"Decadency" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... love in connection with marriage seems to be found in the late Greek world under the Roman Empire.[72] That is commonly called a period of decadence. In a certain limited sense it was. Greece had become subjugated to Rome. Rome herself had lost her military spirit and was losing her political power. But the fighting instinct, and even the ruling spirit, are not synonymous with civilization. The ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... became more comfortable, they were improved in arrangement, they were enlarged and embellished; at length an extraordinary display of sumptuousness began to appear in the dwellings of the great,—that luxury of decadence which marks the ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various
... before been affected by an inanimate thing with so strong a sense of disquiet. He had pictured an old stone tower on a bright headland; he found instead this raw thing among trees. The decadence of the brand-new repels as something against nature, and this new thing was decadent. But there was a mysterious life in it, for though not a chimney smoked, it seemed to enshrine a personality and to wear a sinister aura. He felt a lively distaste, which was almost fear. He wanted ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... thoughtful, "our civilisation, which we think so highly developed, is, after all, but a great decadence which has lost even the historical remembrance of the gigantic societies which have disappeared. We are stupidly proud of a few ingenious pieces of mechanism which we have recently invented, and we forget the colossal splendours and the vast works impossible to any other nation, which are ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... lovely, is she not?' said Urania, with that air of heartiness which every well-trained young woman assumes when she discusses a rival beauty; 'but she has not the purity of the early Italian manner. It is a Carlo-Dolci face—the beauty of the Florentine decadence. I was at ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... expressed a proper regret for this decadence. Mr. Keyts reverted bitterly to the ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... ideas as to marks on Mars, attention is now minutely focused upon such technicalities as variations in shades of Jupiter's fourth satellite. I think that, in general acceptance, over-refinement indicates decadence. ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... It makes Gorgiko Brown, the gypsy man, leave his tent and his old wife, of an evening, and thrust himself into society which could well dispense with him. "Brother," said Mr. Petulengro to the Romany Rye, after telling him many things connected with the decadence of gypsyism, "there is one Gorgiko Brown, who, with a face as black as a tea-kettle, wishes to be mistaken for a Christian tradesman; he goes into the parlour of a third-rate inn of an evening, ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... Hichens (in The Green Carnation) to satirize its distorted attitudinizing. It strained itself to death; it became its own burlesque of the bizarre, an extravaganza of extravagance. "The period" (I am again quoting Holbrook Jackson) "was as certainly a period of decadence as it was a period of renaissance. The decadence was to be seen in a perverse and finicking glorification of the fine arts and mere artistic virtuosity on the one hand, and a militant commercial movement on the other.... The eroticism which became so prevalent in ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... changes have taken place. The Aegean remains have become astonishingly uniform over the whole area; the local ceramic developments have almost ceased and been replaced by ware of one general type both of fabric and decoration. The Cretans have stayed their previous decadence, and are once more possessors of a progressive civilization. They have developed a more convenient and expressive written character by stages of which one is best represented by the tablets of Hagia Triada. The art of all the area ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Christian ideal had grown to be one of penance and mortification of the flesh, and to a few ardent souls these sensuous delights were an open highway to death eternal. Eulogius became the leader of this band of zealots. In lamenting the decadence of his people, he wrote, "hardly one in a thousand can write a decent Latin letter, and yet they indite excellent Arabic verse!" Filled with despairing ardor this man aroused a few kindred spirits to join him in a desperate ...
— A Short History of Spain • Mary Platt Parmele
... for bare bread and bare shelter. But this unlikeness, great as it is and serious and singular, between his former and his latter style in high comedy, gives no warrant for us to believe him capable of so immeasurable a transformation in tragic style and so indescribable a decadence in tragic power as would be implied in a descent from the "fine madness" of "old Jeronymo" to the flat sanity and smoke-dried sobriety of Catiline and Sejanus.—I cannot but think, too, that Lamb's first hypothetical ascription of these wonderful scenes to Webster, so much the ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... fact to be remembered is that these German tribes saved Europe by their love of liberty, and by their virility, from the decadence of an orientalized Rome. Rome, and all Rome meant, was not destroyed by these ancestors of ours; on the contrary, they saved what was best worth saving from the decline and fall of Rome, and made out of it with their own vigorous laws a new world, the modern western world. Great ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... was a man who took no interest in all these matters; none in the significance of rituals, symbols, or the laws of racial growth and decadence. He wanted to be shown the place where Caesar had fallen; he was a survivor of the old school of historical interest. Very out of date and droll; but is not this old-fashioned interest in half-imaginary dramatic ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... vanished before the meerschaum, had that magic clay then been known. How completely would the hookah and the narghileh have harmonized with the crater, cyathi, and tripods of the triclinium in that portraiture of the "Decadence of Rome" which hangs in the Luxembourg Gallery! Poor fellows! they ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... also understanding; a mouth denotes speech, revelation; an ear news, information, and, if ugly and distorted, scandal or abuse. The sun, shining brightly, denotes prosperity, honours. The moon, when crescent denotes success, increase, and improvement. When gibbous, it denotes sickness, decadence, losses, and trouble. The sun eclipsed shows death or ruin of a man; the moon, similarly afflicted, denotes equal danger to a woman. These are ...
— How to Read the Crystal - or, Crystal and Seer • Sepharial
... Marquis of Steyne, is one of the finest in all fiction. Though Becky knows that this blow shatters her social edifice, she is still woman enough to admire her husband in the very act that marks the beginning of the decadence of her fortunes. Vanity Fair, read carefully a half-dozen times, is a liberal education in life and in the art of ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... pitch of frenzy. Since that time their number has decreased to less than one half, and their systematic organizations have fallen into decay; in fact they have been utterly demoralized as a people. This sudden decadence was brought on by two causes: 1. About ten years ago the Americans crossed the line and established themselves on Pelly River, where they carried on to an extraordinary extent the illicit traffic in intoxicating ...
— The Treaties of Canada with The Indians of Manitoba - and the North-West Territories • Alexander Morris
... when men were always fighting, they appreciated the blessings of war much less than does Gen. von Bernhardi, and they valued peace, not war, as a means to civilization and culture. They had not learned in the school of Treitschke that peace means decadence and war ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... "been left to herself she would, in all human probability, have succeeded, notwithstanding her decadence, in establishing political unity under a military chief. Had the country been brought into peaceful contact with continental civilisation, it must have advanced along the path of modern progress. Even if it ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... countries where they were living and sent them to you, that you may mass your forces and lend a hand to save them." No such opportunity ever came to a nation before. The Christian church must seize it or sink into deserved decadence and decay. Only a missionary church can save the world or justify its own existence. The manner in which American Christianity deals with the religious problems of immigration will decide what part America is to play in the evangelization of the ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... hopefulness. The curse of our age is pessimism, a result and a cause of the materialistic spirit. Science, which really involves an infinite hope, has been misinterpreted by Socialists in the most foolish way, until we get a miserable languid fatalism, leading to decadence and despair. The essential of progress is Faith, and Faith can only be established ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... answer, I believe, is simply this: Because there is not room and food in the world at any one time for more than a certain relatively small number of gigantic species. Each great group of animals has had successively its rise, its zenith, its decadence, and its dotage; each at the period of its highest development has produced a considerable number of colossal forms; each has been supplanted in due time by higher groups of totally different structure, which have killed off their predecessors, not indeed by actual stress of battle, but by ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... on the brilliant flower background; and the boyish slightness of her figure led John to think of a statuette done in a period of Greek decadence. 'Others,' he thought, 'would only see her as a somewhat too thin example of English maidenhood. I see her quite differently.' And when her two tame rooks alighted at her ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... illuminators, with his insignificant eyeless face, possesses at his fingers' ends the maximum of dexterity in this art of decoration, light and wittily incongruous, which threatens to invade us in France, in this epoch of imitative decadence, and which has become the great resource of our manufacturers ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... poems represent a new departure in poetry, and some consider that in them the poet, in thus dealing with metaphysical abstractions, has overleapt the boundaries of the poetic art. To such critics, this later period seems the period of his decadence, in which the casuistical tendencies, which had already appeared in Bishop Blougram's Apology, Mr. Sludge the Medium, and other poems, have overwhelmed his art, and his intellect, in its pride of strength, has grown wanton. Fifine at the Fair is said to be "a defence of inconstancy, ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... way as his "Baptism of the Prince Imperial." He had a very distinguished talent, but he was too distinctly clever—clever to the point of sophistication. In this respect he was distinctly a man of the nineteenth century. His great work, "Romains de la Decadence," created as fine an effect at the Centenary Exhibition of the Paris World's Fair in 1889 as it does in the Louvre, whence it was then transferred, but it was distinctly a decorative effect—the effect of a fine panel in the general mass of color and ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... long leap from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, taking us from a period of genuine religious fervor in art, into an age of artificial imitation. In the midst of the decadence of old ideals and the birth of art methods entirely new, arose one who seemed to be the reincarnation of the old spirit in a form peculiar to his age and race. This was Murillo, the peasant-painter of ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... come and see us perhaps once a year. I don't suppose anybody else cares about the place, but to me it is the dearest spot in the world." So she went on in almost high spirits, though alluding to the general decadence of the Grex family, till ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... end of Respectability, but the end is still far distant. We are now in a period of decadence growing steadily more and more acute. The old gods are falling about us, there is little left to raise our hearts and minds to, and amid the wreck and ruin of things only a snobbery is left to us, thank heaven, deeply graven in the English heart; the snob is now the ark that floats ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... very immoral," Lord Henry murmured. "It is the motto of decadence. It means that the moment the Union Jack is unfurled, the voice of criticism, the intellect, and the first principles of justice and ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... that had already begun to produce in the minds of sundry passengers a grave doubt whether yachting was, after all, the most delightful of pursuits. Some miles before the white dome of the Kursaal was sighted the process of moral decadence had set in, and passengers were lying freely to each other, and boastfully lying, just as though somebody had been accusing them of some dreadful crime of cowardice or bad breeding instead of merely inquiring about the existence ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... endeavor to cut out this evil, but let us keep a due sense of proportion; let us not in fixing our gaze upon the lesser evil forget the greater good. The evils are real and some of them are menacing, but they are the outgrowth, not of misery or decadence, but of prosperity—of the progress of our gigantic industrial development. This industrial development must not be checked, but side by side with it should go such progressive regulation as will diminish the evils. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... arose with the Empire of the Parthians. In short, vaguely, in every part of the Empire and beyond its borders, there began to grow the sense that Rome was again weakening; a sense of doubt due to the decadence of the spirit of tradition and of the party representing it; to the new spirit of the new generation; and finally, to the absence of Tiberius, the one capable general of the time, which gradually disorganised even the western armies, ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... be rebuilt. Year by year the statuaries make fewer images of foxes. Year by year fewer victims of fox-possession are taken to the hospitals to be treated according to the best scientific methods by Japanese physicians who speak German. The cause is not to be found in the decadence of the old faiths: a superstition outlives a religion. Much less is it to be sought for in the efforts of proselytising missionaries from the West—most of whom profess an earnest belief in devils. It is purely educational. The omnipotent enemy of superstition is the public school, ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... a councilor in 1716; president of the Bordeaux Parliament; devoted himself to a study of literature and jurisprudence; published "Persian Letters" in 1721, which secured him an election to the Academy in 1728; traveled in Austria, Italy, Germany, Holland and England; published "Grandeur and Decadence of the Romans" in 1734, and "Spirit ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... their successive cycles of glory and decadence; is not the present theosophical movement the renaissance of the Neoplatonic movement which brought the light to Greece and Egypt fifteen hundred years ago? In 1875 H. P. Blavatsky restored it to life, whilst ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... the first, the eye of the owner was always present, while in the case of the second, the owner was totally absent for many years, and afterwards only visited his property at long intervals, sufficiently long to enable him NOT to estimate its steady decadence. ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... mystery, attended by a sad-faced daughter and two ancient domestics. It was a lesson in the vanity of human wishes which the shallowest moralist would have noted. Nay, I felt more than the moral. Something human and kindly in the old fellow had caught my fancy. The decadence was too tragic to prose about, the decadent too human to moralise on. I had left the chamber of the—shall I say de jure King of England?—a sentimental adherent of the cause. But this business of the bagpipes ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... as to the decadence of the church, which has become painfully apparent when great moral issues have been at stake. That the church could stamp out the liquor traffic has often been said, and yet although general conferences and assemblies have met year ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... hieratic in the British Museum (No. 5645) we find that a priest of Heliopolis called Khakhepersenb, who was surnamed Ankhu, shared his discontent, and was filled with disgust at the widespread corruption and decadence of all classes of society that were everywhere in the land. In the introduction to this description of society as he saw it, he says that he wishes he possessed new language in which to express himself, and that he could find phrases ...
— The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians • E. A. Wallis Budge
... issue is sufficient proof of this. For it was falling to pieces, long before the Anglo-Saxon race entered into possession of the territory where it once flourished. The missions are now in a state of decadence, their buildings fast falling into decay; while the red man, disgusted at the attempt to enslave, under the clock of christianising him, has returned to his idolatry, as ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... hand, seems aimless and chaotic, and is not stamped with any eminent characteristics. A volume of short stories, entitled "Wild and Tame," partakes very much more of the latter adjective than of the former. The first of the tales, "Inclined Planes," is a discursive family chronicle, showing the decadence of a fishing village under the influence of city boarders. The second, "Love and Despatches," inculcates a double moral, the usefulness of economy and the uselessness of mothers-in-law; and the third, "The ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... ancient, barbaric—reminding me of the flat, motionless pictures of Earth's early history. Yet it was a symbol here on Venus, not of barbarism, but of decadence. ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... said, and Jane smiled on, yet waited most acceptably and kept all things decently and in order—for a little while. Along about Christmas-time a further decadence and additional flaw in the jewel was discovered, and it was Perkins himself who discovered it. It happened one day while he was at work alone in the house, Mrs. Perkins having gone out shopping. A friend from Boston appeared—a friend interested in bric-a-brac and china generally. Thaddeus, ...
— Paste Jewels • John Kendrick Bangs
... calls to progress, where the results of hasty development create a large share of its problem—a land where the need of Christian effort is paramount, and where such effort is so vital to the world, the decadence of the country church is of far-reaching significance. Home Missions is called to direct its energizing, constructive ability to the solution of this baffling and discouraging feature of its problem to a greater ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... pattern, and ended by choosing the one that Maisie liked best. And the furniture went where Maisie thought it should go, because Anne was too tired to care. Besides, she was busy on her farm. Old Sutton in his decadence had let most of his arable land run to waste, and Anne's job was to make good soil again out ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... and exhausted them all, real and alleged, in less than half a day (for in addition to a lust for ready-cut building stone the Turks have never cherished monuments that might accentuate their own decadence). After that we fossicked in the manner of prospectors that we are by preference, if not always by trade, eschewing polite society and hunting in the impolite, amusing places where most of the facts have teeth, sharp and ready to ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... we may take it for granted that any popular idea which runs the gamut of the idealistic lecture-halls and pulpits of a modern democracy is false through and through. Among such false ideas is the almost universal one that what is called the decadence of a nation is a sign of something regrettable and deplorable. On the contrary, it is a sign of something admirable and excellent. Such "weakness," in a deeper than a popular sense, is "strength"; ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... a great deal of lamentation lately among old breeders and exhibitors about the decadence of the breed and the loss of the true old type possessed by these dogs. But, despite all they can say to the contrary, the Clumber is now in a more flourishing state than it ever has been; and although perhaps we have not now, nor have had for the last decade, a John o' Gaunt or a Tower, ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... his verses is quaintly representative of the Georgian peace. Defoe and Swift had both done their work; and the latter had withdrawn to Ireland to die like a rat in a hole. Bishop Berkeley, indeed, was convinced of the decadence of England; but his Essay towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain (1721) shows rather the effect of the speculative mania which culminated in the South Sea Bubble upon a noble moral nature than a genius for political thought. Certainly no one in that ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... usual caution, I lamented to my friend F—— of the neglect in which readers held me, to which the above experience in a library was a rare exception. F—— offered me such consolation as he could, deplored the general taste and the decadence of the times, and said that as praise was sweet to everyone, he, as far as he himself was able, offered it anonymously to those who merited it. He was standing recently in a picture gallery, when a long-haired man who stood before one of the pictures was pointed out ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... repetitions of others, and selected those which would be serviceable for the inculcation of propriety and righteousness. Ascending as high as Hsieh and Hu-k, and descending through the prosperous eras of Yin and Ku to the times of decadence under kings Y and L, he selected in all 305 pieces, which he' sang over to his lute, to bring them into accordance with the musical style of the Sho, the W, the ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... te jure" in the quavering voice of eighty-five; it would be wonderful to hear her sing it because she doesn't know how wonderful she is; the old light of love requires an interpreter, and she has had many; many great poets have voiced her woe and decadence. ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... development. The Primaire: the development of the style finding its best example at Paris. The Secondaire: the Perfectionnement at Reims, and its Apogee at Amiens. The Tertiaire: practically the beginning of the decadence, in St. Ouen at Rouen, only a shade removed from the debasement which soon followed. As to the merits or demerits of the contemporary structures of other nations, that also would be obviously of comparative unimportance herein except ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... term Renascence cannot be applied to the movement that asserted itself in Hebrew literature at the end of the fifteenth century, as little as the term Decadence can be applied to the ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... seen her occasionally, at supper in smart restaurants, at first nights, riding in the Park. Now, as he looked at her name, he realized that he had not even seen her for a long time, perhaps for a couple of years. He had heard the rumours of her decadence, and taken little heed of them, not being specially interested in her. Nevertheless, this morning, as he shut up his book and got up to go downstairs to his work, he was aware of a desire to hear the clock strike the ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... so as examples; whereas the Roman had the greatness of soul to do homage to Greek intellect, and, notwithstanding an occasional Mummius, preserved all that was of the highest value in Greek civilization, better perhaps than it would have been preserved by the tyrants and condottieri of the Greek decadence. As to a Semitic Empire, whether in the hands of Syrians or Carthaginians, with their low Semitic craft, their Moloch-worships and their crucifixions,—the very thought fills us with horror. It would have been a world-wide tyranny ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... century. Mrs. Josephine K. Henry was introduced as "the daughter of Kentucky," and the Constitution said the next day: "If the spirit of old Patrick Henry could have heard the eloquent plea of his namesake, he would have had no reason to blush for a decadence of the oratory which gave the name to the world." In considering Woman Suffrage in the South, ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... and soared towards heaven, but alas! its wings, like those of Icarus, melted in the sun and it fell to earth again. Instead of wax it needed the strong "eagle pinions of faith" which revelation only can supply. The decadence is strongly marked both in the Epicurean and Stoic schools. They both express the feeling of exhaustion, disappointment, and despair. The popular theology had lost its hold upon the public mind. The gods no ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... made the most brilliant civilization the world has ever seen—the civilization which still gives us the inexhaustible wells of our intellectual life—what was it that made it the shortest-lived? Few, I think, would deny that the rapid decadence of Greece, despite her splendid intellectual life, was due to moral causes. Not the pure, but the impure—the brilliant Hetairae—were the companions of men, and the men themselves were stained with nameless vices. Speaking of the decay of ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... of the first donation in 1608, the year of inauguration, to 1737. Facsimiles of the title-page, with the initials "J.S." in the lower corners, and two typical pages face this page. The lettering of these pages is characteristic of the period, and shows the decadence of the ...
— Three Centuries of a City Library • George A. Stephen
... not slow in perceiving the weakness and decadence of the Portuguese power in Asia. They felt with how much ease a clever and prudent nation might in a short time become possessed of the whole commerce of the extreme East. After a considerable number of private expeditions and voyages of reconnaissance they had ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... few months after writing the above letter, Lamb contributed to "The London Magazine,"—then in its decadence, but among whose "creaking rafters" Elia fondly lingered, "like the last rat,"—to this (his favorite periodical) he contributed a brief, but beautiful paper, suggested by Fauntleroy's sad story. The article is entitled "The Last Peach," and purports to be written by a bank-officer (possibly the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... could not have been more striking. The soft, delicate, well-groomed figure of Blanch, the accomplished woman of the world, with eyes intoxicating as wine and a glowing wealth of golden hair, tempting and alluring as the luxuriance of old Rome at the height of her triumphs before her decadence set in—the last fair breath of her ancient glory—the best and fairest that modern civilization had produced. She had no need of the artificial head-gear and upholstery with which the modern society belle is wont to bolster up herself. There was not the slightest trace of rouge on her ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... probably advanced man from savagism into barbarism, seems to have at that stage exhausted its energies. This is but an illustration of the fact that a race, like an individual, has a period of growth, a maturity of healthful powers, and an old age of slow decadence. After thus dispersing over the world, carrying with them the culture of the Neolithic Age, they seem to have halted in their progress. It remained for a new people, starting, perhaps, from the same state of culture, but with new energies, to discover and employ metals in the construction ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... when Gian Giacomo de' Medici laid the country of Siena waste, levelled her luxurious suburbs, and delivered her famine-stricken citizens to the tyranny of the Grand Duke Cosimo, this town has gone on dreaming in suspended decadence. Yet the epithet which was given to her in her days of glory, the title of "Fair Soft Siena," still describes the city. She claims it by right of the gentle manners, joyous but sedate, of her inhabitants, by the grace of their pure Tuscan speech, and by the unique delicacy of her architecture. ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... details of the preparations for the barbarous sepulture of the young Briton. Now and then the cracking of rifle-shots betokened the shooting of his horses and cattle and all the living things among his possessions—a practice already in its decadence among the Cherokees, and later, influenced by the utilitarian methods of civilization, altogether abandoned. Swift steps here and there throughout the town intimated errands to gather all his choicest effects to be buried with him, for his future use. To this custom, ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... grow small, hard and unsympathetic. Very few young men or young women of strength and feeling fail to pass through a period of Pessimism. With some it is merely an affectation caught from the cheap literature of decadence. It then may find expression in imitation, as a few years ago the sad-hearted youth turned down his collar in sympathy with the "conspicuous loneliness" that took the starch out of the collar of Byron. "The youth," says Zangwill, "says bitter things ...
— The Philosophy of Despair • David Starr Jordan
... hoping for a decadence of the craze for historical romances so long as the public is fed on books like this? Such a story has zest for the most jaded palate; nay, it can hold the interest even of a book reviewer. From the first page to the last there is not a moment when one's desire to finish the book weakens. Along ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... erred with respect to London, in magnifying it into a town of superlative commercial splendour in the days of Nero, which, I repeat, is wildly ridiculous, he more grossly erred with respect to our form of government; for when he decried it, and prophesied its decadence and downfall, his sagacity ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... in all its aspects, of a malignant influence, and every one of the planets threatening thee with disgrace, according as they stand seated towards one another, in relation to the horned signs of Aries, Taurus, and Capricorn. In the fourth house I find Jupiter in a decadence, as also in a tetragonal aspect to Saturn, associated with Mercury. Thou wilt be soundly peppered, my good, honest fellow, I warrant thee. I will be? answered Panurge. A plague rot thee, thou old fool and doting sot, how graceless and unpleasant thou art! When all ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... part in this work, for with the decadence of the church it has become the only truly catholic organization in the land. Its task is essentially to carry out programs of service, to add and build and increase the facilities of life. Repression is an insignificant part of its work; the use of the club ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... novel, in its view of the decay of the Border, the ruined Laird, the frivolous foolish society of the Well, taking the place of sturdy William of Deloraine, and farmers like Scott's grandfather, makes a picture of decadence as melancholy as "Redgauntlet." "Not here, O Apollo, are haunts meet for thee!" Strangely enough, among the features of the time, Scott mentions reckless borrowings, "accommodation," "Banks of Air." ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... shrouded in this strange mystery, hovered over by the untiring affection of her children, sweet and tender in her decadence, but "absent." ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... came from within. It was decadence. There was nothing left for the beings to do. They had solved all their problems and could find no new ones. They had exhausted the intricate workings of reflection, academic hypothetica and mind-play; there hadn't been a new game, for instance, in ...
— The Inhabited • Richard Wilson
... their children.[315] Throughout the careful study which we now possess, thanks to Dr. Rivers, of this people, there is the dominant note of dairy economy superimposing itself upon all else, and even religion seems to be in a state of decadence.[316] I do not know that anywhere else could be found a stronger example of the results of extreme specialisation upon the social and mental condition of a people. As a rule such specialisation ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... people, that the suddenness of the catastrophe was essential to the lesson. The same necessity exists no longer, the Chosen People are now beyond the lesson, and nations undergo suffering, and approach dissolution, by laws not unlike those of the decadence of the human frame; the disease makes progress, but the evidence scarcely strikes the eye, and the seat of the distemper is almost beyond human investigation. The jealousy of the European powers, too, protects the Turk. But he must go down—Mahometanism is already ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... hear that Dr. Dresser is here, collecting, lecturing, and trying to persuade the Japanese to adhere to their own forms and taste in art and decoration. It is a great pity to observe the decadence of native art, and at the same time to see how much better the old things are than the new. A true Japanese artist never repeats himself, and consequently never makes an exact pair of anything. His designs agree generally, and ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... on the stage, and the unhappy singer, bereft of romance, his career finished, decadence and old age staring him in the face, went to answer the call. But suddenly his face changed; a brightness, an alertness came into it and even, mysteriously, into all his body. There was a woman at the other end of the wire, and ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... the trade union after its triumph over the extreme methods of the Knights of Labor. The public, however, did not anticipate the revolutionary ideal which again sought to inflame industrial unionism. After the decadence of the older type of the industrial union several conditions manifested themselves which now, in retrospect, appear to have encouraged the violent militants who call themselves the Industrial ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... From him "Pride and Prejudice" got a chance of three readings at least. This generous universality of taste, in addition to all his other qualities of humour and poetry, enabled Scott to raise the novel from its decadence, and to make the dry bones of history live again in his tales. With Charles Edward at Holyrood, as Mr. Senior wrote in the "Quarterly Review," "we are in the lofty region of romance. In any other hands than those of Sir Walter ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... General William Heath, is a striking example of the decadence of the New England hill towns, its population having fallen from eleven hundred and ninety-nine in the year 1830, to five hundred and sixty-eight at present. The site of old Fort Shirley is in the township. ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1886 - Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 3, March, 1886 • Various
... meaning of a common word as to apply the term "commerce" to the carrying trade, when in the session of 1869 it commissioned Hon. John Lynch, of Maine, and his associated committee "to investigate the cause of the decadence of American commerce," and to suggest a remedy by which it ...
— Free Ships: The Restoration of the American Carrying Trade • John Codman
... forsaken during long periods, when it seems that the entire race is hopelessly abased. The mass perceives too late in rare individuals certain wasted talents—treasures of sagacity, spiritual vigor, heroic and almost supernatural comprehension. Such men are prodigious exceptions in times of material decadence and mental laxness. They inherit all the qualities that have long since ceased to be current. They serve as examples and rallying points for other generations, more clear-sighted and less degenerate. On reading ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... of progress in art, that when the aesthetic impulse is on the wane, artists should perforce select to follow the weakness rather than the vigour, of their predecessors. While painting was in the ascendant, Raphael could take the best of Perugino and discard the worst; in its decadence Parmigiano reproduces the affectations of Correggio, and Bernini carries the exaggerations of Michelangelo to absurdity. All arts describe a parabola. The force which produces them causes them to rise throughout their growth up ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... Thucydides and Herodotus, and most momentous perhaps for the age to come, of Plato and Demosthenes and of the New Testament in its original Greek. The quick and vivid intellect of Italy, which had been torpid in the decadence of mediaevalism and its mysticism and piety, seized with avidity the revelation of the classical world which the scholars and their manuscripts brought. Human life, which the mediaeval Church had taught them to regard but as a threshold and ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... sort is no doubt learned in hours of reflection, by those who are not born with it. What rebuke of aimless excitement there is to be got out of a little reflection, when we have been inveighing against the corruption and decadence of our own days, if only we have provided ourselves with a little knowledge of the past wherewith to balance our thought! As bad times as these, or any we shall see, have been reformed, but not by protests. They have been made glorious instead of shameful by the ...
— On Being Human • Woodrow Wilson
... and hurrahing out of the lake. These rambling, sway-backed tunnels are very attractive things, with their alcoved outlooks upon the lovely and inspiriting water. They contain two or three hundred queer old pictures, by old Swiss masters—old boss sign-painters, who flourished before the decadence of art. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... also supports," said Madame de Stael; and what more sure support in the decadence which threatens us, than a positive science deduced from irrefragable law! I say irrefragable with conviction. Though human laws be subject to change, the laws of nature are shown to be immutable, at least so far as ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... this end approaching strive to hasten its arrival, or should he oppose it? In a decadent society, to come nearer to the problems which concern us in ethics, must a man strive to realize the social will expressed in progressive decadence? Should he hasten the ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... circle—of dwarfs. They had their maxim: to enjoy themselves. They lived on public death. There they inhaled shame, and they throve on that which kills others. It was there that was reared up with art, purpose, industry, and goodwill, the decadence of France. There worked the bought, fed, and obliging public men;—read prostituted. Even literature was compounded there as we have shown; Vieillard was a classic of 1830, Morny created Choufleury, Louis Bonaparte was a candidate for the Academy. Strange place. Rambouillet's ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... what point this development began and what influences stimulated its progress are questions which still remain in [7] dispute. Three theories have been proposed. It is, in the first place, obviously tempting to explain the origin of Provencal poetry as being a continuation of Latin poetry in its decadence. When the Romans settled in Gaul they brought with them their amusements as well as their laws and institutions. Their scurrae, thymelici and joculatores, the tumblers, clowns and mountebanks, who amused the common people by day and the nobles after their banquets by ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor
... the explorer was always emboldened by that impulse, and, if there ever be a future of decadence, it will live again in ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... gas-fixtures without gas, and a bathing-room without water. There was a separate building for servants' quarters, and a kitchen with every convenience, even to a few jars of lingering pickles. On the whole, there was an air of substance and comfort about the town, quite alien from the picturesque decadence of Beaufort. ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... custom are invincible in the country regions, where the peasants are left very much to themselves, the town of Issoudun itself has reached a state of complete social stagnation. Obliged to meet the decadence of fortunes by the practice of sordid economy, each family lives to itself. Moreover, society is permanently deprived of that distinction of classes which gives character to manners and customs. There is no opposition of social forces, such as that to which the cities of the Italian States ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... Clarice Pendomer was now rather precariously retained within the social pale through her initial precaution of having been born a Bellingham.... But all such tittle-tattle, as has been said, is quite beside the mark, since with the decadence of Clarice Pendomer this chronicle has, in the outcome, as scant concern as with the marital aspirations ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... the money with which he bought his shares. When the company proved insolvent, and perhaps fraudulent, Grant was forced to recall him. Critics who saw dishonesty or low ethical standards in these men were ready to see in the carnival of the Reconstruction Governments wholesale proofs of decadence. ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... an official or distinctive dress worn by students and officers of a College or University, and also by officials of a {128} Court of Justice. It is not an ecclesiastical garment, although it was customary during a time of great spiritual decadence in the Church for the gown with bands to be worn during the preaching of the sermon in the service. This, however, has long since been given up; the surplice ...
— The American Church Dictionary and Cyclopedia • William James Miller
... This decadence was hastened by an unfortunate alliance with those forms of magic and erotic mysticism which are called Saktism[24]. It is difficult to estimate the extent of the corruption, for the singularity of the evil, a combination of the austere and ethical teaching ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... them again and again, and sending the curtain up and down and up and down time after time. He could not bear that what he detested should be deliriously admired. He went so far as to form views about the decadence of the theatre as an institution. Most of all he was disgusted because his beloved Eve was not disgusted. Eve said placidly that she did not think much of the affair, but that she had thoroughly enjoyed it ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... have taken to devious practices, or been forced into them; whatever the cause of her present decadence she could not have been always the thief she now confessed herself. I had it from her own lips, she had acknowledged it with some show of remorse. There must surely have been some excuse for her, some overmastering ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... can bring on still deeper depressions of the psychological tension. But that evolution is rarely fatal; it can very often be checked, and it seems to me fair to preserve the distinction between neuroses and psychoses considered as different degrees of psychological decadence. ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... appeal to human sympathies, and ignored all the highest motives to human action. The especial materialistic standpoint from which Pyrrhonism judged all that pertains to knowledge and life shut out the ideal, and all possibility of absolute truth. It was an expression of the philosophic decadence of the age when it flourished, and although it possessed some philosophic worth, yet it bore in itself the causes of ...
— Sextus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism • Mary Mills Patrick
... so for the Church, that written word is the guarantee for its purity and immortality. Christianity is the only religion that has ever passed through periods of decadence and purified itself again. They used to say that Thames water was the best to put on shipboard because, after it became putrid, it cleared itself and became sweet again. I do not know anything about whether that is true or not, but I know that it is true about Christianity. Over and over ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... knowledge of the earlier and ruder form; its history, as we know it, might almost be said to begin with the perfection of the sixth and fifth centuries, and what we know after that is the history of a long decadence, not indeed without new developments of importance, as for instance in the architectural structure of Roman building, and perhaps in the sculpture of the Early Empire on one side, and in certain aspects of Latin literature on another. The history of mediaeval art is ...
— Progress and History • Various
... those who 'arrive,' flowed from him copiously. He was the age indeed for 'arrival,' when, as so often happens, the man of middle life, appeased by success, dismisses the revolts of his youth. But this was still the language—and the fierce language—of revolt! The decadence of English art and artists, the miserable commercialism of the Academy, the absence of any first-rate teaching, of any commanding traditions, of any 'school' worth the name—the vulgarity of the public, from royalty downward, the snobbery of the rich world in its dealings with art: all these ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... bivalved Ostracoda—which here are occasionally found of the size of beans—and various Phyllopods of different kinds, we have an abundance of Trilobites. These last-mentioned ancient types, however, are now beginning to show signs of decadence; and though still individually numerous, there is a great diminution in the number of generic types. Many of the old genera, which flourished so abundantly in Lower Silurian seas, have now died out; and the group is represented chiefly by species of Cheirurus, Encrinurus, ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... of its military glory and its wealth, it begins at once to sink more or less rapidly on the declivity of moral degeneration and decay. The Israelites having, among the first, experienced this law of the evolution of nations, the neighboring peoples profited by the decadence of the then effeminate and debauched descendants of Jacob, ...
— The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery • Nicolas Notovitch
... how he might best appropriate the epigram, and when the influence of the liberty lately acquired by girls had been discussed—the right to go out shopping in the morning, to sit out dances on dark stairs; in a word, the decadence and overthrow of the chaperon—the ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... tree. The Penwicks had come over in the Mayflower, or at a period yet more remote, and the acme of the prosperity and social distinction of the name was coincident with the second administration of President Washington. Since that time its decadence had been steady; at first slow, but later with the accelerating motion common to falling bodies, until nothing remained of the family revenues, little but a tradition of the family greatness, and none of the race but this frostbitten old lady, poor and forsaken ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... is wastefully harsh to frank unorthodoxy. But its heart is sound if its judgments fall short of acuteness and if its standards of achievement are low. It needs but a quickening spirit upon the throne, always the traditional centre of its respect, to rise from even the appearance of decadence. There is a new quality seeking expression in England like the rising of sap in the spring, a new generation asking only for such leadership and such emancipation from restricted scope and ungenerous hostility as a ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... danger confronts us as a nation than the unhappy decadence among our people of genuine and trustworthy love and affection for our Government as the embodiment of the highest and best aspirations of humanity, and not as the giver of gifts, and because its mission is the enforcement of exact justice and equality, ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... to your house when they cannot marry your daughters were to solicit awkward complications. In business, in civic affairs, in politics, the Jew has mixed freely with his fellow-citizens, but indiscriminate social relations only become possible through a religious decadence, which they in turn accelerate. A Christian in a company of middle-class Jews is like a lion in a den of Daniels. They show him deference ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... so quiet, some rash critics fancy that she may be termed effete. But this is far from the truth. The absence of military burdens, rendered needless by the intelligent selfishness, if not the conscience, of the rest of Europe, implies no decadence of masculine spirit in the Dutch. In no department of enterprise, commercial ability, or intellectual energy are they inferior to any of their contemporaries, or to their own great progenitors. "Holland," says Professor Thorold Rogers, "is the origin of scientific medicine and rational therapeutics. ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... show. It makes Gorgiko Brown, {340} the gypsy man, leave his tent and his old wife of an evening, and thrust himself into society which could well dispense with him. 'Brother,' said Mr. Petulengro the other day to the Romany Rye, after telling him many things connected with the decadence of gypsyism, 'there is one Gorgiko Brown, who, with a face as black as a tea-kettle, wishes to be mistaken for a Christian tradesman; he goes into the parlour of a third-rate inn of an evening, calls for rum-and-water, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... human race. The third point is that Harvey was devoid of care either for wealth, or for riches, or for ambition. The man found a higher ideal than any of these things in the pursuit of truth and the benefit of his fellow-men. If we all go and do likewise, I think there is no fear for the decadence of England. I think that our children and our successors will find themselves in a commonwealth, different it may be from that for which Eliott, and Pym, and Hampden struggled, but one which will be identical in the substance of its aims—great, worthy, ...
— William Harvey And The Discovery Of The Circulation Of The Blood • Thomas H. Huxley
... the death of Louis XV., Madame du Barry (originally a courtesan,) had drawn from the royal treasury no less than 2,450,000 francs, or equal to about L200,000 of our present money. ["Histoire de la Decadence de la Monarchie Francaise," par Soulavie l'Aine, iii. 330.] "La corruption," says Lacretelle, "entrait dans les plus paisibles menages, dans les familles les plus obscures. Elle [Madame du Barri] etait savamment et longtemps combinee ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... of England's superiority helped to bring about the decadence of travel for education. Travel continued, and the eighteenth century was as noticeable as any other for the "mal du pays" which attacked young men, but travel became the tour of curiosity and diversion with ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... fritter away a decade or two of years in dissipation and excess, and ever hope to make up their losses by rigid surveillance in later years." "The sins of youth are expiated in age," is a proverb which daily examples illustrate. In proportion as puberty is precocious, will decadence be premature; the excesses of middle life draw heavily on the fortune of later years. "The mill of the gods grinds slow, but it grinds exceedingly fine," and though nature may be a tardy creditor, she is found at last to be an ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... generally get at one season of the year—about the condition of the stage, and a well-known writer who, I believe, combines the function of a dramatic critic with the responsibility of a watch-dog to the Navy, informed his readers that the sad decadence of the British Drama was due to the evils of party government. That is certainly an original idea; but I fancy that if the author were to unfold it to this company, he would be told that he had ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... when the art of a country turns to over-elaboration of detail and mechanical dexterity, when there is a general tendency toward vividness of impression rather than poignancy and vitality of expression, then we have the invariable sign of that decadence which inevitably drifts into revolution of one kind or another. Lasus (500 B.C.), who, as previously mentioned, was a great flute and lyre player as well as poet, betrays this tendency, which reached its ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... of the most lamentable decadence followed, during which Turkish domination prevailed more and more in the country. During an interval of twenty-five years (1521-46) no less than eleven princes succeeded one another on the throne of Muntenia, ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... cottage-croft, whilst murmuring bees Went by, and almost touched thy temples bare, Edged with a few flakes of the whitest hair. And, soothed by the faint hum of ebbing seas, And song of birds, and breath of the young breeze, Thus didst thou sit, feeling the summer air Blow gently;—with a sad still decadence, Sinking to earth in hope, but all alone. Oh! hast thou wept to feel the lonely sense Of earthly loss, musing on voices gone! Hush the vain murmur, that, without offence, Thy head may rest in peace beneath the ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... impossible for any student of literature, for any interested reader, not to indulge in some forecast as to what rank in the poetic hierarchy Robert Browning will ultimately occupy. The commonplace as to the impossibility of prognosticating the ultimate slow decadence, or slower rise, or, it may be, sustained suspension, of a poet's fame, is often insincere, and but an excuse of indolence. To dogmatise were the height of presumption as well as of folly: but to forego speculation, based upon complete ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... one ill to think of it!" It certainly very nearly made him ill. And as if these exercises in distinction had inflamed his conscience Mr. Brumley wrote two articles in the Hebdomadal denouncing impure literature, decadence, immorality, various recent scandalous instances, and the suffragettes, declaring that woman's place was the home and that "in a pure and exalted monogamy lies the sole unitary basis for a civilized state." The most remarkable thing about this article is an omission. That Sir Isaac's monogamy ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... conclusion of the process was so inevitable. The time came when he did not pass my house. Then he took the sunlight in a bow-window on the second floor of his residence. So closely had I watched his decadence during the six years that I was able to say to myself one morning, 'There will be crape on his door before the day is out.' ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... did not break on the wheel alive, burn alive, boil alive, flay alive, crucify, impale, and quarter, blame him not, the fault was not his; the age obstinately refuses to allow it. He has done all that was humanly or inhumanly possible. Given the nineteenth century, a century of gentleness,—of decadence, say the papists and friends of arbitrary power,—Louis Bonaparte has equalled in ferocity his contemporaries, Haynau, Radetzky, Filangieri, Schwartzenberg, and Ferdinand of Naples: he has even ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... expressed; and then reformers, like the Puritans and the Quakers, have endeavored to exclude the arts from religion, lest they should contaminate it. But the exclusion has been accomplished with difficulty, and to maintain it has been impossible. It is neither an accident, nor a sign of decadence, that painting and sculpture are creeping back into the Protestant churches, to combine with poetry and music in expressing the religious life of man. For the intellect alone is inadequate either to express ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... unless humanity's supposition of a life beyond this life, and of the existence of spiritual powers and beings to whom we are related, holds good. No nation has ever conducted its life on the basis of pure materialism, save in those last stages of its decadence which preluded ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... Constantinople, was spoken there, with different degrees of corruption, by Syrians, Bulgarians, and Goths; and thus, as Christianity undermined the old classical literature, the political condition of the capital deteriorated the language itself. Other causes accelerated the decadence of Greek learning: the great library at Alexandria, and the school which had been established in connection with it, were destroyed at the end of the fourth century by the edict of Theodosius, and the conquest of Egypt by the Saracens in the seventh century ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... to some plaintive whisper from the Past amid the deserted memorials of its glory and grief. Such a place is Ferrara. The broad and regular streets and the massive palaces emphatically declare its former splendor; and its actual decadence is no less manifest in the grass-grown pavement of the one and the crumbling and dreary aspect of the other. It requires no small effort of fancy, as we walk through some deserted by-way, wherein our footsteps echo audibly at noonday, to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... the other arts, the death of Leo X (1521) and the sack of Rome (1527) mark the epoch of decadence. Giovio, but just escaped from the desolation of the eternal city, described, not impartially, but on the whole correctly, the causes of this decline: 'The plays of Plautus and Terence, once a school of Latin style for the educated Romans, are banished ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... One. You see what is plain to all others; at last it becomes clear to you. But you are dying, and it is too late for wisdom to come to the Jivros. Once you set your feet on the path to greatness; but when you did evil, your feet naturally turned to the downward path of decadence. Evil is not a way of life, it ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... Prints. In this room one can trace the development of American engraving and etching from the beginnings to the present day. Starting on wall D one finds steel engraving illustrated from the days of Paul Revere to its decadence; then the history of wood-engraving to its flowering in Cole and Wolf; early and recent American etching; and a few modern ...
— An Art-Lovers guide to the Exposition • Shelden Cheney
... one to understand why it sometimes disappoints modern expectations. Particular scenes are seared on our memories: persons stand before us lit to the soul by a fierce light of psychological analysis: we learn to loath the characteristic vices of the time, and to understand the moral causes of Roman decadence. But somehow the dominance of the moral interest and the frequent interruption of the narrative by scenes of senatorial inefficiency serve to obscure the plain sequence of events. It is difficult after a first reading of the Histories ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... detriment, delaceration|, outrage, havoc, inroad, ravage, scath[obs3]; perversion, prostitution, vitiation, discoloration, oxidation, pollution, defoedation|, poisoning, venenation|, leaven, contamination, canker, corruption, adulteration, alloy. decline, declension, declination; decadence, decadency[obs3]; falling off &c. v.; caducity[obs3], decrepitude. decay, dilapidation, ravages of time, wear and tear; corrosion, erosion; moldiness, rottenness; moth and rust, dry rot, blight, marasmus[obs3], atrophy, collapse; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus |
