"Seduction" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with difficulties with Mademoiselle de Marignan, a rich heiress of one of the greatest families of Provence, he displayed, like a wrestler, all kinds of stratagems and daring schemes of policy in the small theater of Aix. Not only cunning, seduction, and courage, but every resource of his nature was used to succeed, and he succeeded; but he was hardly married before fresh persecutions beset him, and the stronghold of Pontarlier gaped to enclose him. A love, which his "Lettres a Sophie" has rendered immortal, opened its gates and freed him. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... of death set him instantly repenting, and with shrieks of laughter when he was well, his lordship having a very great sense of humour—how in half an hour's time, and before a bottle was drunk, he had completely succeeded in biting poor Pastoureau. The seduction he owned too: that he could not help: he was quite ready with tears at a moment's warning, and shed them profusely to melt his credulous listener. He wept for your mother even more than Pastoureau did, who cried very heartily, poor fellow, as my lord informed me; he ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... ever had before; say 1,000,000 pounds sterling by the Year. To which Friedrich answered, "Subsidies, your Excellency?" (Are We a Hackney-Coachman, then?)—and, with much contempt, turned his back on that offer. No fighting to be had, by purchase or seduction, out of this young man. Will not play the Conquering Hero at all, nor the Hackney-Coachman at all; has decided "not to fight a cat" if let alone; but to do and endeavor a quite other set of things, for the rest of ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... her virtues, she was not at all disconcerted with this tete-a-tete; nor did it lessen her vivacity. Lord Robert, encouraged by her easiness on the occasion, declared himself so plainly that she was no longer able to blind herself to his views and with surprise found seduction was his aim, if that word maybe used for a man's designs against the honour of a woman who seems so careless of it. Her heart was entirely innocent of vice, and she could not imagine how his lordship could conceive it possible ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... inferior to his character; and moved by a delicate consideration for that splendid girl he tried to think out for the man a character of inward excellence and outward gifts—some extraordinary seduction. But in vain. Fresh from months of solitude and from days at sea, her splendour presented itself to him absolutely unconquerable in its perfection, unless by her own folly. It was easier to suspect her of this than to imagine in the man qualities which would be worthy of her. Easier ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... on the seduction of young orators, the influence of the crown, and the corruption of our glorious constitution: Old and new nobility: Poor old England: Necessary precautions: The man ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... stage. Adultery itself indeed seems to be only the fruit of curiosity about another man's pleasures, and an inquiring and prying into things kept close and hidden from the world; while curiosity is a tampering with and seduction of and revealing the nakedness ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... to the art of pleasing and attracting women, we have the word of Cardinal de Retz for it, that he was not always successful. Perhaps it is only inferior minds who possess the art and the genius of seduction. ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... an imprudent intimacy with a farm servant in the neighbourhood, which had ended in her seduction. Her situation rendered marriage a matter of necessity. In this arrangement of the matter, it required both parties should agree; and the man, who doubtless knew more of the girl's real character than her benevolent mistress, flatly refused to make her his wife. Hannah, in an ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... modesty invests its possessor, they would dress decorously from mere self-love, if not from principle. The designing would assume modesty as an artifice; the coquette would adopt it as an allurement; the pure as her appropriate attraction; and the voluptuous as the most infallible art of seduction.' ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... be considered that, as the vanity and proneness to seduction of the imprisoned women represented a general degradation in their sex; so do these acts a still more general and worse in the male. Where so many are weak, it is natural there should be many lost; where legislators admit that ten thousand prostitutes ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... cell walls may have doubled the monks' appreciation of blue skies and open-air life; but they were fettered by the constant fight with the senses; Nature to them must needs be less a work of God for man's delight, than a dangerous means of seduction. 'They wandered through Nature with timid misgiving, and their anxious fantasy depicted forms of terror or marvellous rescues.[3] The idyllic pleasure in the simple charms of Nature, especially in the monastery garden of the Carlovingian time, contrasts strikingly with the tone ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... arching at the corners, is of a vivid red; blood abounds there, and supplies the living, thinking oxide which gives such seduction to the lips, reassuring the lover whom the gravity of that majestic face may have dismayed. The upper lip is thin, the furrow which unites it with the nose comes low, giving it a centre curve which emphasizes its natural ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... the way of temptation, it is now that it behoves him to show the brilliance of his virtue. The trial is dangerous; He is just at that period of life when the passions are most vigorous, unbridled, and despotic; His established reputation will mark him out to Seduction as an illustrious Victim; Novelty will give additional charms to the allurements of pleasure; and even the Talents with which Nature has endowed him will contribute to his ruin, by facilitating the means of obtaining his object. Very few would ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... borders of it; and the condemnation attached to them is a legal rather than a moral one. It is based, that is, not so much on the kind of happiness itself as on the circumstances under which we are at present obliged to seek it. Thus the practice of seduction may be said to be condemned sufficiently by the misery brought by it to its victims, and its victims' families. But suppose the victims are willing, and the families complacent, this ground of condemnation goes; though in the eye of the moralist, matters in this last will be far worse ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... matter sensational enough for the most exacting novelist; but we disclaim all effort to play upon the passions, or add another work of fiction to the mass of irreligious trash so powerful in the employ of the evil one for the seduction of youth. In the varied scenes of life there are many actions influenced by secret motives known only to the heart that harbors them. Not all are dishonorable. It takes a great deal of guilt to make a person as black as he is painted by his ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... relations of d'Alembert and Diderot with the Empress Catherine, conferred on these men of letters, and on the ideas for which they stood, a prestige which carried great weight with the bourgeoisie. Humbler people, too, were as amenable as the great to the seduction of theories which supplied simple keys to the universe [Footnote: Taine said of the Contrat Social that it reduces political science to the strict application of an elementary axiom which renders all study unnecessary ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... way, to that train of ideas which her relentless friend had forced her to pursue. Treason, then—deep menaces, concealed under the semblance of public interest—such were Colbert's maneuvers. A detestable delight at an approaching downfall, untiring efforts to attain this object, means of seduction no less wicked than the crime itself—such were the weapons Marguerite employed. The crooked atoms of Descartes triumphed; to the man without compassion was united a woman without heart. The marquise perceived, with sorrow rather than indignation, that the king was an accomplice in the plot which ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... proceeding in relieving an important frontier post, and in several incidental operations against hostile tribes of savages, rendered indispensable by the subserviency into which they had been seduced by the enemy—a seduction the more cruel as it could not fail to impose a necessity of precautionary severities against those ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... with the beads of a necklace of great pearls, that lay on the ocean of her surging breast, so that it was carried up and down on its wave. And she looked, as she stood before me, like a faultless feminine incarnation of the essence of a bosom friend, turned into an instrument of supernatural seduction by the infusion of the intoxication of the other sex, and seeming as it were to say: How much dearer is a dear friend, that looks at thee ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... we love a lady fair The easier 'tis to gain her grace, And the more surely we ensnare Her in the pitfalls which we place. Time was when cold seduction strove To swagger as the art of love, Everywhere trumpeting its feats, Not seeking love but sensual sweets. But this amusement delicate Was worthy of that old baboon, Our fathers used to dote upon; The Lovelaces are out of date, Their glory with ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... and children as European women. The children are entirely naked; and the only peculiarity I observed is filing their teeth to a sharp point, like those of a shark. The men marry but one wife, as I have before observed. Concubinage is unknown; and cases of seduction or adultery very seldom arise. Even the Malays speak highly of the chastity of the Dyak women; yet they are by no means shy under the gaze of strangers, and used to bathe before us in a ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... up the fire and watching the child, whom Germain seemed to have forgotten. Germain, meanwhile, was not asleep; he was not reflecting on his lot, nor was he devising any bold stroke, or any plan of seduction. He was suffering keenly, he had a mountain of ennui upon his heart. He wished he were dead. Everything seemed to be turning out badly for him, and if he could have wept, he would not have done it by halves. But there was a little anger ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... in innumerable ways, such attachments are particularly alarming to the truly enlightened and independent patriot. How many opportunities do they afford to tamper with domestic factions, to practice the arts of seduction, to mislead public opinion, to influence or awe the public councils! Such an attachment of a small or weak toward a great and powerful nation dooms the former to be the satellite of the latter. Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... The Lord forbade them to marry strange women on account of the danger of seduction, lest they should be led astray into idolatry. And specially did this prohibition apply with respect to those nations who dwelt near them, because it was more probable that they would adopt their religious practices. When, however, the woman was willing to renounce idolatry, and become ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... his debut in the ecclesiastical career, had been distinguished by a veritable seduction and capturing of souls, by a success which had been a perfect triumph and indeed almost a scandal. After taking the catechism classes for a year in the parish of B——, the archbishop had appointed him to other work, putting another ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... way of coitus during menstruation, there is nevertheless good reason to believe that the first coitus very frequently takes place at this point of least psychic resistance. When still a student I was struck by the occurrence of cases in which seduction took place during the menstrual flow, though at that time they seemed to me inexplicable, except as evidencing brutality on the part of the seducer. Negrier,[115] in the lying-in wards of the Hotel-Dieu at Angers, constantly found ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... think, be termed a LEFT-HANDED marriage, and the man should be LEGALLY obliged to maintain the woman and her children, unless adultery, a natural divorcement, abrogated the law. And this law should remain in force as long as the weakness of women caused the word seduction to be used as an excuse for their frailty and want of principle; nay, while they depend on man for a subsistence, instead of earning it by the exercise of their own hands or heads. But these women should not in the full meaning of the relationship, be termed wives, or the very ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... share of the attention of the Fathers. It is the devil who instigates the Roman authorities to persecute; the gods and goddesses of paganism are devils, and idolatry itself is an invention of Satan; if a saint falls away from grace, it is by the seduction of the demon; if heresy arises, the devil has suggested it; and some of the Fathers[86] go so far as to challenge the pagans to a sort of exorcising match, by way of testing the truth of Christianity. Mediaeval ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... all, for it is already too powerful and progressive. It is the public interest to check all propagation but that of good citizens, and to protect all women from enforced maternity, whether enforced under legal powers or by the arts of seduction and libertinism. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, May 1887 - Volume 1, Number 4 • Various
... human mind: and I thank you for it. They have been often interrupted by the business and dissipations of the world, but they were never so more grievously to me, nor less usefully to the public, than since royal seduction prevailed on me to abandon the quiet and leisure of the retreat I had chosen abroad, and to neglect the example of Rutilius, for I might have imitated him in this at least, who fled further from his country when ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke
... face but also on another part of my person, which had now become somewhat prominent. He seemed satisfied with this, and then opened the other packet, which was a series of drawings executed by a first-rate artist in the most admirable style delineating the seduction of a beautiful young boy of about fifteen by another handsome youth a few years older. Every scene in the progress was illustrated by an appropriate and admirably drawn portrait of the two characters, commencing ...
— Laura Middleton; Her Brother and her Lover • Anonymous
... and story of Measure for Measure the Poet was ultimately indebted to Cinthio, an Italian novelist of the sixteenth century. The original story makes the eighty-fifth in his Hundred Tales. A youth named Ludovico is there overtaken in the crime of seduction: Juriste, a magistrate highly reputed for wisdom and justice, passes sentence of death upon him; and Ludovico's sister, a virgin of rare gifts and graces, goes to pleading for his life. Her beauty and eloquence have the same effect on Juriste as Isabella's ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... of St Macarius, St Stephen, St Theodore, St Abraham, Seduction Island, and some others, which are to be found in Mr Muller's chart, had no place in this now produced to us; nay, both Mr Ismyloff, and the others, assured me, that they had been several times sought for in vain. And yet it is difficult to believe ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... acquired advantage, graced with the borrowed as well as native ornaments of humanity, he found no joy in his inheritance, but sacrificed it all, and crawled through life a gross and earthy man. The seduction of Emma, young as he was when he committed that offence, was, by many, not the first crime for which—not, thank Heaven! without some preparation for his trial—he was called suddenly to answer. As a boy, he had grown aged is vice. It has been stated that he ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... appearances. I do not love Cordiani, and I never had any love for him; on the contrary, I have felt, and I do feel, for him a hatred which he has richly deserved, and I hope to convince you, in spite of every appearance which seems to convict me. As to the reproach of seduction, I entreat you to spare me such an accusation. On our side, consider that, if you had not yourself thrown temptation in my way, I never would have committed towards you an action of which I have deeply repented, for reasons which you do not know, but which you must learn from me. The ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... seduction, putting out her heavy fists in every direction she exhibited a bearish kindness toward Gard that seemed calculated at first to frighten him. She was loud-voiced, iron-jawed. One of her favorite boasts was that she ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... time I went to a play myself, which surely I may live long enough and never forget. It was "Seduction," a very clever piece, but containing a dreadful picture of vice and dissipation in high life, written by Mr. Miles Andrews, with an epilogue—O, such an epilogue! I was listening to it with uncommon attention, from a compliment ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... "The Woodman's Daughter," is a story of seduction, madness, and child-murder. These are powerful materials to work with; yet it is not every man's hand that they will suit. In the hands of common-place, they are simply revolting. In the hands of folly and affectation, their repulsiveness is aggravated by the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... you not only prevent the undesirable secrecy, but you build normally on modesty; you lay foundations for a true sense of shame, disgust, and disgrace; and in doing so, set up one of the strong defenses against perversions and prurient allurement and seduction. ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... pass resolutions condemnatory of false doctrine, but it is somewhat more difficult to counteract the seduction of the principles from which heresies derive their influence. The Gnostics, the Montanists, and the Manichaeans, owed much of their strength to fallacies and superstitions with which the Christian teachers ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... to all that you have sinned against God, and injured a respectable citizen of Rochelle by the seduction of his daughter. We can not hope that God will bless our arms in this approaching battle while such a sin remains unrepented ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... this design, his attention is attracted by a group of men attacking an individual. This individual proves to be himself, Lisardo. Lisardo, then, witnesses his own murder and subsequent funeral obsequies. This warning is too terrible not to heed. He gives over his attempt at seduction and leads an ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... He sits obese and stolid, yet not without the dignity that belongs to absolute simplicity, showing on his left cheek the wound received at the battle of Muehlberg. The picture has, as a portrait by Titian, no very commanding merit, no seduction of technique, and it is easy to imagine that Cesare Vecellio may have had a share in it. Singular is the absence of all pose, of all attempt to harmonise the main lines of the design or give pictorial elegance to the naive directness of the presentment. ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... against this error, yet am I compelled to entertain some slight degree of suspicion lest evil communication, the alluring nurse of the vices, should lend an unhappy impulse to your still tender mind, especially as I am not ignorant with what facility the external senses yield to seduction. I have therefore sent you this treatise, not only as a monitor, but even as an importunate and sometimes impudent dun, who in this turn of life may convoy you beyond the rocks of adulation; and may not merely offer you advice, but confine you to the path which ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... father confessor hardly knows more about women than a nurse about men. Moreover, she had her arts, little as men suspected it. Long ago she had read an appraisement of Madame Recamier by Sainte-Beuve: "She listens avec seduction." Gora had no intention of practising seduction in any of its forms, but she listened and she never betrayed, and her reward was that men sound and whole, and full of man's inherent and technical peculiarities, had confided in her. Altogether she was ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... this time was in the territory of Sind, laying it waste with fire and sword, no troops scarcely being opposed to his sudden invasion. He received the ambassador with mortifying haughtiness, bidding him return to his master, and inform him that he never would forgive the seduction of his daughter, in revenge for which he had taken a solemn oath to overturn the kingdom of Sind, raze the capital, and feast his eyes with the blood of the old sultan and his son. On receipt of this ungracious reply to his proposals, the sultan ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... punished by the captain with three days on bread and water-but no pay could be forfeited for any offense, for no fines were allowed in the republic. For serious offenses committed by either officer or private in time of peace, such as sodomy, crimes against nature, adultery, seduction, larceny, embezzlement or any other felony, the accused was sent to the district court for trial and on conviction was dismissed the service and committed to prison for the term of years provided by the law for the crime he had been convicted of and five years additional for perjury, he having violated ...
— Eurasia • Christopher Evans
... keeping in which she was held, with the daughters of the house for bedfellows. Their mother and the Regent's, her father's former mistress, was herself not impervious to her prisoner's lifelong power of seduction and subjugation. Her son George Douglas fell inevitably under the charm. A rumor transmitted to England went so far as to assert that she had proposed him to their common half-brother Murray as a fourth husband for herself; a later tradition represented her as the mother of a child by ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... Studium der Theologie betr. ii. S. 225 (Tueb. 1808): "The serpent had injured them; it had become to them a symbol of evil, of seduction, and at the same time of God's curse, of contempt and punishment. To men the encouraging prospect was held out, that they, the seed of the woman, were stronger and nobler than the serpent, and all evil. They should tread upon the head ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... to be blighted By the swarm of foul destruction? Why such innocence delighted, When sin stalks to thy seduction? All the litanies e'er chaunted Shall not keep thy ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... of the Court of Appeal was once seriously disturbed by Edward Bullen reading to them the following paragraph from a pleading in an action for seduction: "The defendant denies that he is the father of the said twins, or of either of them." This he apologetically explained was due to an accident in his pupil-room, but everyone recognised the style ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... England. Young, clever, and fashionable, but a little eccentric, she had been married some years when she fell so desperately in love with Lord Byron that she braved every thing for him. It was not Byron who made the first advances, for his powers of seduction were only the attractions with which nature had endowed him. His person, his voice, his look,—all in him was irresistible. In presenting himself anywhere, he could very well say with Shakspeare, ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... 176): "Go and ask these unfortunate creatures if they willingly and freely devoted themselves to vice. And nearly all of them will tell you a story of need and destitution, of hunger and lack of work, which compelled them to it, or else of love and seduction and the fear of the discovery of their false step which drove them out of their homes, helpless and forsaken, into the pool of vice from which there is hardly any salvation." It is, of course, quite true that the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... and the punishment goes deepening with the crime from circle to circle, through gluttony, avarice, prodigality, wrath, sullenness, or unwillingness to be pleased with the creation, disbelief in God and the soul (with which the punishment by fire commences), usury, murder, suicide, blasphemy, seduction and other carnal enormities, adulation, simony, soothsaying, astrology, witchcraft, trafficking with the public interest, hypocrisy, highway robbery (on the great Italian scale), sacrilege, evil counsel, disturbance ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... or Holland—a province slowly wrested from the sea, and secured by dams and dykes. Woe to him who makes a breach in the sea-walls! And yet Nietzsche is to be read, though 't is a pity he is to be translated into English for the seduction of unripe minds. The desuetude of Latin as a common language for scholars is to be regretted; it kept the thinkers of Europe in touch, and kept out the profanum vulgus. As I have often pointed out, a truth grows so stale that it is almost a lie, and to invert ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... this address to THE LOVER without something on the subject of seduction and inconstancy. In, perhaps, nineteen cases out of twenty, there is, in the unfortunate cases of illicit gratification, no seduction at all, the passion, the absence of virtue, and the crime, being all mutual. But, there are other cases of a very different description; and where a man goes coolly and deliberately to work, first to gain and rivet the affections of a young girl, then to ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... ministers to the wants of youth. In the window is displayed a box of marbles—glassies, commonies, and a larger browny adapted to the purpose of "pugging," by reason of the violence with which it seems to respond to the impact of your thumb. Then there are baseballs of graded excellence and seduction. And tops. Time is needed for the choosing of a top. First you stand tiptoe with nose just above the glass and make your trial selection. Pay no attention to the color, for that's the way a girl chooses! Black is good, without womanish taint. Then you wiggle ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... accompanied by his counsel, a leading attorney of Winchester, whose learning and ability were not less pronounced than was the quality of his whisky, samples of which he, at irregular intervals, brought in for the solace, if not for the seduction of the court. It was no more like the article commonly called whisky than Mumm's extra dry is like the pink lemonade of circus time. It had an oily appearance, an aromatic flavor, and the lawyer averred that there was not a headache in a barrel of it, ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... Slavery did de white race a whole lot a good but it wasn't lastin' good. It did de Negro good, dat will be lastin' good forever. De Negro women protected de pure white woman from enticement and seduction of de white man in slavery time. My grandpap say he never heard of a bad white woman befo' freedom. I leave it wid you if dere's any dese times? Dat was worth more to de South, my grandpap say, dis santification of de white women, than all de cotton and corn dat de Negroes ever makes, in all ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... appreciate him, Frederick the Great did. It is true, too, that he admired Frederick's intellect, and that he was flattered by his favour. 'Il avait de l'esprit,' he said afterwards, 'des graces, et, de plus, il etait roi; ce qui fait toujours une grande seduction, attendu la faiblesse humaine.' His vanity could not resist the prestige of a royal intimacy; and no doubt he relished to the full even the increased consequence which came to him with his Chamberlain's key and his ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... case the woman must be shown to be 'quick with child.' A woman may also plead pregnancy to delay her trial in Scotland, and both in England and Scotland, in civil cases, to produce a successor to estates, to increase damages for seduction, in compensation cases where a husband has been killed, to obtain increased damages, etc. A woman may become pregnant within a month of ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... separated. After the death of Buckingham, the King attempted to seduce some of the chiefs of the Opposition from their party; and Wentworth was among those who yielded to the seduction. He abandoned his associates, and hated them ever after with the deadly hatred of a renegade. High titles and great employments were heaped upon him. He became Earl of Strafford, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, President of the Council of the North; and he employed all his power for the ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... her, and in presence of her relations expels her from his house, and pursues her with stripes through the whole village. [113] Nor is any indulgence shown to a prostitute. Neither beauty, youth, nor riches can procure her a husband: for none there looks on vice with a smile, or calls mutual seduction the way of the world. Still more exemplary is the practice of those states [114] in which none but virgins marry, and the expectations and wishes of a wife are at once brought to a period. Thus, they take one husband as one body and one life; that no thought, no desire, ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... is a sophism," cried Durtal, growing angry. "God has left to every man his liberty; no one is tempted beyond his power. If in certain cases, he allows the seduction to overpass our means of resistance, it is to recall us to humility, to bring us back to Him by remorse, for other causes which we know not, which it is not His business to show us. Then probably those transgressions are appreciated in a different ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... procure the immediate fulfilment of the marriage contract between himself and Constance. This was his only hope, the sheet-anchor to which he alone trusted; he felt assured that, if the Protector discovered his infamous seduction of the Jewess, Zillah, he would step in, from a twofold motive, and prevent his union: in that he esteemed both the Rabbi's wisdom and his wealth, and was most unlikely to suffer one on whom his favour had been bestowed ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... simple rustic happiness, if, misled by the weakness of a tender heart, she had not listened to the passion of a gentleman in the neighbourhood, who promised her marriage. He soon abandoned her, and adding inhumanity to seduction, refused to insure a provision for the child of which she was pregnant. Margaret then determined to leave forever her native village, and retire, where her fault might be concealed, to some colony distant from that ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... fancy paints to me the good old man stooping to raise the weeping penitent, while every tear from her eye is numbered by drops from his bleeding heart, my bosom glows with honest indignation, and I wish for power to extirpate those monsters of seduction from the earth. ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... Nobili, wildly. He could contain himself no longer. His heart beat almost to bursting. A desperate seduction was stealing over him. ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... ready with suggestions. She had spoken of riding. There would be places to go. The bailes out at the Quemado; weddings far out in the chaparral. Many Americans attended these affairs in a spirit of adventure, and the ride was always delightful. There was a seduction in the desert winds, in the low-vaulted skies with their ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... mother; the next, and the next, by the under-jailers; and Angiola continued grievously ill. The under-jailers, also, brought me very unpleasant tidings relating to the love-affair; tidings, in short, which made me deeply sympathize with her sufferings. A case of seduction! But, perhaps, it was the tale of calumny. Alas! I but too well believed it, and I was affected at it more than I can express; though I still like to flatter myself that it was false. After upwards of a month's illness, the poor girl was taken into the country, ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... mother. Note the contrast which the duel between Alfio and Turiddu presents with the double murder to the piquant accompaniment of comedy in 'Pagliacci,' the opera which followed so hard upon its heels. Since then piquancy has been the cry; the piquant contemplation of adultery, seduction, and murder amid the reek and stench of the Italian barnyard. Think of Cilea's 'Tilda,' Giordano's 'Mala Vita,' Spinelli's 'A Basso Porto,' and ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... an enemy to ecclesiastical and civil tyranny, that it is here subjoined. It showed the author at an early period capable of seconding efficaciously the formation of republics on the principles of justice and virtue. Such a man became most naturally an object of Governor Barnard's seduction. The perversion of his abilities might be of use in a bad cause; the corruption of his principles might tarnish the best. But the arts of the Governor, which had succeeded with so many, were ineffectual with Mr. Adams, who ...
— A Collection of State-Papers, Relative to the First Acknowledgment of the Sovereignty of the United States of America • John Adams
... this custom came under judicial cognizance in the year 1804, when the supreme court held, that although bundling was admitted to be the custom in some parts of the state, it being proven that the parents of the girl, for whose seduction the suit was brought, countenanced her practicing it, they had no right to complain, or ask satisfaction for the consequences, which, the court ...
— Bundling; Its Origin, Progress and Decline in America • Henry Reed Stiles
... made no more struggles; he surrendered himself to the charming seduction, and as his advances were respectful, but ardent and incessant, he found himself at the end of a ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... seduction of a young girl by the heir to an earldom, the resulting illegitimate pregnancy, and the young nobleman's struggle to decide whether to marry or to abandon the girl—certainly not the usual content ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... "Fellow-Citizens:—The seduction which has spread over a very small part of the people and garrison of this capital; the forgetfulness of honour and duty, have caused the defection of a few soldiers, whose misconduct up to this hour has been thrown into confusion ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... we are right with Him, that same thought brings with it security and companionship. Ah! we do not need ever to say 'I am alone' if we are walking before God. It brings with it, of course, an armour against temptation. What mean, lustful, worldly seduction has any power when a man falls back on the thought, 'God sees me, and God is with me'? Do you remember the very first instance in Scripture of the use of this phrase? The Lord said unto Abraham, 'Walk before Me, and be thou perfect.' That ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... protection. But as transgressors of the law, which forbids the entrance of strangers, they have stolen into the country, and secretly endeavoured to multiply converts to their way of thinking, it became my duty to oppose a conduct so deceitful, and to put a stop to the progress of seduction. Justly as they were found to deserve the punishment to which they have been condemned, touched, nevertheless, with compassion for their imprudence, it was not without injury to my feelings that I ratified the sentence. But recollecting ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... lips bore habitual testimony to the disorders of her existence, but that under a calm and sedate demeanour there lurked a secret and indefinable charm. Many other women possessed more regular features, but none of them had a greater power of seduction. We must add that she owed that power entirely to her physical perfections, for except in regard to the devices necessary to her calling, she showed no cleverness, being ignorant, dull and without inner resources ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - LA CONSTANTIN—1660 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... woman he took both death and hell, although it did not bear these names, but bore the name of fruit. The sleep of death and fiends' seduction; death and hell and exile and damnation—these were the fatal fruit whereon they feasted. And when the apple worked within him and touched his heart, then laughed aloud the evilhearted fiend, capered about, and gave thanks to his ...
— Codex Junius 11 • Unknown
... the Fitful Head, "The Reimkennar." Her real name was, Ulla Troil, but after her seduction by Basil Mertoun (Vaughan), and the birth of a son named Clement Cleveland (the future pirate), she changed her name. Towards the end of the novel, Norna gradually recovered her senses. She was the aunt of Minna and Brenda Troil.—Sir W. Scott, The Pirate ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... say why, but in spite of its seduction, which is full of splendour, of its noble history and great buildings, I have never been able to love Arundel. One is there always I feel too much in the shadow of that mighty Castle which for the most part is not old at ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... they two sit curmurring, forgetful of mice and milk, of all but love! How meekly mews the Demure, relapsing into that sweet under-song—the Purr! And how curls Tom's whiskers like those of a Pashaw! The point of his tail—and the point only is alive—insidiously turning itself, with serpent-like seduction, towards that of Tabitha, pensive as a nun. His eyes are rubies, hers emeralds—as they should be—his lightning, hers lustre—for in her sight he is the lord, and in his, she is the lady ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 484 - Vol. 17, No. 484, Saturday, April 9, 1831 • Various
... a pretty but giddy girl in the "Heart of Midlothian," whom seduction and the murder of her child ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... her friends said, for marriage. We courted, as the saying is, in the meanwhile. It was my love for her, my wish to deserve her, that made me iron against my friend's example. I was fool enough to speak to him of Mary—to present him to her—this ended in her seduction." (Again Gawtrey paused, and breathed hard.) "I discovered the treachery—I called out the seducer-he sneered, and refused to fight the low-born adventurer. I struck him to the earth—and then we fought. I was satisfied by a ball through my side! but he," ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Salpetriere, the healthy are separated from the diseased; and the latter are sent to Bicetre, where they either find a cure or death. Your imagination will supply the finishing strokes of this frightful picture.—These unfortunate victims of indigence or of the seduction of man, are deserving of compassion. With all their vices, they have, after all, one less than many of their sex who pride themselves on chastity, without really possessing it; that is, hypocrisy. As they shew themselves ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... replied: "The soul of Foylge, for that he unjustly slew my chariot-driver, God justly judging and vindicating my cause, hath gone cut of his body, and descended into hell; but Satan, to the delusion and the seduction of mankind, hath entered into his corpse, and occupieth it as his own proper vessel." Then the saint forbade Satan that in that vessel he should longer abide, or deceive mankind with so wicked a phantom. ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... females of his own circle; on the contrary, the more crimes he commits of this sort, the more sometimes he may expect to be caressed by males and females of his own order. The man who would not hesitate a moment to destroy the happiness of a family by the seduction of the wife or the daughter, would not dare to leave one shilling of a gambling debt unpaid—the one would bring down upon him the odium of his circle, but the other would not; and the odium of that circle is the only kind of odium he dreads. Appius Claudius apprehended no odium from ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... opinions, on points, too, of some moment, it had not entered my imagination to conceive the difference could be such as she had now proved it. That the manner in which she treated the dreadful crime committed by her brother and my sister (with whom lay the greater seduction I pretended not to say), but the manner in which she spoke of the crime itself, giving it every reproach but the right; considering its ill consequences only as they were to be braved or overborne by a defiance of decency ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... women with the greatest reserve, and we must attribute this to the low esteem in which they generally hold the fair sex; in their illustrations of the disorders of love, it is almost always the woman on whom the blame of seduction ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... an independent existence. The first real interlude which has come down to us is that called De Clerico et Puella, Of the Cleric and the Maiden, which was written not later than the early fourteenth century. This is little more than a dialogue depicting the attempted seduction of a maiden by a wanton cleric. The only other surviving fourteenth-century interlude, that of Dux Maraud, is, on the other hand, the dramatization of a tragic tale of incest and murder. This is, however, somewhat ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... who are practitioners of this work. Into whatever houses I enter, I will go into them for the benefit of the sick, and will abstain from every voluntary act of mischief and corruption, and, further, from the seduction of females or males, of freedmen and slaves. Whatever, in connection with my professional practice, or not in connection with it, I see or hear, in the life of men, which ought not to be spoken of abroad, I will not divulge as reckoning that all such ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... with the women he had known had always been possible—possible in its various degrees, some more difficult to arrive at than others, but always possible. And, until that moment, when Sally had told him that she knew he was a gentleman, he had placed her no differently to the rest. Cheap, sordid seduction, there had been none of that in his mind; but he had tacitly admitted within himself that if their acquaintance were to drift—she willing, he content—into that condition of intimacy, then what harm would be done? She was a little type-writer; ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... nothing very much to charm in a history of three disagreeable children developing into detestable young women. Perhaps it may have some value as a study of feminine adolescence, but I defy anyone to call the result attractive. Its chief incident, which is (not to mince matters) the attempted seduction by Christina of a middle-aged man, the father of one of her friends, mercifully comes to nothing. I like to believe that this sort of thing is as unusual as it is unpleasant. For the rest, the picture of ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, Feb. 7, 1917 • Various
... against the persons sent from Europe to arrange measures for that purpose. One of them, however, M. Dolomieu, had cause to repent his mission, which occasioned him to be badly treated by the Sicilians. M. Poussielgue had done all he could in the way of seduction, but he had not completely succeeded. There was some misunderstanding, and, in consequence, some shots were interchanged. Bonaparte was very much pleased with General Baraguay d'Hilliers' services in Italy. He could not but ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... in innumerable ways, such attachments are particularly alarming to the truly enlightened and independent patriot. How many opportunities do they afford to tamper with domestic factions, to practice the art of seduction, to mislead public opinion, to influence or awe the public councils! Such an attachment of a small or weak toward a great and powerful nation dooms the former to be the satellite of ...
— Key-Notes of American Liberty • Various
... me assure you, my Lord, that, although, from the extreme delicacy of your honour, you have ever through life shuddered at seduction; yet, there are constitutions, and there are circumstances, in which it can ...
— Lover's Vows • Mrs. Inchbald
... the popular summit of his glory. He had already tainted it by many acts of violence, and by an exclusive devotion to personal ends, in defiance of justice and liberty. Henceforward and under the disastrous inspirations of a mad ambition, victory itself was to become a fatal seduction which by inevitable degrees draws us on to ruin. Great and terrible lesson of Divine justice on the morality of nations! Starting from the violation of the peace of Amiens, and in spite of the glory of the sun of Austerlitz, the history of the glory of the conqueror includes in ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... social, or economical thinker. A man would give all other bliss and all his worldly wealth for this, to waste his whole strength in one kick upon this perfect prig. He employs the arguments of evolution and so forth to justify the seduction of a little girl of fifteen, and later, by way of making amends, proposes to commit incest by marrying her sister. There have been evolutionists, to be sure, who believed in promiscuity, like Mr Edgar, as preferable to monogamy. But this only proves that an evolutionist may fail to understand ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... from her hair, for Terran spacemen are educated, and if they have a choice, or seem to have, prefer seduction to rape. ...
— Step IV • Rosel George Brown
... deserves. To find a book to compare with Esther Waters we must go back to December, 1891, and to Mr. Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles. It happens that a certain similarity in the motives of these two stories makes comparison easy. Each starts with the seduction of a young girl; and each is mainly concerned with her subsequent adventures. From the beginning the advantage of probability is with the younger novelist. Mr. Moore's "William Latch" is a thoroughly natural figure, and remains a natural figure to the end of the book: an uneducated ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... had so worked, indeed, from the beginning. She could recall—with trembling—many a strange moment in Helbeck's presence, or in the chapel, when she had seemed to feel her whole self breaking up, dissolving in the grip of a power that was at once her foe and the bearer of infinite seduction. But always the will, the self, had won the victory, had delivered a final "No!" into which had rushed the whole energy ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... he perpetrated was to be numbered the seduction of a young lady, whose heart was broken by the detection of his perfidy. The fruit of this unhappy union was a daughter. Her mother died shortly after her birth. Her father was careless of her destiny. She was consigned to the care ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... the Guards, where his conduct became so irregular and profligate that his father, the admiral, though a good-natured man, discarded him long before his death. In 1778 he acquired extraordinary eclat by the seduction of the Marchioness of Caermarthen, under circumstances which have few parallels in the licentiousness of fashionable life. The meanness with which he obliged his wretched victim to supply him with money would have been disgraceful to the basest adulteries of the cellar or garret. A divorce ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... his neck, in order to induce ignorant people to believe that they might themselves legally follow, when they perceived a member of that illustrious fraternity to be leading the way. As De Hammer was only an official or servant of that Order, but not a companion, the seduction of the lieges by such false pretenses was reckoned among the most heinous of his offences. He was fierce in his hostility to the government, and one of those fiery spirits whose premature zeal was prejudicial to the cause of liberty, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... die like sheep with the rot; so fast that soon there would be none left, if a fresh supply were not obtained equal to the number of deaths. But a fresh supply is always obtained without the least trouble; seduction easily keeps pace with prostitution or mortality. Those that die are, like factory children that die, instantly succeeded by new competitors for misery and death." There is no hour of a summer's or a winter's ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... but swift relaxation of her tense glance, of her stiffened muscles, of every fibre of her body. That black, fixed stare into which I had read a tragic meaning more than once, in which I had found a sombre seduction, was perfectly empty now, void of all consciousness whatever, and not even aware any longer of my presence; it had become a little sleepy, ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... assignations. But if the author of the Reflections, though a vigilant, was not a discreet guardian of the Constitution, let them who have the same regard to it show themselves as vigilant and more skilful in repelling the attacks of seduction or violence. Their freedom from jealousy is equivocal, and may arise as well from indifference to the object as from confidence ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... orders that the door was to be denied to all emissaries or letters from Rawdon), took Miss Crawley's carriage, and drove to her old friend Miss Pinkerton, at Minerva House, Chiswick Mall, to whom she announced the dreadful intelligence of Captain Rawdon's seduction by Miss Sharp, and from whom she got sundry strange particulars regarding the ex-governess's birth and early history. The friend of the Lexicographer had plenty of information to give. Miss Jemima was made to fetch the drawing-master's receipts and letters. This ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Lemminkainen, and a new cycle of adventures, is abruptly introduced. Lemminkainen is a profligate wanderer, with as many loves as Hercules. The fact that he is regarded as a form of the sea-god makes it strange that his most noted achievement, the seduction of the whole female population of his island, should correspond with a like feat of Krishna's. 'Sixteen thousand and one hundred,' says the Vishnu Purana, 'was the number of the maidens; and into so many forms did the son of Madhu multiply himself, so that every ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... the parliamentary oath, and the ultimate event proved that he was right and they were wrong. Now what were the crimes of the three other members, who were completely and absolutely expelled? Captain Verney was found guilty of procuration for seduction, Mr. Hastings was found guilty of embezzlement, and Mr. De Cobain was pronounced guilty of evading justice, while charged with unnatural offences. Mr. Jabez Spencer Balfour might also have been expelled, if he had not accepted the Chiltern ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... below it, since he is deficient in one of the great essentials of the character; and that is virtue." "I am surprised," said I; "but how has he incurred so severe a censure?" "By being a professed libertine; by having but too successfully, practised the arts of seduction; by triumphing in the destruction of innocence and the peace of families." "O, why was I not informed of this before? But perhaps these are old affairs—the effects of juvenile folly—crimes of which he may have repented, and which charity ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster
... early plays are the strongest expression of the revolutionary tendencies, the other more important names are Klinger, Wagner, Lenz, Leisewitz, and Maler Mller. Their favorite form was the prose tragedy of middle-class life. They wrote of crime and remorse; of fratricide, seduction, rape and child-murder; of class conflict, and of fierce passion at war with the social order. While their plays were meant to exemplify a fearless 'naturalism,' the language is often unnaturally ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... clutched him, half by the jowl, half by the slack of the neck under the ear. There was no threat in that reach, nothing tentative nor timorous. It was hearty, all-confident, and it produced confidence in Michael. It was roughness without hurt, assertion without threat, surety without seduction. To him it was the most natural thing in the world thus to be familiarly seized and shaken about by a total stranger, while a jovial voice muttered: "That's right, dog. Stick around, stick around, and ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... treason, adultery, killing the escaped snakes from the fetich-house,—and often stealing,—are punished by death, or by being sold into slavery. A girl who loses her standing, disgraces her family by an immoral act, is banished from the tribe. And in case of seduction the man is tied up and flogged. In case of adultery a large sum of money must be paid. If the guilty one is unable to pay the fine, then death or slavery ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... inaccessible to seduction, he is a human obstacle. We must make our way around him, since we ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... accomplished? Others than you have doubtless admired her, but they ran no risk. She might employ all the seduction she pleased; you ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... were full of the assassin. Many things were incomprehensible in her character, unless you approached it with the right key. Young and with a fatal beauty, fantastic, audacious, a great coquette, always giving out a perfume of seduction and feminine ruin, she was one of those women who live in the atmosphere of infamous intrigue, and her last victim ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... the pairing is preceded by courtship; for these animals, though hermaphrodites, are compelled by their structure to pair together. Agassiz remarks, "Quiconque a eu l'occasion d'observer les amours des limacons, ne saurait mettre en doute la seduction deployee dans les mouvements et les allures qui preparent et accomplissent le double embrassement de ces hermaphrodites." (2. 'De l'Espece et de la Class.' etc., 1869, p. 106.) These animals appear also susceptible of some degree of permanent ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... contempt of the chaste male for the imperfect woman. Because he thought of her as one degraded below scruples, he had picked her out to be still more degraded, and to risk her whole irregular establishment in life by complicity in this dishonourable act. It was uglier than a seduction. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... clerk seem made for each other; a sleepy, stupid solemnity marks every muscle of the divine, and the nasal droning of the lay brother is most happily expressed. Accompanied by her child and mother, the unfortunate victim of his seduction is here again introduced, endeavouring to enter the church, and forbid the banns. The opposition made by an old pew-opener, with her bunch of keys, gave the artist a good opportunity for indulging his taste in the burlesque, and he has not ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... slowly along, through wet and weary ways, in frost and in fog, have undoubtedly a stronger temptation to indulge in that cordial and reviving stimulus, than we water-drinkers, sitting in warm and comfortable rooms, can readily imagine. For certain, our drover could never resist the gentle seduction of the gin-bottle, and being of a free, merry, jovial temperament, one of those persons commonly called good fellows, who like to see others happy in the same way with themselves, he was apt to circulate it at his own ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... the iniquity of seduction. Your servant is not destitute of feminine and virtuous qualities; but she was taught that the best use of her charms consists in the sale of them. My nocturnal visits to Mettingen were now prompted by a double view, and my correspondence with your servant gave me, at all ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... play, was published in 1915. Gloomy and terrible, but strong and restrained, it is built on a theme of seduction, remorse, and forgiveness in death, woven about the legendary figure of Galdra-Loftur, who lived in Iceland at the beginning of the eighteenth century. It ends with an intensely dramatic scene in the ...
— Modern Icelandic Plays - Eyvind of the Hills; The Hraun Farm • Jhann Sigurjnsson
... was fleeting as the reflection of lightning. Without appearing to have heard the dialogue, of which she had not lost a word, she began again, giving to her voice all the charm, all the power, all the seduction the demon ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... in particular interested me. The Pine-chafer emits a musical note. The female is as gifted as the male. Does the lover make use of his faculty as a means of seduction and appeal? Does the female answer the chirp of her innamorata by a similar chirp? That this may be so under normal conditions, amidst the foliage of the pines, is extremely probable; but I can make no assertion, as I have never heard anything ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... function, but it may easily become immoral per accidentem, i.e., from the special circumstances under which it takes place, and whereby it acquires the character of an act of injustice or treachery, such as seduction of a friend's wife or daughter."[918] A very influential Socialist writer asks: "Is chastity a virtue, and is there such a vice as unchastity?" and he answers his question by quoting the above statement of Bax.[919] "If it be asked, Is marriage a failure? ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... was his son's full wife, was apparently punished by his being drowned. The Code is obscure here and we are not sure whether she was drowned also.(253) If the girl was not yet fully married, the case was treated as one of ordinary seduction, and the culprit was ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... naturally. From long knowledge and intense thinking he could see her at will; and there she was at the end of the sofa crossing and uncrossing her lovely legs, so long from the knees, showing through the thin evening gown; he thought of their sweetness and the seduction of the foot advancing, showing an inch or two beyond the skirt of her dress. And then she drew her rings from her fingers, dropping them into her lap, and unconsciously placed them ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... consideration; attraction; loadstone; magnet, magnetism, magnetic force; allectation|, allective|; temptation, enticement, agacerie[obs3], allurement, witchery; bewitchment, bewitchery; charm; spell &c. 993; fascination, blandishment, cajolery; seduction, seducement; honeyed words, voice of the tempter, song of the Sirens forbidden fruit, golden apple. persuasibility[obs3], persuasibleness[obs3]; attractability[obs3]; impressibility, susceptibility; softness; persuasiveness, attractiveness; tantalization[obs3]. influence, prompting, dictate, instance; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... which redeems me in his far-seeing eyes is what places me beyond redemption in the minds of others. I have spent some sleepless nights in his fine home, kept awake by the seductions of social life tugging at my heart-strings. So one night I stole away from this seduction and slept with some drunken hoboes in the tall soft grass, where I could have no doubt about being welcome. I might as well doubt the grass as those pals, who without question hailed me as an equal. I, having the ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... blush in his cooler moments, and which he will lament as the sad effect of a spirit unsubdued by religion; but infidelity is a calm, considerate act, which cannot plead the weakness of the heart, or the seduction of the senses. Even good men frequently fail in their duty through the infirmities of nature and the allurements of the world; but the infidel errs on a plan, on a settled and ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... estate, his Illustrious Friend accompanies him and the same process goes on. But now things turn less happily for Robert. He finds himself, without any consciousness of the acts charged, accused on apparently indubitable evidence, first of peccadillos, then of serious crimes. Seduction, forgery, murder, even matricide are hinted against him, and at last, under the impression that indisputable proofs of the last two crimes have been discovered, he flies from his house. After a short period of wandering, in which ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... session being now over) resolved to make my accustomed journey northwards a little earlier than usual; to the end that, though my fighting days are over, I may give some countenance to the friends of the government, and prevent the seduction of the unwary, if there should be any truth ...
— The Jacobite Rebellions (1689-1746) - (Bell's Scottish History Source Books.) • James Pringle Thomson
... become rich all of a sudden. They said he had strangled one of his guests, a rich Siberian. Zubov's business in his youth had been to purchase thread from the peasants. He had failed twice. Kononov had been tried twenty years ago for arson, and even now he was indicted for the seduction of a minor. Together with him, for the second time already, on a similar charge, Zakhar Kirillov Robustov had been dragged to court. Robustov was a stout, short merchant with a round face and cheerful blue eyes. Among these people there was hardly ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... hands lutes and divers instruments of mirth and music; and these, having saluted the two guests, sat down and fell to tuning their lute-strings. Then they rose and standing before them, played and sang and recited verses: and indeed each one of them was a seduction to the servants of the Lord. Whilst they were thus busied there entered other ten damsels like unto them, high-bosomed maids and of an equal age, with black-eyes and cheeks like the rose, joined eyebrows and looks languorous; ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... economic freedom and social independence of the woman exterminating sexual love between man and woman, it would for the first time fully enfranchise it. The element of physical force and capture which dominated the most primitive sex relations, the more degrading element of seduction and purchase by means of wealth or material good offered to woman in our modern societies, would then give place to the untrammelled action of attraction and affection alone between the sexes, and sexual love, after its ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... she feared shame, more than the poverty to which it would lead. Her incessant importunities to prevail upon my father to screen her from reproach by marrying her, as he had promised in the fervour of seduction, estranged him from her so completely, that her very person became distasteful to him; and he began to hate, as well as despise me, before I ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... contentment, they abscond, and passing over the lines into a non-slaveholding State, are there concealed and protected. The number and the success of elopements leave no doubt of the establishment of a regular chain of posts, accessary to, and of systematic plans, deliberately organized, for their seduction and concealment. In these escapes, the free negroes are, for the most part, undoubtedly instrumental, as they are to most of the robberies committed by slaves. While at Easton, two weeks since, the slaves ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... tranquillising for the spirit, if the memory retained only the dark shadows of the past? so that the mind could turn with zest and interest to the joys of the moment? Instead of that, memory tempted the soul, by a kind of magical seduction, to dwell only upon what was sweet and beautiful in the past, thereby emphasising and heightening the sense of dissatisfaction with the present. Was it true that the very days that were then passing, those sober, uneventful days, would at some future time ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... exceed the gain of a present to. I hold this maxim infallible in the accepting Line. I read your Magazines with satisfaction. I throughly agree with you as to the German Faust, as far [as] I can do justice to it from an English translation. 'Tis a disagreeable canting tale of Seduction, which has nothing to do with the Spirit of Faustus— Curiosity. Was the dark secret to be explored to end in the seducing of a weak girl, which might have been accomplished by earthly agency? When Marlow gives his Faustus a mistress, he flies him ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... then she laughed and said, that she did really begin to believe that there was such a thing as love at first sight, and then—he had better go now, she wished to be alone—she really had a headache. Oh! Nancy Corbett! you were, indeed, an adept in the art of seduction—no wonder that your name has been handed down to posterity. Mr Vanslyperken perceived his advantage, and pressed still more, until the blushing widow declared that she would really think seriously about the matter, ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... informs us of the way this tragic intrigue ended. "Acquet employed every means of seduction to attain his end. The young girl, fearing to remain long unmarried because of the unhappy times, listened to him, in spite of the many reasons for waiting and for refusing the proposals of a man whose name, country and fortune were unknown to them. The mother's advice was unfortunately not ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... homed with him in the house of instruction, and they brought her the instruments of music. Furthermore, as time went on she was vouchsafed health and soundness and her beauty waxed many times brighter than before and her pallor was changed to white and red, so that she became a seduction to all who saw her. One day, Ishak bade summon all who were with him of slave-girls from the house of instruction and carried them up to Al-Rashid's palace, leaving none in his house save Tohfah and a cookmaid; for that he thought not of Tohfah, nor did she ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... against Sir William Wilde; but that was not the way it presented itself. The action was not even brought directly by Miss Travers or by her father, Dr. Travers, against Sir William Wilde for rape or criminal assault, or seduction. It was a civil action brought by Miss Travers, who claimed L2,000 damages for a libel written by Lady Wilde to her father, Dr. Travers. The letter complained of ran ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... herself at times. "I know so well how to manage men; but what use is my knowledge to me now that I am old? Alice is young, and even without beauty she could do so much, if she only understood the art of masculine seduction. But then it is a gift, not an acquired art, and Alice was not born with ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... aside; yet though she could not take part in a battle, there were incessant battles about her: the fatal woman, who is the ruin of her country, is well-known in all legend and romance, from Helen of Troy to La Cava, whose seduction by King Roderick brought the Moors into Spain.[18] In the Iliad King Priam treats Helen with delicate consideration, as is seen in the beautiful passage that describes her sitting by him on the walls of Troy, and pointing out to him the leaders of the Greek army marshalled in the plain ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... which any religious improvement could be created—the only chance of being saved. I rather became refined in vice, without quitting it. Gross and sensual gratification, so easily obtained in the West Indies, was disgusting to me; yet I scrupled not to attempt the seduction of innocence, rather more gratified in the pursuit than in the enjoyment, which soon palled, and drove me ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... you were virtuous from vanity, not principle, and I seized the fit moment for your seduction. I observed your blind idolatry of the Madonna's picture. I bade a subordinate but crafty spirit assume a similar form, and you eagerly yielded to the blandishments ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... discovered by Beering, in 1741, and being found to abound with sea-otters, the Russian merchants became exceedingly eager in searching for the other islands seen by that navigator, to the S.E. of Kamtschatka, called in Muller's map the islands of Seduction, St Abraham, &c. In these expeditions they fell in with three groups of islands; the first about fifteen degrees to the east of Kamtschatka, in 53 deg. N. latitude; the second about twelve degrees to the eastward of the former; ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... occupied the mind of the German poet for an ordinary lifetime, the French librettists extracted the romance which sufficed them—the story of Gretchen's love for the rejuvenated philosopher, her seduction and death. This romance is wholly the creation of Goethe; it has no place in any of the old legends which are at the bottom of the history of Dr. Faust, or Faustus. Those legends deal with the doings of a magician who has sold his soul to the devil for the accomplishment of some ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... true that by the practice we offend laws human and divine; but at the same time, it must be acknowledged, that neither law nor religion can keep society in such good order, or so restrain crime. The man who would defy the penalty of the law, and the commandments of his God against seduction, will, however pause in his career when he finds that there are brothers to avenge an injured sister. And why so?—because in this world we live as it were in a tavern, careless of what the bill is which we run up, but ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... medical teaching. Certain branches must be taught in the lecture-room, and will necessarily involve a good deal that is not directly useful to the future practitioner. But the over ambitious and active student must not be led away by the seduction of knowledge for its own sake from his principal pursuit. The humble beginner, who is alarmed at the vast fields of knowledge opened to him, may be encouraged by the assurance that with a very slender provision of science, in distinction from ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... forced a transformation in so vital a matter necessarily resulted in a reaction of the worst kind, and forced into secret channels the impulse which it had attempted to suppress. This reaction occurred, moreover, with an elemental force. There resulted widespread sexual violence and seduction, hesitating at nothing, often insanely daring, in which everywhere the devil was supposed to help; everyone's head was turned in this way; the uncontrolled lust of debauchees found vent in secret bacchanalian associations and orgies, wherein ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... abandoned by an unfeeling parent to poverty, and thus became an easy prey to the licentious and the giddy, who, in the pursuit of pleasure, never contemplate the attendant misery which is sure to follow the victim of seduction. There was something romantic in their story: they were daughters of the celebrated Mother Goose, whose person must have been familiar to every Oxonian for the last sixty years prior to her decease, which occurred but a short time since Of 162 this woman's ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... that by the practice we offend laws human and divine; but, at the same time, it must be acknowledged, that neither law nor religion can keep society in such good order, or so restrain crime. The man who would defy the penalty of the law, and the commandments of his God against seduction will, however, pause in his career, when he finds that there are brothers to avenge an injured sister. And why so?—because in this world we live as if we were in a tavern, careless of what the bill is which we ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... anxious for war, would not spend a penny in order to wage it; and it was not easy to corrupt some of the great vassals ordered to march at their own expense against a man in whose downfall they had no special interest. Nor were the means of seduction wanting to Ali, whose wealth was enormous; but he preferred to keep it in order to carry on the war which he thought he could no longer escape. He made, therefore, a general appeal to all Albanian warriors, whatever their religion. Mussulmans and Christians, alike attracted by the prospect of ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - ALI PACHA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... feelings of less degraded and guilty times. This person (you will guess readily it was a woman) I made it my especial business and care to wean away from my prey; I would not suffer him a consolation he had denied to me. I used all the arts of seduction to obtain the transfer of her affections. Whatever promises and vows—whether of love or wealth—could effect were tried; nor, at last, without success: I triumphed. The woman became my slave. It was she who, whenever Tyrrell faltered in his course ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... or words, for his faux pas with my frail mother convinced me that he was capable of any act of lechery. I also felt assured that he lusted after me with all the ardor of his lascivious passions, and I well know that he waited but for an opportunity to attempt my seduction.—I hated the man, both for his adultery with my mother, and his vile intentions towards myself—and I determined to punish him for his lewdness and hypocrisy—yes, punish him through the medium of his own bad ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... waiting for people brought up in ignorance of fine art. Nothing is more pitiably ridiculous than the wild worship of artists by those who have never been seasoned in youth to the enchantments of art. Tenors and prima donnas, pianists and violinists, actors and actresses enjoy powers of seduction which in the middle ages would have exposed them to the risk of being burnt for sorcery. But as they exercise this power by singing, playing, and acting, no great harm is done except perhaps to themselves. Far graver are the powers enjoyed by brilliant persons who are also connoisseurs in art. The ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw |
