"Decadence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and undignified petulance, furnishes a pitiful proof of the intellectual and moral decadence of a once great name;" i.e., The same oration seen from the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, May 17, 1890. • Various
... demand thus created and encouraged should last indefinitely could not be expected: that the demand itself should lead to overproduction and glut was certain. But, as we shall see, there was no sudden decadence; the period even of best or nearly best production went on with no important intermission; and was but yesterday still represented by two great names, is still represented by one, among the older writers, by more than one or two ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... other Nueva Vizcaya towns we had seen or were to see, shows signs of decadence. It has a good church and convento, a great plaza, and is surrounded by a fertile country, but something is missing. After dinner, I went over and called on the padre, one of the Belgians, whom we had met the ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... out into a sword. But when man found that the red ocher he had hitherto used only as a cosmetic could be made to yield iron by melting it with charcoal he opened a new era in civilization, though doubtless the ocher artists of that day denounced him as a utilitarian and deplored the decadence of ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... blood and their other barbarous passions were constantly fired to the highest pitch of frenzy. Since that time their number has decreased to less than one half, and their systematic organizations have fallen into decay; in fact they have been utterly demoralized as a people. This sudden decadence was brought on by two causes: 1. About ten years ago the Americans crossed the line and established themselves on Pelly River, where they carried on to an extraordinary extent the illicit traffic in intoxicating ...
— The Treaties of Canada with The Indians of Manitoba - and the North-West Territories • Alexander Morris
... the country to which he felt the greatest attachment. He remembered his long travels in Germany, he remembered on his return his growing disapproval of English slackness, her physical and moral decadence. Her faults had inspired him not with the sorrow of one of her real sons, but with the contempt of one only half bound to her by natural ties. The ground had been laid ready for the poison. He had started honestly enough. His philosophy had satisfied himself. He had felt no moral degradation ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... flight, it rose aloft and soared towards heaven, but alas! its wings, like those of Icarus, melted in the sun and it fell to earth again. Instead of wax it needed the strong "eagle pinions of faith" which revelation only can supply. The decadence is strongly marked both in the Epicurean and Stoic schools. They both express the feeling of exhaustion, disappointment, and despair. The popular theology had lost its hold upon the public mind. The gods no longer visited the earth. "The ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... Montesquieu (Considerations sur la Grandeur et La Decadence des Romains, c. 17) supposes, on the authority of Orosius and Eusebius, that, on this occasion, the empire, for the first time, was really divided into two parts. It is difficult, however, to discover in what respect the plan of Galerius ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... thereof, he being unmarried and having no children who would mourn his loss. But Charles was poor rather than vindictive at this period, and preferring to adopt the other course, turned a deaf ear to the petitioners. This was probably one of the earliest factors in the decadence of literature as a pastime for men of ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... Russia, with the rest of Christendom, has advanced; her faults grew with her strength, but did not die with her decay. It will not be sufficient for her merely to regain her former power; she must overtake Christendom in the progress made during her decadence. Her spirit of vitality is not yet extinct; it wants guidance and development to strengthen and elevate it. There is still hope of reforming the Turkish empire without that baptism of blood which many have urged and are still urging. Indeed, Lord ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... or withdrawal from daily duties, or decadence of mental powers, or physical disability, he made up his mind that he was about to die. Closing his telescopes, putting his achromatic glasses in their several grooves, locking the doors of his laboratories, destroying the papers he deemed useless, ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... money, and a nation which has grown tired of the responsibilities of empire, and careless of the acquisitions of its past and of its greatness in the future, would indeed have entered into a period of inevitable decadence. Happily we have not yet come to this. I believe the overwhelming majority of the people of these islands are convinced that an England reduced to the limits which the Manchester school would assign to it would be an England shorn of the chief elements of its dignity in the world, and ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... trick." (The italics and small caps are the author's, and we hope they assist the reader's comprehension.) Of Sir Lionel, the model old gentleman, we are told that "the simple ideal of the middle age, apart from its anarchy and decadence, in him most truly seemed to live again, when the ties which knit men together were of heroic cast. The first-born colors of pristine faith and truth engraven on the common soul of man, and blent into the wide arch of brotherhood, where the primaeval ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... have been omitted on the ground that as regards the general character of their writings they belong rather to the Augustan period than to the subsequent age of decadence. Manilius indeed composed a considerable portion of his work during the lifetime of Augustus, while Phaedrus, though somewhat later in date, showed a sobriety of thought and an antique simplicity of style that place ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... first chapter of Cope in "Religious Education in the Family," the following is quoted: "The ills of the modern home are symptomatic. Divorce, childless families, irreverent children, and a decadence of the old type of separate home life are signs of forgotten ideals, lost motives, and insufficient purposes. When the home is only an opportunity for self-indulgence, it easily becomes a cheap boarding house, a sleeping shelf, an implement for social advantage. ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... Greek intellect, and, notwithstanding an occasional Mummius, preserved all that was of the highest value in Greek civilization, better perhaps than it would have been preserved by the tyrants and condottieri of the Greek decadence. As to a Semitic Empire, whether in the hands of Syrians or Carthaginians, with their low Semitic craft, their Moloch-worships and their crucifixions,—the very thought fills us with horror. It would have been a world-wide tyranny of the strong ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... remained to loot and rule. Subjugating them had been easy; the Space Vikings had taken Aditya and made it their home. For several centuries, there had been communication between them and their home planet. Then Morglay had become involved in one of the interplanetary dynastic wars that had begun the decadence of the Space Vikings, and again Aditya dropped out ...
— A Slave is a Slave • Henry Beam Piper
... opportunity to examine; and among these I have paid special attention to the American varieties, of which I find here several singular examples. The two most remarkable are a young man who presents all the characteristics of a period of national decadence; reminding me strongly of some diminutive Hellenised Roman of the third century. He is an illustration of the period of culture in which the faculty of appreciation has obtained such a preponderance over that ...
— A Bundle of Letters • Henry James
... these noble souls died that their country might be free? the name of her people great? In the former they lost, as the ends for which they fought and died were never consummated. To-day, after nearly a half century has passed, when we look around among the young and see the decadence of chivalry and noble aspirations, the decline of homage to women, want of integrity to men, want of truth and honor, individually and politically, are we not inclined, at times, to think those men died in vain? We gained the shadow; have we the substance? We gained an unparalleled prestige ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... granted that any popular idea which runs the gamut of the idealistic lecture-halls and pulpits of a modern democracy is false through and through. Among such false ideas is the almost universal one that what is called the decadence of a nation is a sign of something regrettable and deplorable. On the contrary, it is a sign of something admirable and excellent. Such "weakness," in a deeper than a popular sense, is "strength"; ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... the conventional writer of adventures, though he held his ground up to or even beyond the middle of the century, was in a state of incurable decadence. He was losing the confidence of the general reader, who had picked up some precise notions regarding appropriate scenery, language, and costume in sundry periods and divers places, from China to Peru; and he was persecuted by that mortal foe of the old romancer, the well-informed critic, who ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... hand, and it occupies with its garden the whole space between the market-place and Church Square. But though the house enjoys the privilege of a large garden,—so large that the land being in the middle of a town would be of great value were it not that Dillsborough is in its decadence,—still it stands flush up to the street upon which the front door opens. It has an imposing flight of stone steps guarded by iron rails leading up to it, and on each side of the door there is a row of three windows, and on ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... dimmer—how can the two diminutive circular panes carried before the eyes produce any other effect? Besides, their sight as a rule is good when they are young, and as they progress in life they are not conscious of decadence in it; from infancy to old age the world looks, they imagine, the same; the grass as green, the sky as blue as ever, and the scarlet verbenas in the grass just as scarlet. The man lives in his sight; it is his life; he speaks of the loss of it as ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... makes Gorgiko Brown, the gypsy man, leave his tent and his old wife, of an evening, and thrust himself into society which could well dispense with him. "Brother," said Mr. Petulengro the other day to the Romany Rye, after telling him many things connected with the decadence of gypsyism, "there is one Gorgiko Brown, who, with a face as black as a teakettle, wishes to be mistaken for a Christian tradesman; he goes into the parlour of a third-rate inn of an evening, calls for rum and water, and attempts to enter into conversation with ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... away a decade or two of years in dissipation and excess, and ever hope to make up their losses by rigid surveillance in later years." "The sins of youth are expiated in age," is a proverb which daily examples illustrate. In proportion as puberty is precocious, will decadence be premature; the excesses of middle life draw heavily on the fortune of later years. "The mill of the gods grinds slow, but it grinds exceedingly fine," and though nature may be a tardy creditor, she is found at last to be ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... to observe, during my permission, the new France which has come into being since the outbreak of the war, and the attitude of the French toward their allies. I knew the old France pretty well. Putting any ridiculous ideas of French decadence aside, the France of the last ten years did not have the international standing of an older France. The Delcasse incident had revealed a France evidently untaught by the lesson of 1870, and if the Moroccan question ended in a French victory, it was frankly won by getting ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... all others; at last it becomes clear to you. But you are dying, and it is too late for wisdom to come to the Jivros. Once you set your feet on the path to greatness; but when you did evil, your feet naturally turned to the downward path of decadence. Evil is not a way of life, it ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... scath[obs3]; perversion, prostitution, vitiation, discoloration, oxidation, pollution, defoedation|, poisoning, venenation|, leaven, contamination, canker, corruption, adulteration, alloy. decline, declension, declination; decadence, decadency[obs3]; falling off &c. v.; caducity[obs3], decrepitude. decay, dilapidation, ravages of time, wear and tear; corrosion, erosion; moldiness, rottenness; moth and rust, dry rot, blight, marasmus[obs3], atrophy, collapse; disorganization; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... to know and to love a whole school. The two brothers, Stephen and Oliver Greenfield, and Wraysford, and Pembury, and Loman stand out with strong personality and distinctness; and especially admirable is the art with which is depicted the gradual decadence of character in Loman, step by step, entangled in a maze of lies, and degraded by vice until self-respect ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... resided for two years at Port-au-Prince, the capital. "Unless you are compelled to land there," said he, "I advise you to avoid Hayti." He fully confirmed the reports of its barbarous condition, and declared it to be in a rapid decadence, as regarded every desirable element of civilization. In the country, a short distance from either Gonaives, Jacmel, or Port-au-Prince, where the mass of the negro population live, Voudou worship and cannibalism are quite common ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... black or African race, since the decadence and destruction of the cities of North Africa and the Nile Delta and the loss of prestige of the peoples who held sway in them, has been shrouded and obscured, and hence gratuitous arguments are made in regard to the ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... very much at home here in Memphis," he observed, when the old man had expressed his surprise at the decadence and melancholy ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... counted; and Mr. Curtenty gazed at him in reproach, for that he, a Town Councillor, had thus mathematically demonstrated the commercial decadence ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... could be found in Rome or Alexandria. The books were arranged according to subjects. The room had a 'ladies' side'; and here were arranged the devotional works. The illuminated volumes, as far as can now be judged, were rather gaudy than brilliant, as was natural in an age of decadence; but St. Germanus was a friend of the Bishop, and as we suppose of the Prefect, and his copy of the Gospels was in gold and silver letters on purple vellum, as may still be seen. By the gentlemen's seats were ranged the usual classical volumes, all the ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... Because there is not room and food in the world at any one time for more than a certain relatively small number of gigantic species. Each great group of animals has had successively its rise, its zenith, its decadence, and its dotage; each at the period of its highest development has produced a considerable number of colossal forms; each has been supplanted in due time by higher groups of totally different structure, ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... lapse from candour, in the conversation of a person who had raised delicate kindness to an art and whose pride was too high for the narrow ways of deception. Her conception of human motives might, in certain lights, have been acquired at the court of some kingdom in decadence, and there were several in her list of which our heroine had not even heard. She had not heard of everything, that was very plain; and there were evidently things in the world of which it was not advantageous to hear. She had once or twice had a positive scare; since it so affected ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... not slow in perceiving the weakness and decadence of the Portuguese power in Asia. They felt with how much ease a clever and prudent nation might in a short time become possessed of the whole commerce of the extreme East. After a considerable number of private ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... own. These races of people have all achieved a certain success, and have then passed entirely out of existence. Why? And are we destined to extinction in the same way? We know that the cause of the decline and ultimate extinction of all past civilizations was due primarily to the moral decadence of their people. Disease and vice gradually sapped their vitality, and their continuance was impossible. [xx] It would seem to be the destiny of a race to achieve material prosperity at the expense of its morality. ...
— 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.
... speculate upon a Trans-Neptunian planet, and Lowell did try to have accepted heretical ideas as to marks on Mars, attention is now minutely focused upon such technicalities as variations in shades of Jupiter's fourth satellite. I think that, in general acceptance, over-refinement indicates decadence. ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... aspects it had become an immense corporation with strong vested interests. Kings found it necessary to fight it; religious reformers had to rise up and overcome every form of repression used against them. The decadence is exemplified incidentally in the increasing poverty in material and expression of the monastic chronicles, which practically died out by 1485. The period of turmoil and change was yet ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson
... deliver the address to the graduating class. This was Emerson's second opportunity to apply his beliefs directly to society. A few lines out of the famous address are enough to show that he saw in the church of his day signs of the same decadence that he saw in the letters: "The prayers and even the dogmas of our church are like the zodiac of Denderah and the astronomical monuments of the Hindoos, wholly insulated from anything now extant in the life and business of the people. They ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... exclusively a glorifier of mutinous emotion and the apologist of lawless love, must have been taken aback by these pages, in which she had devoted her most fervent energies to tracing the spiritual history, peu recreatif, as she dryly observes, of a monk who, in the days of the decadence of the monastic orders, retained earnestness and sincerity; whose mind, revolted by the hypocrisy and worldliness around him, passes through the successive stages of heresy and philosophic doubt, and to whom is finally revealed an eternal gospel, which lies ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... their art has escaped our eyes filled as they are with the marvellous work of Greece, unknown till our own time, the splendid and joyful work of the Renaissance, the mysterious and lovely work of our own day: it remains, nevertheless, a consummate and exquisite art in its dawn, in its noon, in its decadence, but it seeks to express something we have forgotten, and its secret is for the most part altogether hidden from us. It is from this art, as beautiful in its expression of itself as that of Greece, that Niccolo Pisano turns away, not to Nature, but to Antiquity. The movement which ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... victim of every possible superstition. I am always wondering why I have never been taken in by that." He was once sitting at dinner by the celebrated Lady E—— of T——, who was indulging in a long lament over the social decadence of the rising male generation. "When I was a girl," she said, "all the young men in London were at my feet." "My dear lady," said Lord Houghton, "were all the young men of your generation chiropodists?" Mr. C. Milnes Gaskell of Thornes told me of a perplexing situation ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... brooked the dictation, of none; when his existence was a round of joysome light-heartedness, and he, a stranger to constraint—this habitation of the Indian, to my mind, emphasizes his melancholy, and, perhaps, inevitable decadence, rather than symbolizes his partnership with the white in the more palpable pursuits of a practical, enlightened, and energetic age, or co-activity with him on a theatre of enlarged and more vigorous action. It is in some respects more comfortless than even was his experience under his primitive ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... in the brief paragraph just quoted, is he really unaware of the nature of this mildew? Is he to be told that it is one of the many classes of fungus, of which the most ordinary feature is its upspringing and decadence within twenty-four hours? ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... when people are young they can put up with small means, because they are strong enough to work hard and help each other; indeed, the demand for little work and many luxuries in youth is not a healthy one, it is a sign of decadence in ...
— Conception Control and Its Effects on the Individual and the Nation • Florence E. Barrett
... For the others, it often spells liberty and interest and heightened consciousness of self for some years; but the time comes when outraged Nature exacts her vengeance, when middle age abbreviates the youth that was really misspent, and is itself as prematurely followed by a period of decadence grateful neither to its victim nor to anyone else. Meanwhile the women who have chosen to be and to remain women realize the promise of Wordsworth to the girl who preferred walks in the country to ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... all. We shall only view it in its real perspective when we recognise the spiritual impulses which direct it, and the strange spiritual efficacy that is in it to burn out the deep-fibred cancer of doubt and decadence which has long threatened civilisation with a slow corrupt death. Seventy-five years ago Mrs. Browning, writing on The Greek Christian Poets, used a striking sentence to which the condition of human thought to-day lends a new emphasis. ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... the Fine Arts, in his address to the students made pointed allusion to the difference of results between the instrumental classes and those for singing. Said the orator: "It is claimed that singing is in a state of decadence, and that the cause is largely due to the style of modern music. It is rather owing to the fact that this art is not studied at present with the same methodic diligence that formerly obtained. I would remind the students of singing ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... came from within. It was decadence. There was nothing left for the beings to do. They had solved all their problems and could find no new ones. They had exhausted the intricate workings of reflection, academic hypothetica and mind-play; there hadn't been a new game, for instance, in ...
— The Inhabited • Richard Wilson
... over!" she said—"How tired I am of that phrase! She knows as well as anybody that Roxmouth, for all his airs of aristocratic propriety, is a social villain of the lowest type of modern decadence, yet she would rather see me married to him than to any other man she has ever met. And why? Simply because he will be a Duke! She would like to say to all her acquaintances—'My niece is a Duchess.' She would feel a certain fantastic satisfaction ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... almost impossible. The result is a continuous drain of women out of agriculture—of the very women best fitted in the beginning to be the helpmate of the farmer. In no other calling is the assistance of the wife so valuable; it is not too much to say that part at least of the decadence of agriculture is owing to the lack of women willing to devote themselves as their mothers did before them. It follows that by degrees the farming caste is dying out. The sons go to the city, the daughters go to the city; in a generation, or little more, a once well-known farming ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... to live there;" observed Elizabeth, eyeing uneasily the gloomy rez de-chaussee, familiar to many a generation of struggling respectability, where, in the decadence of the season, every second house bore ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... in the hierarchy. She is the Saint Anne of France, and shows it. "She is no longer," says the official Monograph, "that majestic queen who was seated on a throne, with her feet on the stool of honour; the personages have become less imposing and the heads show the decadence." She is the Virgin of Theology; she has her rights, and no more; but she is not ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... of the time is summarized in Pope; and the easy neatness of his verses is quaintly representative of the Georgian peace. Defoe and Swift had both done their work; and the latter had withdrawn to Ireland to die like a rat in a hole. Bishop Berkeley, indeed, was convinced of the decadence of England; but his Essay towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain (1721) shows rather the effect of the speculative mania which culminated in the South Sea Bubble upon a noble moral nature than ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... its heart is sound if its judgments fall short of acuteness and if its standards of achievement are low. It needs but a quickening spirit upon the throne, always the traditional centre of its respect, to rise from even the appearance of decadence. There is a new quality seeking expression in England like the rising of sap in the spring, a new generation asking only for such leadership and such emancipation from restricted scope and ungenerous hostility as a King alone ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... behave as if all her happiness depended on a pattern, and ended by choosing the one that Maisie liked best. And the furniture went where Maisie thought it should go, because Anne was too tired to care. Besides, she was busy on her farm. Old Sutton in his decadence had let most of his arable land run to waste, and Anne's job was to make good ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... Yet there is rarely to be found in the Church annals an excommunication on the ground of chauvinism or brutal egoism. No one of the world conquerors—neither Napoleon nor Kaiser William—have been excommunicated by the Church. It signifies an extreme decadence of the Church. And this decadence penetrates and dominates our own time. Speaking on the reunion of the Churches the peoples of the East are anxious to know—not whether the Church of the West has preserved the unmixed Christian spirit in its integrity, but whether this Church still keeps Filioque ...
— The Agony of the Church (1917) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... able, and probably it is impossible, to define madness, or to give a clearly marked indication of the boundary line between sanity and insanity. Mental soundness is merged in unsoundness by degrees of decadence which are so small as to be practically inappreciable. It is with the mind-state which precedes the development of recognized form of insanity the therapeutist and the social philosopher are chiefly interested. Although in ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... us, from the prisoner-of-war camps, from the Concentration Camps, from the grave, from the field, and from the womb of the future, to decide wisely and to avoid all measures which may lead to the decadence and extermination of the Africander people, and thus frustrate the objects for which they made all their sacrifices. Hitherto we have not continued the struggle aimlessly. We did not fight merely to be shot. We commenced the struggle, and continued it to this moment, ...
— The Peace Negotiations - Between the Governments of the South African Republic and - the Orange Free State, etc.... • J. D. Kestell
... no more sentimental lamentation over the decadence of chivalry. There is a broad field open to us, for deeds of chivalrous daring, now, upon the battle-field, amid the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... perfect development. The Primaire: the development of the style finding its best example at Paris. The Secondaire: the Perfectionnement at Reims, and its Apogee at Amiens. The Tertiaire: practically the beginning of the decadence, in St. Ouen at Rouen, only a shade removed from the debasement which soon followed. As to the merits or demerits of the contemporary structures of other nations, that also would be obviously of comparative unimportance herein except so far as a comparison might ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... Shirley preserves in the main the great tradition of the Elizabethans. A further step downwards, a more deadly stage in the history of decadence, is marked by Sir William Davenant. That arch-impostor, as is well known, had the effrontery to call himself the "son of Shakespeare": a phrase which the unwary have taken in the physical sense, but which was undoubtedly intended to mark his ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... second." From him "Pride and Prejudice" got a chance of three readings at least. This generous universality of taste, in addition to all his other qualities of humour and poetry, enabled Scott to raise the novel from its decadence, and to make the dry bones of history live again in his tales. With Charles Edward at Holyrood, as Mr. Senior wrote in the "Quarterly Review," "we are in the lofty region of romance. In any other hands than those of Sir Walter Scott, the language and conduct ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... grief endured by the dying Francis over the decadence of the Order would have been less poignant if they had not been mingled with self-reproaches for his own cowardice. Why had he deserted his post, given up the direction of his family, if not from idleness and selfishness? And ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... little, and not wholly for Venice. He was an embodiment of that late time of Venetian culture when its magnificence, its artistic and intellectual development had touched their height, and the hint of decadence shadowed its splendor with a pathos unguessed ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... do with the decline as Savonarola. The Pope in Rome, and Lorenzo in Florence, led art to the verge of paganism; Savonarola would have kept it on the confines of purism; it was divided and fell, passing through the various steps of decadence, the mannerists and the eclectics, to rise again in this nineteenth century with what is after all its true aim, the interpretation of nature, and the illustration of the ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... together of the sociological dicta of to-day. Its range is wide—education, wages, distribution and housing of population, conditions of women, home decadence, tenure of working life and causes of distress, child labor, unemployment, and remedial methods. A capital reading book for the million, a text-book for church and school, and a companion for the economist of the ...
— Making Both Ends Meet • Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt
... brought forth is unquestionably Opera. Three hundred years does not at first seem a very short time, but it is not long when it covers the whole period of the inception, development, and what certainly looks like the decadence, of an important branch of man's artistic industry. The art of painting has taken at least twice as long to develop; yet the three centuries from Monteverde to Debussy cover as great a distance as that which separates Cimabue from Degas. In operatic history, ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... bringing up a more numerous family. A practice which tends to produce such exaggerated notions of what constitutes hardship, which leads men and women to cherish such a degree of ease, makes inevitably for inefficiency, a decline in the capacity to endure and to achieve, and for a general social decadence. ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... sexual selection. The special peculiarity of this group of sensations in man, and that which gives them an importance they would not otherwise possess, is due to the fact that we here witness the decadence of a sense which in man's remote ancestors was the very chiefest avenue of sexual allurement. In man, even the most primitive man,—to some degree even in the apes,—it has declined in importance to give place to the predominance of vision.[85] Yet, at that lower threshold ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... that Neumann had deceived his Government, giving them very different accounts, that it was no use telling them what they might wish to hear, but that he was resolved to tell them the truth, and make them understand how greatly they were deceiving themselves if they counted upon the decadence or want of power of this country; a great deal more of the same sort, which proves that the Austrian Court were all on the qui vive to find out that we are paralysed, and that their political conduct is in fact influenced by their notion of our actual position. They probably ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... fence, looking at his wheat. The hare, busy as he was and seeming to see nothing, had crossed his 'wind.' Hilary came to me, and we walked together along the waggon-track, repassing the wheat. He was full about it: he was always grieving over the decadence of ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... and a cause of the materialistic spirit. Science, which really involves an infinite hope, has been misinterpreted by Socialists in the most foolish way, until we get a miserable languid fatalism, leading to decadence and despair. The essential of progress is Faith, and Faith can only be established by the study ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... gold, cotton, coffee—almost whatever we may ask them—and will continue to do so while held to labor under sufficient restraint; but where are their men, where are their books, where is their learning, their art, their enterprise? I say it with sad regret at the decadence of so vast a population; but I do say that the Southern States of America have not been able to keep pace with their Northern brethren; that they have fallen behind in the race, and, feeling that the struggle is too much for them, ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... unsightly one." He adds that once a handsome book and a new English book were synonymous terms, but that now the production of really fine books is becoming one of England's lost arts. He indulges in a fling at "the efforts of certain recent printers to retrieve this decadence by throwing on to the already overburdened trade several big, heavy, and voluminous works of standard authors termed 'editions de luxe.'" He assures his hearers that his judgments were not formed on the spur of the moment, but were based partly on long personal ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... those who 'arrive,' flowed from him copiously. He was the age indeed for 'arrival,' when, as so often happens, the man of middle life, appeased by success, dismisses the revolts of his youth. But this was still the language—and the fierce language—of revolt! The decadence of English art and artists, the miserable commercialism of the Academy, the absence of any first-rate teaching, of any commanding traditions, of any 'school' worth the name—the vulgarity of the public, from royalty downward, the snobbery of the ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... while in the case of the second, the owner was totally absent for many years, and afterwards only visited his property at long intervals, sufficiently long to enable him NOT to estimate its steady decadence. ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... between the youthful Bacchus and the Venus emerging from the foam, he averred that, when Venus and Bacchus had reached thirty, the point no longer admitted of a doubt; the male form having then attained its greatest nobility, while the female is far gone in decadence; and that, at this epoch, womanly beauty, so far as it is independent of grace or expression, is a ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... settlement. Father Merolla (A.D. 1682) declares that "the women, being bred among blacks, suffer themselves to be much perverted—they scarcely retain anything white about them except their skins." J. C. Feo Cardoso (Memoir published in Paris in 1825) attributes the decadence of Angola and Benguela to three reasons; rare marriages amongst the higher orders; poverty amongst the lower; and the immorality and incontinence of both. Lopes de Lima (p. 149 loc. cit.) traces the decline and fall of Christianity in the eighteenth century to ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... the powerful. The separation of power and riches kept the distribution of the latter more nearly equable. Professor Dill, the author of "Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire," has brought afresh to our mind that one cause of the decadence of the Roman Empire, was the permission given to the nobility to engage in trade, and the consequent monopoly of wealth and power by a minority of the ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... their neighbours. People said that such an example of conjugal felicity was not often seen in those degenerate days, for even then they prated of the golden age of their grandfathers, lamenting their own decadence.... As behoved good Castilians, burdened with such a line of noble ancestors, the fortunate couple conducted themselves with all imaginable gravity. No strange eye was permitted to witness a caress between the lord and his lady, or to hear an expression of endearment; ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... usually in its excellence the sign of culminating strength in the people; while fine sculpture, requiring always submission to severe law, is an unfailing proof of their being in early and active progress. There is no instance of fine sculpture being produced by a nation either torpid, weak, or in decadence. Their drama may gain in grace and wit; but their sculpture, in days of ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... From all sides we hear lamentations about the decadence of art. We are, indeed, far behind the great masters of the Renaissance. The technicalities of art have recently made great progress; thousands of people gifted with a certain amount of talent cultivate every branch, but art seems to fly from civilization! Technicalities make ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... lose our heads over this, any more than over other prophecies of our national decadence. The "Oxford English Dictionary" has not yet unfolded the last of its coils, which yet are ample enough to enfold us in seven words for every three an active man can grapple with. Yet the warning has point, and a particular point, for ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... during the decadence of nations, when it has been hired by wealth as the minister of luxury. Exquisite art and degrading corruption were contemporary in Greece as well as in Rome. Phidias and Iktinos had scarcely completed the Parthenon, when the glory of Athens had departed; ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... amusement of her young neighbours, it need hardly be said that Miss Thorne would be the last to think of it. And yet there was something so charming in the name. A bull-ring, however, without a bull would only be a memento of the decadence of the times, and she felt herself constrained to abandon the idea. Quintains, however, she was determined to have, and had poles and swivels and bags of flour prepared accordingly. She would no doubt have been anxious for something small in the way of a tournament, ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... divinities, and into fiction when it treats of imaginary events. Metrical chronicles, however valuable may be the historical materials they contain, are not to be regarded as history in the true sense of the word. History presupposes change, which may take the form of progress or decadence. Without the element of change, there is nothing to relate beyond the existing state of things. English literature is very rich in historical writing of every kind, and in the century that has just passed, we meet ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... tendency to cultivate acquaintance with the curious and rare, and communicate it to a narrow group of initiated persons, is characteristic of modern times, and that on the whole it is a symptom of decadence, Tolstoy has, I believe, proved. At any rate, the effect of such a tendency in art can not fail to be morally injurious, since life is not represented proportionately. Art has much to do with the vogue ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... The present decadence of Berberah is caused by petty internal feuds. Gerhajis the eldest son of Ishak el Hazrami, seized the mountain ranges of Gulays and Wagar lying about forty miles behind the coast, whilst Awal, the cadet, ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... emotional experience, a feverish ambition to impress a point-of-view. It is all part of a revolt against settled ways and conventional theories. I do not mean that we can expect to find greatness in this direction, for greatness is essentially well-balanced, calm, deliberate, and decadence is a sign of a neurotic and ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... highest class of authors. His frequent orations for the literary societies of Brown University and the University of Michigan, and other occasions, have been marked by scholarly finish and have always been received with approval. During the existence of the Knickerbocker Magazine, before its decadence, he contributed to its pages a series of valuable articles on "Butler's Horae Juridical," and ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... speak or sing the vowel sound ah otherwise than mixed, and only the neglect of this mixture could have brought about the decadence of the Italian teaching of song. In Germany no attention is paid to it. The ah, as sung generally by most Italians of the present day, quite flat, sounds commonplace, almost like an affront. It can range itself, that is connect itself, with no other vowel, makes all vocal connection impossible, ...
— How to Sing - [Meine Gesangskunst] • Lilli Lehmann
... the other. "But this monarchy fell, and every day we compose beautiful dissertations in order to find the cause of its decadence and downfall." ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... the Middle Ages. The issue is sufficient proof of this. For it was falling to pieces, long before the Anglo-Saxon race entered into possession of the territory where it once flourished. The missions are now in a state of decadence, their buildings fast falling into decay; while the red man, disgusted at the attempt to enslave, under the clock of christianising him, has returned to his idolatry, ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... illustration; the Renaissance thus putting forth in France an aftermath, a wonderful later growth, the products of which have to the full that subtle and delicate sweetness which belongs to a refined and comely decadence; just as its earliest phases have the freshness which belongs to all periods of growth in art, the charm of ascesis, of the austere and serious girding of the loins ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... this time, however, was well established in the homes as a breakfast and dinner beverage, and such consumption more than made up for any loss sustained through the gradual decadence of the coffee house. Yet signs of the change in national taste that arrived with the Georges were not wanting; for the active propaganda of the British East India Company was fairly well launched during Queen ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... year, or else suffer in deeper ways than death. The City will do for those younger-souled peoples that have not had their taste of its cruel order and complicating pressures; for the Mediterranean peoples already touched with decadence; for the strong yet simple peasant vitalities of Northern Europe, but the flower of the American entity has already remained too long in ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... Patience) or Robert Hichens (in The Green Carnation) to satirize its distorted attitudinizing. It strained itself to death; it became its own burlesque of the bizarre, an extravaganza of extravagance. "The period" (I am again quoting Holbrook Jackson) "was as certainly a period of decadence as it was a period of renaissance. The decadence was to be seen in a perverse and finicking glorification of the fine arts and mere artistic virtuosity on the one hand, and a militant commercial movement on the other.... The eroticism which became so prevalent in the verse of many of ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... testimony is of over-care, over-work, over-weariness, the abuse of capacities that were bestowed for most sacred uses, an utter waste of most pure and life-giving waters. Its prophecy is of early decline and decadence, forfeiture of position and power, and worst, perhaps, of all, irreparable loss and grievous wrong to the children ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... decadence, decapitate, deciduous, declivity, decompose, decorous, dedicatory, deduction, deferential, deficiency, deglutition, dehiscence, delectable, delete, deleterious, delineate, deliquescent, demarcation, demimonde, demoniac, denizen, denouement, deprecate, depreciate, derelict, derogatory, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... occasionally, at supper in smart restaurants, at first nights, riding in the Park. Now, as he looked at her name, he realized that he had not even seen her for a long time, perhaps for a couple of years. He had heard the rumours of her decadence, and taken little heed of them, not being specially interested in her. Nevertheless, this morning, as he shut up his book and got up to go downstairs to his work, he was aware of a desire to hear the clock strike the half-hour after five, and to see Henry opening the door to show Mrs. Chepstow ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... a long correspondence—the sort of thing we generally get at one season of the year—about the condition of the stage, and a well-known writer who, I believe, combines the function of a dramatic critic with the responsibility of a watch-dog to the Navy, informed his readers that the sad decadence of the British Drama was due to the evils of party government. That is certainly an original idea; but I fancy that if the author were to unfold it to this company, he would be told that he had mistaken the Playgoer's Club for the War Office ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... cher amant, je te jure" in the quavering voice of eighty-five; it would be wonderful to hear her sing it because she doesn't know how wonderful she is; the old light of love requires an interpreter, and she has had many; many great poets have voiced her woe and decadence. ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... objects, though here and there were found more sedentary tribes in villages of bark, encircled by walls of earth, or palisades of wood, whose institutions, commercial spirit, and agriculture, superior to that of the wild rovers, seemed to show the remnant of some more civilized tribe in a state of decadence. Around each isolated tribe lay an unbroken wilderness extending for miles on every side, where the braves roamed, hunters alike of beasts and men. So little intercourse or knowledge of each other existed, ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... waning? The alarmists say it is and point to the increase of divorce, falling off in church attendance, and the unrest among the laboring classes as evidence that there is a decadence. Pleasure is sought, excitement is the goal, and sober, solid duty is "forgotten." They point out a resemblance to the decadent days of Rome, in the rise of luxury and luxurious tastes, and indicate that duty ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... a decadence of crop from soil exhaustion, but that you could prevent by fertilization. The greatest danger from continuously growing these vegetables on the same land is the multiplication of bacteria which injuriously affect them, in the soil. The plants which you mention are all subject ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... the general interest in social amelioration, that is the worst sign of all. "Coming events cast their shadows before," and we may see the shadow of the coming Revolution. Is there any symptom of decadence more sure than when the moral temperature suddenly rises above normal? Watch the clinical charts of Empire. In the period of national vigor the blood is cool. But the time arrives when the period of ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... city will be neglected, tumbled into ruins, buried beneath the silt of the passing centuries. The sun will slowly rise—a giant dull red ball, burning out, cooling. And the Earth will cool. Humans, perhaps, will have passed decadence and reverted to savagery. Perhaps the polar ice-caps will again come down, and ice slowly cover the dying world. All nature will be struggling and dying, with the sun a red ball turning dark ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... the prophet sees but one shoot, and that rising to more than the original height and fruitfulness of the tree. The prophecy is distinctly that of One Person, in whom the Davidic monarchy is concentrated, and all its decadence more than recovered. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... taken to devious practices, or been forced into them; whatever the cause of her present decadence she could not have been always the thief she now confessed herself. I had it from her own lips, she had acknowledged it with some show of remorse. There must surely have been some excuse for her, some overmastering temptation, some extreme pressure exercised irresistibly ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... legislative functions, but it is almost powerless upon opinion—it allays no discontent, and attracts no affection. Political talent, which for many years was at least as abundant among Irishmen as in any equally numerous section of the people, has been steadily declining, and marked decadence in this respect among the representatives of the nation reflects but too truly the absence of public spirit in ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al. |
