"Dark Ages" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that Christian religion to which Britain owes its present greatness. Yet subsequently, on account of the inaccessible nature of the country, the inhabitants, separated from their more enlightened fellow-subjects, remained for a long period almost as ignorant as their ancestors in the dark ages; and, till of late years, retained many of the grosser superstitions and customs of ...
— Mountain Moggy - The Stoning of the Witch • William H. G. Kingston
... stationary, and dark age. There is at first sight something surprising in the respect which Turgot's ablest contemporaries paid to the contributions made to progress by Greece and Rome, compared with their angry disparagement of the dark ages. The reason of this contrast we soon discover to be that the passions of present contests gave their own colour to men's interpretation of the circumstances of the remote middle time, between the Roman Empire and the commencement of the revolutionary ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... shown any such tendency, or given any reason to fear that such a concession would lead to further demands? In answer to that question, let me sketch, in dramatic fashion, the history of her recent career in Oxford. In the dark ages of our University (some five-and-twenty years ago), while we still believed in classics and mathematics as constituting a liberal education, Natural Science sat weeping at our gates. "Ah, let me in!" she moaned; "why cram reluctant youth with your unsatisfying ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... officiate in the same desk where her father and grandfather had now conducted the worship of God for more than half a century; a period of time that, to us young people, seemed to lead us back to the dark ages of the country. And all this the dear girl wished for her brother, in connection with his spiritual rather than his temporal interests, inasmuch as the living was worth only a badly-paid salary of one hundred and fifty pounds currency per annum, together ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... Christians has come down to us, that I can discover; but we know that they, as well as the later Hebrews, considered Death as the emissary of the Evil One, if not identical with him, and called him impious, unholy. It was in the Dark Ages, that the figure of a dead body or a skull was first used as a symbol of Death; but even then its office appears to have been purely symbolic, and not representative;—that is, these figures served to remind men of their mortality, or to mark ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... installing a chartered accountant in the home offices to check the finances and collect the interest on the loans outstanding. Before reaching this position the concern had passed through nearly all the customary intervening stages. Nearly a decade rearward, back in the dark ages of the filmic cosmos, the Jurassic Period of pictures, so to speak, this little group of pathfinders tracking under the chieftainship of Mr. Lobel into almost uncharted wilds of artistic endeavor had dabbled in slap-stick one reelers ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... natural scope for innumerable calls of this nature; visits, as we should now term them, because it was customary for the callers to bring their nighties—or would have been if the callers had had any. The Dark Ages, curiously enough, lacked this garment of the dark. But it was only after the Feudal Period that the call, as we now know and practise it, became a social custom; and even to this day feudalism, in an attenuated form, rules society, ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... threatening from another quarter. Creeping up from the darkness of the dark ages, a hideous monster is intently watching to seize the throat of liberty in our land. It thrusts itself up into the noonday of the ninteenth century, not that it may be benefited by its light and freedom, but that it may suppress and obscure them. The name of this monster is Popery; ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... country yielded when the Roman forces were defeated. But hence also arose the weakness of the Persians, and their speedy loss of this conquest when the Arabs rebelled. Their rule, however, in Egypt was not quite unmarked in the history of these dark ages. ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... around a person who was able to read, and would listen for hours. At St. Paul's in London public reading of the Bible became a regular custom. But between the early days of Christianity and the beginning of the Reformation lies a period which. is known as the Dark Ages. No amount of oratory will turn that age into a Bright Age. "From the seventh to the eleventh century books were so scarce that often not one could be found in an entire city, and even rich monasteries possessed ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... changed the whole relations of monarch to people. In their social and political relations chieftains of tribes or clans divided power with the monarch, and for many centuries there was continuous warfare between these antagonistic ideas. This period is known as the "dark ages," for while it lasted there was little visible progress, and an apparent almost entire ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... fence, not knowing which way to jump, they are surely in no condition to tell us where we had better stand. In pity for man, we would no longer hang like a millstone round his neck. Undo what man did for us in the dark ages, and strike out all special legislation for us; strike the words "white male" from all your constitutions, and then, with fair sailing, let us sink or swim, live or die, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... of the dark ages," said Susie to herself, "when they just snatched up girls and ran off with them!" Then aloud, "Have you ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... The Dark Ages were dark because religion was supreme, and to keep it pure they had to subdue every one who doubted it or hoped to improve upon it. So wrangle, dispute, faction, feud, plot, exile, murder and Sherlock Holmes absorbed the energies of men and paralyzed spontaneity ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... in the guardianship of the world's great treasure house of historic memories and of the creations of genius. We have become, as it were, co-trustees of an incomparable, irreplaceable heritage of beauty. Italy has been the scene of many and terrible wars; but since she emerged from the Dark Ages I do not know that war has greatly damaged the glory of her cities. She has not, of recent centuries, had to mourn a Louvain or a Rheims. But if the Teuton, in his present temper, should gain any considerable footing within her bounds, the Dark Ages would be upon ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... skeletons that laugh and jest at our racial vanities. The Aryan savages of Europe came down upon Greece, found there a great civilization, merged with the inhabitants and builded a greater. The all but savage European of the Dark Ages knew nothing of culture save what had been taught him by the Roman legions, the heirs of the Mediterranean civilization. This little was almost forgotten until religious fanaticism started the Crusades and brought them into contact with the civilized refinement of the Arabians, Moors and ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... invariable law of sequences, the more does the natural instinct of man rebel, and seek an outlet for those obstinate questionings, those 'blank misgivings of a creature moving about in worlds not realised,' taking refuge in delusions as degrading as any of the so-called Dark Ages." It was the revolt from the chilling materialism of the age which inspired the mystic creations of "Zanoni" and "A Strange Story." Of these works, which support and supplement each other, one is the contemplation of our actual life through a spiritual ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... recorded of the monks in the dark ages, which was likely enough to happen when their ignorance was so dense. A rector of a parish going to law with his parishioners about paving the church, quoted this authority from St. Peter—Paveant illi, non paveam ego; which he construed, They are to pave the church, not I. This was allowed ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... powerful among nations, and blessed it with equal laws and equal protection to all? What shall we say of the constitution that ordained slavery as the corner stone of a new confederacy, to teach mankind the folly of Christian civilization, and bring back the 'statelier Eden' of the dark ages? To which party in this terrible strife of brothers does 'liberty' look for protection to-day? Which of the two armies of brothers now arrayed against each other on the plains of Virginia and Georgia, is fighting for the principle of order, which is the 'public welfare'? Let these ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... soap. Perfumery is used even in the "scentless" powders and soaps. In fact it is now used more extensively, if less intensively, than ever before in the history of the world. During the Unwashed Ages, commonly called the Dark Ages, between the destruction of the Roman baths and the construction of the modern bathroom, the art of the perfumer, like all the fine arts, suffered an eclipse. "The odor of sanctity" was in highest esteem and what that odor was ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... everything for themselves, with the least possible amount of Government interference. Our play-writers and play-actors could do a great deal to raise the standard of stage-literature and of acting, if they would but try. But they do not try. I went the other evening to see that relic of the Dark Ages, a sterling English comedy. If any one thinks I go too far in saying that there is no attempt on our stage to imitate Nature, and that the writing and acting of English plays are like the landscape-painting of the Chinese,—a wonderfully good ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... of the case, Sir, seems to be this:—At that period, the science of government, the knowledge of the true relation between king and subject, was, like other sciences and other knowledge, just in its infancy, emerging from dark ages of ignorance and barbarity. ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... wheeled vehicles— the street railway. Its glory is departing: the mercer's showy counter and shelves are gradually replaced by vegetable and fruit stores. Stately shops on Desfosses, Crown and Craig streets are rapidly diverting the Pactolus of the city custom northwards. In the dark ages of the Ancient Capital, when this lengthy, narrow lane was studded with one-story wooden or stone tenements, Old Sol occasionally loved to look down and gladden with his rays its miry footpaths. To our worthy grandfathers 'twas ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... conversational powers of the sexes. Let the facilities for the education of men and women once be made equal throughout the civilized world, and the hackneyed cry of her mental inferiority will be heard of no more, excepting when mentioned among the other exploded theories of the Dark Ages and of barbaric times. The cramping of the mental powers of women, or the attempting to cramp them, lest they might claim equal advantages with the other half of the race, will be classed—and justly so—with the cramping of women's feet by the Chinese, ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... helpless child, sacrificed by his parents. I saw the bent skull of the Flathead Indian child, the crippled feet of the Chinese girl child, the age-long, hideous life and death of the child-wife and the child-widow of Hindoostan. I saw The Child in Sparta, and The Child in Rome, The Child in the Dark Ages, The Child scourged, imprisoned, starved, its mind filled with all manner of black falsehoods, its body misunderstood, and maltreated; and my heart ached, and I cried out, "Were there ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... young, stands out to the mind with a sort of barbaric power, more vividly than the Austrian house of Hapsburg, which is the oldest reigning family in Europe, tracing its beginnings backward until they are lost in the Dark Ages. The Hohenzollerns of Prussia are comparatively modern, so far as concerns their royalty. The offshoots of the Bourbons carry on a very proud tradition in the person of the King of Spain, although France, which has been ruled by so many members of the family, will probably ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... autocracy, and it is less capable of remedy. The "divine right of the odd man" "to govern wrong" is too often assumed as an article of political faith. A new generation may think that to quote from an early Victorian writer is to appeal to the "dark ages"; but is there not a warning for all time in Hallam's words, "the absolute Government of the majority is in general the most tyrannical of any"? It is possible to decapitate a king who sets himself above the law, or to deport or destroy ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... our participation in a universal memory or because of reincarnation, it is easy to explain why Sharp is best in his writing of myths, his pictures of the wild beauties of love and war and dream in barbaric Erin and Alba. It is because he is the reincarnation of the shanachie of the Dark Ages. When he thought of reincarnation, however, in relation to himself, he thought, I have no doubt, of himself as the reincarnation of a druid, one who had been aware of mysteries; but what he really was, in life, with his magnificent enthusiasm ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... into hell has been the subject of much controversy, and the question is as far from solution now as it was in the dark ages, when it was first propounded, and then arbitrarily decreed to be an article of faith. Those who explain hell as hades, the place of departed souls, or of the dead generally, fortify themselves with Psalm ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Christ, and the mythology and institutions of the Celtic conquerors of the Roman empire, outlived the darkness and the convulsions connected with their growth and victory, and blended themselves in a new fabric of manners and opinion. It is an error to impute the ignorance of the dark ages to the Christian doctrines or the predominance of the Celtic nations. Whatever of evil their agencies may have contained sprang from the extinction of the poetical principle, connected with the progress of despotism and superstition. Men, from causes ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... the lucky hit of the philosopher rather than the poet.] Then followed the Middle Ages; the dark ages, as they are called, though in their darkness were matured those seeds of knowledge, which, in fulness of time, were to spring up into new and more glorious forms of civilization. The organization of society became more favorable to geographical science. Instead of one overgrown, lethargic ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... kindled, and at last I spake with my tongue." The old classical literature had said its last word when Claudian died; and though men continued to compose, often with ability and intelligence, the histories and chronicles which practically formed the only non-theological writings of the so-called "Dark Ages," letters in the full sense of the term lay dormant for centuries. Not till the twelfth century was far advanced did any signs of a re-awakening appear. Then, to use a phrase of Dante's, the dead poetry arose, and a burst of song came almost simultaneously from all ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... be wise enough and sufficiently well organized and equipped to demolish and construct at the same time. As yet no such stage has been reached. During the intervals of chaos which separate two periods of forward movement (the dark ages of the world, as they are sometimes called) the masses agonize and suffer, groping blindly and crying out for guidance. Such is the period in which ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing
... classic art, which they learnt to admire with an almost superstitious awe, would have perished likewise. Greek philosophy, the germs of physical science, and all that we owe to the ancients, would have perished; and we should have truly had an invasion of the barbarians, followed by truly dark ages, in which Europe would have had to begin all anew, without the help of the generations which ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... with a lofty smile, "belong to the Pah-bodh of the dark ages, and now only serve for the amusement of infants. When we know the elements out of which our bodies are composed, elements in common to the humblest vegetable plants, can it signify whether the All-Wise combined those elements ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... dark ages of Europe, whilst new civilizations were in the making and all was unrest, art and religion, like the lamp of the sanctuary, burned brightly and steadily in Ireland, and their rays penetrated the outer gloom. Scattered through the libraries ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... of Rome. The defensible frontier of European civilization carried northward and eastward to the Rhine by Caesar; to the Oder by Charles the Great; to the Vistula by the Teutonic Knights; to the Volga and the Oxus by the Russians. Danger in the Dark Ages from Huns and Mongols on the one hand, from Mussulmans on the other. Immense increase of the area and physical strength of European civilization, which can never again be in danger from outer barbarism. Effect of all this secular ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske
... circumstances and what turns up down there, but we'll start with the Flopper now. First of all, Flopper, you've got to have a name. What's your real name—what did they decorate you with at the baptismal font back in the dark ages?" ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... that this contemptible practice was first introduced into Europe by the Gipsies: but such persons are greatly mistaken. In the dark ages of superstition, in which this wandering people came to our part of the world, prognostication and fortune-telling were carried on to an infinite extent; and so enraged were the deceivers of those days against the Gipsies, that they proclaimed they knew ...
— The Gipsies' Advocate - or, Observations on the Origin, Character, Manners, and Habits of - The English Gipsies • James Crabb
... sufficient folly to believe in the influence of planetary conjunctions himself, nor to have so miserable an idea of the understanding of his readers as to suppose them capable of a similar belief. We must also remember that the time of this novel is not in the dark ages, but scarcely forty years since; no aid, therefore, can be derived from the general tendency of popular superstition. What the clew may be to this apparent absurdity, we cannot imagine; whether the Author be in jest or earnest we do not know, and we are ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... other things, in the dark ages of Europe. Abridgments took the place of the large collections, and probably occasioned the entire loss of some of them. As literature revived, fable was resuscitated. The crusades had brought European mind in contact with the Indian works which we have already described, ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... were sold at such an enormous price that only men of rank or great wealth could afford to purchase them. The peasant, and the landholder who employed him, were alike ignorant; they could not obtain books, and therefore learning to read might well be considered in those dark ages a waste of time. This profound ignorance gave rise to all those superstitions which in the present enlightened age are regarded with ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... established not a few of these abominable institutions in our free England, where girls are incarcerated and strictly kept from communicating with their friends, and where foolish youths play the part of the monks of the dark ages. I am not afraid of your turning Romanists, my boys, but it is important to be guarded on all points. Just bring the monastic system to the test of Scripture, and then you will see how utterly at variance it is from the lessons we ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston
... Pleading; Puterbaugh on Pleading; Phillips on Pleading; Pomeroy on Pleading. The number of court decisions in which this branch of the proceeding has been reverently and gravely dealt with reads like a metaphysical discussion in the dark ages. The names formerly used were superb. Complaint, demurrer, confession and avoidance, traverse, replication, dilatory pleas, peremptory pleas, rejoinder, rebutter, ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... Love of Books in Dark Ages with Sketches of Bookworms, Bible Students, &c. from the Saxon Period to the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 63, January 11, 1851 • Various
... must here warn everyone concerned that the most formidable opposition to the break-up of these unnatural alliances between east and west, between Democracy and Autocracy, between the twentieth century and the Dark Ages, will not come from the Balancers of Power. They are not really Balance of Power alliances: in fact, they are tending to an enormous overbalance of power in favor of the east as against the west and in favor of Militarist Autocracy as against Democracy. They are at root absolutely unpatriotic, ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... rusted iron doors around it, leading into little dungeons. On one side of this horrible place was a rude stone altar with an iron crucifix. In the center was a block. It was probably a vault which in the old and dark ages had been used for a place of secret imprisonments, ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... sinners! do ye wish More than your Lord, and grudge His dying poor What your own pride and not His need requires? Souls, than these shining gauds, He values more Mercy, not sacrifice, His heart desires!" O faithful worthies! resting far behind In your dark ages, since ye fell asleep, Much has been done for truth and human-kind; Shadows are scattered wherein ye groped blind; Man claims his birthright, freer pulses leap Through peoples driven in your day like sheep; Yet, like ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... later), it may yet be said that the Revival of Letters did do a good deal to divest celestial phenomena of those alarming and panic-causing attributes which undoubtedly attached to them during the earlier ages of the world and during the "Dark Ages" in Western Europe quite as much as during any other period of the world's history. No one can examine the writings of the ancient Greek and Roman historians, and the chronicles kept in the monasteries of Western Europe by their monkish ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... the dark ages. It is months, however, since she gave me the smallest chance of doing it again. Everything I do or say appears to annoy her, and of course, naturally, I have relieved her of my presence as ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... have urged in excuse that their light was small. She received many shocks and frequent insults from individuals, but liberty was sincerely loved and fondly cherished by the body of the Norwegian people, through all the period of those dark ages during which other nations scarce dared to mention ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... form of political association. Some of the mediaeval communes were not without traces of democracy; but modern nations do not derive from those turbulent little states. They derive from the larger political divisions into which Europe drifted during the Dark Ages; and they have grown with the gradually prospering attempt to bestow on the government of these European countries the ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... are so barbarously ignorant as not to understand that language, why, you might just as well retire for an old fossil or petrifaction. You're obsolete, that's all; as much behind the times as RIP VAN WINKLE himself, after his memorable sleep. English is out of date here—a relic of the Dark Ages. Fashionable ladies return from Paris, bringing with them accomplished bonnes, and every one is prohibited from speaking a word of English to the children; but, in spite of every precaution, the vulgar little creatures ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 8, May 21, 1870 • Various
... remarkable specimen of Wagner's alliterative verse, only helps the more to rivet attention and compel admiration. I have given you an idea of the brief overture, and the opera itself opens with a somber recitative, descriptive or symbolic of the Dark Ages of Juvenile Literature. ...
— Bluebeard • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... through late Lat. aetaticum, from aetas), a term used (1) of the divisions into which it is suggested that human history may be divided, whether regarded from the geological, cultural or moral aspects, e.g. the palaeolithic age, the bronze age, the dark ages; (2) of an historic epoch or generation; (3) of any period or stage in the physical life of a person, animal or thing; (4) of that time of life at which the law attributes full responsibility for his or her acts to the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... without by wall and redoubt, Kiova within was a place of renown, With more advantages than in those dark ages Were commonly known to belong to a town. There were places and squares, and each year four fairs, And regular aldermen and regular lord-mayors; And streets, and alleys, and a bishop's palace; And a church with clocks ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... delirium tremens. There's one thing sure. Birds as big as these, and iguanas as huge as the three we've seen,—to say nothing of the enormous flying fish Morris Shine claims to have seen,—take me back to the Dark Ages. I daresay we're seeing the tag end of the giants. God knows how old these birds and reptiles are,—hundreds of years, at least. I'd give almost anything to get one of those birds and stuff him. There was once a flying animal known as the pteranodon. It has been extinct for millions of years. ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... stories, for in those dark ages, even all-perfect America read rubbish. She told no one, but concocted a 'thrilling tale', and boldly carried it herself to Mr. Dashwood, editor of the Weekly Volcano. She had never read Sartor Resartus, but she had a womanly instinct ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... his following in the sphere of poetry and of the arts—the voice of Dante, the hand of Giotto—giving visible feature and colour, and a palpable place among men, to the regenerate race, did but re-establish a continuity, only suspended in part by those troublous intervening centuries—the "dark ages," properly thus named—with the gracious spirit of the primitive church, as manifested in that first early springtide of her success. The greater "Peace" of Constantine, on the other hand, in many ways, does but establish the exclusiveness, the puritanism, ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... confused records of these barbaric times the names of two women issue, and have remained permanently engraven upon the tablets of history,—one of them as that of a personification of Christian and feminine virtues rare at any age and doubly so in these dark ages, and the other that of a monstrous queen whose crimes have made her immortal. Radegonde was a daughter of Bertaire, King of Thuringe, killed by his brother Hermanfried at the instigation of the wife of the latter; the murderer invited Thierry, King ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... keep constantly in mind that what we call the Middle Ages or—worse yet—the Dark Ages, made up the Yesterday of the Holbeins and was the flesh and blood transmitted to them as their own flesh and blood with all its living bonds toward the Old and all its living ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... have kept their watch through long dark ages. When sunrise reddens them, their shadows stretch westward in bars of darkness over the burnished grass. From morning to midday the shadows shrink, ever hiding from the sun; an army of wraiths, sprite-like able to grow gigantic or draw together into mere blots ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... agencies is natural, and indeed seems connected with and deduced from the invaluable conviction of the certainty of a future state. Moreover, it is very possible that particular stories of this class may have seemed undeniable in the dark ages, though our better instructed period can explain them in a satisfactory manner by the excited temperament of spectators, or the influence of delusions produced by derangement of the intellect or imperfect ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... to do what is, to me, obviously the right thing, and making no endeavour but such as is sure to be applauded—working in the hope of a reward, in fact, seems to me to be a terribly old-fashioned idea, miserable remnant of the bribery and corruption of the Dark Ages, when the people were kept in such dense ignorance that they could be treated like children, and told if they were good they should have this for a prize, but if they were bad they ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... over his knees, and threatening to wet his feather-stuffed breeches. "I'm ashamed of your father and Ralph's father. Call themselves Christian gentlemen, and because a pair of old idiots of ancestors in the dark ages quarrelled, and tried to cut one another's throats, they go on as their fathers did before them, trying to seize each other's properties, and to make an end of one another, and encouraging their sons to grow up in ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... Crusade, introduced the notation, the science, the manufactures, and the medical skill of the Arabs into Europe,—all of which aided the coming of the light to the Dark Ages. ...
— Peter the Hermit - A Tale of Enthusiasm • Daniel A. Goodsell
... a wine-cup in his hand." Antigonus was, in fact, not so much what we should call a philosopher as a man of action with literary tastes, standing thus in marked contrast to Pyrrhus, who "cared as little for knowledge or culture as did any baron of the Dark Ages." When he was engaged in a difficult negotiation with Ptolemy Philadelphus he allowed himself to be mollified by a quotation from Homer, who, as Plato said, was "the educator of Hellas." Although not himself an original thinker, he encouraged ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... sternly. Then, as the shock passed, he hastily changed his tone. Suppose this child did have some strange sort of power—mystic perhaps, but definitely abnormal. He may belong in the School of the Future, Smithy thought. Or perhaps in the School of the Past—the Dark Ages Department. ...
— When I Grow Up • Richard E. Lowe
... the rubric, caused much murmuring, [495] It was known that he was so profane as to sneer at a practice which had been sanctioned by high ecclesiastical authority, the practice of touching for the scrofula. This ceremony had come down almost unaltered from the darkest of the dark ages to the time of Newton and Locke. The Stuarts frequently dispensed the healing influences in the Banqueting House. The days on which this miracle was to be wrought were fixed at sittings of the Privy Council, and were solemnly notified by the clergy in all the parish churches of the realm, [496] ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... educated and enabled to cope with the philosophers of the world. Here in Arabia was the highest culture known at the time, in Medicine and all the Arts and Sciences, while the Ecclesiastics were inaugurating the dark ages elsewhere, to eventually spread over ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... had seen the ancient horror of famine come stalking back from the Dark Ages trembled now before the plague. The influenza swept the ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... of the eleventh century English cloth manufacturing had begun to revive. In the northern part of Italy certain Italians had flocks of sheep and obtained very fine wool, and the people of Flanders continued to develop skill in weaving during the Dark Ages. ...
— Textiles • William H. Dooley
... retarding force which shows little sign of being overcome—the profound superstition of the people. A striking episode of street life reminded me how near akin were the southern Italians of to-day to their predecessors in what are called the dark ages; nay, to those more illustrious ancestors who were so ready to believe that an ox had uttered an oracle, or that a stone had shed blood. Somewhere near the swing-bridge, where undeniable steamships go and come between the inner and the outer sea, I saw a crowd gathered about a man ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... in hand, looked curiously at this heathen Prince of Darkness, arrived out of the dark ages to sit to ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... relentless cruelties of the Romanists, we are told, and that, too, by the influential, the intelligent, those who are well-informed on other subjects, that "these horrid scenes transpired only in the 'dark ages;'" that "the civilization and refinement of the present age has so modified human society, so increased the milk of human kindness, that even Rome would not dare, if indeed she had the heart, to repeat ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... the eve of her flight, and printed the pathetic epistle along with his denunciation of the cowardice which had given her over to her enemies. Later Bishop Bradford, expressing his sympathy in a speech to the Dorcas' Society, referred to the walling up of escaped nuns during the dark ages. A little tide of paragraphs flowed from the papers, plaintively murmuring the one sad strain: the dear sister could not be far distant; she might be in the city, deep in a convent dungeon; she had belonged to the community of the Good Shepherd, whose convent stood ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... the penniless culprit commuted by personal slavery, was sufficiently unjust as well as absurd, yet it served to mitigate the horrors with which tumult, rapine, and murder enveloped those early days. Gradually, as the light of reason broke upon the dark ages, the most noxious features of the system were removed, while the general sentiment ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... we have received was on April 27th before leaving Bloemfontein; three months less a week since any whisper concerning events or people out of our immediate sight has reached us. My ignorance of things in general weighs on me. It is a taste of life in the dark ages before modern inventions kept one in ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... Keep at your father until he consents to your going. Here you are despised and ridiculed—a victim of heathen prejudice left over from the Dark Ages. Get away, even if you have to walk, and take my word for it, the moment you leave Morovenia you will be a very beautiful girl; not a merely attractive young person, but what we would call at home a radiant beauty—the oriental ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... monkish Tale, the other a simple Narrative of an Event. One is a Fact supported by numerous authorities, the other evidently is one of those prodigies, pretended miracles, and priestly Inventions, which are to be found in most Authors who wrote during the dark ages of Popery. ...
— An Enquiry into the Truth of the Tradition, Concerning the - Discovery of America, by Prince Madog ab Owen Gwynedd, about the Year, 1170 • John Williams
... interrupts Mr. Soloman, tipping his glass very politely, "I never-that is, when I hear our people who get themselves laced into narrow-stringed Calvinism, and long-founded foreign missions, talk-think much could have come of the dark ages. I speak after the manner of an attorney, when I say this. We hear a deal of the dark ages, the crimes of the dark ages, the dark idolatry of darker Africa. My word for it, and it's something, if they had anything darker in Sodom; if they had in Babylon a state of degradation more hardened ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... of the scare, nobody really believed that an actual deluge was coming. There might be great floods, and great suffering and loss, but the world was not going to be drowned! Such things only occurred in early and dark ages. ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... get a tent made of some sheets and keep a kettle boiling under it," he said, for he was an old man and belonged to the dark ages of medicine. "But first of all I'll get the children over to your mother's. They'd better not come in here again. I'll ask the servant ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... curious devices in the electrically equipped house which could they have been exhibited a generation or so ago, would have condemned the owner as a sorcerer and necromancer of the dark ages, but which now only place him in the category of the smart ones who are up to date and take advantage of the science and progress ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... intelligence and the natured results of long culture. The epithets of Gothic ignorance, rudeness, and barbarism, which the eighteenth-century critics applied so freely to all the issue of the so-called dark ages, were not entirely without justification. Dante is almost the only strictly mediaeval poet in whose work the form seems adequate to the content; for Boccaccio and Petrarca stand already on the sill of ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... those dark ages ... the Hoopoe was considered as prodigiously skilful in defeating the machinations of witches, wizards, and hobgoblins. The female, in consequence of this art, could preserve her offspring ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... Milton's argument, leads him to employ language which would appear, at first sight, to verge upon their doctrine; but it will be seen immediately, that he guards himself against the charge of having adopted one of the most ignorant errors of the dark ages of the church.—Dr. Sumner's Notes on ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... coat could not possibly have been mistaken for anything but a sportsman, if he had not borne an equal resemblance to a general postman. Last of all came Mr. Pickwick, whom the boys applauded as loud as anybody, probably under the impression that his tights and gaiters were some remnants of the dark ages; and then the two vehicles proceeded towards Mrs. Leo Hunter's; Mr. Weller (who was to assist in waiting) being stationed on the box of that in which his ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... was still a third principle of versification to be reckoned with, not depending on Quantity or Stress, but merely Syllabic, or syllable-counting. This was immemorially old, it seemed, and it had reappeared mysteriously in Europe in the Dark Ages. ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... in the history of Buddhism is that which follows the reign of Asoka, but the enquirer cannot grope for long in these dark ages without stumbling upon the word Mahayana. This is the name given to a movement which in its various phases may be regarded as a philosophical school, a sect and a church, and though it is not always easy to define its relationship ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... of centuries, filled in by impossible stories of magical flight by witches, wizards, and the like—imagination was fertile in the dark ages, but the ban of the church was on all attempt at scientific development, especially in such a matter as the conquest of the air. Yet there were observers of nature who argued that since birds could raise themselves by flapping their wings, man had only to make suitable wings, flap them, ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... eighth, ninth and succeeding century were not without their brighter sides and were not those totally Dark Ages they have been represented by the enemies of the Church, nevertheless, seeds of evil passions, which in spite of her endeavors the Church had been unable completely to stifle, lingered in the hearts of those strong-limbed, strong-passioned ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... frightful period known as the "Dark Ages," Faith reigned, with scarcely rebellious subject. Her temples were "carpeted with knees," and the wealth of nations adorned her countless shrines. The great painters prostituted their genius to immortalize her vagaries, ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... the hope, and the vigor of any one of our leading Cities, more than at the beginning of the war were found in either of several States in the Nation, were sent to their graves, "unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown," victims of the most barbarous and unnecessary cruelty recorded since the Dark Ages. Barbarous, because the wit of man has not yet devised a more savage method of destroying fellow-beings than by exposure and starvation; unnecessary, because the destruction of these had not, and could not have the slightest effect upon the result ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... medical practitioners about the alleged harmfulness of douching. The same kind of distracting and misleading statements were made a few years ago regarding antiseptic mouth-washes, which were similarly condemned. Fortunately, we are passing out of these dark ages! Soon it will be regarded as quite as natural and necessary and desirable to cleanse the genital passages as to rinse out the mouth or wipe ...
— Safe Marriage - A Return to Sanity • Ettie A. Rout
... it was an unhappy thing, that the consolations in sorrow and the view of death should either be too feeble to animate, or should animate only by deluding. And it was the consummation of evil in the state of the people of those dark ages, it was, emphatically to be "destroyed," that the great doctrines of redemption should have been essentially vitiated or formally supplanted, so that multitudes of people were betrayed to rest their final ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... we boasted ourselves a Rational University; in the highest degree hostile to Mysticism; thus was the young vacant mind furnished with much talk about Progress of the Species, Dark Ages, Prejudice, and the like; so that all were quickly enough blown out into a state of windy argumentativeness; whereby the better sort had soon to end in sick, impotent Scepticism; the worser sort explode (crepiren) in ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... with their disciples in the shades of his grove of classic laurels. He was indifferent alike to princely and to popular favour, passionately consecrating his efforts to the revival and preservation of such classics as had survived the destructive era known as the Dark Ages. Denied a name of his own, he adopted a Latin one to his liking, thus from necessity setting a fashion his imitators followed from affectation. When approached in the days of his fame by the Sanseverini with proposals to recognise him as a ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... of the Tower disapproved of young ladies being taught to write, there were women whose employment writing seems to have been; but these were nuns safely shut up from the risk of billets-doux. In Dr. Maitland's Essays on the Dark Ages, he quotes from the biography of Diemudis, a devout nun of the eleventh century, a list of the volumes which she prepared with her own hand, written in beautiful and legible characters, to the praise of God, and of the holy Apostles Peter and Paul, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... legend of Midas turning everything he touched into gold, is truer than most people imagine. Mediaeval superstition changed the human being who possessed such a power into the philosopher's stone—the stone which so many alchemists sought in the dark ages. But we of the nineteenth century have given back into human hands this power ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... his favored city was the next and most serious object of the attention of its founder. In the dark ages which succeeded the translation of the empire, the remote and the immediate consequences of that memorable event were strangely confounded by the vanity of the Greeks and the credulity of the Latins. It was asserted, and believed, that all the noble families of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... that there is more superstition—that is belief and dabbling in these inane practices—to-day in one of our large cities than the Dark Ages ever was afflicted with. If true, it is one sign of the world's spiritual unrest, the decay of unbelief; and irreligion thus assists at its own disintegration. The Church swept the pagan world clean ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... What are called the "dark ages" were indeed dark in the Church, for then it was that she became erring in faith, doctrine, and practice, and almost a caricature of what she once was. This state of things continued until the 16th century, when the Reformation took place. ...
— The Church Handy Dictionary • Anonymous
... the vast majority of women want more than anything else in life—children. If they deliberately prefer independence to marriage, well and good, but surely we are growing civilized enough (and this war, in itself a plunge into the dark ages, has in quite unintentional ways advanced civilization, for never in the history of the world have so many brains been thinking) so to arrange the social machinery that if girls and young women are forced to work for their daily bread, and often the bread of others, at least it shall be ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... wise was justice carried out at the palace at Yedo and at the Court-house at home. But in the history of the world, from the dark ages down to the present time, there are few instances of one man laying down his life for the many, as Sogoro did: noble and peasant praise ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... service was over in Lincoln Cathedral, and the congregation were slowly filing out of the great west door. But that afternoon service was six hundred years ago, and both the Cathedral and the congregation would look very strange to us if we saw them now. Those days were well called the Dark Ages, and how dark they were we can scarcely realise in the present day. Let us fancy ourselves coming out of that west door, and try to picture what we should have seen ...
— Our Little Lady - Six Hundred Years Ago • Emily Sarah Holt
... of childhood? The old, primitive view was as guileless and as simple as the age in which the diseases occurred. They were regarded not merely by the laity but by grave and reverend physicians of the Dark Ages as a sort of necessary vital crisis peculiar and appropriate to each particular age of life,—a sort of sweating out and erupting of "peccant humors" of the blood, which must be got rid of or else ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... meant for an allegorical picture of Brute Force, and it has its foot upon Intellect—Intellect, mind you! and not a cigar-store Indian. It is a likeness of Captain Kidd, and I set it back to represent the fact that Brute Force belonged to the Dark Ages. How on earth that man of yours ever got an idea that it was ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... softly, "do have licenses against book agents. One of the relics of the dark ages, but abolished wherever the light o' culture is loved and esteemed. What so helpful as the book? What so comforting? What so uplifting? And who but the book agent carries help and comfort and uplift, ...
— Kilo - Being the Love Story of Eliph' Hewlitt Book Agent • Ellis Parker Butler
... girlhood pride in the filth and made of herself a byword for vicious boys. He told her the truth of what real men thought and felt of women. Every man had a mother. No war, no unrest, no style, no fad, no let-down of morals could change the truth. From the dark ages women had climbed on the slow realization of freedom, honor, chastity. As the future of nations depended upon women, so did their salvation. Women could never again be barbarians. All this modern license was a parody of love. It must inevitably end in the degradation and ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... Halliday, I may add that he regarded Bethlem as, at this period, well conducted, but as having "too much of the leaven of the dark ages in its constitution, and too rigid a system of quackery, in regard to its being seen and visited by respectable strangers." He adds that in some respects "it is little better than when, in fact, ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... accounted a saint during the dark ages: and Louis XI, as one of his successors, honoured his shrine with peculiar ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... to be treated very seriously by the ancients, but until recently modern scientists, rejecting the ideas of the dark ages, have scouted dreams. To-day, however, we study them scientifically, for we believe that whatever is, has a reason. Dr. Ross, I think, is acquainted with the new and remarkable theories of Dr. ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... description of some of the precious spoils of mediaeval refinement. Where all is so splendidly beautiful, so deeply erudite, or so tenderly naif, choice is difficult; but at all events, here are a few of the priceless gems with which the Dark Ages ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... Channel and the Severn Sea, and the Bristol Avon receives the stream that rises but a mile from its namesake of Christchurch Bay. High in one of the combes at this end of the valley is the small village of All Cannings, said to have been of much importance in the dark ages as a Saxon centre. All it has to show the visitor now is a cruciform church with Norman and Early English fragments and ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... Justinian (A.D. 527-565) mosaics began to be less artistic, and those of the later time degenerated, as did everything else during the Middle or Dark Ages, and at last all works of art show less and less of ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... as it appeared, all the rubbish of the herald's office,—the blazonry of coat armor, the crests and devices of illustrious families, pedigrees that extended back, like lines of light, into the mist of the dark ages, together with stars, garters, and embroidered collars, each of which, as paltry a bawble as it might appear to the uninstructed eye, had once possessed vast significance, and was still, in truth, reckoned among the most precious of moral or material facts by the worshippers ...
— Earth's Holocaust (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... most strikingly illustrated by a retrospect of the state of European society in the middle, or, as they are frequently styled, the dark ages. ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... illustration and example of the truth of our proposition. When the mists of ignorance and superstition which had for centuries enveloped the world, had begun to clear away, and when Europe first attempted to throw off the errors of the Dark Ages, the arts were dead, and the only music known was that cultivated by the monks and clergy, as necessary to their profession, and the songs of the Troubadours. "The fame of the Troubadours," remarks Mr Hallam, "depends less on their positive excellence than on the darkness of preceding ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... victories not all bought with battle-axe and sword, stately with a pride that had won its just and inalienable majesty from elastic centuries of progress and culture, History, the muse to whom fewest songs were sung, yet whose march was music's sublimest voice, trembled upon the brink of the Dark Ages, and leaped, in her armor, into the abyss of ignorance before her. A poetry the purest, an art the noblest, a religion deeply symbolical, a freedom bold and magnificent, had given to the world-histories of those early days a melody ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... unknown, and a civilising agency rarely counteracted the social evils which prevailed. The transactions of those early days are scarcely colonial: charged with debauch and outrage, they denote a time of social disorganisation—the dark ages found in the history of every country, where men have been their own masters, and remote from a public opinion, which ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... the existence of such an organization cannot be tolerated today! This survival of the dark ages must be stamped out. However just a cause may be, secret murder is not permissible, as you, a man of culture, a Believer, and"—I glanced at his unusual turban—"a descendant of the Prophet, ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... our readers with such details. Suffice it to say that they were all perpetrated, and that he, the aforesaid Lorenzo Pedan, received the indignities heaped upon him with a degree of patience and fortitude rivalled only by that of the martyrs of the dark ages. He was, in fact, a martyr to his love of gold; and a recompense for all his outward troubles was the satisfaction of knowing that he might be rich some ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... They are not true!" he exclaimed. "They belong to the dark ages. They are relics of the days when the upholders of one religion believed that they saved souls by the stake and the rack and thumbscrew. There were men and women who did believe it with rigid honesty. There were men and women who, believing in other forms, died in torture for ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... celebrated writers on the state of Europe from the decline of the Roman power to the epoch at which we are now arrived must be referred to, to judge of the gradual progress of civilization through the gloom of the dark ages, till the dawn of enlightenment which led to the grand system of European politics commenced during the reign of Charles V. The amazing increase of commerce was, above all other considerations, the cause of the growth of liberty in the Netherlands. The Reformation opened the minds ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... round the old grey tower morning and evening. When the October gales are tossing the trees, and the rain-clouds are gathering on the hills their cawing has a sound of ill-omen, which makes them seem the unresting and malignant spirits of those fierce lords of the Dark Ages, evil-doers ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... nature than this. Papa's words confirm what I have read but never thought of much: the chief need of men who can do much or who amount to much is the intelligent sympathy of women who understand and care for them. Why, it was the inspiration of chivalry, even in the dark ages. Well, Marian Vosburgh, if you can't excel a kitchen-maid, it would be better that you had ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... supporting my views. I can prove that miracles have not ceased for eighteen centuries; that they appeared abundantly in the days of the venerable Catholic fathers; that a stream of prophecies and healings and tongues ran clear through the Dark Ages down to the Reformation; that the superhuman influence flamed in the dreams of Huss, the ecstasies of Xavier, and the marvels of Fox and Usher. Look at the French Prophets, or Tremblers of the Cevennes, who had prophesyings and healings and discoverings of spirits and tongues ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various |
