine children, and almost every house full: rare to find one of them without three or four boys and as many girls; some six, seven, and eight ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Vol. II - The Planting Of The First Colonies: 1562—1733 • Various
... ravings of a maniac. But eccentricity has often provided the best cloak for dark designs, and the outbreak of war proved that there was a method in the madness of the man whom the authorities persisted in regarding merely as an irresponsible degenerate of a non-political kind. To quote the press report of ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... the young lord, no admonition would do him good now; he was thoroughly bewitched by the girl, and though he made a hundred promises to give her up, would never hold one of them. Alas! alas! that the son of good Duke Philip should be so degenerate. ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... circumstances that may cast a stain upon high integrity and spotless innocence, so long as it is possible the proofs I speak of may fail. In the latter case, so far at least as the world is concerned, justice would degenerate into scandal, whilst great evil and little good must be the consequence. I think I am bound in honor not to place old age, venerable and virtuous, on the one hand, and unsuspecting innocence on the other, in a contingency that may cause them irreparable injury. I will now say, that if your ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... that went to St. Helena dwelt in a worn-out body, a fat, degenerate perversion of the Napoleon that conquered ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... improvement of this domain, and the plans of the founder might be carried out by his successors; but, as it is, the present worthy possessor once laid beneath the turf, the object of all his pains-taking and labour will, in all probability, be cut up into small farms, or be allowed once more to degenerate into forest, as may appear ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... name for myself in the House; she'll be able to read all sorts of nice and horrid things about me in the papers at breakfast-time. I can be brilliantly amusing at times, and I understand the value of silence; there is no fear that I shall ever degenerate into that fearsome thing—a cheerful talkative husband. For a girl with money and social ambitions I should think I was rather a ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... are the three above named; the bad, three others dependent upon these, and each so like that to which it is related, that it is easy to pass imperceptibly from the one to the other. For a Monarchy readily becomes a Tyranny, an Aristocracy an Oligarchy, while a Democracy tends to degenerate into Anarchy. So that if the founder of a State should establish any one of these three forms of Government, he establishes it for a short time only, since no precaution he may take can prevent it from sliding into its contrary, ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... psychology on reactions is that it keeps us "close to the ground", and prevents our discussions from sailing off into the clouds of picturesque but fanciful interpretation. Psychology is very apt to degenerate into a game of blowing bubbles, unless we pin ourselves down to hard-headed ways of thinking. The notion of a reaction is of great value here, just because it is so hard-headed and concrete. Whenever we have any human action before us for explanation, we have to ask what the stimulus ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... speaker and a writer he had no superior among his contemporaries. His varied talents are further shown by his numerous literary labours, of which some small notices remain. His views were large and enlightened, his schemes were vast and boundless. His genius deserved a better sphere than the degenerate republic in which he lived. But the power which he acquired did not die with him. A youth of tender age succeeded to the name and the inheritance of Caesar, and by his great talents and a long career of wonderful success consolidated that ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... wont, it was believed, to visit the earth and mingle with men. But even in Homer's time this familiar intercourse was a thing of the past—a tradition of a golden age that had passed away. Their forms were no longer seen, their voices no longer heard. In these later and more degenerate times the recognized modes of divine communication with men were by oracles, and by casual and unusual sights and sounds, as thunder and lightning, a sudden tempest, an eclipse, a flight of birds,—particularly of birds ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... latter was just saying to his neighbor, Sperber's nephew, "in whom one notices by his walk or his bearing or his speech, even to the slightest degree, that he has taken too much of a good thing—is a degenerate! In man there is a whole world at war. The microcosm is in revolution! Storms are raging in the brain—the world is on fire! He stands unmoved, a god in revolt! What is your opinion? That is the highest self-conquest, the primeval type of manhood, the struggle and victory ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... Thrums, pipe and drum were calling the inhabitants to arms. Scouts rushed in with the news that the farmers were advancing rapidly upon the town, and soon the streets were clattering with feet. At that time Thrums had its piper and drummer (the bellman of a later and more degenerate age); and on this occasion they marched together through the narrow wynds, firing the blood of haggard men and summoning them to the square. According to my informant's father, the gathering of these angry and startled weavers, when he thrust his blue bonnet on his ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... hand felt Out along the wall for support. Was this a dream, some ghastly, soul-terrifying nightmare! Danglar! Those working lips! That callous viciousness, that leer in the degenerate face. It seemed to bring a weakness to her limbs, and seek to rob her of the strength to stand. She could not even hope against hope; she knew that Danglar was in deadly earnest. Danglar would not ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... England's sake, For our dear Sovereign's sake,— We cry all shame on traitors, high and low, Whose word let no man take, Whose love let no man seek throughout the land,— Traitors who strive, with most degenerate hand, To bring ...
— The Song of the Flag - A National Ode • Eric Mackay
... sighed at us as degenerate Winslows, and Emily reserved to herself the right of believing that the daughter was ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... where are they? and where art thou, My Country? On thy voiceless shore The heroic lay is tuneless now— The heroic bosom beats no more![cz] And must thy Lyre, so long divine, Degenerate into hands ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... stings me that this chivalrous king of ours, this degenerate grandson of Henry the Great, should think of selling for a few paltry livres such an heritage as this. Shame to you ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... together. The utriculus is a warped, irregular bag, whose sections have become unrecognizable. The utriculus and sacculus are in wide-open communication with each other and have almost become one. The utriculus opens broadly into the scala tympani, and the nervous elements of the cochlea are degenerate. ...
— The Dancing Mouse - A Study in Animal Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... governor-general of Canada. As a boy in his teens he was sent into the counting-house, an apprentice to commerce, and so he escaped the 'education of a gentleman' in the brutal public schools and the degenerate universities of the time. Business in those days had a sort of sanctity and was governed by punctilious—almost religious—routine. In the interests of the business he travelled, while young and impressionable, ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... spent much time and energy on philosophic study. He claims Philosophy as his mistress in The Fisher, and in a case where he is in fact judge as well as party, has no difficulty in getting his claim established. He is for ever reminding us that he loves philosophy and only satirizes the degenerate philosophers of his day. But it will occur to us after reading him through that he has dissembled his love, then, very well. There is not a passage from beginning to end of his works that indicates any real comprehension of any philosophic system. The external characteristics ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... licentiousness and depravity of Imperial Rome. Looking back to Republican Rome, and considering the state of public morals but fifty years before the emperors, we can with difficulty believe that the descendants of a people so severe in their habits could thus rapidly degenerate, and that a populace, once so hardy and masculine, should assume the manners which we might expect in the debauchees of Daphne (the infamous suburb of Antioch) or of Canopus, into which settled the very lees and dregs of the vicious Alexandria. Such extreme changes would falsify all that we know ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... mesalliances will tell. An American, too—a governess, a poor relation of some common rich people from the States. The best county families, with daughters to marry, shook their heads. It was very sad—very sad, to see a good old name and a good old family degenerate in this way. But there was always a taint of madness in the Catheron blood—that accounted for a good deal. Poor Sir Victor—and ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... enriching of memory, enabling of judgment, and enlarging of conceit, which commonly we call learning, under what name soever it come forth, or to what immediate end soever it be directed, the final end is, to lead and draw us to as high a perfection, as our degenerate souls made worse by their clayey lodgings, can be capable of. This, according to the inclination of the man, bred many formed impressions; for some that thought this felicity principally to be gotten by knowledge, and no knowledge to ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... the graves of Shelley, Keats and Salvator Rosa! The Palace of the Cassars looked even more mournful in the pale, slant sunshine, and the yellow Tiber, as he flowed through the "marble wilderness," seemed sullenly counting up the long centuries during which degenerate slaves have trodden his banks. A leaden-colored haze clothed the seven hills, and heavy silence reigned among the ruins, for all work was prohibited, and the people were gathered in their churches. Rome never appeared so desolate ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... certain set of men until the moment they lost their power, and who never agreed with them in a single instance afterwards? Would not such a coincidence of interest and opinion be rather fortunate? Would it not be an extraordinary cast upon the dice, that a man's connexions should degenerate into faction, precisely at the critical moment when they lose their power, or he accepts a place? When people desert their connexions, the desertion is a manifest FACT, upon which a direct simple issue lies, triable by plain men. Whether a MEASURE of government be right or wrong, IS ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... pay the hotel bill, of a handful of diamonds cast on the fire during an evening of drunkenness in order to see whether they would burn like coal. Little by little her great limbs and her coarse, plebeian way of laughing had gained complete mastery over this elegant, degenerate son of an ancient race. At that time he was risking his all, for he had been so utterly overpowered by his taste for ordure and stupidity as to have even lost the vigor of his skepticism. A week before Nana had made him promise her a chateau on the Norman coast between Havre and Trouville, ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... backwards against the balustrade, and holding him there transfixed, while, with eyes seething with wrath beneath the blanched, and big, umbrageous brows, and showing like a sudden opening of the infernal pit, he cried: "Demon, degenerate dog, where hast thou been walking to and fro in the earth? whom helping to devour? Ah, son of Satan, ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... Europe lose in a few years their distinctive qualities, and degenerate at length into the cur with erect ears, kuyu, vulgarly called the pariah dog. An instance did not occur of any one going mad during the period of my residence. Many of them are affected with a ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... had intended for the others, struck and stirred popular imagination. Some century earlier the last of the minstrels might have fashioned the last of the ballads out of that Homeric fight and chase; but the spirit was dead, or had been reincarnated already in Mr. Sheriff Scott, and the degenerate moorsmen must be content to tell the tale in prose, and to make of the "Four Black Brothers" a unit after the fashion of the "Twelve Apostles" or ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the imperial masters. Religion lost its prestige and the family bond loosened, until from being one of the purest of social institutions in the early days of the republic, the Roman family became one of the most degenerate. This boded ill for the future of the ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... Pope was ready to spend enormous sums of money on this petty war; the Duke's purse was shorter, and the mercenary troops he was obliged to use, proved worthless in the field. Spaniards, for the most part, pitted against Spaniards, they suffered the campaigns to degenerate into a guerilla warfare of pillage and reprisals. In 1517 the duchy was formally ceded to Lorenzo. But this Medici did not live long to enjoy it, and his only child Catherine, the future Queen of France, never exercised the rights which had devolved upon her by inheritance. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... most specious arguments, that the republic summoned them to break the bonds of hereditary servitude; and, by the choice of an active and vigilant prince, to reward the same virtues which had raised the ancestors of the degenerate Constans from a private condition to the throne of the world. As soon as the conspiracy was ripe for execution, Marcellinus, under the pretence of celebrating his son's birthday, gave a splendid entertainment to the illustrious ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... and princesses made the grande tournee through the rooms, and then mingled with the guests; all formal etiquette was now laid aside, and a gay and unembarrassed conversation might be carried on till the beginning of the concert. This seemed to degenerate, on the part of the French officers, to an indiscreet, frenzied levity. They laughed and talked boisterously—they walked arm in arm before the ladies, and remarked upon them so boldly, that crimson blushes, or frightened pallor, was the result. Even the ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... the world at New York. The distinguished part taken by Irishmen or sons of Irishmen in all departments of the Olympic games is so recent and so well known as to call for no comment. Ireland is far indeed from being degenerate ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... the curious observation that the beavers of the present day seem to be a degenerate race, as they neither fell huge trees not construct great dams, while their progenitors cut down trees two feet in diameter and dammed up rivers a hundred feet in width. The change in the habits of the beaver is probably ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... were, of course, aware that in the insect world the ocelli served the same purpose that the degenerate pituitary body once served in the occiput ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... we to believe and do? Shall we degenerate into a lazy scepticism, which believes that everything is a little true, and everything a little false—in plain words, believes nothing at all? Or shall we degenerate into faithless fears, and unmanly wailings that the flood of infidelity ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... of Washington as the greatest man on earth. The war, he said, was the King's war, ministers were his tools, the press was bought. He denounced later the King's reception of the traitor Arnold. When the King's degenerate son, who became George IV, after some special misconduct, wrote to propose his annual visit to Holkham, Coke replied, "Holkham is open to strangers on Tuesdays." It was an independent and irate England which spoke in Coke. Those who paid taxes, he said, should control those who governed. ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... comedy—may degenerate, and become subservient to licentiousness and profligacy; yet the shafts of ridicule judiciously aimed, like a well-directed artillery, do much execution. With what becoming severity does the bold Caricature lay ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... and unambitious. Meaner men, their contemporaries or successors, raved of high art with incoherent passion; arrogated to themselves an equality with the masters of elder time, and declaimed against the degenerate tastes of a public which acknowledged not the return of the Heraclidae. But the two great—the two only painters of their age—happy in a reputation founded as deeply in the heart as in the judgment of mankind, demanded no higher function than that of ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... plantations of late, and the opinion of many grave divines concerning the gospel's fleeting westward. Sometimes I have had such thoughts, Why may not that be the place of the New Jerusalem? But you have handsomely and fully cleared me from such odd conceits. But what, I pray? Shall our English there degenerate, and join themselves with Gog and Magog? We have heard lately divers ways, that our people there have no hope of the conversion of the natives. And, the very week after I received your last letter, I saw a ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... that this activity, generally first noticed in the use of the hands, might be trained into right and ennobling habits, rather than be allowed to degenerate into wrong and often degrading ones, Froebel arranged his charming set of finger-games for the mother to teach her babe while he is yet in her arms; thus establishing the right activity before the wrong one can assert itself. In such little songs ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... still roam over the country between the western Argentine states and the Andes. There they live free and independent, though barbarous. When they venture into the neighbourhood of large towns, they soon degenerate into thieves and drunkards. Here they come to carry on a trade in furs and panther skins, or to collect meat at the saladeros, which they dry and carry off with them. They make money by selling Indian ornaments, and foraging for the settlers' cattle; or by thieving, which they ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... globe, they gradually fall into old age; then the more developed Egos—those incarnated in these races during their maturity—come down into the advanced nations, living on the continents animated by the "life-wave," whilst the less evolved go to form the so-called degenerate races vegetating in obscure parts of the world. Look now at the adolescence of Russia, the youth of America, the old age of France, and the decrepitude of Turkey. Look backwards at the glorious Egypt of bygone ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... power, the other typifies the sordid ignorance and fearful superstition of the credulous masses which maintains the power of the first. High in the streets of Moscow, where one may see the pallid, long-haired, degenerate-looking venders of holy lies and pious impositions shuffle along like spectres from a remoter age, there hangs a woven streamer of scarlet hue with huge white lettering, which defiantly proclaims that religion is the ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... confess what we have never confessed to anyone. Our self-love is outraged, but outraged with that strange accompaniment of thrilling pleasure that means an expiation paid, a burden lightened. Use the word "degenerate" if you will. But in this sense we are all "degenerates" for thus and not otherwise is woven the stuff whereof ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... had returned upon him; something instinctive and inherited had reappeared; and the gentlemanly, easy-going father, who yet, as Doris remembered, when matters were serious "always got his way," was there—strangely there—in the degenerate son. ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... of St. Clair-sur-Epte, on the borders of Neustria, as the place of meeting for the purpose of receiving his homage and oath of fealty. It was a strange meeting which there took place between the degenerate and almost imbecile descendant of the great Charles, with his array of courtly followers and his splendor and luxury, and the gigantic warrior of the North, the founder of a line of kings, in all the vigor of the uncivilized native of a cold climate, and the unbending ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... engaged in a career much too lively and interesting to himself to admit of his allowing himself to be bored by an unwanted and entirely superfluous child. The elder son, who was Lord Tenham, had reached a premature and degenerate maturity by the time the younger one made his belated appearance, and regarded him with unconcealed dislike. The worst thing which could have befallen the younger boy would have been intimate association with ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... you have degraded yourself, you shall be scourged. For a subsistence, therefore, betake yourself to cultivation; or other drudgeries for which alone you are now fit, and do not bring a disgrace on the character of the sacred order.” In these degenerate days perhaps there is not one Brahman out of fifty who either does not do what he ought to shun, or who does not omit to do what he ought to perform; and all will admit that degraded Brahmans are unworthy of holding such possessions. If the Brahmans, however, were to be ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... and interchange our ideas of books and by personal discussions is indeed the mightiest factor of modern improvement. But the mere meeting to talk about things unless it is combined with the disposition and the apparatus for studying things is but barter without production, and may degenerate to a barren exchange of words, as unprofitable as that described in the Yankee proverb, "swapping jackknives in a garret." This aspect of the truth Mr. Cooper doubtless came to appreciate; but at the outset, habituated as he was ...
— Peter Cooper - The Riverside Biographical Series, Number 4 • Rossiter W. Raymond
... exhibit the superstitions known as "animism." It has been argued that these characteristics, taken together, indicate a primitive condition of humanity. On the other hand, many writers regard them as degenerate offshoots of negro-like races of larger stature and ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... of women, When Breffni's good sword would have sought That man, thro' a million of foe-men, Who dared but to wrong thee in thought! While now—oh degenerate daughter Of Erin, how fallen is thy fame! And thro' ages of bondage and slaughter, Our country shall ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... have international arbitration in the near future, we must have it in spite of this spirit of war rather than by destroying the spirit. In fact, the only practical way to destroy it is to let it, like vestigial organs of which biologists tell us, degenerate from disuse. This inherited emotional tendency remains as a threat with which we, as exponents of arbitration, must reckon before we are justified in saying that the world ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... all such legislation except in war is to an over degree to strike at the roots of individual initiative. We have secured its execution during the war as to the willing co-operation of 95 per cent of the trades of the country, but under peace conditions it would degenerate ...
— Socialism and American ideals • William Starr Myers
... reference is plainly to degenerate civilized men frequenting the forests, such as bandits or outlaws, not to what we ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... of St. Francis had become, in spite of himself, an ecclesiastical institution: it must soon degenerate into a clerical institution. All unawares, the Franciscan movement had been unfaithful to its origin. The prophet had abdicated in favor of the priest, not indeed without possibility of return, for when a man has once reigned, I would say, ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... Like tepid airs of Spring, their genial influence! Such is thy boast, Refinement. But deep dyes Oft mar the splendour of thy noontide skies: 230 Then Fancy, sick of follies that deform The face of day, and in the sunshine swarm; Sick of the fluttering fopperies that engage The vain pursuits of a degenerate age; Sick of smooth Sophistry's insidious cant, Or cold Impiety's defying rant; Sick of the muling sentiment that sighs O'er its dead bird, while Want unpitied cries; Sick of the pictures that pale Lust inflame, And flush the cheek of Love with ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... under the banner of the cross, they went forth to conquer infidels, to establish the true faith, to recover the blessed land, hallowed by the Redeemer's footsteps, from the power of the cruel followers of the false prophet of Mecca. How degenerate are we Christians of the present generation! Who among us dreams of expelling the Turks from Syria? On the contrary, our statesmen devote their energies to keep them there. I really believe that were Peter the Hermit ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... has the wrath of O'Iwa San brought this Cho[u]bei. Does not Iemon, the one-time neighbour Kazuma, recognize Cho[u]bei? And yet all comes through Iemon. Child, wife, means of life, all these have failed Cho[u]bei. In the jail robbed of everything, degenerate in mind and body, Cho[u]bei has found refuge at nights in the booths of street vendors; on cold wet nights, even in the mouths of the filthy drains. Fortunate is he when fine weather sends him to rest on ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... the animus of the assembly, and of its orators. It was delivered by M. Saint Just:—"To the men strong, courageous, and valiant in the cause of humanity. To those whose names serve as a guide, a support, and an example to the degenerate beings—to all those whom history calls heroes!... To Brutus, to Catiline, to Jesus Christ, to Julian the Apostate, to Attila!... To all the thinkers of the middle age.... To unfortunate thinkers!... To Jean Jacques Rousseau, and his pupil, Maximilian ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... admire most, the man or his muscle. One doesn't often see such vigor, size and comeliness in these degenerate days," said Randal, mentally booking the fine figure ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... the action of the rays so that the varying densities of bodily organs will enable them to be photographed, will bring all such morbid growths as tumors and cancers into the photographic field, to say nothing of vital organs which may be abnormally developed or degenerate. How much this means to medical and surgical practice it requires little imagination to conceive. Diagnosis, long a painfully uncertain science, has received an unexpected and wonderful assistant; and how greatly the world will benefit thereby, how much ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... September, 1809, Governor Harrison called all the tribes that claimed certain lands between the White and Wabash rivers to a council. Only a few of the weak and degenerate tribes answered the summons. Nevertheless, he went through the ceremony of making a treaty by which the United States government claimed three ...
— Four American Indians - King Philip, Pontiac, Tecumseh, Osceola • Edson L. Whitney
... she came back, accompanied by the two old people. There was an expression of anxious watchfulness and aimless attention in both faces, such as deaf people often have, and which is apt to degenerate into a look of inanity and distrust. It is a very true saying that when a husband and wife have lived many years together, and have shared each other's thoughts and interests, they at last grow to be like one another in ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... are full of eloquence and pathos. The "great law" has become old, and has lost its force. Its authors have passed away, and have carried it with them into their graves. They have placed it as a pillow under their heads. Their degenerate successors have inherited their names, but not their mighty intellects; and in the flourishing region which they left, naught but a desert remains. A trace, and not a slight one, of the mournful ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... love and pride, and the father was a gentleman, like Falstaff, a pure gentleman. The daughter-in-law also peered out to look at Il Giovann', who was evidently a figure of repute, in his sordid, degenerate American respectability. Meanwhile, this figure of repute blew himself red in the face, producing staccato strains on his cornet. And the crowd stood desolate and forsaken in the cold, ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... are the persons we trust? we answer, those persons whose feelings and actions are congruous with themselves and with the feelings and actions of others. And, on the contrary, it is in the worthless, in the degenerate creature, that we note moods which are destructive to one another's object, ideas which are in flagrant contradiction; and it is in the idiot, the maniac, the criminal, that we see thoughts disconnected ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... those sunken, red-rimmed eyes, For his who in the flush of manhood rode Among the cliffs, and followed up the crags The flying temptress; and there fell on him A horror of her beauty, a disgust For his degenerate and corrupted life, With irresistible, intense desire, To feel the breath of heaven on his face. Then as Fate willed, who rules above the gods, He saw, within the glass, behind him glide The form of Venus. Certain of her power, She had laid by, in fond security, ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... generous victor, a great-grandson of the brother of Saladin, sent a robe of honor to his royal captive, and his deliverance, with that of his soldiers, was obtained by the restitution of Damietta [98] and the payment of four hundred thousand pieces of gold. In a soft and luxurious climate, the degenerate children of the companions of Noureddin and Saladin were incapable of resisting the flower of European chivalry: they triumphed by the arms of their slaves or Mamalukes, the hardy natives of Tartary, who at a tender age ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... ages and countries. Man every where does best, nationally and individually, other things being equal, on a well-chosen diet of vegetables, fruits, and water. In proportion as individuals or families, or tribes or nations, depart from this—other things being equal—in the same proportion do they degenerate physically, ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... and blind as to think that good can come of it? Nothing but evil upon evil can accrue from such a system,—and those who have prophetic eyes to see through the veil of events can perceive, even now, the not far distant end—namely, the ruin of the country that has permitted itself to degenerate into a mere nation of shopkeepers, —and something worse ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... that saw everything except the small modicum of good which is in all human things, and to this they were persistently blind. Taking into consideration the small, set mouth, it was eminently a pugnacious face—a face that might easily degenerate to the coarseness of passion in the trough of a losing fight. But, fortunately, Luke's lines were cast upon the great waters, and he who fights the sea must learn to conquer, not by passionate effort, but by consistent, cool resolve. ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... is said, by Ruffhead, to have told Warburton, that "Young had much of a sublime genius, though without common sense; so that his genius, having no guide, was perpetually liable to degenerate into bombast. This made him pass a foolish youth, the sport of peers and poets: but his having a very good heart enabled him to support the clerical character when he assumed it, first with decency, and ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... seen them. The vilest inclinations, the basest actions, succeeded my amiable amusements and even obliterated the very remembrance of them. I must have had, in spite of my good education, a great propensity to degenerate, else the declension could not have followed with such ease and rapidity, for never did so promising a Caesar so quickly become ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... take a long breath, and rest a minute. O, Abou Inau Faris! we envy the blessed people that were gathered under thy wing; we weep for our degenerate age, wherein thy like is nowhere to be found. No wonder that Ibn Batuta declares that he lays aside forever his pilgrim's staff—that, after traversing the Orient, he sits down under the full moon of the Occident, preferring it to all other regions, 'as one prefers gold-dust to the sands ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... where ornamentations envelop and conceal line as in late Renaissance, the Italian Rococo, the Portuguese Barrocco (baroque), the curving and contorted degenerate forms of Louis XIV and XV and the Victorian—all examples of the same thing, i.e.: perfect line achieved, acclaimed, flattered, losing its head and going to the bad in extravagant exuberance ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... well; there is cogency in a good supper; a good supper in these degenerate days bespeaks a good man; but much more is wanted to make up an Athenian. Athenians, indeed! where is your theatre? who among you has written a comedy? where is your Attic salt? which of you can tell who was Jupiter's great- grandfather? ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... so gratifying to the fusionists, George Opdyke defeated Fernando Wood by a small plurality for mayor of New York. Wood had long been known as a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He talked reform and grew degenerate; he proclaimed patriotic views and held disloyal sentiments; he listened respectfully to public opinion, and defied it openly in his acts. He did not become a boss. It was ten years later before William M. Tweed centralised Tammany's ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... final days of his life and reign the hapless Austrian prince exhibited a courage and nobility of character which showed that the blood of Maria Theresa was not degenerate in his veins. He faced death with more than reckless daring; he shared in all the privations of his faithful adherents, and he was preparing to cut his way out through the host of besiegers, at the head of his men, when treachery betrayed ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... rehearsal of "Lohengrin" in time, he was not sorry to see his table relieved of the dull pomposity and brilliant watch-chain of the pillar of Prague society. How mean to hide one's Judaism! What a burden to belong to such a race, degenerate sons of a great but long-vanished past, unable to slough the slave traits engendered by centuries of slavery! How he had yearned as a boy to shake off the yoke of the nations, even as he himself had shaken off the yoke of the Law of Moses. Yes, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... all languages spoken by the human tongue, from the powers of his mind, which occupied a pure and healthy physique. In a word he was well made and fully endowed with all the physical and mental forces necessary to the whole journey of his life. Now a question arises: "When did he begin to degenerate physically and mentally?" Let us reason some on this line, which seems to be a rather solid foundation, and as history is young itself, and has imperfectly recorded only such events as have transpired during a few ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... Mr. Frederick Locker vouches for a light-hearted old Tom who, at the close of a long and ill-spent life, actually squandered his last breath in the pursuit of his own elusive tail. But there are few of us who would care to see the monumental calm of our fireside sphinx degenerate into senile sportiveness. Better far the measured slowness of her pace, the superb immobility of her repose. To watch an ordinary cat move imperceptibly and with a rhythmic waving of her tail through a doorway (while we are patiently ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... a belief in Germany that the French nation was degenerate and corrupt and unprepared for war. This belief became conviction when, in the debates of the French Senate, Senator Humbert, early in 1914, publicly exposed what he claimed to be the weakness and ...
— My Four Years in Germany • James W. Gerard
... and customs, a man may spend half his life in the insane asylum or in the penitentiary, and still be the father of a dozen children with degenerate tendencies. There should be no reproduction from convicted criminals, insane persons, and other degenerates. Thieves, grafters, bribers and bribe-takers all belong in the same class, and it should not be left possible for them to reproduce ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... succeeds the rags of conquest: The lust of gold, unfeeling and remorseless! The last corruption of degenerate man. 132 DR. JOHNSON: Irene, Act i., ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... raised to a higher level. In this way then, in successful cases, the worthless men become workmen. Worthless men are changed into economic assets. The dependents become independent. Working by means of the laws of environment and association, the Army elevates the degenerate from a pseudo-social and anti-social class to a higher level and to social position. Where individuality was lost, independence of character ...
— The Social Work of the Salvation Army • Edwin Gifford Lamb
... Scotch doctor, a Jacobin and a free-thinker, who could only be got to attend church by the positive orders of the Governor-General, cried over the last volume until he was too ill to appear at dinner. [Degenerate readers of our own day have actually been provided with an abridgment of Clarissa, itself as long as an ordinary novel. A wiser course than buying the abridgment would be to commence the original at the Third volume. In the same way, if anyone, after obtaining the outline of Lady Clementina's ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... background. A picture of Spanish society does emerge from the dramas, indeed. It is a society in which there are great extremes of wealth and poverty, in which the old titled families are generally degenerate and slothful, and the middle classes display admirable spiritual qualities, but are too often unthrifty and inefficient. Of the laboring classes, Galds has little to say. Bitter religious and political intolerance creates an atmosphere of hatred which a few ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... observed the partiality of his Sovereign for his fascinating young daughter, and being a man anxious, after the manner of a true Florentine, even in those degenerate days, to better himself and his family, he saw that something more than mere romance could be made out of the situation. The commercial assets of his daughter's person loomed large in his estimation, for if the Duke took a serious fancy to Eleanora, it was conceivable that she might ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... about such things!" observed Chia Cheng with a listless smile. "By my bringing up such a degenerate child of retribution I have myself become unfilial! Whenever I've had to call him to account, there has always been a whole crowd of you to screen him; so isn't it as well for me to avail myself of to-day to put an end to his cur-like existence ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... insolent, and needlessly rich. He had a passion for gambling, horse-racing, dog-fighting, and indulged in the churchly habit of doing that which he ought not and leaving undone that which he should have done. He was worse than that degenerate scion of a proud ancestry, who a-kneiping went with his lady friends in the Cincinnati fountain, after the opera, on a wager. He whipped a man who admitted he did not have a copy of the "Iliad" ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... their utmost attention, it is natural to conclude, that, should they once become established, leisure and peace will make them dangerous to the tranquillity of all Europe. Other governments may be improved by time, but republics always degenerate; and if that which is in its original state of perfection exhibit already the maturity of vice, one cannot, without being more credulous than reasonable, hope any thing better for the future than what we have experienced from the past.—It is, ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... savages were strictly consistent and logical in their theories. But they are not. They admit that their remote ancestors, in other words, that they themselves in former incarnations, possessed certain marvellous powers to which in the present degenerate days they can lay no claim; and in this significant admission we may detect a rift, a real distinction of kind, between the living and the dead, which in time might widen out into an impassable gulf. In other words, we may suppose that the Central Australians, if left to ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... with Presbyterian traditions behind her, could not achieve union the other way about; and Abby's sanctioned defection was a matter of rather shame-faced reference by her family. Advena and Lorne had fallen into the degenerate modern habit ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... which are represented as thus related by descent or cognation, do not always agree in sense; for it is incident to words, as to their authours, to degenerate from their ancestors, and to change their manners when they change their country. It is sufficient, in etymological enquiries, if the senses of kindred words be found such as may easily pass into each other, or such as may both be ...
— Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language • Samuel Johnson
... gone. Pantomimists, and dancing girls with bare faces, have replaced Paulus and Roscius. What would the Athenians of the days of Pericles have said if they had seen a woman on the stage? It is indecent for a woman to appear in public. We must be very degenerate to permit it. It is as certain as that my name is Dorion, that woman is the natural enemy of man, and a disgrace to ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... carpets, of fish-balls and fried ham, of old-style plumbing and of nine-dollar-a-week humanity in the unwashen raw—the odour of misery that permeated the lodgings to which his lack of means had introduced him. He could see again, and with a painful vividness of mental vision, the degenerate "brownstone fronts" that mask those haunts of wretchedness, with their flights of crumbling brownstone steps leading up to oaken portals haggard with flaking paint, flanked by squares of soiled note-paper upon which inexpert hands had traced ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... benevolence for its moving principle, instead of self-love, and with every evil disposition in all its members corrected by reason and not force, would, from the inevitable laws of nature, and not from any original depravity of man, in a very short period degenerate into a society constructed upon a plan not essentially different from that which prevails in every known state at present; I mean, a society divided into a class of proprietors, and a class of labourers, and with self-love the main-spring of ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... She soon became acquainted with this little family, and, as the wife is a prodigious admirer of quality, grew in a short time to be very intimate, and imagining that she may one day make her market of the girls, has much ingratiated herself with them. She introduced me—I drank, and abused this degenerate age with the father—promised wonders to the mother for all her brats—praised her gooseberry wine, and ogled the daughters, by which means in three days I made the progress I related ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... eastern satraps and of the Greek cities of Asia Minor to achieve their independence; and in family quarrels and insurrections of pretenders. None indeed of the states founded by the successors of Alexander were free from such attempts, or from the other horrors which absolute monarchy in degenerate times brings in its train; but in the kingdom of Asia these evils were more injurious than elsewhere, because, from the lax composition of the empire, they usually led to the severance of particular portions from it ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... contempt of the modes of honorable warfare, supplying the place of a conquering force by attempts to disorganize our political society, to dismember our confederated Republic. Happily, like others, these will recoil on the authors; but they mark the degenerate counsels from which they emanate, and if they did not belong to a series of unexampled inconsistencies might excite the greater wonder as proceeding from a Government which founded the very war in which it has been so long engaged on a charge against the disorganizing and insurrectional ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 1: James Madison • Edited by James D. Richardson
... contend with. In the first place, being a sheepman, he was absolutely without caste in the cattle country, where men who went in for the "woolly idiots," as someone has aptly called them, was considered for the most part as a degenerate, and only fit for target practice. This side of the matter troubled him not at ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... substitute expedients, you will extinguish that enthusiasm and energy which have hitherto been the life and soul of the revolution; and you will substitute in its place nothing but a cold indifference and self-interest, which will again degenerate into intrigue, ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... glad to consent to it," he said, "is the sodden depravity of that Floud chap. Really he's a menace to the community. I saw from the degenerate leer on his face this morning that he will not be able to keep silent about that little affair of ours back there. Mark my words, he'll talk. And fancy how embarrassing had you continued in the office for which you were engaged. ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... negligible. Well, let us see. France, a nation of peacocks, excitable, impressionable, easily angered, making much of trifles, jealous of their dignity, a dying nation which grows smaller and weaker every year. England, also a degenerate nation, soaked in gin, where a hundred thousand men are unemployed, and where no better remedy for pauperism can be found than universal pensions, which only make more paupers. Russia, an ignorant nation, whose ruling class is composed of men without morals and without ideals—thieves ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... her son, as he finished picking the bones of the chicken. "You know I like people to accuse me to my face. If I have sometimes talked to the little fellow about the Republic, it was only to bring him round to a more reasonable way of thinking. He was dotty. I love liberty myself, but it mustn't degenerate into license. And as for Rougon, I esteem him. He's a ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... human fuel, While sate the catholic Moloch, calmly cruel, Enjoying, with inexorable eye,[ef] That fiery festival of Agony! The stern or feeble sovereign, one or both 340 By turns; the haughtiness whose pride was sloth; The long degenerate noble; the debased Hidalgo, and the peasant less disgraced, But more degraded; the unpeopled realm; The once proud navy which forgot the helm; The once impervious phalanx disarrayed; The idle forge that formed Toledo's blade; The foreign wealth that flowed on every shore, Save hers ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... good or great sentiments, which are the souls of good or great ideas, these sentiments will be sure to organize all the capacity there is in them into positive intellectual character; but let them once divorce love from their occupations in life, and they will find that labor will degenerate into drudgery, and drudgery will weaken the power to labor, and weakness, as a last resort, will intrench itself in pretence and deception. If they are in the learned professions, they will become tricksters in law, quacks in medicine, formalists in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... punishments? Have virtue and the people will be virtuous." If Thoreau had made the first sentence read: "If all men were like me and were to live as simply," etc., everyone would agree with him. We may wonder here how he would account for some of the degenerate types we are told about in some of our backwoods and mountain regions. Possibly by assuming that they are an instance of perversion of the species. That the little civilizing their forbears experienced rendered these people more susceptible to the physical than to the spiritual influence ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... personal discussions is indeed the mightiest factor of modern improvement. But the mere meeting to talk about things unless it is combined with the disposition and the apparatus for studying things is but barter without production, and may degenerate to a barren exchange of words, as unprofitable as that described in the Yankee proverb, "swapping jackknives in a garret." This aspect of the truth Mr. Cooper doubtless came to appreciate; but at the outset, habituated as he was to get ideas from everybody ...
— Peter Cooper - The Riverside Biographical Series, Number 4 • Rossiter W. Raymond
... modern Arabic), gave her name to Bubastis (Pi-Bast, the city of Bast). From the Osiric term (Bass) the learned Egyptologist would derive Bacchus and his priests, the Bacchoi and the Bacchantes, whose dress was the leopard's skin. Could Osiris have belonged to the race whose degenerate descendants are the murderous ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... some Norman knightling who took Verbicaro for himself one morning in the old days, and kept it; or perhaps even the far-off progeny of one of those bright-eyed, golden-locked Goths who made slaves of the degenerate Latins some thirteen centuries ago or more, and treated their serfs indeed more like cattle than slaves until almost the last of them were driven into the sea with their King Teias by Narses. But a few were left in ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... which make you exclaim with a start, "Why, I'm seeing and hearing all this!" It is such a book as an historian of the modern school would delight in, more engrossing than fiction of the most realistic type. There is incident in it too—as of the degenerate KUROLYESSOFF, a cousin-in-law of MIHAILOVITCH, who used to flog his serfs, sometimes to death, for the pleasure of seeing them suffer; while the opening pages, describing the trekking of the family out of far-eastern Orenburg into the adjoining ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various
... the further life-history of hydatids, the living elements of the cyst may die and degenerate, or the cyst may increase in size until it ruptures. As a result of pyogenic infection the cyst may be ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... history of the world. Why, when these sentiments were uttered, I almost expected to see the shades of Burke and Fox, and Pitt and Chatham, and Peel and Wellington, rise in the midst and denounce the degenerate bearer of such a message. What! the British Commons become the supple tools, the obsequious minions, the obedient parasites, to do the bidding of a foreign master, and tremble when his envoy should stamp his foot and wave the imperial banner in the halls ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... exorbitant price of volunteers, and the reluctance with which the government admitted of this alterative. Such was the horror for the profession of a soldier, which had affected the minds of the degenerate Romans, that many of the youth of Italy and the provinces chose to cut off the fingers of their right hand, to escape from being pressed into the service; and this strange expedient was so commonly practised, as to deserve the severe animadversion ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... it from worldly soil, and prompt to sympathise with the sorrows, and out of his scanty means, to relieve the necessities of others; but such is the imperfection of man, that his piety was apt to degenerate into superstition; his abstinence yielded to slight temptations, and his charity was often not proof against a discrepancy of opinion either ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... represented herself as a sister of my own to whom a maternal uncle had left a fabulous fortune. She herself had suggested her being sheltered under my aunt's roof as a singularly welcome "paying guest." She herself, too, had suggested the visit to Paris and had hired the house from a degenerate Duc de Luynes who preferred the delights of an appartement in the less lugubrious ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... the most sinister combinations. You are only an honest countryman wandering amongst a crowd of courtiers,—virtue in danger amidst a myriad of vices: they speak our language, and we do not know theirs. Would it be possible that they should not deceive us? Louis XVI., of a degenerate race, without elevation of mind, or energy of will, allowed himself to be enthralled early in life by religious prejudices, which have even lessened his intellect; fascinated by a giddy queen, who unites to Austrian insolence the enchantment of beauty and the highest rank, and who makes of her secret ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... worship, or "stock") in common. All brothers took the oath of abandoning all feuds of old; and, without imposing upon each other the obligation of never quarrelling again, they agreed that no quarrel should degenerate into a feud, or into a law-suit before another court than the tribunal of the brothers themselves. And if a brother was involved in a quarrel with a stranger to the guild, they agreed to support him for bad and for good; that is, whether he was unjustly accused of aggression, ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... dressed in the gayest of peasant clothes—green and scarlet petticoats, flowered kerchiefs, coral beads and flashing earrings; you would have to go far into the hills in these degenerate days before meeting their match on an Italian highway. But the girl on the wall, who was actual if not titular ruler of the domain of Villa Rosa, possessed a keen eye for effect; and—she plausibly argued—since one must have washer-women about, why not, in the name of all that is beautiful, have ...
— Jerry • Jean Webster
... the disturbances which had arisen in England, and was much inclined to favor John in his pretensions. He had no hopes of retaining and extending his newly acquired superiority over that kingdom, but by supporting so base and degenerate a prince, who was willing to sacrifice every consideration to his present safety; and he foresaw that if the administration should fall into the hands of those gallant and high-spirited barons, they would vindicate the honor, liberty, and independence ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... early years of their marriage the Rogrons had a son and a daughter, both hideous; for such human beings degenerate. Put out to nurse at a low price, these luckless children came home in due time, after the worst of village training,—allowed to cry for hours after their wet-nurse, who worked in the fields, leaving them shut up to scream for her ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... to follow M. Thierry in his account of the progress and fall of that strange Gaulish kingdom of Galatia. From the year 241 to the year 190 B.C., it maintained its independence unshaken, amidst the degenerate sons of Greece and the effeminate Asiatics. But the Roman power, beneath which the Gaulish race was ever doomed to bend, overtook them even amidst the mountains of Asia Minor. The Galatians had furnished ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... extent of the Broadway pavement, dressed in fashions carried to the very sublime of the ridiculous. Whatever is the order of the day, the highest ton among the whites is instantly adopted, with the most ludicrous exaggeration, by the blacks: if small brims be worn by the beaus of the former, they degenerate to nothing on the skulls of the latter; if width be the order of the day, the coloured gentlemen rush out in unmeasurable umbrellas of felt, straw, and gossamer. A long-tailed white is, in comparison, but a docked ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 30, 1841 • Various
... to have you play football. I believe in rough, manly sports. But I do not believe in them if they degenerate into the sole end of any one's existence. I don't want you to sacrifice standing well in your studies to any over-athleticism; and I need not tell you that character counts for a great deal more than either intellect or ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... may be called scientifically. Very good type too, altogether, of that sort of degenerate. It's enough to glance at the lobes of his ears. If you ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... as stale as a bone"? And, if so, are these unworthy specimens of their sex worth tears? The vast majority of women bear the discomforts of gestation and the actual perils and pangs of birth with exemplary fortitude: and it is a gross slander for anyone to maintain that a few cowardly and degenerate individuals really represent that devoted sex. But these writers are indeed well out of the ruck of ordinary humanity, because they tell us that "whatever the means employed, and whether righteous or not, the propensity to limit ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... themselves accepted, they lounge—mentally, mannerly, and physically—when at home or elsewhere alone together. Some of this relaxation is a good thing, but it is a mistake to let home and spouse degenerate into nothing more than an invitation to ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... the founder might be carried out by his successors; but, as it is, the present worthy possessor once laid beneath the turf, the object of all his pains-taking and labour will, in all probability, be cut up into small farms, or be allowed once more to degenerate into forest, as may appear most ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... any group of these lower neurones is interrupted, not only do the nerve fibres degenerate, but the nutrition of the muscles supplied by them is interfered with and they rapidly degenerate and waste, and after an interval show the reaction of degeneration. In addition, the reflex arc is disturbed, and reflexes are lost. As these changes do not occur in lesions of the upper ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... not possibly be afraid of death, which is not only the peaceful harbour that receives him shattered on the tempestuous sea of life, but also the eternal seal of his fame and glory, which it is no longer in his power to forfeit and forego. He lamented his fate, in being doomed to live in such degenerate days, when war is become a mercenary trade; and ardently wished, that the day would come, when he should have such an opportunity of signalizing his courage in the cause of liberty, as that of Marathon, where a handful of Athenians, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... concerning the gospel's fleeting westward. Sometimes I have had such thoughts, Why may not that be the place of the New Jerusalem? But you have handsomely and fully cleared me from such odd conceits. But what, I pray? Shall our English there degenerate, and join themselves with Gog and Magog? We have heard lately divers ways, that our people there have no hope of the conversion of the natives. And, the very week after I received your last letter, I saw a letter, written ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... "drudgery," occurred to me. I remember the time when I, too, deified the "soul's impulses." It is a noble worship; but, if we do not aid it by a just though limited interpretation of what "Ought" means, it will degenerate into idolatry. For a time it was so with me, and I am not yet good enough to love ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... comparison with Dumas's immortal musketeers; but the result justifies the boldness.... The plot is admirably clear and strong, the diction singularly concise and telling, and the stirring events are so managed as not to degenerate into sensationalism. Few better novels of adventure than this have ever ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... that, if he had had to write, not on the institutions, but on the products of England, he would have discovered that beer was first made from grapes, and that the hop is a fruit of the vine—rather a degenerate product, it is true, of the wisdom of our ancestors, but as such worthy of respect. It is impossible to imagine an excess more opposite to that of his contemporaries in France, for whom it was enough that a thing was old for it to be bad. ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... a knowledge in the art of making war upon their country, when they found their enemies clamorous and bold, used to awe them with prosecutions and penalties, or destroy them like burglars, with prisons and gibbets. But every age, my lords, produces some improvement, and every nation, however degenerate, gives birth at some happy period of time to men of great and enterprising genius. It is our fortune to be witnesses of a new discovery in politicks; we may congratulate ourselves upon being contemporaries with those men who have shown that hangmen and halters are unnecessary in a state, and ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... opinions, revived, however, and introduced by [407] degenerate scholasticism, and in the Age of Chimeras, is vague indifference of choice, or real chance, assumed in our souls; as if nothing gave us any inclination unless we perceived it distinctly, and as if an effect could ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... livelihood on the property of others, as soon as they find a leader who is enterprising but is excluded from the honors of office by his poverty, institute the rule of violence; and now uniting their forces massacre, banish, and plunder, until they degenerate again into perfect savages and find once ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... livelihood. The wolf was lettered, likewise the man. The wolf had been trained by the man, or had trained himself unassisted, to divers wolfish arts, which swelled the receipts. "Above all things, do not degenerate into a man," his ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... technical successes. To afford a popular flavour and attract the mob, he adds a steady current of what I may be allowed to call the rancid. That is exciting to the moralist; but what more particularly interests the artist is this tendency of the extreme of detail, when followed as a principle, to degenerate into mere feux-de-joie of literary tricking. The other day even M. Daudet was to be heard babbling of audible ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... regretted that foreigners should judge her contemporary ideals and literary achievements by the brilliant, but obscene and degenerate books of Gabriele d'Annunzio. Such books, the products of disease no matter what language they may be written in, quickly circulate from country to country. Like epidemics they sweep up and down the world, requiring no passports, respecting no frontiers, while benefits travel slowly from ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... disappeared as an efficient organ, but the significant fact is that small rudiments of hind limbs are present just where corresponding structures are placed in the seal. These vestiges cannot be reasonably accounted for, unless they are the degenerate hinder limbs of a remote four-footed ancestor. Furthermore the unborn whale possesses a complete coat of hair, which is afterwards replaced by blubber; but hair is a thatchlike coat to shed rain, as the way the hairs lie on a terrestrial mammal indicates. We are therefore forced ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... of functions the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state he is Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the scrap committee may interfere with your plans," rejoined Atwater, shaking his head. "We don't want fighting to degenerate into the appearance of ...
— Dick Prescott's First Year at West Point • H. Irving Hancock
... he crawled, footsore and faint, to slake his thirst from the roadside pool—while the dear ones at home kept in shivering life with cornbread—degenerate southerners and foreign leeches reveled in luxury untold, from the very gain ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... cynically, for he was composed and calculating now. A few minutes ago he had sent a jar of oxygen to keep Luke Claridge alive! But for it one enemy to his career, to his future, would be gone. He did not shrink from the thought. Born a gentleman, there were in him some degenerate characteristics which heart could not drown or temperament refine. Selfishness was inwoven with every fibre of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... St. Helena dwelt in a worn-out body, a fat, degenerate perversion of the Napoleon that ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... made excellent improvement of both; it was in vain to try to persuade him that seed-time and harvest were the same thing, and that he had nothing to do but to rest in what he had done; show his bright colours and flutter like a moth in the sunshine, or sit down like a degenerate bee in the summer time and eat his own honey. The power of action which he knew in himself could not rest without something to act upon. It ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... cold, Frosen and impotent, and so report me? That I had Nestor's hernia, thou wouldst think. I do degenerate, and abuse my nation, To play with opportunity thus long; I should have done the act, and then have parley'd. Yield, or I'll ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... problems, he is dominated by the emotion of his subject, but his emotion, his pathos, are invariably tempered and restrained by the calm moderation of the quattrocento. The golden mean still has command of Bellini, and never allows his feelings, however poignant, to degenerate into sentimentality or violence. ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... had been previously established for the great purpose of their preservation and enforcement. That which was experimental in our plan of government was the question whether democratic rule could be so organized and conducted that it would not degenerate into license and result in the tyranny of absolutism, without saving to the people the power so often found necessary of repressing or destroying their enemy, when he was found in the person of a ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... away with the degenerate pack! Waft, western winds! the foreign spoilers back! Enough has been in wild amusements spent, Let British verse and harmony content! No music once could charm you like your own, 5 Then tuneful Robinson,[64] and Tofts were known; Then Purcell touched the strings, while numbers hung Attentive ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... sobriquet conferred for some feat of strength and daring on a stalwart Borderer. We find the corresponding Tornebeuf in Old French, and Turnbuck also occurs. Trumbull and Trumble are variants due to metathesis followed by assimilation (Chapter III), while Tremble is a very degenerate form. In Knatchbull we have the obsolete verb knatch, which in Mid. English meant to strike on the head, fell. Crawcour is Fr. Crevecoeur, breakheart, which has also become a local name in France. With Shacklock, shake-lock, and Sherlock, ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... all strange from the point of view from which Sunday was then regarded. Indeed many people feel about the same now. They would have the old laws enforced in regard to riding and neglect of public worship. They have fears that the day may degenerate into a European Sunday, with prayers in the morning and amusements in the afternoon ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 3: New-England Sunday - Gleanings Chiefly From Old Newspapers Of Boston And Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... satisfactory progress is made the instructor will proceed to the exercises at will, by which is meant assaults between two men, each endeavoring to hit the other and to avoid being hit himself. Fencing at will should not be allowed to degenerate into random ...
— Infantry Drill Regulations, United States Army, 1911 - Corrected to April 15, 1917 (Changes Nos. 1 to 19) • United States War Department
... "That any reputable woman should have nocturnal appointments with gentlemen in the back garden, and beguile her own grandmother into an odious marriage! I protest, Captain Audaine, the degenerate world of to-day is no longer a suitable residence for ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... herself from keeping a close watch that would degenerate into drudgery and to remain alive to events even when resting, with her back turned on the net, the ambushed Spider always has her foot upon the telegraph-wire. Of my observations on this subject, let me relate the following, which will be sufficient ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... was of opinion, at the time—and am so still— that we might have obtained considerably more than we did of the last, but for the eagerness with which we prosecuted our search for the larger gems, which caused our search for the smaller seed pearls to degenerate into a ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... customs, a man may spend half his life in the insane asylum or in the penitentiary, and still be the father of a dozen children with degenerate tendencies. There should be no reproduction from convicted criminals, insane persons, and other degenerates. Thieves, grafters, bribers and bribe-takers all belong in the same class, and it should not ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... period is the sleeping Ariadne of the Vatican. This represents a woman reclining in a studied sentimental attitude, her arms thrown about her head, her body swathed in its protecting drapery. To the same period also belongs almost the last notable work of Greek art, the degenerate and sensuous conception of the Venus de Medici. In this statue the goddess stands as if rising from the sea, her attitude reserved, yet coquettish and self-conscious. The form is technically perfect, graceful, and soft ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... bounty to the just And needy is gone by, not through its fault, But his who fills it basely, he besought, No dispensation for commuted wrong, Nor the first vacant fortune, nor the tenth), That to God's paupers rightly appertain, But, 'gainst an erring and degenerate world, Licence to fight, in favour of that seed, From which the twice twelve cions gird thee round. Then, with sage doctrine and good will to help, Forth on his great apostleship he far'd, Like torrent bursting from a lofty ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... mark of great poetry. He does not demand of poetry an orthodox code of morals, but he does contend that great poetry marches along the path that leads to abundance of life, and not to a feeble and degenerate egotism. ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... studied, Blattella alone has many degenerate spermatozoa. Some follicles have none, others a number varying perhaps from one-fourth to three-fourths of the whole number. No evidence of degeneracy was detected among the young spermatids up to the stage shown in figures 154-155, where a few like figure 162 were found. Most of the degenerate ...
— Studies in Spermatogenesis (Part 1 of 2) • Nettie Maria Stevens
... was up I had learned to know what that meant. Yet I had come in the degenerate day of trolley, bicycle and rural delivery, when communication was easy between the scattered mountain villages, and the bigger towns in the valleys, such as Bettsbridge and Shadd's Falls, had libraries, theatres and Y. M. C. ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... Memoir suggests[136] that the author may have become aware 'of the evil of having placed her heroine too low, in a position of poverty and obscurity, which, though not necessarily connected with vulgarity, has a sad tendency to degenerate into it; and therefore, like a singer who has begun on too low a ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... my duties too much for me," replied Mr Wilkins with a peculiar smile, "and it is almost impossible that I can get along without a clever, honest, intelligent clerk, or, shall we say, secretary—a character that is not easily found in these degenerate days. Can you recommend ...
— Philosopher Jack • R.M. Ballantyne
... strong within them. True, the assignable lands in Japan continued to grow smaller, but what reason was there for stifling the reproductive instincts of a vigorous people in a great unused world half populated by a degenerate humanity? ...
— In the Clutch of the War-God • Milo Hastings
... through close investigation by the writer and her co-workers, together with the sickening fact that little girls scarcely more than babies, are being constantly sought, secured and sacrificed to satisfy the cravings of abnormal, degenerate vice and debauchery abounding in every large city. These little children, painted and showily dressed, are fast making their appearance in such cities as New York and Chicago, and they are the forerunners of Oriental child debauchery. These little girls are seldom ...
— Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls • Jean Turner-Zimmermann
... company, and from that time have never seen them. The vilest inclinations, the basest actions, succeeded my amiable amusements and even obliterated the very remembrance of them. I must have had, in spite of my good education, a great propensity to degenerate, else the declension could not have followed with such ease and rapidity, for never did so promising a Caesar so quickly ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... statesman and general, was an hereditary priest of the Eleusinian family of the Kerykes, and held the offices of archon basileus and eponymus in Athens. When the Heruli overran Greece and captured Athens (269), Dexippus showed great personal courage and revived the spirit of patriotism among his degenerate fellow-countrymen. A statue was set up in his honour, the base of which, with an inscription recording his services, has been preserved (Corpus Inscrr. Atticarum, iii. No. 716). It is remarkable that the inscription is silent ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... entertained by the houses of lords and commons, lest the executive power, finding itself by these means enabled to increase the revenue of the crown to any degree it pleased, should disdain to ask aid from the legislature; and in consequence should degenerate into ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... slaves to the number of nearly one-twentieth of the whole amount of her slaves in that year. To learn whether your native Virginia clung in the year 1787 to the inter-state traffic in human flesh, we must take our post of observation, not amongst her degenerate sons, who, in 1836, sold men, women, and children, to the amount of twenty-four millions of dollars—not amongst her President Dews, who write books in favor of breeding human stock for exportation—but amongst her Washingtons, and Jeffersons, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... the only meeting in ten years where there was no contention or bitterness of feeling. For once these good people were all of the same mind, and a "barrill of W. I. Rum," which in these days gives rise to such excited controversy, in the presumably degenerate days of 1796 acted like oil ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... accompanies them with the following reflections:—"We feel bound to protest in favour of the English press against the assertions of those who would judge the opinions of a great liberal nation by the wretched specimens which are under our eyes. Heaven be praised. The civilized world is not so degenerate that the ignoble conduct of Prussia fails to elicit universal reprobation." We have had two more pigeons, but Gambetta either cannot or will not let us know anything of importance. These two messengers confirm the news of the "victory ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... in the air Denounces us degenerate, Unfaithful guardians of a noble fate, And prompts indifference or despair: Is this the country that we dreamed in youth, Where wisdom and not numbers should have weight, 200 Seed-field of simpler manners, braver truth, Where shams should cease to dominate In ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... The present Queen is a princess of as many and great virtues as ever filled a throne: How would it brighten her character to the present and after ages, if she would exert her utmost authority to instil some share of those virtues into her people, which they are too degenerate to learn only from her example! And, be it spoke with all the veneration possible for so excellent a sovereign, her best endeavours in this weighty affair are a most important part of her duty, as well as of her ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... with boats sailing in the air, and houses built in the clouds, and sundry other ingenious Dutch fantasies. The beaux distinguished themselves by their adroitness in replenishing this pot from a huge copper tea-kettle which would have made the pigmy macaronies of these degenerate days sweat merely to look at it. To sweeten the beverage a lump of sugar was laid beside each cup, and the company alternately nibbled and sipped with great decorum, until an improvement was introduced by a shrewd and economic old lady, which was to suspend a large lump ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... asked by those who, approaching the stage from the outside, in the light of prejudice and misrepresentation, believe the calling of the actor to be one morally dangerous and intellectually contemptible; one in which it is equally easy to succeed as an artist and degenerate as an individual. She begins by telling me that she has a "fancy for the stage," and has "heard a great many things about it." Now, for any man or woman to become an actor or actress because they have a "fancy for the stage" is in itself the height of ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... strove hard during the days that followed to right himself in her eyes. But so headlong was he in the attempt, and so misguided, that presently he overshot his mark by dropping an unflattering word concerning Crispin, whereby he attributed to the Tavern Knight's influence and example the degenerate change that had of late been wrought ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... stretched forth her hand against devoted Germany, and chastened her rulers and her people for the sins and transgressions of many generations. Like those wild sons of the desert, whom in the seventh century, heaven let loose to punish the degenerate Christians of the East, the new Islamite hordes of revolutionary France were permitted by Divine Providence to spread through Germany, as through almost every country ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... the great mass of the old stories of wise animals or foolish men that have amused our childhood. But we should expect the fable, in company with other and more important literary forms, to be more and more loosely, or at least largely, comprehended as time went on, and so to degenerate in conception from this original type. That depended for much of its piquancy on the very fact that it was fantastic: the point of the thing lay in a sort of humorous inappropriateness; and it is natural enough that pleasantry of this description should become less common, as men ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... disproportionate pride. Their coarseness revolted me. They laughed cynically at my face, at my clumsy figure; and yet what stupid faces they had themselves. In our school the boys' faces seemed in a special way to degenerate and grow stupider. How many fine-looking boys came to us! In a few years they became repulsive. Even at sixteen I wondered at them morosely; even then I was struck by the pettiness of their thoughts, the stupidity of ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... disgrace to greatness is, that it is for the most part in pitiful want and distress. What a wonderful thing is this, unless it degenerate into avarice, and so cease to be greatness. It falls perpetually into such necessities as drive it into all the meanest and most sordid ways of borrowing, cozenage, and robbery, Mancipiis locopules, eget aris Cappadocum Rex. This is the case of almost ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... Zealand offers far better chances of success: it is further from the tropics, it abounds in suitable rivers, the climate and temperature are more like England, and I believe the rivers never degenerate into mere water-holes, as they seem to do in Australia; and I think the residents of that colony ought to make a vigorous attempt to introduce Salmon, Salmon Trout, and the common brown Trout into their rivers immediately; and I should be delighted ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... pleasure, from which he can reap but small advantage. They look on the desire of the bloodshed, even of beasts, as a mark of a mind that is already corrupted with cruelty, or that at least by the frequent returns of so brutal a pleasure must degenerate ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... but animals of any sort only came in sight occasionally, and there were no birds visible, except a solitary heron or owl, and a thrush or grebe, flying from the falcon. Human beings there were none, not a native appeared; not even one of the GUASSOS, the degenerate offspring of Indians and Spaniards, dashed across the plain like a shadow, his flying steed dripping with blood from the cruel thrusts inflicted by the gigantic spurs of his master's naked feet. It was absolutely impossible to make inquiries when there was ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... and the great khan was satisfied with the empire of China and eastern Mongalia, In 1367, one hundred and forty years after the death of Zingis, roused to rebellion by a dreadful famine, in which thirteen millions of the inhabitants of China perished, the native Chinese expelled their degenerate Mogul oppressors, and the great khan became a wanderer in the desert. The vast empire established by Zingis and his immediate successors was now broken down into four vast fragments, each a powerful empire, Mongalia, Kipzak, Zagtai or Transoxiana, and Persia; and these ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... manipulating the mechanical resources of the stage, and in addition to these minor indispensable talents he was endowed with a lofty philosophic imagination and a wealth of poetic diction. Naturally, he had the defects of his great qualities; his ingenuity is apt to degenerate into futile embellishment; his employment of theatrical devices is the subject of his own good-humoured satire in No hay burlas con el amor; his philosophic intellect is more interested in theological mysteries than in human passions; and the delicate beauty of his style is tinged ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... however, there is some danger lest the beauty and appropriateness of the conception should entice us to receive it on insufficient evidence. The fact that some plants in certain adverse circumstances tend to degenerate, and in certain favourable circumstances to attain a higher type, is well known in natural history; but it seems questionable whether these changes ever take place to such an extent, and in such a uniform method, as must be assumed if we take darnel for degenerated wheat. ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... it, and degenerate." Anne was speaking. Her cheeks were as pink as her gown. She leaned a little forward. "You don't know all that they have at Crossroads, and Dr. Brooks is too polite to tell you how poor New York seems to those ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... Wykehamist took his degree with no examination but that of his own college, both under the Laudian Statute and after the great statute of 1800, which set up the modern system of examinations. What the founder had intended as an encouragement for industry was made by his degenerate disciples an excuse ...
— The Oxford Degree Ceremony • Joseph Wells
... generally that patriotic purpose, the support of principle, the desire for the public good, and solicitude for the nation's welfare would be nearly banished from the activity of our party contests and cause them to degenerate into ignoble, selfish, and disgraceful struggles for the possession of office ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... heated altercation with Mr. McGinnis, whom he threatened with expulsion from the meeting, the mayor finally left the chair and the meeting broke up in disorder which threatened to degenerate into a series of ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... government of college, Those liberal helluos of knowledge, Who, e'en in these degenerate days, Deserve the world's unceasing praise; Who, friends of science and of men, Stand forth Gomorrah's righteous ten; On them I naught but thanks bestow, For, like my cash, my credit's low; So I can give nor clothes nor wines, ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... filthy knowledge, but if the atmosphere is filled with respect and reverence, and the minds are trained by inner discipline and morality, the contagion of such mischievous talk will reach only those children who have the disposition of the degenerate. The majority will remain uncontaminated. Plenty of lewd literature in the circulars of the quacks and even in the sensational newspapers will reach their eye and their brain, and yet it will leave not the slightest trace. The trained, clean mind develops ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... burning root and branch, for it must have been absolutely rotten, or unquestionably corrupt. We were led by members of this Department to believe that the Boer was a cowardly kind of veldt pariah, a degenerate offshoot of a fine old parent stock. Well, the Boer is nothing of the kind. He is not in any way degenerate. He is a good fighting man, according to his lights. He does not wear a stand-up collar, nor an eyeglass, nor spats ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... to Republican Rome, and considering the state of public morals but fifty years before the emperors, we can with difficulty believe that the descendants of a people so severe in their habits could thus rapidly degenerate, and that a populace, once so hardy and masculine, should assume the manners which we might expect in the debauchees of Daphne (the infamous suburb of Antioch) or of Canopus, into which settled the very lees and dregs of the vicious Alexandria. Such extreme changes would falsify ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... effect upon the general organism of dejection and resentment at meals. Prisoners more than men in any other condition need abundance to eat and good cheer while eating; but the food they get, and the circumstances in which they get it, causes them to degenerate physically, and the body affects the mind. Physical disease breeds the disease of evil thoughts and impulses. Criminals might be generated by prison food alone, without taking account of their ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... serious, and the few guests at this solemn consecration seemed impressed with the dignity of the occasion. The pathway of the young princess was not all strewn with roses, however, as her marriage seemed to enrage her degenerate brother and to stimulate him to new deeds of unworthiness. In spite of the fact that King Henry's shameless conduct in private life had been given a severe rebuke, by implication at least, at the time that Isabella was ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... and make excellent wives and mothers. This character must not, however, be taken in an unlimited sense, for we cannot expect this rule to be without its exceptions, and it is true that some of these females do degenerate, and copy after the manners of the creoles, or white natives; but this is only the case when, by their intercourse with the whites, their Indian blood is merged and lost in the European. That part of the population in which is blended ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... nation had been steadily changing for the worse under such kings as Manasseh and Amon; nor could the zealous efforts of Josiah avail to check the swelling tide of idolatry and profligacy. Sent by Jehovah in such a degenerate age to rebuke the wicked rulers and people for their sins, and to forewarn them of God's impending judgments, he was necessarily subjected to much persecution. Isaiah had administered stern rebukes to Ahaz and his people, ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... and regard this as exercise for themselves. They join the baby brigade and parade up and down the block, or select a sunny spot where there are others on a like quest, and sit around exchanging confidences. These outings usually degenerate into gossiping parties and are a dangerous and questionable practice. They are no doubt good for the baby, but they are morally and physically bad for the young mother. This daily habit is called exercise, but it is in no sense physical ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... that this should stop. Whatever happened, he and Kitty should not degenerate into a pair of scolds—besmirch their life with quarrels as ugly as they were silly. He would wrestle with her, his beloved, unreasonable, foolish Kitty; he ought, of course, to have done so before. But it was only within the last week or so that the horizon had suddenly darkened—the thing ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... he will change into a worse man and a lower man. If it is his body that he neglects, he will deteriorate into a wild and bestial savage—like the de-humanized men who are discovered sometimes upon desert islands. If it is his mind, it will degenerate into imbecility and madness—solitary confinement has the power to unmake men's minds and leave them idiots. If he neglect his conscience, it will run off into lawlessness and vice. Or, lastly, if it is his soul, it must inevitably atrophy, drop ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... Syracusan in life. His human nature is of the kind that makes the nymphs and swains of Alexander Pope dull and artificial. There are flies in this delicious ointment, one must admit, touches of corruption which a degenerate paganism condoned and palliated, but we must remember, as an extenuation of the Greek attitude, that the oracle of Delphi protested against them. The cyprus plains of Theocritus yet echo with the call of ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... race had come into play in fashioning this warm home in the barren arctic wastes. But Craig's ever-alert eyes warned him of what was to come. The characters, the hieroglyphs, the rude forms of Egyptian gods on the jagged walls were of degenerate character—and always, when degeneration sets in, the cruellest form of worship has been chosen. The worship of Aten, the Sun God, Wes recalled, was one that ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... beneath him. A little group of high- born Chinese ladies in holiday attire are seated in a garden of potted plants on the river's bank, drinking tea, flirting their fans, and doubtless talking over the latest Court gossip. Nearby is a willow, not the stiff, ugly tree now seen upon tame and degenerate imitations of real old China pottery, but a graceful weeping-willow, whose drooping branches sweep the opposite shore, as sublimely indifferent to distance ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... Cuban said suddenly, "I will pronounce his panegyric. He was a man of a great gentleness, of an inevitable nobility, of an invariable courtesy. Where, in this degenerate age, shall we find the like!" He stopped to breathe a sound ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... originally from Denmark and a Pagan, embraced Christianity, and took service under Charlemagne. He revolted from the Emperor, and was driven into exile. He afterwards led one of those bands of piratical Northmen which ravaged France under the reigns of Charlemagne's degenerate successors. The description which an ancient chronicler gives of Charlemagne, as described by Ogier, is so picturesque, that we are tempted to transcribe it. Charlemagne was advancing to the siege of Pavia. Didier, King of the Lombards, was in the city with Ogier, ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... find No mystery couched in this excess of kindness? Were kings e'er known, in this degenerate age, So passionately fond of noble acts, Where interest shared not more than half ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... will be a labor of time. And you know, of course, or you have guessed, that there are no mysteries to be revealed to you, no profound religious truths to be communicated, no dogmas to be accepted. I am afraid we are very degenerate descendants of the Mystics, and the Illuminati, and all the rest of them; we have become prosaic; our wants are sadly material. And yet we have our dreams and aspirations, too; and the virtues that we exact—obedience, temperance, faith, self-sacrifice—are not ignoble. Meanwhile, to begin. I think ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... man in a savage and domestic condition, than between beast and beast; for as men and beasts have been treated alike by nature, all the conveniences with which men indulge themselves more than they do the beasts tamed by them, are so many particular causes which make them degenerate ...
— A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of - The Inequality Among Mankind • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... must say what it will do," states The Daily Mail. Waiting for The Daily Mail to say it first must not be allowed to degenerate ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 12, 1919 • Various
... acquittal—inasmuch as he told me to make myself as comfortable as I could in his house, and to enjoy myself thoroughly in it for the next fortnight to come, at the very least. It may have been that, in considering my faults as those of the degenerate age in which I lived—which age, however, be it known, lived afterwards to recover its character, and to be held up as a model of propriety and virtue to the succeeding generation—the merciful doctor ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... talent of the craftsman. The manner of the oldest weavers was to produce a fabric not too thick, flexible rather—for was it not meant to hang in folds?—and of an engagingly even surface. It was not too fine, yet had none of the looseness associated with the coarse, hurried work of later and degenerate times. It was more like the even fabric we associate with machine work, yet as unlike that as palpitating flesh is like a graven image. It was the logical production of honest workmen who counted time well spent if spent ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... for their wealth, hated because they had dared to keep their rights and treaties and sell goods to the enemies of Germany, and despised because the Germans believed them too rich and cowardly, too fat and degenerate, to fight in the great war for the mastery of ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... and sole takes place, and the arch of the sole bends down under the pressure until the ground surface of the hoof becomes flat or convex, bulging down even lower than the cruel iron that clamps its edge. This is the condition of a drop sole. This degenerate state of the foot has other complications. Active inflammation is often present and all the wretchedness of a pumiced foot—the despair of owner and veterinary—is experienced. The smith, whose clumsy contrivance has been the cause of all the woe, has abundant reasons to offer for the disease, ...
— Rational Horse-Shoeing • John E. Russell
... take what was offered us, and be thankful that it was no worse. Often many of our poor fellows had not the bare necessaries of life, and it was only by great exertion that I was able to procure them, as I have described, for myself and a few of my more intimate friends. I had not supposed that so degenerate a race of Frenchmen existed, for when they saw us all rapidly sickening and advancing towards the grave, instead of relaxing their system of tyranny, they only increased their ill-treatment, and made us believe that they really wished to put us to ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... and with a decisive word opened the gates of happiness for millions and closed them upon millions more: how different nations pioneered in art and knowledge and broke ground for the mightier growths of coming ages; how civilization underwent as it were, the holocaust of a degenerate age, and rose again, like the Phoenix, among the nobler sons of the North; and how by liberty, tolerance and education the great and the wise have opened the way for the ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... person readily acknowledges that far greater weight ought to be attached to the finding of this Commission than to the declarations of the complainants, who contradicted one another in nearly every particular, and who caused the whole enquiry to degenerate into a farce." ...
— A Century of Wrong • F. W. Reitz
... observation that the beavers of the present day seem to be a degenerate race, as they neither fell huge trees not construct great dams, while their progenitors cut down trees two feet in diameter and dammed up rivers a hundred feet in width. The change in the habits of the ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... or more the old wolf sat there, challenging his degenerate mates in every silence, calling the tame to be wild, the bound to be free again, and listening gravely to the wailing answer of the dogs, which refused with groanings, as if dragging themselves away from overmastering temptation. Then the shadow vanished from the big rock on the mountain, the huskies ...
— Northern Trails, Book I. • William J. Long
... followed the dusty road and examined the telegraph poles, for the woodpecker of these latter days has departed from the ways of his fathers, deserted the cool and fragrant woods, and taken up his abode in degenerate places, a fitting change of residence to follow his change of habit from digging his prey out of the tree-trunks to ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... her a cripple, or an invalid, or an imbecile, or tuberculous, everybody would cry out with horror, and she would become a social outcast. But if she inflicts these injuries on her granddaughter, by marrying her daughter to a drunkard, in the hope of reforming him, or to a wealthy degenerate, or an imbecile baron, no one says a word, provided the marriage ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... fashion that sets back old Turnspit into the remotest corner under the backstairs of the Dark Ages. I have alluded to his alleged descendants, as pointed out to my observation in boyhood; but they were an effete and degenerate race, purposeless, and wallowing much with the pigs, whom their grandsires would have ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... Anthony appeared to the convention like Minerva, goddess of wisdom. Her advent was with thunders, not of applause, but of the scorn of a degenerate masculinity. The great Horatio said, with infinite condescension, that he held in his hand a memorial of the women of the United States. The name of Miss Anthony was greeted with a yell such as a Milton might imagine to rise from a conclave of the damned. "She asked to plead the cause of her ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... of the senses, indulging in these alone; whereas the natural pour forth into the world all things of the will and understanding, covetously and fraudulently acquiring wealth, and regarding no other use therein and thence but that of possession. The above-mentioned adulteries change men in these degenerate degrees, one into this, another into that, each according to his favorite taste for what is pleasurable, in which taste his ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... contempt of pain and death, this noble contempt, so universal amongst the men of that time, deprived cruelty of its sting. Our degenerate race has scarcely a conception of the strength which made the men of past times find a pleasure even in pains, since they spurred their courageous souls to the highest pitch of heroism; since in such moments they felt themselves able to be more ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... into town on the Fourth of July, and has Chinese crackers and fiery serpents cast under his heels. One evening, in particular, they asked me to play the game of Comparisons (a proverbially odious game, that could exist only in an effete and degenerate civilization), in which the entire company tried to see how Funny they could be; and because I made stupid answers, I was laughed at by the ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... of September, 1809, Governor Harrison called all the tribes that claimed certain lands between the White and Wabash rivers to a council. Only a few of the weak and degenerate tribes answered the summons. Nevertheless, he went through the ceremony of making a treaty by which the United States government claimed three million acres ...
— Four American Indians - King Philip, Pontiac, Tecumseh, Osceola • Edson L. Whitney
... honours? IDA, once your own, When Probus fill'd your magisterial throne; As ancient Rome fast falling to disgrace, Hail'd a Barbarian in her Caesar's place; So you degenerate share as hard a fate, And seat Pomposus, where your Probus sate. Of narrow brain, but of a narrower soul, Pomposus, holds you in his harsh controul; Pomposus, by no social virtue sway'd, With florid jargon, and with vain parade; With ...
— Fugitive Pieces • George Gordon Noel Byron
... in thought. "You know," he broke out, suddenly, "this war has been a revelation to me—the most horrible you could imagine. It's as if you loved a woman, and saw her go insane before your eyes, or turn into some sort of degenerate. For I believed in the Christmas-tree Germany; I loved it, and I argued for it, I just couldn't bring myself to believe what I read in the papers. Now I look back, and it seems like a trap that the German war-lords had set for my mind—reaching way ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... shew-picture is a last year's Valentine, and whither the fame of the last ten Scotch novels has not yet travel'd (marry, they just begin to be conscious of the Red Gauntlet), to have a new plasterd flat church, and to be wishing that it was but a Cathedral. The very blackguards here are degenerate. The topping gentry, stock brokers. The passengers too many to ensure your quiet, or let you go about whistling, or gaping—too few to be the fine indifferent pageants of Fleet Street. Confining, room-keeping thickest winter is yet more bearable here than the gaudy months. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... the vitalising and nourishing principles in maritime sands under the effects of heat, light, and moisture, it is necessary to retrace our steps and walk round the sandspit to the transfigured and degenerate mouth of that once mangrove-creek known to the blacks by a name signifying that a boy once tethered in it a sucking fish (Remora). Obstructed by a bank, the creek is dead and dry save when the floods of the wet season co-operate with high tides and effect ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... turning black on the distant hills, and the silent stars were slowly coming into view. Clean, health-giving Baden-Baden, in the Valley of the Oos, with its beauty and its pure air, was holding out her arms to all the disease and filth that degenerate ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... not that our builders are degenerate, but that their art is a trade, occupies only their hands, not their minds, and this by no fault in them or in anybody, but by the natural progress of the world. In each age by turn some one mental organ is in a state of hypertrophy; immediately that becomes the medium of expression,—not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... cold at the calm pride of this degenerate fiend, had it not been boiling at the reference to Helene. He crept nearer to them, along the wall. He lay down on the floor, below the level of the first bullet paths. Then he drew his automatic and the bulb light, ready for ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... Horrible sympathy! And leagued with these Each petty German princeling, nursed in gore! Soul-hardened barterers of human blood![116:1] 180 Death's prime slave-merchants! Scorpion-whips of Fate! Nor least in savagery of holy zeal, Apt for the yoke, the race degenerate, Whom Britain erst had blushed to call her sons! Thee to defend the Moloch Priest prefers 185 The prayer of hate, and bellows to the herd, That Deity, Accomplice Deity In the fierce jealousy of wakened wrath Will go forth with our armies and our fleets To scatter ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... opinion of Christendom has not altogether condemned passionate friendships between persons of the same sex, but has certainly not encouraged them, because though innocent in themselves in a few temperaments they are liable to degenerate into fearful evil. Pausanias is very earnest in the defence of such loves; and he speaks of them as generally approved among Hellenes and disapproved by barbarians. His speech is 'more words than matter,' and might have been composed by a pupil of Lysias or of Prodicus, although ...
— Symposium • Plato
... O degenerate Italy! exclaims Dante; land without affections, without principle, without faith in any one good thing! here was a man who could not hear the sweet sound of a fellow-citizen's voice without feeling his heart gush towards him, and there are no people now in any ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... flavour and attract the mob, he adds a steady current of what I may be allowed to call the rancid. That is exciting to the moralist; but what more particularly interests the artist is this tendency of the extreme of detail, when followed as a principle, to degenerate into mere feux-de-joie of literary tricking. The other day even M. Daudet was to be heard babbling of audible ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... their attraction for each other. One can imagine that their state presented an example of the way in which people of abnormal instincts tend to drift together: Arthur, the a-moral prodigy, and Gabrielle, the last offshoot of the decayed house of Hewish, daughter of the definitely degenerate Sir Jocelyn. But I do not think that there was anything abnormal or decadent in Gabrielle's composition. Her nature was gay and uncomplicated, in singular contrast to her involved and sombre fate. One is forced to the conclusion that the Payne miracle was the result of nothing more uncommon ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... historical facts related in the Bible, in order that those believers who were unable to read might in this way instruct themselves in sacred history, but that great care must be taken that such a practice might not degenerate into idolatry. ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... wonderfully. As a doctor had roughly expressed it, this girl of fourteen, at a critical period of her life, already ravaged, too, by asthma, was, after all, simply an exceptional victim of hysteria, afflicted with a degenerate heredity and lapsing into infancy. If there were no violent crises in her case, if there were no stiffening of the muscles during her attacks, if she retained a precise recollection of her dreams, the reason was that her case was peculiar to herself, and she added, so to say, a new and very curious ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... and interfused that to human eyes they seem to coalesce into a multitude of individualities. This is in course of years, the real, the hidden condition of a nation, which has been bathed in Christian ideas, whether it be a young vigorous race, or an old and degenerate; and it will manifest itself socially and historically in those characteristics, sometimes grotesque, sometimes hideous, sometimes despicable, of which we have so many instances, medieval and modern, both in this hemisphere and in the western. It is, I say, the ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... those who are addicted to that vice, every impediment should be put in the way. Drinking is a vice, the disposition to which grows with its gratification; most other avocations (for drinking in moderation is only such) have no tendency of the sort. Those enjoyments which have a tendency to degenerate into vice should be kept under some check; those which have no such tendency ought to be encouraged; for, where the main and general mass of the population of a country is corrupted, it is impossible to prevent its decline. If it remains uncorrupted, ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... unsurpassed,— For England's sake, For our dear Sovereign's sake,— We cry all shame on traitors, high and low, Whose word let no man take, Whose love let no man seek throughout the land,— Traitors who strive, with most degenerate hand, To bring about ...
— The Song of the Flag - A National Ode • Eric Mackay
... consternation, from the lookouts on the boldest of its headlands, to those on the turrets of Windsor Castle. But I was born without nobility of twenty generations to corrupt my blood and deaden my soul, and am not trusted by the degenerate wretches who rule the ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... as a sister of my own to whom a maternal uncle had left a fabulous fortune. She herself had suggested her being sheltered under my aunt's roof as a singularly welcome "paying guest." She herself, too, had suggested the visit to Paris and had hired the house from a degenerate Duc de Luynes who preferred the delights of an appartement in ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... the number of nearly one-twentieth of the whole amount of her slaves in that year. To learn whether your native Virginia clung in the year 1787 to the inter-state traffic in human flesh, we must take our post of observation, not amongst her degenerate sons, who, in 1836, sold men, women, and children, to the amount of twenty-four millions of dollars—not amongst her President Dews, who write books in favor of breeding human stock for exportation—but amongst her Washingtons, and Jeffersons, and Henrys, and Masons, who, at ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... an enemy. The Tsar, on the other hand, he considered cowardly, false, and despicable. It was a proof of the incapacity of the bourgeois that they had tolerated such a Tsar. Monarchs were all of them more or less degenerate; he could not understand how anyone could accept a form of government which involved the risk of having a degenerate ruler. I answered him as to this, that a monarchy had first of all one advantage, that there was at least one place in the state ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... Europe stood aloof from her, she drew her stores of provisions from the Moslem ports, and was thus enabled successfully to resist the pressure which she suffered from the interdict. She foresaw, too, the growing power of the Turks, and perceived that in the future they would triumph over the degenerate Greek empire at Constantinople. She had spent her blood and treasure freely in maintaining that empire; but the weakness and profligacy of its emperors, the intestine quarrels and disturbances which were forever going on, and the ingratitude with which she had always treated ...
— The Lion of Saint Mark - A Story of Venice in the Fourteenth Century • G. A. Henty
... Behaviour, all outward Show of Virtue, and Abhorrence of Vice, are carefully avoided by this Set of Shame-faced People, as what would disparage their Gayety of Temper, and infallibly bring them to Dishonour. This is such a Poorness of Spirit, such a despicable Cowardice, such a degenerate abject State of Mind, as one would think Human Nature incapable of, did we not meet with frequent Instances of ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... Gonzaga's features lack distinction this portrait shows fine qualities and good breeding. Nothing could better illustrate how minute are the plastic details which will revolutionise a countenance; how easily noble and handsome features can degenerate into what is sordid and vulgar. In this bust the chin, though receding, is far from weak; the lips are full but not sensual; the nose has the faint aquiline curve of distinction. There is benevolence in the eyes, meditation in the brow, dignity ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... at the first glance to invest it, and takes rank, without any straining, among the other processes of selection. It seems to me that, from the facts that sterile animal forms can adapt themselves to new vital functions, their superfluous parts degenerate, and the parts more used adapt themselves in an ascending direction, those less used in a descending direction, we must draw the conclusion that harmonious adaptation here comes about without the cooeperation of the Lamarckian principle. This conclusion once established, ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... handful of earth, he trimmed the plant frequently, he pulled at it to lengthen it and hasten its growth, he grafted on it cedars and oaks, until one day the little tree died, leaving the man convinced that it belonged to a degenerate species, attributing the failure of his experiment to everything except the lack of soil and his ...
— The Indolence of the Filipino • Jose Rizal
... the opinion of many grave divines concerning the gospel's fleeting westward. Sometimes I have had such thoughts, Why may not that be the place of the New Jerusalem? But you have handsomely and fully cleared me from such odd conceits. But what, I pray? Shall our English there degenerate, and join themselves with Gog and Magog? We have heard lately divers ways, that our people there have no hope of the conversion of the natives. And, the very week after I received your last letter, I saw a letter, written from New England, discoursing of an impossibility ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... it, anyhow, and I'll play the game for them. If I ever had had a father I'd like to talk politics with him. He must have had some decency in him, or I'd have been all bad, like my mother. Or maybe I'm a throw-back from two degenerate parents. Well, we'll end ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... It is transmitted with difficulty to sheep and goats, and cattle seem to be entirely immune. It runs a variable course and usually produces the death of the animal affected with it. It is characterized by the formation of neoplasms, or nodules, of connective tissue, which degenerate into ulcers, from which exude a peculiar discharge. It is accompanied with a variable degree of fever, according to the rapidity of its course. It is subject to various complications of the lymphatic glands, of the lungs, of ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... was one of this breed. But it was supposed by many to have become extinct soon after the disappearance of the last wolf in Ireland, and it was the endeavour of Captain Graham to demonstrate that specimens, although admittedly degenerate, were still to be found, and that they were capable of being restored to a semblance ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... condition of things sometimes results from a confusion of those factious tyrannies into which kings, aristocrats, and democrats are apt to degenerate. For thus, from these diverse elements, there occasionally arises (as I have said before) a new kind of government. And wonderful indeed are the revolutions and periodical returns in natural constitutions of such alternations and vicissitudes, which it is the part of the wise politician to investigate ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... points the way to new ideas of, the primitive relations of different organic systems in respect of their function and topography. One of the most puzzling features in its structure, and, at the same time, one of the greatest obstacles to the view that it is essentially primitive and not merely a degenerate creature, is the entire absence of the paired organs of special sense, olfactory, optic and auditory, which are so characteristic of the higher vertebrates. Although it is true that there is a certain amount of gradation in the degree of development to which ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... unenvious, and unambitious. Meaner men, their contemporaries or successors, raved of high art with incoherent passion; arrogated to themselves an equality with the masters of elder time, and declaimed against the degenerate tastes of a public which acknowledged not the return of the Heraclidae. But the two great—the two only painters of their age—happy in a reputation founded as deeply in the heart as in the judgment of mankind, demanded no higher function than that of soothing ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... and reserve and repression are parts of the dignified office of the preacher, but carried too far may degenerate into weak and unproductive effort. Perfection of English style, rhetorical floridness, and profundity of thought will never wholly make up for lack of appropriate action in the work ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... air of displeasure, reprehended Ferdinand for yielding his confidence to those idle alarms, which he said were the suggestions of a timid imagination. 'Alarms,' continued he, 'which will readily find admittance to the weak mind of a woman, but which the firmer nature of man should disdain.—Degenerate boy! Is it thus you reward my care? Do I live to see my son the sport of every idle tale a woman may repeat? Learn to trust reason and your senses, and you will then be worthy of ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... that He alone was the righteous seed of David; for although Hezekiah and Josiah were legitimate successors, yet, when we look to others, they were, as it were, monsters. Except three or four, all the rest were degenerate and covenant-breakers." The words: "I raise unto David a righteous Branch" are here, as well as in chap. xxxiii. 15, not by any means equivalent to: a righteous Branch of David. On the contrary, David is designated as he to whom the act of raising belongs, for whose sake it is undertaken. ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... is this, and I feel that it is just the holiest thing in matrimony, and its greatest justification—that love should never degenerate into softness, that each should consciously stimulate the better part of the other and discourage the worse, that there should be a discipline in our life, and that we should brace each other up to a higher ideal. The love ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... off. Like tired dogs, we still creep into our holes. The youngest were moaning and tossing, as they have done every night for weeks past—shaking off sleep like a harmful narcotic, because the poison of fighting is too strong for most blood in these degenerate days. What sounds have I not heard during the past two months—what sighs, what gasps, what groans, what muttered protests! When men lie asleep, their imaginations betray ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... ought alone to be inculcated; and that the exceptions, which are rare, ought seldom or never to be mentioned in popular reasonings and discourses. Nor is there any danger that mankind, by this prudent reserve, should universally degenerate into a state of abject servitude. When the exception really occurs, even though it be not previously expected and descanted on, it must, from its very nature, be so obvious and undisputed, as to remove all doubt, and overpower the restraint, however great, imposed by teaching ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... pustules. At their first appearance they are commonly of a palish blue, or rather of a colour somewhat approaching to livid, and are surrounded by an erysipelatous inflammation. These pustules, unless a timely remedy be applied, frequently degenerate into phagedenic ulcers, which prove extremely troublesome[2]. The animals become indisposed, and the secretion of milk is much lessened. Inflamed spots now begin to appear on different parts of the hands of the domestics ...
— An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae • Edward Jenner
... nice distinctions, admits that Burns was not a man of degraded genius, but a degraded man of genius. Burns was neither the one nor the other. In spite of the occasional excesses of his later years, he did not degenerate into drunkenness, nor was the sense of his responsibilities as a husband, a father, and a man less clear and acute in the last months of his life than it had ever been. Had he lived a few years longer, we should have seen the man mellowed by sorrow and suffering, braving life, not as ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... placid disposition, so danger and war are a pleasure to the Alani, and among them that man is called happy who has lost his life in battle. For those who grow old, or who go out of the world from accidental sicknesses, they pursue with bitter reproaches as degenerate and cowardly. Nor is there anything of which they boast with more pride than of having killed a man: and the most glorious spoils they esteem the scalps which they have torn from the heads of those whom ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... contemporaries had suffered from, but which he was certain involved enormous dangers not only for himself but also to the next and subsequent generations (see Note B., where "pity" is mentioned among the degenerate virtues). Later in the book we shall see how his profound compassion leads him into temptation, and how frantically he struggles against it. In verses 31 and 32, he tells us to what extent he had to modify himself in order to be endured by his fellows ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... meeting, as I am obliged to return hither on Saturday the 2nd of January. This is really a curious way of employing you; however, you will gain something by it; you will acquire a particular exactness in knowing the days of the month, a science too much neglected in these degenerate days, but a science which was cultivated with a glorious ardour in Greece and Rome, and was no doubt the cause of their flourishing so ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... dishwashing of the country. And note that this is most filthy and deadening and brutalizing work; that it is a cause of anemia, nervousness, ugliness, and ill-temper; of prostitution, suicide, and insanity; of drunken husbands and degenerate children—for all of which things the community has naturally to pay. And now consider that in each of my little free communities there would be a machine which would wash and dry the dishes, and do it, not merely to ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... 'solemn' that day! I made my agonized protest on the spot, but it fell unheeded, and with satisfied sneer Eliza knit on, and the young Californian continued making the rosebuds. I gazed into space, and, when alone, wept for my degenerate countrywoman. I not only was 'solemn' that day, but I am profoundly 'solemn' whenever I think of that queenly woman and that cotton wash rag. (One can buy a whole dozen of these useful appliances, with red borders ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... to the further life-history of hydatids, the living elements of the cyst may die and degenerate, or the cyst may increase in size until it ruptures. As a result of pyogenic infection the cyst may be converted ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... with love and pride, and the father was a gentleman, like Falstaff, a pure gentleman. The daughter-in-law also peered out to look at Il Giovann', who was evidently a figure of repute, in his sordid, degenerate American respectability. Meanwhile, this figure of repute blew himself red in the face, producing staccato strains on his cornet. And the crowd stood desolate and forsaken in the ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... products. But they come from a comprehensible idea; and the new woman comes from nothing and nowhere. It is right to have an ideal, it is right to have the right ideal, and these two have the right ideal. The slum mother with her funerals is the degenerate daughter of Antigone, the obstinate priestess of the household gods. The lady talking bad Italian was the decayed tenth cousin of Portia, the great and golden Italian lady, the Renascence amateur of life, who could ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... along the wall for support. Was this a dream, some ghastly, soul-terrifying nightmare! Danglar! Those working lips! That callous viciousness, that leer in the degenerate face. It seemed to bring a weakness to her limbs, and seek to rob her of the strength to stand. She could not even hope against hope; she knew that Danglar was in deadly earnest. Danglar would not have the slightest compunction, let alone hesitation, in carrying out his threat. Terrified ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... Indians present with Cortes, Malinal alone could speak two languages. The Tabascans spoke a sort of degenerate Maya, with which, as she had lived among them so long, she was of course perfectly familiar, at the same time she had not forgotten her native Mexican. It would have been impossible for Cortes to have communicated with ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... the most pernicious things in the world. The stunted man is a retrogression in the human race: he throws a shadow over all succeeding generations The tendencies and natural purpose of the individual science become degenerate, and science itself is finally shipwrecked: it has made progress, but has either no effect at all on life or ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Indians at his speech, because such attractions are rare in Belleville, and the Indian would come to see what it is that stirs up so much his white friend and brother. Of course, the Indian in his degenerate days, would take the chance to get drunk, and, being in a whiskey stupor, he naturally supposed that Mr. Grayson was chanting a chant of victory, and quite as naturally he chanted in return his own chant, and also quite as naturally this chant was about the deed that he ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... cannot stand the touch-stone of truth; there are mean plebeians, who sweat and struggle to maintain the appearance of gentlemen; and, on the other hand, there are gentlemen of rank who seem industrious to appear mean and degenerate; the one sort raise themselves either by ambition or virtue, while the other abase themselves by viciousness or sloth; so that we must avail ourselves of our understanding and discernment in distinguishing ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... family a right, who have been always eminent in the support and favour of our religion and liberties. And if the promises of your youth, your education at home, and your experience abroad, deceive me not, the principles you have embraced are such, as will no way degenerate from your ancestors, but refresh their memory in the minds of all true Englishmen, and renew their lustre in your person; which, my lord, is not more the wish, than it is the ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... admirer of quality, grew in a short time to be very intimate, and imagining that she may one day make her market of the girls, has much ingratiated herself with them. She introduced me—I drank, and abused this degenerate age with the father—promised wonders to the mother for all her brats—praised her gooseberry wine, and ogled the daughters, by which means in three days I made the progress I related ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... with their traditions of slavery and dark beginnings in the experimental pens of the older race, continued to insist that across the sea—on the unknown western continent—Those Others still held onto the remnants of a degenerate civilization. Thus the explorers from Homeport went out by ones and twos and used the fauna of the land as a ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... the Prince had died prematurely at the age of fifty, and with him the Ciceronian traditions had ended in Casa Conti, and their place had been taken by the caprices of the big, healthy, indolent, extravagant Polish woman, by the miserable weaknesses of a degenerate heir, and the fanatic ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... laudable to grasp at wealth and power even when they were within our reach? Were not these the two great sources of depravity? What security had he, that in this change of place and condition, he should not degenerate into a tyrant and voluptuary? Power and riches were chiefly to be dreaded on account of their tendency to deprave the possessor. He held them in abhorrence, not only as instruments of misery to others, but to him on whom they were conferred. Besides, riches were comparative, ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... as a model for schools to be founded in East Anglia by Felix.[9] It is an interesting question whether these were the missionary schools, or whether they were schools which kept up the traditions of Roman education in a degenerate form like the schools in Gaul. On the ground that our oldest document is a Code of the first converted king, it has been too easily inferred, that before this time the Saxons were wholly destitute of literary appliances. Were the fact more certain, than it is, the conclusion would ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... returned Bermudo, "with the affection of one, who centres his whole bliss only in the enjoyment of his selfish and degenerate passion. But she spurned him; stratagem and force prevailed. Madness—despair—must I say it? death ensued. Enough—the circumstances of the horrid tale 'tis needless to relate: I have said thus much to convince you of the impossibility of my harming a woman whose fate bears ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... imaginative sadness in his nature, no morbid dread of undefined evil, no melancholy to dye the days black; for melancholy is more often an affliction of the very strong in body or mind than of the weak, or of average men and women. Marcello was delicate, but not degenerate; he seemed gentle, cheerful, and ready to believe the world a very good place, as indeed it is for people who are not too unlike their neighbours to enjoy it, or too unlucky to get some of its good things, or too weak to work, fight, and love, ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford
... there exists an unsupported mother or a suffering child; so long as we rely on hospitals and prisons, penitentiaries and the police, to minister to the correction and regeneration of the unfit and degenerate; so long as we tolerate grafting politicians and deprive the poor of breathing spaces, sanitary appliances, and a hygienic environment; so long as war and pestilence deprive posterity of the best of the race for parenthood; so long as ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... of the "manifest destiny" type seem to imagine oar country necessary to the designs of Providence. So thought the Hebrews, and on far more plausible grounds, of their commonwealth; but, rather than fulfil to such degenerate descendants the promise made to their great ancestor, "God is able," said the divine Teacher. "of these stones to ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... his less known, but remarkable, story "Moll Flanders," picaresque as it is and depicting the life of a female criminal, has yet considerable character study and gets no small part of its appeal for a present-day reader from the minute description of the fall and final reform of the degenerate woman. It is comparatively crude in characterization, but psychological value is not entirely lacking. However, with Richardson it is almost all. It was of the nature of his genius to make psychology paramount: just there is found his modernity. Defoe and ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... made the instructor will proceed to the exercises at will, by which is meant assaults between two men, each endeavoring to hit the other and to avoid being hit himself. Fencing at will should not be allowed to degenerate into ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... are on a wrong tack there. There is nothing weak-minded or degenerate about Miss Howard. She is an excellent specimen of well-balanced English beef and brawn. She is ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... most part, figured. Foreign trees, though locally established, are not figured. Trees may be occasionally spontaneous over a large area without really forming a constituent part of the flora. Even the apple and pear, when originating spontaneously and growing without cultivation, quickly become degenerate and show little tendency to possess themselves of the soil at the expense of the native growths. Gleditsia, for example, while clearly locally established, has with some hesitation been accorded ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... and it ended with "yours truly." "—Yours truly—mine truly—and how kind to write at all!" Now it so happened that Vaudemont, having never merged the art of the penman into that rapid scrawl into which people, who are compelled to write hurriedly and constantly, degenerate, wrote a remarkably good hand,—bold, clear, symmetrical—almost too good a hand for one who was not to make money by caligraphy. And after Fanny had got the words by heart, she stole gently to a cupboard and took forth some specimens ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 5 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the Doge and Senate, which lost nothing in its recital before that august body. At the close a few senators called out, "Let us fight": but the spirit of the Dorias flickered away with these protests; and the degenerate scions of mighty sires submitted to the insults of an aide-de-camp and the dictation ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... cases, however, there is some danger lest the beauty and appropriateness of the conception should entice us to receive it on insufficient evidence. The fact that some plants in certain adverse circumstances tend to degenerate, and in certain favourable circumstances to attain a higher type, is well known in natural history; but it seems questionable whether these changes ever take place to such an extent, and in such a uniform ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... so-called classical art, historical, genre and landscape painting, all showing the same conventional black grease. The works reeked of uniform mediocrity, they were characterised by a muddy dinginess of tone, despite their primness—the primness of impoverished, degenerate blood. And the friends quickened their steps: they ran to escape from that reign of bitumen, condemning everything in one lump with their superb sectarian injustice, repeating that there was nothing in the place worth looking at—nothing, ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... virtue, deeper in knowledge, more strictly temperate, exercise a greater degree of brotherly kindness and godliness, and enjoy more of heaven's pure love in our hearts. Neglect the proper Scriptural culture of the spiritual life and the Christian will degenerate into a few irksome duties of cold formality. By the writers of the New Testament we are urgently exhorted, yea, commanded, to attend to certain duties necessary to keep us in the love of God. Of these especially important are reading the Scripture, prayer, fasting, ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... black eyes looked surly and wrathful, and one versed in children's grievances could easily see what the matter was,—she was turning a sheet! Perhaps, happy young female reader, you don't know what that is,—most likely not; for in these degenerate days the strait and narrow ways of self-denial, formerly thought so wholesome for little feet, are quite grass-grown with neglect. Childhood nowadays is unceasingly feted and caressed, the principal difficulty of the grown people seeming to ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... A bully, a degenerate, a thug of the city, a brigand of the country, a horse thief of the western plains, attacks a weaker and unprepared victim. A man with red blood in his veins sees the assault, and attacks the attacker with strength enough to save the victim, arrest the disturber of the peace, ...
— The Spirit of Lafayette • James Mott Hallowell
... republic has given us more to apprehend from what they call their virtues than we had to dread from the vices of other men. Avowedly and systematically, they have given the upperhand to all the vicious and degenerate part of human nature. It is from their lapses and deviations from their principle that alone we ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... suspect that we are some of those that degenerate from the Institutions of our Founder; we are strict Observers ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... two sides of a question is usually a virtue, but it may degenerate into a vice. Thus, a visitor found his bachelor friend glumly studying an evening waistcoat. When inquiry was ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... snows, the vaudeville resorts, whose highest priced "talent" is some voluptuous female, who has cultivated the art of draping nudity with suggestiveness and singing immoral songs, all tend to give youth a false impression of the reality of life and to make the path of the degenerate easy and profitable. The rich are growing richer, and their children are pampered and overfed and underrestrained. Time hangs heavily on their hands and their only mental effort is to devise new methods and new ways of satisfying the lust of liberty ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... very brave man himself, said now in great anger: The more base and degenerate in you to take such means for her as you have done, and leave her on such slight conditions.' Then turning to Valentine, he said: 'I do applaud your spirit Valentine, and think you worthy of an empress's love. You shall have Silvia, for you have well ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... the enormous weight could raise; Such men as live in these degenerate days. Iliad, Bk. V. HOMER. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... possible, still more essentially requisite; there being nothing eminent, in that case, to compensate for the want of them, or preserve the person from our severest hatred, as well as contempt. A high ambition, an elevated courage, is apt, says Cicero, in less perfect characters, to degenerate into a turbulent ferocity. The more social and softer virtues are there chiefly to be regarded. These are always good and amiable [Cic. de Officiis, ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... modes of honorable warfare, supplying the place of a conquering force by attempts to disorganize our political society, to dismember our confederated Republic. Happily, like others, these will recoil on the authors; but they mark the degenerate counsels from which they emanate, and if they did not belong to a series of unexampled inconsistencies might excite the greater wonder as proceeding from a Government which founded the very war in which it has been so long engaged on a charge against the disorganizing ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 1: James Madison • Edited by James D. Richardson
... was strong within them. True, the assignable lands in Japan continued to grow smaller, but what reason was there for stifling the reproductive instincts of a vigorous people in a great unused world half populated by a degenerate humanity? ...
— In the Clutch of the War-God • Milo Hastings
... These names are used in Binh-Thuan to make a distinction, but Banis and Kaphirs alike are all Chams.... In Cambodia all Chams are Mussulmans." (E. Aymonier, Les Tchames, p. 26.) The religion of the pagan Chams of Binh-Thuan is degenerate Brahmanism with three chief gods, Po-Nagar, Po-Rome, and Po-Klong-Garai. (Ibid., p. 35.)—H.C.] The books of their former religion they say (according to Dr. Bastian) that they received from Ceylon, but they were converted to Islamism by no ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... too full of repose, and the Ottoman race has become too degenerate through indulgence, to exhibit many striking specimens of physical beauty. The face is generally fine, but the body is apt to be lank, and with imperfect muscular development. The best forms I saw in the baths were those ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... John Ryder's outward appearance to justify Lombroso's sensational description of him: "A social and physiological freak, a degenerate and a prodigy of turpitude who, in the pursuit of money, crushes with the insensibility of a steel machine everyone who stands in his way." On the contrary, Ryder, outwardly at least, was a prepossessing-looking man. His ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... to refer to both men in a future chapter, when I shall examine the degenerate growths of metaphysical eroticism; for the ardour of their souls was frequently kindled by sexual imaginings; in the case of emotional mystics it is often difficult to distinguish between sensual conceptions and the pure love of God (a fact which does not, however, justify the superficial opinion ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... involuntary explorer two planet years ago! The beast things which had lived in the dark of the desert world the Terrans' wandering galactic derelict had landed upon. Yes, the beast things whose nature they had never been able to deduce. Were they the degenerate dregs of a once intelligent species? Or were they animals, akin to man, but ...
— The Defiant Agents • Andre Alice Norton
... myself as comfortable as I could in his house, and to enjoy myself thoroughly in it for the next fortnight to come, at the very least. It may have been that, in considering my faults as those of the degenerate age in which I lived—which age, however, be it known, lived afterwards to recover its character, and to be held up as a model of propriety and virtue to the succeeding generation—the merciful doctor was willing to merge my ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... sorrow exhibit for children who have not. Reading him again, however, last night, after the long interval of fever and unrest which the war has enforced, I found his pessimism troublesome. Sussex, so far as I know it, is not so degenerate as he seems to have found it; and surely since the war began he must have changed his mind. It is hard to remember 1898, or 1913 for that matter, but I happen to know that Sussex emptied itself of its young manhood, and voluntarily, because I went to live there ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... has gained in condensation and copiousness)—I read with sedulous accuracy the Minnesinger (or singers of love, the Provencal poets of the Swabian court) and the metrical romances; and then laboured through sufficient specimens of the master singers, their degenerate successors; not however without occasional pleasure from the rude, yet interesting strains of Hans Sachs, the cobbler of Nuremberg. Of this man's genius five folio volumes with double columns are extant in print, and nearly an equal number in manuscript; ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... air and exercise! What did my grandmother do? Why, she did all her own work, and made grandfather's ruffled shirts besides, with the finest stitching and gathers; and she found exercise enough, I warrant you. Women of this day are miserable, sickly, degenerate creatures." ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... Englishman. Shall that victorious hand be feebled heere, That in your Chambers gaue you chasticement? No: know the gallant Monarch is in Armes, And like an Eagle, o're his ayerie towres, To sowsse annoyance that comes neere his Nest; And you degenerate, you ingrate Reuolts, You bloudy Nero's, ripping vp the wombe Of your deere Mother-England: blush for shame: For your owne Ladies, and pale-visag'd Maides, Like Amazons, come tripping after drummes: Their thimbles into armed Gantlets change, Their Needl's to Lances, and their gentle hearts ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... capable of making temporary as of registering irrevocable decisions. And though Locke admits that monarchy, from its likeness to the family, is the most primitive type of government, he denies Hobbes' assertion that it is the best. It seems, in his view, always to degenerate into the hands of lesser men who betray the contract they were appointed to observe. Nor is oligarchy much better off since it emphasizes the interest of a group against the superior interest of the community as ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... senses muffle Common Sense! And more and more with pleasing objects strive To dull his judgment and pervert his will To their behests: who, were he not so wrapp'd I'the dusky clouds of their dark policies, Would never suffer right to suffer wrong. Fie, Lingua, wilt thou now degenerate? Art not a woman? dost not love revenge? Delightful speeches, sweet persuasions, I have this long time us'd to get my right. My right—that is, to make the senses six; And have both name and power with the rest. Oft have I season'd savoury ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... grow out of her little heretic prejudices, and learn to love her mother's staunch friends, the champions of Holy Church, and the representatives of true knighthood in these degenerate days. Ah, child! couldst thou but see a true Spanish caballero, or again, could I but show thee my noble cousin of Guise, then wouldst thou know how to rate these gross clownish English mastiffs who now turn thy silly little brain. Ah, that thou ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... had passed and repassed before the window—Sorenson's figure, of course. Brute, coward, degenerate he was, and to be dealt with as such. Not only as such, indeed, but as a wretch who had dared to touch Janet Hosmer against her will, to drag her from her home to this lonely spot by violence for ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... almost uneatable, and at times so plentiful and easily caught that the blackfellows scarcely trouble to get them, which is rarely the case elsewhere. The Australian native is a man with an unknown history whether he is an improvement on his remote ancestors or a degenerate descendant it is impossible ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... refuge in the bosom of the grave; he will voluntarily return to his ancestors whom he has worshipped as gods. In the late war between China and Japan, in which China was vanquished, some of her generals committed suicide. It presents, alas, a degenerate side of human nature. It is most pathetic. Better far to live under the smart of defeat and bear its shame, carry the cross, endure the stings of conscience, and meet the frowns of the world, than flee from the path ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... Philosophy as his mistress in The Fisher, and in a case where he is in fact judge as well as party, has no difficulty in getting his claim established. He is for ever reminding us that he loves philosophy and only satirizes the degenerate philosophers of his day. But it will occur to us after reading him through that he has dissembled his love, then, very well. There is not a passage from beginning to end of his works that indicates any real comprehension of any philosophic system. ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... Her brother Charles—a degenerate, pettifogging barrister, with all his father's faults and none of his grandfather's virtues—for whom Mary had advanced money so that he could go to college, came to her in her dire extremity and proffered help. But it was on ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... [Occonestoga, the degenerate son of the Yemassee chief Sanutee, has been condemned, for befriending the whites, to a fate worse than death. The totem of his tribe, an arrow branded upon the shoulder, is to be cut and burnt out by the executioner, Malatchie, and he is to be declared accursed from his tribe ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... of war and self-defence developed a Roman populace more fierce and savage and degenerate, while the growing importance of their pope beyond the city's walls brought wealth and splendor to his office. The result was that some very unsaintly popes were elected amid unseemly squabbles. The conditions surrounding the high office became so bad that they were felt as a disgrace ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... ill-conduct of subjects, but of the ill-conduct of officials. The 91st article of his code puts the matter thus plainly, even as regarded the Shogunate: "When punishments and executions abound in the Empire, it is a proof that the military ruler is without virtue and degenerate." He devised particular enactments to protect the peasantry and the poor from the cruelty or the rapacity of powerful lords. The great daimyo were strictly forbidden, when making their obligatory journeys to Yedo, "to disturb ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... were figures whose white bodies glowed red in its reflected light as they floated on black wings high above; the light of those hidden fires blazed and died intermittently. There death was waiting, while these demons—these degenerate half-men, living products of a dying race—whipped the air in a frenzy of expectation as they darted above those chasms that were like rifts in the ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... the gems of India's gaudy zone, And plunder piled from kingdoms not their own, Degenerate trade! thy minions could despise Thy heart-born anguish of a thousand cries: Could lock, with impious hands, their teeming store, While famish'd nations died along the shore; Could mock the groans of fellow men, and bear The curse of kingdoms, peopled with despair; Could stamp disgrace on man's polluted ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... of to-day is the degenerate son of the conquering warriors of a thousand years ago. Once his name carried terror to the shores of the Midland Sea. Now those who do not like him can say with some truth that he lives the life of an animal, mating rather than marrying, his warlike ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... always prided herself on her good constitution, and despised doctors and dentists as people who pandered to the fads and fancies of a degenerate generation—a generation who, according to her creed, weakened their backs and ruined their health by lounging on sofas and easy chairs, while, for her part, though seventy years of age, she was thankful ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 355, October 16, 1886 • Various
... bound to protest in favour of the English press against the assertions of those who would judge the opinions of a great liberal nation by the wretched specimens which are under our eyes. Heaven be praised. The civilized world is not so degenerate that the ignoble conduct of Prussia fails to elicit universal reprobation." We have had two more pigeons, but Gambetta either cannot or will not let us know anything of importance. These two messengers confirm the news of the "victory of Orleans," and inform us that public ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... heavenly origin by its amazing adaptation to man's nature, and by its almighty tendency to promote his improvement and perfection; by the light, the life, the blessedness it gives; by the love it kindles; by the glorious transformations which it effects in depraved individuals and degenerate communities; by the peace, the hope, the joy it inspires; and by the courage and strength it imparts both in life ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... eighth century, but one whose sentiments indicate a Saxon origin, thus laments the degenerate ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... seven figures. Another, more striking still, also mentioned by Dr. Clarapede in his paper on the learned horses, is that of a man blind from birth, an inmate of the lunatic-asylum, at Armentieres. This blind man, whose name is Fleury, a degenerate and nearly an idiot, can calculate in one minute and fifteen seconds the number of seconds in thirty-nine years, three months and twelve days, not forgetting the leap-years. They explain to him what a square root is, without telling him the conventional method ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... the stage from the outside, in the light of prejudice and misrepresentation, believe the calling of the actor to be one morally dangerous and intellectually contemptible; one in which it is equally easy to succeed as an artist and degenerate as an individual. She begins by telling me that she has a "fancy for the stage," and has "heard a great many things about it." Now, for any man or woman to become an actor or actress because they have a "fancy for ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... now, because our life is narrower and more monotonous. I know, talking so much over our work, we have terrible temptations to gossip; but I can't bear to think that we should ever lower our standard, ever degenerate into the feeble girlishness we abhor. We never used to talk about young men, Nan, except Dick; and that did not matter. Of course we liked them in their places, and had plenty of fun, and tormented them a little; but you never made such a speech ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... of the universe, which, according to our original intention, has now been brought down to the creation of man. Completeness seems to require that something should be briefly said about other animals: first of women, who are probably degenerate and cowardly men. And when they degenerated, the gods implanted in men the desire of union with them, creating in man one animate substance and in woman another in the following manner:—The outlet for liquids they connected with ...
— Timaeus • Plato
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