"Decadency" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "I showed him the decadence of his country, decadence visible through all her institutions, through her political tendencies, through her young men of all classes. I convinced him that what the country needed was a bitter ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... shrouded in this strange mystery, hovered over by the untiring affection of her children, sweet and tender in her decadence, ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... Changes and the Printing Press.—Architecture, which in England, as upon the Continent, had been the one great art of the Middle Ages, was already, though still instinct with beauty, giving signs in its over-elaboration of approaching decadence. To the tower of Fotheringhay Church (see p. 311) had succeeded the tower of St. Mary's, Taunton. To the roof of the nave of Winchester Cathedral (see p. 276) had succeeded the roof of the Divinity School at Oxford (see p. 319), and ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... is one interesting thing connected with the work of these vocal reformers. From the beginning they have insisted that the art of bel canto is lost. Tosi (1647-1727), Porpora (1686-1766), Mancini (1716-1800), three of the greatest teachers of the old Italian school, all lamented the decadence of the art of singing. Others before and since have done the same thing. It seems that in all times any one who could get the public ear has filled it with this sort of pessimistic wail. From this we draw some interesting conclusions: ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... wild-beast show. It 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 to the Romany Rye, after telling him many things connected with the decadence of gypsyism, "there is one Gorgiko Brown, who, with a face as black as a tea-kettle, wishes to be mistaken for a Christian tradesman; he goes into the parlour of a third-rate inn of an evening, calls for rum ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... custom are invincible in the country regions, where the peasants are left very much to themselves, the town of Issoudun itself has reached a state of complete social stagnation. Obliged to meet the decadence of fortunes by the practice of sordid economy, each family lives to itself. Moreover, society is permanently deprived of that distinction of classes which gives character to manners and customs. There is no opposition of social forces, such as that to which the cities of the Italian ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... including free-trade, the removal of twenty millions of taxation, a cheap press, and an education bill, Mr. Gladstone thus restored himself to the confidence of his constituents, but the ministry did not wholly regain the popularity they once enjoyed. The Gladstone period had passed its zenith and its decadence had ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... among the nature peoples after the white man has visited them and demoralized their family life. But in all these cases the existence of promiscuity is manifestly something exceptional and abnormal. Perhaps civilized peoples such as the Romans of the decadence have more nearly approximated the condition of promiscuity than any savage people of which we have knowledge. At any rate, one must conclude that the lowest existing savages found in the nineteenth century had definite forms of family life, and that ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... reached its zenith in 1853. What more natural than that the army of miners, with the decadence of the California fields, ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... this problem people in all stages of civilization have worked out for themselves some kind of an answer. It was one of the great speculations of the Greeks, and it was at Alexandria, in the period of its decadence, that the Egyptian geographer Ptolemy (138 A.D.) had offered an explanation which was accepted by Christian Europe and which dominated all thinking on the subject during the Middle Ages. He had concluded that the earth was located at the center of the visible universe, immovable, ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... Patriotism cannot be reduced to a mere question of money, and a nation which has grown tired of the responsibilities of empire, and careless of the acquisitions of its past and of its greatness in the future, would indeed have entered into a period of inevitable decadence. Happily we have not yet come to this. I believe the overwhelming majority of the people of these islands are convinced that an England reduced to the limits which the Manchester school would assign to it would be an England shorn of the chief ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... life: 'I am proud and intellectual, but forced by the habits of years to like the base and dishonourable from which I formerly revolted.' Little children have the seeds of all this within them; men and women are born with the inspiration which starts these mysterious and direful changes; the fatal decadence takes ...
— Four Psalms • George Adam Smith
... have been propounded as to the decadence of the church, which has become painfully apparent when great moral issues have been at stake. That the church could stamp out the liquor traffic has often been said, and yet although general conferences and assemblies have met year after ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... this decadence natural selection may in time bring forward better strains, and with normal conditions of security and peace nature may begin ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... government, and claiming for it the prerogatives and supremacy appertaining to the feudal institutions of Asia and Europe. Our simple democratic form of government seems to be getting ashamed of its plebeian origin, and ambitious to ape the language and pretensions of its former masters. This decadence was made apparent not long ago, in the discussions "for the removal of the United States Capitol." In a two-hours' discussion, the word "Republic," or "Federal Government," or "United States," was not once mentioned!! It was "Nation," "Empire," etc., etc., usque ad nauseam, ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... 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. When conditions render possible the fulfilment of every ...
— 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.
... walked by my house daily and I walked by his. It was an interesting study. The conclusion of the process was so inevitable. The time came when he did not pass my house. Then he took the sunlight in a bow-window on the second floor of his residence. So closely had I watched his decadence during the six years that I was able to say to myself one morning, 'There will be crape on his door before the day is out.' And ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... 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 ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... resounding lamentations over the decadence and decline of taste, and slip in eulogies of Messieurs Etienne Jouy, Tissot, Gosse, Duval, Jay, Benjamin Constant, Aignan, Baour-Lormian, Villemain, and the whole Liberal-Bonapartist chorus who patronize Vernou's paper. Next you draw a picture of that glorious ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... American countries, was once the heart of a vast Inca empire and later the colony whose governors ruled the territories of Argentina and Chile to the south, and of Ecuador and Colombia to the north. With the decline of wealth and political influence there has come to Peru a decadence in letters. Lima is still a center of cultivation, a city in which the Castilian language and Spanish customs have been preserved with remarkable fidelity; but its importance is completely eclipsed by such growing commercial centers as Buenos Aires, Montevideo and ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... said to have attained anything like greatness. Another, Joseph, had the sense to give a free hand to an able, if despotic, minister, the Marquis of Pombal. But, on the whole, the history of the Braganza rule was one of steady decadence, until the second half of the nineteenth century found the country one of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... through many introductions that evening; and, in the next fortnight, received ample and daily proofs of the proverbial hospitality of Baltimore. There are residents—praisers of the time gone by, who cease not to lament the convivial decadence of the city; but such deficiency is by no means ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... drift, my Paul, like so many of your countrymen do. You must help to stem the tide of your nation's decadence, and be a strong man. For me, when I read now of England, it seems as if all the hereditary legislators—it is what you call your nobles, eh?—these men have for their motto, like Louis XV., Apres moi le deluge—It will last my time. Paul, wherever I am, it will give me joy for you ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... the signs of social decadence the more patriotic of China's statesmen were not slow to perceive that all attempts at reform in education, army, and laws must prove abortive if opium were allowed to sap the vigour of the nation. "You can't carve a piece of rotten wood," says Confucius. Every scheme ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... purpose to maintain the national honor and to promote the happiness and prosperity of all our people, and this brief exhibit of the growth and prosperity of the country will give us a level from which to note the increase or decadence that new legislative policies may bring to us. There is no reason why the national influence, power, and prosperity should not observe the same rates of increase that have characterized the past thirty years. We carry the great impulse and increase of these years into the future. There is ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... a barbarian religion stricken with moral decadence were in vain. On the very spot on which the last taurobolia took place at the end of the fourth century, in the Phrygianum, stands to-day the ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... which this crop of pseudo-democracies ripened for the sickle of the great Revolution, seems to the modern view nothing but a dreary interregnum of nondescript, faineant government intervening between the decadence of virile monarchy in the eighteenth century and the rise of positive democracy in the twentieth. The period may be compared to that of the minority of a king, during which the royal power is abused by wicked stewards. ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... are still occasionally to be found in booksellers' catalogues at a high price, though the American millionaire collector has made it one of the rarest of finds. These were the days of his youth, the golden age of 'decadence.' For is not decadence merely a fin de siecle literary term synonymous with the 'sowing his wild oats' of our grandfathers? a phrase still surviving in agricultural districts, according to Mr. Andrew Lang, Mr. Edward ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... of their history. If we elect the Republics, we are met with another class of difficulties. The historian who makes the Commune his unit, who confines attention to the gradual development, reciprocal animosities, and final decadence of the republics, can hardly do justice to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the Papacy, which occupy no less than half the country. Again, the great age of the Renaissance, when all the free burghs accepted the ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... supports," said Madame de Stael; and what more sure support in the decadence which threatens us, than a positive science deduced from irrefragable law! I say irrefragable with conviction. Though human laws be subject to change, the laws of nature are shown to be immutable, at least so far as the observations of learned ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... parliamentary intelligence and turned to the "By the Way" column. I remember distinctly there was only one amusing paragraph therein, and I was about to throw the paper aside, with the customary lament as to the decadence of British humour, when my attention was arrested by a paragraph at the bottom of the next column. The heading was "Strange Highway ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... Giustinian held relentlessly before him; he wished to live for himself a 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
... of their power. They went on, gayly roasting their heretics and devouring the substance of the people, more prosperous than ever in those days of national decadence. Philip III. gave up the government entirely to the Duke of Lerma, who formed an alliance with the Church, and they led together a joyous life. In the succeeding reign the Church had become such ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... study "the heathen in his blindness" and the child "born in sin." We still indeed send out missionaries to convert the heathen, but here at least in Cambridge before they start they attend lectures on anthropology and comparative religion. The "decadence" theory is ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... 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 expeditions and voyages of reconnaissance they had founded ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... 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
... crescent denotes success, public recognition, increase and improvement; when gibbous, sickness, decadence, loss and trouble. ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... the naturally secluded position of the Scandinavian colony in Greenland, seemed to have occasioned its perfect decadence, or, otherwise, as traditions tell us, a sudden hostile inroad of the Esquimaux swept off the isolated Europeans: from either cause there remained, after the lapse of two centuries, but the moss-covered ruins of a few churches, some Runic ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... that. Everything that you would reckon as progress, he reckons as decadence. Democracy he regards, with all that it involves, as a revolt of the weak against the strong, of the bad against the good, of the herd against the master. Every great society, in his view, is aristocratic, and aristocratic in the sense that the many are deliberately and consciously ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... and bordered with fine old trees, and the houses, each in its own lawn, each with its vines and shrubs, were full of the suggestion of an easy-going home life and an informal hospitality. Most of them were of frame and in their architecture illustrated the decadence of the eighties and nineties, but here or there was a fine old brick homestead with a noble columned portico, or a formal Georgian house, disposed among beautiful trees and gardens and sheltered from the street by an ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... are attributed to this Bodhisattva who enjoyed considerable honour at this period. It may be that the veneration for the Buddha of the future, the Messiah who would reign over his saints in a pure land, owed something to Persian influence which was strong in India during the decadence of the Kushans.[223] Both Mithraism and Manichaeism classified their adepts in various ranks, and the Yogacara doctors who delight in grading the progress of the Bodhisattva may have borrowed something from them.[224] Asanga's doctrine of defilement (klesa) and purification may also owe something ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... matter of history and legend, to King Arthur, Theseus, Alexander, ancient heroes and warriors who were brought alive again in the likeness of knights and emperors. Its triumph was so complete, that its decadence followed swiftly. Like the creatures that live in the blood of man, literary forms and species commonly die of their own excess. Romances were multiplied, and imitated; professional poets, not content with marvels that had now become familiar, sought for a new sensation ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... sentimentality which vitiates practically all Anglo-Saxon art. And I have stood in the streets of New York, as I have stood in the streets of London, and longed with an intense nostalgia for one hour of Paris, where, amid a deplorable decadence, intellectual honesty is widely discoverable, and where absolutely straight thinking and talking is not ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... secret of the present decadence of Religion in the world of Science. For Science can hear nothing of a Great Exception. Constructions on unique lines, "portions cut off by an insurmountable barrier from the domain of scientific inquiry," it dare not recognize. Nature has taught it ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... to Augustus, than to account for the change from the Rome of the Empire at the beginning of our era to the Rome of the Popes in the year eight hundred. Probably the easiest and truest way of looking at the transition is to regard it according to the periods of supremacy, decadence and ultimate disappearance from Rome of the Roman Army. For the Army made the Emperors, and the Emperors made the times. The great military organization had in it the elements of long life, together with all sudden and terrible possibilities. The Army made Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... is not good. Indeed the novel, in its view of the decay of the Border, the ruined Laird, the frivolous foolish society of the Well, taking the place of sturdy William of Deloraine, and farmers like Scott's grandfather, makes a picture of decadence as melancholy as "Redgauntlet." "Not here, O Apollo, are haunts meet for thee!" Strangely enough, among the features of the time, Scott mentions reckless borrowings, "accommodation," "Banks of Air." His own business was ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... good, I lost no time in acting upon it. I need hardly tell you, that to employ the services of a hired spy, and to degrade myself in some sort to the level of a private inquirer, was somewhat revolting to a man, who, in the decadence of his fortunes, has ever striven to place some limit on the outrages which that hard taskmaster, poverty, may have from time to time compelled him to inflict upon his self-respect. But in the furtherance ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... of Respectability, but the end is still far distant. We are now in a period of decadence growing steadily more and more acute. The old gods are falling about us, there is little left to raise our hearts and minds to, and amid the wreck and ruin of things only a snobbery is left to us, thank heaven, deeply graven in the English heart; the snob is ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... special virtue in that date, but because Athens was then architecturally almost perfect, her civic and her social life seemed at their best, the democratic constitution held its vigor, and there were few outward signs of the general decadence which was to set in after the triumph ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... servants, who had been taking such good care of themselves, and our two daft selves into the bargain, were found to be sadly demoralized. The discovery came upon us gradually. I think my husband noticed the decadence as soon as I did, but I wasn't going to invite his attention to the fact; and he, I suppose, thought that I thought that everything was just as it ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... or Tanra. Ancient town, now a petty village, in Malda District, Bengal, the capital of Bengal after the decadence of Gaur. Its history is obscure, and the very site of the city has not been accurately determined. It is certain that it was in the immediate neighbourhood of Gaur, and south-west of that town beyond the Bhagirathi. Old Tandan has been utterly swept away by ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... use of hoping for a decadence of the craze for historical romances so long as the public is fed on books like this? Such a story has zest for the most jaded palate; nay, it can hold the interest even of a book reviewer. From the ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... said Cecil. "It is another example of my decadence. My attitude quite an indefensible one—is that so long as I am no trouble to any one I have a right to do as I like. I know I ought to be getting money out of people, or devoting myself to things I don't care a straw about, but somehow, I've not ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... poor, and it is wastefully harsh to frank unorthodoxy. But 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 ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... reading, and it is well if it gets a chance of a second." From him "Pride and Prejudice" got a chance of three readings at least. This generous universality of taste, in addition to all his other qualities of humour and poetry, enabled Scott to raise the novel from its decadence, and to make the dry bones of history live again in his tales. With Charles Edward at Holyrood, as Mr. Senior wrote in the "Quarterly Review," "we are in the lofty region of romance. In any other hands than those of Sir Walter Scott, the language and ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... "and have agreed to present the following propositions: the line of the Rhine for France; Salzburg, Passau for the Emperor; ... the maintenance of the Germanic Body; ... Venice for the Emperor. Venice," he continued, "which has been in decadence since the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope and the rise of Trieste and Ancona, can scarcely survive the blows we have just struck. With a cowardly and helpless population in no way fit for liberty, without territory and without rivers, it is but natural that she should ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... 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; delabrement &c. (destruction)[Fr]. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... word to the wise—he only saved his estate at expense of a lawsuit, which again subdivided the family property. He was, however, a man of resolution. He sold part of the lands, evacuated the old cattle, where the family lived in their decadence as a mouse (said an old farmer) lives under a firlot. Pulling down part of these venerable ruins, he built with the stones a narrow house of three stories high, with a front like a grenadier's cap, having in the very centre ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Marquis of Steyne, is one of the finest in all fiction. Though Becky knows that this blow shatters her social edifice, she is still woman enough to admire her husband in the very act that marks the beginning of the decadence of her fortunes. Vanity Fair, read carefully a half-dozen times, is a liberal education in life and in ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... with wash-drawing, pastel crayon crushed with brushes of special pattern. Here one can find again his meticulous spirit. He has many of the qualities of the scientist; he is as much chemist as painter. It has been said of him, that he was a great artist of the decadence. This is materially inexact, since his qualities of draughtsmanship are those of a superb Classicist, and his colouring of very pure taste. But the spirit of his work, his love of exact detail, his exaggerated psychological refinement, are certainly the ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... for from a board inscribed in hieratic in the British Museum (No. 5645) we find that a priest of Heliopolis called Khakhepersenb, who was surnamed Ankhu, shared his discontent, and was filled with disgust at the widespread corruption and decadence of all classes of society that were everywhere in the land. In the introduction to this description of society as he saw it, he says that he wishes he possessed new language in which to express himself, and that he could find phrases that ...
— The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians • E. A. Wallis Budge
... to deal fully with this subject it is necessary to discuss another important phase in the worship of sex. We refer to the decadence or degeneracy of this worship, which occurred after people had outgrown these simple religious conceptions. The decadence of sex worship is observed during the early centuries of Christianity and traces of it are seen throughout the middle ages. In the decadence of sex worship we are able to observe how an important motive in the race finds expression in the thoughts and conduct of people after ...
— The Sex Worship and Symbolism of Primitive Races - An Interpretation • Sanger Brown, II
... furniture came cheap imitations of antiques and the rapid decadence of this art. Hand-made reproductions are quite another thing. Sir Richard Wallace (of the Wallace Collection, London) is said to have given $40,000 for a reproduction of the ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... brief notices in Dampier's Voyages, Wafer's Voyages, various gazetteers, and some maps and pamphlets relating to Admiral Vernon's attack in 1739-40. There is a capital description of the place as it was in its decadence, circa 1820, in Michael ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... all 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
... writes, "been left to herself she would, in all human probability, have succeeded, notwithstanding her decadence, in establishing political unity under a military chief. Had the country been brought into peaceful contact with continental civilisation, it must have advanced along the path of modern progress. Even if it had been conquered by a powerful nation, it would at least have participated in the ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... characteristic of the "beautiful style" was soon relinquished for exaggerated ornamentation, combined with a preference for representing sumptuous dresses and the immoderate use of white, yellow, and other colors. This led gradually to the decadence ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... entirely perverted ingenuity which sought a generation ago to find mystic meaning in the representations on Greek vases. Attempts to portray the Deities of the Mysteries scarcely count as works of art. Such figures as Sabazius, Isis, Mithras, only come into ancient art in its decadence. I would not maintain that the modern world, with its infinitely varied emotions, or the higher aspirations of religions like the Christian or the Buddhist, could be satisfied with such simple schemes as those of Greek sculpture, which ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... find their way into the magazines and popular literature of the day, to be greedily read by a public which, next to a prurient divorce case, likes nothing so well as slander of a great man. We have heard much of late years about the decadence of the English Press, but editors know very well the public for ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... that the suddenness of the catastrophe was essential to the lesson. The same necessity exists no longer, the Chosen People are now beyond the lesson, and nations undergo suffering, and approach dissolution, by laws not unlike those of the decadence of the human frame; the disease makes progress, but the evidence scarcely strikes the eye, and the seat of the distemper is almost beyond human investigation. The jealousy of the European powers, too, protects the Turk. But he must go down—Mahometanism is already decaying. Stamboul, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... Bull, now at Naples. The former was the work of three artists, given by Pliny as Agesandros, Athanodorus, and Polydorus. It has been accepted as one of the masterpieces of the world, but as we shall see, it is manifestly a work of a time of decadence. ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... fails to imitate, we call it trash. But the theory of Aeschylean Tragedy is the illumination of life. Illumination of life, through a medium quite unlike life. Art begins on a spiritual plane, and works down to realism in its decadence; then it ceases to be art at all, and becomes merely copying what we imagine to be nature,—nature, often, as seen through a diseased liver and ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... how much of this prosperity and intellectual pre-eminence was due to the Jews. The cruel edicts of Philip Augustus against the race proved no less disastrous here than the expulsion of Huguenots elsewhere later. The decadence of Narbonne as a port is due to natural causes. Formerly surrounded by lagoons affording free communication with the sea, the Languedocian Venice has gradually lost her advantageous position. The transitional stage induced such unhealthy climatic conditions that at one period there seemed ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... postponing the sanctifying till after death. She, again, is responsible for another attempt, viz., the infallibility of her ministers, a promising enough plan, but ill regulated. The Stuart regime, urging with unpleasant vigour the divinity of kingship and the corresponding caddishness (or decadence) of much of the rest of mankind, is a signal example of how my plan should not be carried out. Carlyle's heroes are ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... art, never a time when the public was so eager to hear and so able to pay for art, as now, never a period of such widespread intelligence on all subjects, music included, the question is a very pertinent one. We believe there are many factors underlying the technical decadence we must regret. The orchestra has greatly developed, choral singing is common in all countries, and the spirit of the times has changed. So analytical, so refined is our age, that singing sometimes becomes a sort of musical declamation, but, unfortunately, without that ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills
... somewhat late in the day that two young ladies had no business to accept breakfast at the hands of German officers: and, if they did, at least they might see that they got it. She appeared to be willing to talk about decadence of modern manners to almost any extent, but the subject of the hairdresser, and how to get rid ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... of works—of faith in themselves which takes the outward form of weird clothing, long hair, and a literary or artistic pose. Paris streets were so full of such in 1870 that all thoughtful men could scarce fail to recognise a nation in its decadence. ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... the West! They could not, because they did not, they had not the will to arrest it. What mankind could achieve with a different will is a speculation as idle as it is magnificent. And this was no slow decadence that came to the Europeanised world; those other civilisations rotted and crumbled down, the Europeanised civilisation was, as it were, blown up. Within the space of five years it was altogether disintegrated and destroyed. Up to the very eve of the War in the Air one sees a ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... imposes restrictions even upon the most high-spirited. At that moment Madame de Vallorbes was ripe for the commission of atrocities. Had she been—as she coveted to be—a lady of the Roman decadence it would have gone hard with her waiting-woman, who might have found herself ordered for instant execution or summarily deprived of the organs of speech. But, latter-day sentiment happily forbidding such active expressions of ill-feeling on the part of ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... one striking thing to be noticed. If men behaved in that way in our time, we should, as we have said, regard them as symbols of the 'decadence.' But the men who did these things were not decadent; they belonged generally to the most robust classes of what is generally regarded as a robust age. Again, it will be urged that if men essentially sane performed such insanities, ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... must frankly confess it to be a weakness and a languor of spirit, not believe it to be a thing which others ought to admire and respect. It was one of the base sentimentalities of the last century, a real sign of the decadence of life, that people felt it to be a fine thing to cherish grief, and to live resolutely with sighs and tears. The helpless widow of nineteenth-century fiction, shrouded in crape, and bursting into tears at the smallest sign ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... mean to be serious," said Mr. Sydney. "In these days of the decadence of civilization if a man is in earnest, terribly in earnest, people think that he is vastly amusing. I shall try to be funny soon, to earn my wage, and people will think ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... changeable as well as a permanent element in the art of healing; not merely changeable as diseases vary, or as new remedies are introduced, but changeable by the going out of fashion of special remedies, by the decadence of a popular theory from which their fitness was deduced, or other cause not more significant. There is no reason to suppose that the present time is essentially different in this respect from any ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... peculiar importance of this set of articles therefore is, that in them we have the first known example of those stereotyped Fighting Instructions to which, as all modern writers seem agreed, was due the alleged decadence of naval tactics in the ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... of towns has a tendency to plunge men into lethargy and indolence, and to precipitate the decadence of a constitution in which the seeds of disease have been sown; whilst, on the other hand, the pure air of the country braces the nerves, excites a healthy action in the system, and invigorates a shattered frame; so it was with Mr. Wolston—under the benign influences of the genial ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... asceticism it eternally preached. The Christian ideal had grown to be one of penance and mortification of the flesh, and to a few ardent souls these sensuous delights were an open highway to death eternal. Eulogius became the leader of this band of zealots. In lamenting the decadence of his people, he wrote, "hardly one in a thousand can write a decent Latin letter, and yet they indite excellent Arabic verse!" Filled with despairing ardor this man aroused a few kindred spirits to join him in ...
— A Short History of Spain • Mary Platt Parmele
... amusement of her young neighbours, it need hardly be said that Miss Thorne would be the last to think of it. And yet there was something so charming in the name. A bull-ring, however, without a bull would only be a memento of the decadence of the times, and she felt herself constrained to abandon the idea. Quintains, however, she was determined to have, and had poles and swivels and bags of flour prepared accordingly. She would no doubt have been anxious for something ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... many ways the most perfect 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
... is the brief passage in the first chapter of the fourth tract in which the "good old times" are lamented and contrasted with the decadence of the then present—now ...
— Game and Playe of the Chesse - A Verbatim Reprint Of The First Edition, 1474 • Caxton
... and fragmentary knowledge of the earlier and ruder form; its history, as we know it, might almost be said to begin with the perfection of the sixth and fifth centuries, and what we know after that is the history of a long decadence, not indeed without new developments of importance, as for instance in the architectural structure of Roman building, and perhaps in the sculpture of the Early Empire on one side, and in certain aspects of Latin literature on another. The history ...
— Progress and History • Various
... greatness of soul to do homage to 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 box, into which all the products ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... pontificate, all the great works were stopped at Rome and slackened at Florence. While Michelangelo was obscurely working at the library of San Lorenzo, the great age of art was drawing to its close; Raphael and Leonardo were dead, and their pupils were already hurrying on to a rapid decadence. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... when Lady Everington met Geoffrey at the theatre, she took him severely to task for treachery, secrecy and decadence. He, was very humble and admitted all his faults except the last, pleading as his excuse that he could not get Asako ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... lamentable decadence followed, during which Turkish domination prevailed more and more in the country. During an interval of twenty-five years (1521-46) no less than eleven princes succeeded one another on the throne of Muntenia, whilst of the nineteen princes who ruled during the last three-quarters of the sixteenth ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... no lower than was that of any race (no matter how intellectual it may be at the present time) at one period of its history. All races have a tendency toward psychical development under favorable surroundings; it has been a progress instead of a decadence, a rise instead of a fall! Evolution has not ceased; nor will it end until Finis is written at the bottom of ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... far more persecuted than you, as you may judge by my present decadence,—for I take it that I am as low in popularity and book-selling as any writer can be. At least, so my friends assure me—blessings on their benevolence! This they attribute to Hunt; but they are wrong—it must be, partly at least, owing to myself; be ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... 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 and prestige of ideas. Thus, for example, though the problem-play ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... clear that the art of this period (fifth to eighth centuries), was a typical primitive movement. To call the great vital art of the Liang, Chen, Wei, and Tang dynasties a development out of the exquisitely refined and exhausted art of the Han decadence—from which Ku K'ai-chih is a delicate straggler—is to call Romanesque sculpture a development out of Praxiteles. Between the two some thing has happened to refill the stream of art. What had happened in China was the spiritual ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... Old One. You see what is plain to 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 is a ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... that this tabloid "story of a woman" has, ever since my first discovery of it, been a source of anger to me; and I do not think that such resentment should be reckoned as a manifestation of modern decadence. The hustling out of sight of that "lovely hoyden" is unworthy of a poet; poet's eyes should rest longer upon beauty so irrecoverable—for though the wife and mother be the happiest that ever was, she can never ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... went on Sir Charles in a somewhat disappointed tone, "I am one who views with regret the decadence ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... breaking point, namely, to our industrial and political order. Let us ask ourselves if we do not find this naturalistic philosophy regnant there. That we are surrounded by widespread industrial revolt, that we see obvious political decadence on the one hand, and a determination to experiment with fresh governmental processes on the other, few would deny. It would appear to me that in both cases the revolt and the decadence are due to that fierce, short creed of rebellion ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... domestics. It was a lesson in the vanity of human wishes which the shallowest moralist would have noted. Nay, I felt more than the moral. Something human and kindly in the old fellow had caught my fancy. The decadence was too tragic to prose about, the decadent too human to moralise on. I had left the chamber of the—shall I say de jure King of England?—a sentimental adherent of the cause. But this business of the bagpipes touched the comic. ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... before sailing you had expressed the hope that something really exciting and adventurous would befall the party—that you were tired of the monotonous humdrum of twentieth-century existence—that you regretted the decadence of piracy, and the expunging ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... he not only knew literally every fact and every date, but he also knew personally most of the great men who had latterly played leading parts. On English politics it was characteristic of the man to have a tremendous belief in the present. For instance, I said something about the decadence of Parliament and Parliamentary speaking. He at once burst out: 'You are quite wrong. The men of to-day are much greater than their predecessors'; and then he went through all our prominent politicians and compared them with the men of the past. The only comparisons I remember are Winston ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... duty waning? The alarmists say it is and point to the increase of divorce, falling off in church attendance, and the unrest among the laboring classes as evidence that there is a decadence. Pleasure is sought, excitement is the goal, and sober, solid duty is "forgotten." They point out a resemblance to the decadent days of Rome, in the rise of luxury and luxurious tastes, and indicate that duty and the love of luxury ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... the preceding generation, and especially for those in it nearest to ourselves, is a sure sign of relaxing dignity, and, in any extended manifestation, an equally sure symptom of national and political decadence. My reader knows, however, that there was much to be ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... all, of the present rottenness of the federal politics of the United States—not argumentatively or with any heat, but with the reflective sadness that steals over an elderly man when he sits in the leather armchair of a comfortable club smoking a good cigar and musing on the decadence of the present day. The rottenness of the federal government didn't anger them. ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... introduced by the French into Martinique in 1727, but it did not make its appearance in Cuba until forty years later, or, to be exact, in 1769. The decadence of this branch of agriculture is due not only to the causes we have already named, but also to the inferior mode of cultivation adopted on the island. It was predicted some years before it commenced, and when the crash came the markets of the world were also ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... bell sounded on the stage, and the unhappy singer, bereft of romance, his career finished, decadence and old age staring him in the face, went to answer the call. But suddenly his face changed; a brightness, an alertness came into it and even, mysteriously, into all his body. There was a woman at the other end of the wire, and she was young and pretty, and she was asking him to ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... remembered is that these German tribes saved Europe by their love of liberty, and by their virility, from the decadence of an orientalized Rome. Rome, and all Rome meant, was not destroyed by these ancestors of ours; on the contrary, they saved what was best worth saving from the decline and fall of Rome, and made out of it with their own vigorous laws a new world, the modern western world. ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... humanity's supposition of a life beyond this life, and of the existence of spiritual powers and beings to whom we are related, holds good. No nation has ever conducted its life on the basis of pure materialism, save in those last stages of its decadence ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... were little and formidable. They formed a family circle—of dwarfs. They had their maxim: to enjoy themselves. They lived on public death. There they inhaled shame, and they throve on that which kills others. It was there that was reared up with art, purpose, industry, and goodwill, the decadence of France. There worked the bought, fed, and obliging public men;—read prostituted. Even literature was compounded there as we have shown; Vieillard was a classic of 1830, Morny created Choufleury, Louis Bonaparte was a candidate for the Academy. ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... in October, 1880, five intelligent Ojibwas from Petoskey, Mich., told the writer that they had never heard of gesture language. An interesting letter from Mr. B.O. Williams, sr., of Owasso, Mich., explains the gradual decadence of signs used by the Ojibwas in his recollection, embracing sixty years, as chiefly arising from general acquaintance with the English language. Further discouragement came from an Indian agent giving the decided statement, ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... impregnated with the strongest and most zealous spirit of Mohammedanism. He points out that the language is the popular or vulgar dialect, differing widely from the classical and literary; that it contains many words in common modern use and that generally it suggests the decadence of Arabian literature. Of one tale he remarks:—The History of the loves of Camaralzaman and Budour, Princess of China, is no more Indian or Persian than the others. The prince's father has Moslems for subjects, his mother is named Fatimah and when imprisoned he solaces himself with ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... the nineteenth century the formal garden was practically abandoned in France. It was the period of the real decadence of the formal garden. This came not from one cause alone but from many. To the straight lines and gentle curves of former generations upon generations of French gardens were added sinuosities as varied and complicated as those of the Vale of Cashmere, and again, ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... who, a poor youth, trudging along, staff in hand, being then in a stress of sore need, found all at once that somewhat was adhering to the end of his stick, which somewhat proved to be a gold ring of price, bearing the words, "God speed thee, Friend!"), already in decadence as I remember him, with head slanting forward and downward as if looking for a place to rest in after his learned labors; and that other Thaddeus, the old man of West Cambridge, who outwatched the rest so long after they had gone to sleep in their own churchyards, that it almost seemed ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... synonomous with moral looseness. The revelations which our recent periodicals have brought us concerning the habits of business men, of politicians, and of society, have left on many minds the impression that this is distinctly an age of decadence. Exactly the reverse is the truth. This is the age of intense sensitiveness to wrong. In almost no particular is it worse than any previous age in the history of our country. We openly discuss things which we left untouched ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... 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 ...
— A Slave is a Slave • Henry Beam Piper
... 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 ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... sure that the best moment to study an artist is not the moment of what is called decadence. The first energy of inspiration is gone; what remains is the method, the mechanism, and it is that which alone one can study, as one can study the mechanism of the body, not the principle of life itself. What ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... to find an old, worn-out city, yet only Mr. Sumner and Mrs. Douglas were quite prepared for the dilapidated carriages that were waiting to take them from the station to their hotels; for the almost deserted streets, and the general pronounced air of decadence. Even the Arno seemed to have lost all freshness, and left all beauty behind as it flowed from Florence, and was here only a swiftly ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... and west was a journey out of the world into chaos, and the region of the unknown and the horrible, which demanded high courage from the unarmed and effeminate Egyptian, who knew not what monster he might meet ere sundown. Moreover, it is very probable that during these centuries of decadence, in Egypt, as in other parts of the Roman Empire, "the wild beasts of the field had increased" on the population, and were reappearing ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... their successive cycles of glory and decadence; is not the present theosophical movement the renaissance of the Neoplatonic movement which brought the light to Greece and Egypt fifteen hundred years ago? In 1875 H. P. Blavatsky restored it to life, whilst its previous birth look place in the time of Ammonius Saccas, the theosophist, in ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... he said to himself, at the close of that half hour's meditations; "she is really very nice, and the position altogether advantageous, perhaps as much as one has the right to expect in the general decadence of things. But, good heavens, how lovely that girl is! She is the first woman who ever looked me in the face and told me she disliked me; the first woman who ever gave me contemptuous looks and scornful words. And yet—for that very ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... condition of subacute or chronic mania, with a slow tendency to decadence of all ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... to win; but that big Black just kept galloping, galloping, an' I never could get to his head; I'd a been in the money, though, if somethin' hadn't bumped me; an' then my mount just died away—she just seemed to die away." He repeated this is a falling decadence, as though it best expressed his reason ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... Phoenician, and later, during the period of her civic grandeur, an arsenal of the Roman navy. Her most interesting ruins are the Coliseum, the Theatre, the old Citadel, and the Aqueduct, suggestions of a really great city of the long-gone past. Frejus lost prestige with the decadence of the Empire, and after a destruction by the Saracens in the X century, Nature gave the blow which finally crushed her when the sea retreated a mile, and her old Roman light-house was left to overlook merely a long stretch of barren, sandy land. Owing to this stranded, ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... current thought and information, digest them carefully, and pour them forth, in attractive form, for their delectation on Sunday. As a sort of oratorical and poetical reviewer, essayist and rhapsodist, the parson and his church had survived the decadence of religion. ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... make the mistake of confusing conservatism and decadence. That the city will in many particulars always progress more rapidly than the country is inevitable. But speed is not the ultimate criterion of a full life. Again must we apply the test whether the gain is relative or essential. Telephones, free mail delivery, electric car lines, operas, great ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... of their year, or else suffer in deeper ways than death. The City will do for those younger-souled peoples that have not had their taste of its cruel order and complicating pressures; for the Mediterranean peoples already touched with decadence; for the strong yet simple peasant vitalities of Northern Europe, but the flower of the American entity has already remained too long in ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... a new kiva is said to be of rare occurrence. On the other hand, it is common to hear the kiva chief lament the decadence of its membership. In the "Oak Mound" kiva at Sichumovi there are now but four members. The young men have married and moved to their wives' houses in more thriving villages, and the older men have died. The chief in this case also says ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... Ashdod must, in this case, have occurred before the emigration of the native troops. In Jer. xxv. 20, reference is made to "the remnant of Ashdod," in the fourth year of Jehoiakim, i.e. about 603 B.C., and the decadence of the city is generally attributed to the war with Egypt; it might with equal probability be ascribed to the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... of the country. Thank you—I will take mine without sugar." It is possible that some of these painful details crept into the local journals. I remember an editorial in "The Monte Flat Monitor," entitled "The Effete East," in which the fatal decadence of New York and New England was elaborately stated, and California offered as a means of natural salvation. "Perhaps," said "The Monitor," "we might add that Calaveras County offers superior inducements to the Eastern ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... accomplished adept in heraldry would not be able to decipher it. Only one leaf of the great double door was ever opened now, for not many guests were received or entertained at the chateau in these days of its decadence. Swallows had built their nests in every available nook about it, and but for a slender thread of smoke rising spirally from a chimney at the back of this dismal, half-ruined mansion, the traveller would have surely believed it to be uninhabited. This was the only sign of life visible about ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... The decadence of native Judaism in France has become proverbial. The original French Jews never amounted to much; and the Alsatian immigrants, while still supplying rabbis for the pulpits, have of late begun to disappear from the pews. You may state it is ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... which the Colonies have been treated by successive Liberal Administrations did much to estrange the people, especially of Canada and Australasia, and the whole foreign policy of England under Mr. Gladstone's rule served to strengthen the general impression that our decadence had not only set in, but was advancing with a rapidity which was palpable to all the world except to those who were chiefly concerned in arresting it. Mr. Froude tells us that one of the shrewdest and most eminent of all ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... for it's quite likely that I may have to call upon you. If a ring of government speculators can come out here and refuse service, or dictate to my office, then old Keith County is certainly on the verge of decadence. Now, I'll be all ready to start for the North Fork in fifteen minutes, and I'd admire to have you ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... Theodoric that his maxims of statesmanship, which were assuredly full of manly sense and vigour, should have reached us only in such a shape, diluted with the platitudes and false rhetoric of a scholar of the decadence. Still, even through all these disguises, it is easy to discern the genuine patriotism both of the great King and of his minister, their earnest desire that right, not might, should determine every case that came before ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... 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 of production that the latter sinks into a kind of rank sterility, and the mental condition ...
— A Bundle of Letters • Henry James
... authorities to whom such submission may become necessary, then, will be contingent on the virtual abeyance of the spirit of national pride in the peoples who so are to come under Imperial rule. A sufficient, by no means necessarily a total, elimination or decadence of this proclivity will be the condition precedent of any practicable scheme for a general peace on this footing. How large an allowance of such animus these prospectively subject peoples might still carry, without thereby assuring ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... in the narration of these facts, they were doubtless exceptions, of which parallels may be found in the present day. The ancient Greek and Roman families were no larger than those of to-day, and were smaller in the zenith of Roman affluence, and continued small until the period of decadence. ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... in history, especially in that of France, that each race has its point of departure, its culmination, and its decadence. Look at the direct line of the Capets; starting from Hugues Capet, they attained their highest grandeur in Philippe Auguste and Louis XI., and fell with Philippe V. and Charles IV. Take the Valois; starting with Philippe VI., they culminated in Francois ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... fine high ceilings and three large windows that loomed down pleasantly upon Fifty-second Street. In its appointments it escaped by a safe margin being of any particular period; it escaped stiffness, stuffiness, bareness, and decadence. It smelt neither of smoke nor of incense—it was tall and faintly blue. There was a deep lounge of the softest brown leather with somnolence drifting about it like a haze. There was a high screen of Chinese lacquer chiefly concerned with geometrical fishermen and huntsmen in ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... dignity to take leave, and asked me to stop at his house some day, when he would show me some outlandish things that he had brought home from sea. I was familiar with the subject of the decadence of shipping interests in all its affecting branches, having been already some time in Dunnet, and I felt sure that Captain Littlepage's mind had now returned to a ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... 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, established himself and ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... each other, their faces gravely troubled, aghast, as though they had glimpsed the end of civilized society, as though they felt that they had lived too long into an age of decadence and open shame. Constance's face showed despair—she might have been about to be pitched into the gutter without a friend and without a shilling—but Sophia's had the reckless courage that ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... were very busy about the waggon, one of them held a dark lantern; Lefebre, Lerouge and even Mme. Acquet pulled the sacks from the straw and threw them into the house by a window on the ground floor. Mme. de Combray seemed to feel her decadence for the first time; she found herself mixed up in one of those expeditions that she had until then represented as chivalrous feats of arms, and these by-ways of brigandage filled ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre |
