"Seduction" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... figured too surely on having his neighbor's cattle to show the banker to stake all on the chance of Grace being able to wheedle him into the scheme. If he couldn't get them by seduction, he meant to take them in a raid. Grace never intended to come to meet ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... happened, that, of all this, the first, merely sceptical or negative step, that easiest step on the threshold, had alone remained in general memory; and the "doctrine of motion" seemed to those who had felt its seduction to make all fixed knowledge impossible. The swift passage of things, the still swifter passage of those modes of our conscious being which seemed to reflect them, might indeed be the burning of the divine fire: but what was ascertained was that they did pass away like a devouring flame, or like ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... right with Him, that same thought brings with it security and companionship. Ah! we do not need ever to say 'I am alone' if we are walking before God. It brings with it, of course, an armour against temptation. What mean, lustful, worldly seduction has any power when a man falls back on the thought, 'God sees me, and God is with me'? Do you remember the very first instance in Scripture of the use of this phrase? The Lord said unto Abraham, 'Walk before Me, and be thou perfect.' That was not only a commandment, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... with honeyed and choice eloquence; the beautiful women on whom he casts his eyes are charmed to love him, and he moves them in a wondrous way, more powerfully than the magnet influences iron;" but this seduction in his manner cannot be considered as merely an innocent result of his great personal beauty, because his lustful disposition is well proved, and sensuality was always his greatest vice. Symonds makes the statement that within the sacred walls of the Vatican ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... assure you, my Lord, that, although, from the extreme delicacy of your honour, you have ever through life shuddered at seduction; yet, there are constitutions, and there are circumstances, in which it ...
— Lover's Vows • Mrs. Inchbald
... appearances. I do not love Cordiani, and I never had any love for him; on the contrary, I have felt, and I do feel, for him a hatred which he has richly deserved, and I hope to convince you, in spite of every appearance which seems to convict me. As to the reproach of seduction, I entreat you to spare me such an accusation. On our side, consider that, if you had not yourself thrown temptation in my way, I never would have committed towards you an action of which I have deeply repented, for reasons which you do ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... entered the service of the Church "was released from the distraction of family cares and the seduction of family ties. The Church was his country and his home and its interests were his own. The moral, intellectual, and physical forces, which throughout the laity were divided between the claims of patriotism, the selfish struggle for advancement, the provision for ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... but their imitation of his vices, and this was always a passport to his favor, whilst virtue, morality, and honor were excluded with contempt and derision. In fact, the corrupt atmosphere of his court carried its contagion throughout the empire, until the seduction of female innocence became the fashion of the day, and no man could consider himself entitled to a becoming position in society who had not distinguished himself by half a dozen criminal intrigues either with the wives or daughters of his acquaintances. When we contemplate for a moment ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... the prettiest women in Innsbruck. She had golden hair, large violet eyes, a smile that would melt a Loyola, and diamonds that set every woman's mouth watering. With such inducements to seduction, how could Madame Mildau help delighting in balls and fetes, and in promenading constantly before the public? She revelled in a universal admiration—she aimed at a monopoly—and she lived wholly and solely to exact homage. To be deprived of any single opportunity of displaying her charms ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... women might reduce the weaker sex to such graceless inferiority that, deprived of the deference and favour they now enjoy, they should find themselves entirely without influence. In that case they would have to begin again at the bottom and appeal to arts of seduction and to men's fondness in order to regain ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... other side He saw an aged woman glide; The name she bears, Historia, Mythologia, Fabula; With footstep tottering and unstable She dragg'd a large and wooden carved-table, Where, with wide sleeves and human mien, The Lord was catechizing seen; Adam, Eve, Eden, the Serpent's seduction, Gomorrah and Sodom's awful destruction, The twelve illustrious women, too, That mirror of honour brought to view; All kinds of bloodthirstiness, murder, and sin, The twelve wicked tyrants also were in, And all kinds of ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... their subject to Goethe's dramatic poem. Out of that great work, which had occupied the mind of the German poet for an ordinary lifetime, the French librettists extracted the romance which sufficed them—the story of Gretchen's love for the rejuvenated philosopher, her seduction and death. This romance is wholly the creation of Goethe; it has no place in any of the old legends which are at the bottom of the history of Dr. Faust, or Faustus. Those legends deal with the doings of a magician who has sold his soul ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... shortly arrive, in which, by ascertaining the characters of persons now, we shall be guarded against their mischiefs then; for in proportion as the enemy despair of conquest, they will be trying the arts of seduction and the force of fear by all the mischiefs which they can inflict. But in war we may be certain of these two things, viz. that cruelty in an enemy, and motions made with more than usual parade, are always signs of weakness. He that can conquer, finds his mind too free ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... foul and willing instrument of seduction, whose baseness insults every moral law, suffered great agony for three years from an incurable disease, and died in December, 1828, aged fifty-seven years. The Kings and regicides in their ferocious fear had made it an important part of their policy that Marie Louise should ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... were full of the assassin. Many things were incomprehensible in her character, unless you approached it with the right key. Young and with a fatal beauty, fantastic, audacious, a great coquette, always giving out a perfume of seduction and feminine ruin, she was one of those women who live in the atmosphere of infamous intrigue, and her last victim ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... principles inculcated by her mother; and they had been so forcibly impressed, that she feared shame, more than the poverty to which it would lead. Her incessant importunities to prevail upon my father to screen her from reproach by marrying her, as he had promised in the fervour of seduction, estranged him from her so completely, that her very person became distasteful to him; and he began to hate, as well as despise me, before I ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... peculiar temptation. The public is prone to take his scientific spirit for granted, and is a long time in opening its eyes. Meanwhile he lives a life of delightful leisure, teaching as many hours a week as a business man labours in a day. Not one man in a hundred is proof against the seduction of those idle hours, during which literature and art and a cultivated society plead for some share of his attention and filch away his will. And, after all, why not? he begins to ask himself. In a commercial ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... greater portion of this force is proceeding in relieving an important frontier post, and in several incidental operations against hostile tribes of savages, rendered indispensable by the subserviency into which they had been seduced by the enemy—a seduction the more cruel as it could not fail to impose a necessity of precautionary severities against ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Macarius, St Stephen, St Theodore, St Abraham, Seduction Island, and some others, which are to be found in Mr Muller's chart, had no place in this now produced to us; nay, both Mr Ismyloff, and the others, assured me, that they had been several times sought for in vain. And yet it is difficult to believe how Mr Muller, from whom subsequent map-makers ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... stay in Constantinople he was named phylarch of Palestine, and received a body of troops from Justin II. With these he started on his way to Arabia. It is said that a man of Asad, who had followed him to Constantinople, charged him before the emperor with the seduction of a princess, and that Justin sent him a poisoned cloak, which caused his ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... practitioners of this work. Into whatever houses I enter, I will go into them for the benefit of the sick, and will abstain from every voluntary act of mischief and corruption, and, further, from the seduction of females or males, of freedmen and slaves. Whatever, in connection with my professional practice, or not in connection with it, I see or hear, in the life of men, which ought not to be spoken of ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... 'after all, what are appearances to the man of wit and intellect? Dress, and women will approve you: but I assure you they much prefer the man of wit in his slouched hat and stockings down. I was introduced to the Duke this morning. It is a curious thing that the seduction of a Duchess has always been ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... mean as well as cruel expedients to accomplish it. For this purpose, he endeavoured to suborn a poet who lived under his patronage. The man, whose name was Philoxenus, had lost the favour of the king, and was imprisoned by him for the seduction of one of his female singers. Having written some verses, the tyrant bethought him of establishing their reputation by getting Philoxenus to express publicly his approbation of them, and for that purpose ordered him from his prison: but the poet, too proud ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... which had now become somewhat prominent. He seemed satisfied with this, and then opened the other packet, which was a series of drawings executed by a first-rate artist in the most admirable style delineating the seduction of a beautiful young boy of about fifteen by another handsome youth a few years older. Every scene in the progress was illustrated by an appropriate and admirably drawn portrait of the two characters, commencing with taking him on his knee ...
— Laura Middleton; Her Brother and her Lover • Anonymous
... "splendid!" and said if he had told them at first, they wouldn't have started away. He made a plausible excuse; but his real reason had been the fear that not even the secret would keep them with him any very great length of time, and so he had meant to hold it in reserve as a last seduction. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... her attention to the opera—to that tragedy of the weakness of the flesh, albeit the spirit may be willing to listen to good. Alas! that the flesh should be so full of color and charm and seduction, while the spirit is pale, colorless, and set to music in a ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... divine; but, at the same time, it must be acknowledged, that neither law nor religion can keep society in such good order, or so restrain crime. The man who would defy the penalty of the law, and the commandments of his God against seduction will, however, pause in his career, when he finds that there are brothers to avenge an injured sister. And why so?—because in this world we live as if we were in a tavern, careless of what the bill is which we run up, ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... difficulties with Mademoiselle De Marignan, a rich heiress of one of the greatest families of Provence, he displayed, like a wrestler, all kinds of stratagems and daring schemes of policy in the small theatre of Aix. Cunning, seduction, courage, he used every resource of his nature to succeed, and he succeeded; but he was hardly married, before fresh persecutions beset him, and the stronghold of Pontarlier gaped to enclose him. A love, which his Lettres a Sophie has rendered immortal, ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... of art which is so free from rigid requirements. Like crystalline masses, it may take any form, and yet be beautiful; we have only to pour in the right elements—genuine observation, humor, and passion. But it is precisely this absence of rigid requirement which constitutes the fatal seduction of novel-writing to incompetent women. Ladies are not wont to be very grossly deceived as to their power of playing on the piano; here certain positive difficulties of execution have to be conquered, and incompetence inevitably breaks down. Every art which ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... towards Mr. Tickels, while his magnificent features grew dark with terrible rage—"as for you, sir, you have betrayed my confidence and abused my hospitality; I introduced you into this house, supposing you to be a man of honor and a friend. You have attempted the seduction of my sister; you have basely tried to take advantage of the weakness of an inexperienced and unsuspecting woman; but more than all this, sir—and my blood boils with fury at the thought!—you would have tarnished the unstained name and honor of a kingly race! Look you, sir, these wrongs ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... save her own was heard till the cup was emptied, upon which Master Gammon, according to his wont, departed for bed to avoid the seduction of suppers, which he shunned as apoplectic, and Mrs. Sumfit prepared, in a desolate way, to wash the tea-things, but the farmer, saying that it could be done in the morning, went to the door and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... worlds,—the indefinite immensity of the universe, is a most awful subject of contemplation. He who rightly feels its mystery and grandeur is in no danger of seduction from the falsehoods of religious systems, or of deifying the principle of the universe. It is impossible to believe that the Spirit that pervades this infinite machine begat a son upon the body of a Jewish woman; or is angered at the consequences of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... that we were married. The brother immediately started for home, and repeated the story, as it was told to him, to his father and the family. Without seeing his daughter, the father at once procured a warrant, and had me arrested and brought before a justice on charge of seduction. The trial was brief; the daughter herself swore positively, that though she had been imprudent and indiscreet in going to Worcester with me, no improper communication had ever, there or elsewhere, ...
— Seven Wives and Seven Prisons • L.A. Abbott
... the whole 'tis most miserable stuff. Miss How, who is called a young lady of sense and honour, is not only extreme silly, but a more vicious character than Sally Martin, whose crimes are owing at first to seduction, and afterwards to necessity; while this virtuous damsel, without any reason, insults her mother at home and ridicules her abroad; abuses the man she marries; and is impertinent and impudent with great applause. Even that model of ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... with the torments of hell. Moreover, she has told me all, a quarrel soon followed by a reconciliation forced her to write the letter which you have received, and she has sent me here in her place. I will not tell you, sir, that by persisting in your plan of seduction you will cause the misery of her you love, that you will forfeit her my esteem, and eventually your own; that your crime will be stamped on the future by causing perhaps sorrow to my children. I will not even speak to ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... she became engaged to him. On the third, she was struck with admiration and awe by a South American diplomat with the green ribbon of a Bolivian order tied across his false shirt front. Don Quebrado d'Acunha was a practiced hand at seduction and Yae became one of his victims soon after her seventeenth birthday, and just ten days before her admirer sailed away to rejoin his legitimate spouse in Guayaquil. The engagement with Hoskin still lingered on; but the young man, who adored ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... if, misled by the weakness of a tender heart, she had not listened to the passion of a gentleman in the neighbourhood, who promised her marriage. He soon abandoned her, and adding inhumanity to seduction, refused to insure a provision for the child of which she was pregnant. Margaret then determined to leave forever her native village, and retire, where her fault might be concealed, to some colony distant from that country ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... saw that you were virtuous from vanity, not principle, and I seized the fit moment for your seduction. I observed your blind idolatry of the Madonna's picture. I bade a subordinate but crafty spirit assume a similar form, and you eagerly yielded to the blandishments ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... Madame de Stael, he said, "What does that woman want? Does she want the money the government owes to her father?" When Madame de Stael heard of it, she said, "The question is not what I want, but what I think." Henceforth women, like men, are to say what they think. For all that flattery and seduction and sin, we have substituted the simple weapon of talk. If women wish education, they must talk; if better laws, they must talk. The one chief argument against woman suffrage, with men, is that so few women even ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... this particular a watch was kept over the stage. "The Maid's Tragedy," which turns upon the seduction of Evadne by a licentious and profligate king, was prohibited during the reign of Charles II., as admitting certain unfavourable applications. The ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... souls are conveyed into their cunning hands, come from that Beauty, which is above our souls.' And it is not a renunciation by one who had never enjoyed what he renounces, or who feels himself, even now, quite safe from certain forms of its seduction. He is troubled especially by the fear that 'those melodies which Thy words breathe soul into, when sung with a sweet and attuned voice,' may come to move him 'more with the voice than with the words sung.' Yet how graciously he speaks of music, allowing 'that the several affections of our spirit, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... subjoined. It showed the author at an early period capable of seconding efficaciously the formation of republics on the principles of justice and virtue. Such a man became most naturally an object of Governor Barnard's seduction. The perversion of his abilities might be of use in a bad cause; the corruption of his principles might tarnish the best. But the arts of the Governor, which had succeeded with so many, were ineffectual with Mr. Adams, who openly declared he would not accept a favour, however flatteringly ...
— A Collection of State-Papers, Relative to the First Acknowledgment of the Sovereignty of the United States of America • John Adams
... passage in Homer, with which a lover of modern "problem novels" feels happy and at home, is the story of Phoenix, about his seduction of his father's mistress at the request of his mother. What a charming situation! But that occurs in an "Odyssean" Book of the Iliad, Book IX.; and thus Odyssean seems lower, not more advanced, than Iliadic taste in morals. To be ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... which so frequently characterise the modern collector. Not only Atticus, on whose fine taste he could depend, but every one likely to increase his acquisitions was Cicero persecuting with entreaties on entreaties, with the seduction of large prices, and with the expectation, that if the orator and consul would submit to accept any bribe, it would hardly be refused in the shape of a manuscript or a statue. "In the name of our friendship," says ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... idiotic follies, causing bankruptcy, scandal, and suicides. Men love them; yes, they love these women because these women know how to inspire love, and because they are loving women. Yes, indeed, they know how to conquer men; they understand the seduction of a smile; they know how to attract, seize, and wrap us up in their hearts, how to enslave us with a look, and they need not be beautiful at that. They have a conquering power that we never find in ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... villainous Swede had done to her—what he promised her, how he frightened her. She couldn't have cared for him, I know." Schomberg's vanity clung to the belief in some atrocious, extraordinary means of seduction employed by Heyst. "Look how he bewitched ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... exhibited a delicate refinement in the art of writing not surpassed in any work of imagination known to us. Another ground for the seeming actuality of the story, to those who have any knowledge of the class to which its heroine belongs, is the cause to which she attributes her fall. This was not seduction; for she confesses, what hardly one in a thousand of her sisters in shame will fail to confess, if they speak the truth, that she was not seduced;—and neither was it poverty; for her father was well-to-do, and she the petted attendant, almost the friend, of a young lady of wealth and station;—but ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... and in front of them. But this woman was moved merely by impulses; and what is more inexplicable than an impulse? What is the spring but an impulse? and this woman was mysterious, evanescent as its breath, with the same irresponsible seduction. He was certain that she was at last clear to him, though she might become dark to him again. One day she had come to gather flowers, and while arranging her posy she said casually: 'You are a ruler in ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... William Wilde; but that was not the way it presented itself. The action was not even brought directly by Miss Travers or by her father, Dr. Travers, against Sir William Wilde for rape or criminal assault, or seduction. It was a civil action brought by Miss Travers, who claimed L2,000 damages for a libel written by Lady Wilde to her father, Dr. Travers. The letter ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... were within hearing of it smile. The seduction of Francoise de Rohan by the Duc de Nemours was the topic of all conversations; but, as the duke was cousin to Francois II., and doubly allied to the house of Valois through his mother, the Guises regarded him more as the seduced than ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... lady fair The easier 'tis to gain her grace, And the more surely we ensnare Her in the pitfalls which we place. Time was when cold seduction strove To swagger as the art of love, Everywhere trumpeting its feats, Not seeking love but sensual sweets. But this amusement delicate Was worthy of that old baboon, Our fathers used to dote upon; The Lovelaces are out of date, ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... frequented the theatres and music-halls. Thus he became acquainted with a famous singing girl called Tu, whose first name was Mei, or "Elegance." As she was the tenth of her family, she was known at the theatre as Shih-niang, "The Tenth daughter." A delicate seduction diffused from her: her body was all grace and perfume. The twin arches of her brows held the black which is blue of distant mountains, and her eyes were as deep and bright as autumn lakes. Her face had the glory of the lotus, and her lips the glory of cherries. By what blunder of ...
— Eastern Shame Girl • Charles Georges Souli
... were set apart for social gallantries. When it came to the art of pleasing and attracting women, we have the word of Cardinal de Retz for it, that he was not always successful. Perhaps it is only inferior minds who possess the art and the genius of seduction. ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... daughter-in-law, if she was his son's full wife, was apparently punished by his being drowned. The Code is obscure here and we are not sure whether she was drowned also.(253) If the girl was not yet fully married, the case was treated as one of ordinary seduction, and the culprit was ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... now over) resolved to make my accustomed journey northwards a little earlier than usual; to the end that, though my fighting days are over, I may give some countenance to the friends of the government, and prevent the seduction of the unwary, if there should be any truth in what ...
— The Jacobite Rebellions (1689-1746) - (Bell's Scottish History Source Books.) • James Pringle Thomson
... change ended there our army would be still more a militia than it is now. It would be the Prussian Landwehr. But those entitled to their discharge are to be enticed by higher pay, promotions, bounties, and retiring pensions—in short, by all means of seduction, to re-enter for long periods, for ten, or fifteen, or perhaps twenty years. It is hoped that thus a permanent regular army may be formed, with an esprit de corps of its own, unsympathising with the people, and ready to keep it down; and such will, I believe, be the result. ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... on. But now things turn less happily for Robert. He finds himself, without any consciousness of the acts charged, accused on apparently indubitable evidence, first of peccadillos, then of serious crimes. Seduction, forgery, murder, even matricide are hinted against him, and at last, under the impression that indisputable proofs of the last two crimes have been discovered, he flies from his house. After a short period of wandering, in which ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... councils may pass resolutions condemnatory of false doctrine, but it is somewhat more difficult to counteract the seduction of the principles from which heresies derive their influence. The Gnostics, the Montanists, and the Manichaeans, owed much of their strength to fallacies and superstitions with which the Christian teachers of the age were not fully prepared to grapple; and hence it was ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... poverty and moral depravity. [Footnote: Green in his 'History of the English People' says:—Purity and fidelity to the marriage vow were sneered out of fashion; and Lord Chesterfield, in his letters to his son, instructed him in the art of seduction as part of a polite education. At the other end of the social scale lay the masses of the poor. They were ignorant and brutal to a degree which it is hard to conceive, for the vast increase of population which followed on the growth of towns and the development of manufactures had ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... begin to believe that there was such a thing as love at first sight, and then—he had better go now, she wished to be alone—she really had a headache. Oh! Nancy Corbett! you were, indeed, an adept in the art of seduction—no wonder that your name has been handed down to posterity. Mr Vanslyperken perceived his advantage, and pressed still more, until the blushing widow declared that she would really think seriously about the matter, if, on further acquaintance, she found that her good opinion of ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... the occasion of minute decoration of the richest beauty. It was written for Faustina Mancina, a celebrated courtesan, whose empire lay till the day of her death over the papal city. The wealth of sensuality and wit that made a fatal seduction of Rome for Molza, scholar and libertine, is reflected as it were in the rich cadences and overwrought adornment of his verse. Such compositions as these had a powerful influence over the tone of idyllic poetry. I have mentioned only a few out of a considerable list. The Driadeo ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... and when she saw him looking over her select and severe library, taking therefrom the "Polite Letter-Writer" and the "Elegant Extracts," Mrs. Crane divined at once that Jasper Losely was meditating the effect of epistolary seduction upon ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... has he managed to hold out so long against the prevailing blasts—of disheartening misunderstanding and misrepresentation, of Puritan suspicion and opposition, of artistic isolation, of commercial seduction? There is something downright heroic in the way the man has held his narrow and perilous ground, disdaining all compromise, unmoved by the cheap success that lies so inviting around the corner. He has faced, in his day, almost every form of attack that ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... the southern and western slave-holding States. I detest this subornation of treason. No; if we must have them, let them fall by the valor of our arms; by fair, legitimate conquest; not become the victims of treacherous seduction. ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... seemed striving to blacken the man who, but three months before, had been almost an angel of light. He was declared to be in debt to every tradesman in the place, and his intrigues, all honoured with the title of seduction, had been extended into every tradesman's family. Everybody declared that he was the wickedest young man in the world; and everybody began to find out that they had always distrusted the appearance of his goodness. Elizabeth, though she did not credit above half of what was said, believed ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... so the women dhressed me up as a girl, and the blackguards, instead of the seduction of Oonah, ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... went out to Cabinet." The cool bearing of Lord Harrington, commander of the forces in London, helped to restore confidence. On 3rd June Government introduced and speedily passed a Bill for preventing seduction of the soldiery. There were rumours of an intended mutiny in the Guards; but fortunately the troops remained true to duty, and some of them helped to quell the mutiny ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... thou readest by the moon's full glare The sculptured children of Affection's tear; Or in the church-yard lone thou sitt'st to weep O'er some sad wreck, beneath the tufty heap— Perchance some victim to Seduction's spell, Who yielded, wept, and then ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... vain for the foremost buffaloes to retreat or even to stop; they are pressed on by the hindmost rank, which, seeing no danger but from the hunters, goad on those before them till the whole are precipitated, and the shore is strewn with their dead bodies. Sometimes, in this perilous seduction, the Indian is himself either trodden under foot by the rapid movements of the buffaloes, or missing his footing in the cliff is urged down the precipice by the falling herd. The Indians then select as much meat as they wish; the rest is abandoned ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... few excursions to the world of gallantry. A little deviation from the exact rule of right we men all allow ourselves in love affairs; but I was willing to keep as near it as I could. Married women are, on my principles, forbidden fruit; I abhor the seduction of innocence; I am too delicate, and (with all my modesty) too vain, to be pleased with venal beauty: what was I then to do, with a heart too active to be absolutely at rest, and which had not met with its counterpart? Widows were, I thought, fair prey, as being ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... she had grown in a hothouse; and with that strange overwhelming characteristic which drew, in spite of all disliking. It was useless to cry, "I do not like you and I will not believe in you." There were two things I had to acknowledge—her will, and her power of seduction. Hadn't I felt the light of it as she had stood looking ...
— The Other Side of the Door • Lucia Chamberlain
... seduction of a young girl by the heir to an earldom, the resulting illegitimate pregnancy, and the young nobleman's struggle to decide whether to marry or to abandon the girl—certainly not the usual content ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... "temperate and moderate," are words either of political cowardice, or of cunning, or seduction.—A thing, moderately good, is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper, is always a virtue; but moderation in principle, is a species of vice. But who is to be the judge of what is a temperate and moderate Reform? ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... probably formed by the Governor himself, and such others among the leaders of the expedition, as from native courage, felt themselves superior to all difficulties likely to occur; and by native good sense were secured from the seduction of romantic reveries. To all it must appear a striking proof of the flourishing state of navigation in the present age, and a singular illustration of its vast progress since the early nautical efforts of mankind; that whereas the ancients coasted with timidity along the ...
— The Voyage Of Governor Phillip To Botany Bay • Arthur Phillip
... people brought up in ignorance of fine art. Nothing is more pitiably ridiculous than the wild worship of artists by those who have never been seasoned in youth to the enchantments of art. Tenors and prima donnas, pianists and violinists, actors and actresses enjoy powers of seduction which in the middle ages would have exposed them to the risk of being burnt for sorcery. But as they exercise this power by singing, playing, and acting, no great harm is done except perhaps to themselves. Far graver are the powers enjoyed ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... perceive, is some slight ambiguity. Evidently she meant to say, by the seduction of 'bad' company, and to express that his Reverence had asserted his power ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... objective point selected,[51113] all disposable forces employed and directed by fixed marches to where the victory is to be decisive, the conquest extended and the seat of the final dominion established; the successive and simultaneous use of every kind of means—cunning, violence, seduction and terror. Calculation of the weariness, anxiety and despair of the adversary; at first menaces and constant disputes, and then flashes of lightning and multiplied claps of thunder, every species of brutality that force can command; the States of the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... all that you have sinned against God, and injured a respectable citizen of Rochelle by the seduction of his daughter. We can not hope that God will bless our arms in this approaching battle while such a sin ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... unfounded. At any rate, the poor sickly man, in his premature and childless old age, looked up to her with fond affection, and left to her nearly the whole of his fortune. His biographers have indulged in discussions—surely superfluous—as to the morality of the connexion. There is no question of seduction, or of tampering with the affections of an innocent woman. Pope was but too clearly disqualified from acting the part of Lothario. There was not in his case any Vanessa to give a tragic turn to the connexion, ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... king's highway, for getting a slave-brand obliterated, for procuring husband's death; burning for incest with own mother, for vestal entering or opening tavern, for theft at fire (on the spot); drowning for adultery, rape of betrothed maiden, bigamy, bad conduct as wife, seduction ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... walls may have doubled the monks' appreciation of blue skies and open-air life; but they were fettered by the constant fight with the senses; Nature to them must needs be less a work of God for man's delight, than a dangerous means of seduction. 'They wandered through Nature with timid misgiving, and their anxious fantasy depicted forms of terror or marvellous rescues.[3] The idyllic pleasure in the simple charms of Nature, especially in the monastery garden of the Carlovingian time, contrasts ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... and if it were not fulfilled, he was to be punished as an impostor. But if he accompanied his prophecy with any doctrine subversive of the exclusive Deity and adorability of the one God of heaven and earth, or any seduction to a breach of God's commandments, he was to be put to death at once, all other proof of his guilt and imposture being superfluous. [10] So St. Paul. If any man preach another Gospel, though he should work all miracles, though he had the appearance ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... be considered that, as the vanity and proneness to seduction of the imprisoned women represented a general degradation in their sex; so do these acts a still more general and worse in the male. Where so many are weak, it is natural there should be many lost; where legislators admit that ten thousand prostitutes are ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... down to continue her narrative. I am convinced that nothing would more powerfully preserve youth from irregularity, or guard inexperience from seduction, than a just description of the condition into which the wanton plunges herself; and therefore hope that my letter may be a sufficient ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... evil touch each other; the woes of the young Werther and Weisslingen's seduction, are almost the same story; no matter, we must not judge between what is good and what is evil in others; for that is what God will do. I have just been spending much time over this thought, and have become convinced that in no circumstances ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - KARL-LUDWIG SAND—1819 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... connection. Besides, it might reasonably be expected that the Czarina, grateful for the really efficient aid given by the Tartar 15 prince, would confer upon him such eminent rewards as might be sufficient to anchor his hopes upon Russia, and to wean him from every possible seduction. These were the obvious suggestions of prudence and good sense to every man who stood neutral in the case. But they were 20 disappointed. The Czarina knew her obligations to the Khan, but she did not acknowledge them. Wherefore? That is a mystery ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... the seduction and the fall of man; of the consequent fall of the demon, and the punishment which God inflicted on Adam, Eve, and the serpent. "He made them all come before him; pronounced nine maledictions on Adam and Eve, and condemned them ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... Subsidies to begin with, such subsidies as nobody ever had before; say 1,000,000 pounds sterling by the Year. To which Friedrich answered, "Subsidies, your Excellency?" (Are We a Hackney-Coachman, then?)—and, with much contempt, turned his back on that offer. No fighting to be had, by purchase or seduction, out of this young man. Will not play the Conquering Hero at all, nor the Hackney-Coachman at all; has decided "not to fight a cat" if let alone; but to do and endeavor a quite other set of things, for the rest ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... accordingly. The count, understanding it as an allusion to a misalliance of one of his ancestors with the daughter of a blacksmith, is thrown into a dreadful passion with the young lover, the consequences of which are the seduction of the young lady, and the slaughter ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... is the old story!" she said. "Will you never comprehend, Dickie, that what is to you hateful in yourself, may to some one else be the last word of attraction, of seduction, even?" ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... prudently withdrawn, leaving only two hired men in the place. The object of Celoron was to induce the Demoiselle and his band to leave this new abode and return to their old villages near the French fort on the Maumee, where they would be safe from English seduction. To this end, he called them to a council, gave them ample gifts, and made them an harangue in the name of the Governor. The Demoiselle took the gifts, thanked his French father for his good advice, and promised to follow it at a more convenient time.[11] In vain Celoron insisted ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... I have softened down a good deal the account of the seduction, which is described with a sincerity and ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... line, "Whose annual wound, in Lebanon, allured," seems to me better than any other that could be quoted, to evoke the awe and the thrill and the seduction of ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... still and peaceful; it seemed as if the sound of human misery and passion could not reach this spot. There was something so holy in this garden, that you could but believe it to be a part of paradise in which the serpent had not yet exercised his arts of seduction. But no, this is but a beautiful dream. Man is here, but he is sleeping; he is still resting from the toils and sorrows of the past day. Man is here—he is coming to destroy the peacefulness of Nature with ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... tribunal, but no tyrant before ever went through the atrocious farce of deliberately making a tribunal the organised negation of security for justice. Couthon laid its theoretic base in a fallacy that must always be full of seduction to shallow persons in authority: 'He who would subordinate the public safety to the inventions of jurisconsults, to the formulas of the Court, is either an imbecile or a scoundrel.' As if public safety could mean anything but the safety of the public. The author of ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... the house of Salmasius—you to renounce the marriage-bond, she to make you name the day for the nuptials. When she saw, on the contrary, that it was your intention to dissolve the marriage-engagement made in the seduction, then lo! your unmarried bride, for I will not call her Tisiphone, not able to bear such a wrong, flew furiously at your face and eyes with uncut nails. You who, on the testimony of Crantzius (for it is right that so ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... trust in Allah, for no harm betideth him whom He protecteth, and carry him with thee this very day to the shop." Then she clad the boy in the costliest clothes and he became a seduction to all who on him cast sight and an affliction to the heart of each lover wight. His father took him and carried him to the market, whilst all who saw him were ravished with him and accosted him, kissing his hand and saluting him with the salam. Quoth ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... he has black, curling hair, he will deceive people through his pleasing address. He will very likely deceive the women who trust him. If a woman's hair seems black and curly, she will be threatened with seduction. ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... local fame, gave in their testimony to the value of the instruments thus presented to them; an unusually moderate proportion, when it is remembered that to the common motives of which I have spoken was added the seduction of a gift for which the profane public was expected ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... menstruation, there is nevertheless good reason to believe that the first coitus very frequently takes place at this point of least psychic resistance. When still a student I was struck by the occurrence of cases in which seduction took place during the menstrual flow, though at that time they seemed to me inexplicable, except as evidencing brutality on the part of the seducer. Negrier,[115] in the lying-in wards of the Hotel-Dieu at Angers, constantly found that the women ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... in midnight purple embroidered with silver, came in from the doorway, and began to dance alone. She was very young—fourteen, I found out afterwards—and, in contrast to the other women, extremely beautiful. There were grace, seduction, mystery, and coquetry in her face and in all her movements. Her long black eyes held fire and dreams. Her fluttering hands seemed beckoning us to the realms of the thousand and one nights. I stood where I had got up, and ...
— Desert Air - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... mind: and I thank you for it. They have been often interrupted by the business and dissipations of the world, but they were never so more grievously to me, nor less usefully to the public, than since royal seduction prevailed on me to abandon the quiet and leisure of the retreat I had chosen abroad, and to neglect the example of Rutilius, for I might have imitated him in this at least, who fled further from his country when ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke
... the joyful sport, and Annie was for the time left lonely. But she was neither disconsolate nor idle. The boat was a sure pledge for them. To the boat and her they must return. She went to the shop still, now and then, to see George Macwha, who, of an age beyond the seduction of ice and skates, kept on steadily at his work. To him she would repeat a ballad or two, at his request, and then go home to increase her stock. This was now a work of some difficulty, for her provision of candles was exhausted, and she ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... control; and this is what is called liberty. Its adversary, therefore, is the central power. This must be disarmed for fear that it may interpose. On all sides, with a sure and persistent instinct, through the capture of fortresses, the pillage of arsenals, the seduction of the soldiery, and the expulsion of generals, the municipality ensures its omnipotence by guaranteeing itself ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... were, for the most part, and especially of late years, easy and light-won nymphs; their coyest were of another clay from the tender but lofty Sibyll. And Hastings shrunk from the cold-blooded and deliberate seduction of one so pure, while he could not reconcile his mind to contemplate marriage with a girl who could give nothing to his ambition; and yet it was not in this last reluctance only his ambition that startled and recoiled. In that strange tyranny over his whole soul which Katherine Bonville ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... characters had a physical power over spirits, and compelled their agency; others who condemned the practice, which in reality was surely never practised, were of opinion, with more reason, that the power of charms arose only from compact, and was no more than the spirits voluntary allowed them for the seduction of man. The art was held by all, though not equally criminal, yet unlawful, and therefore Causabon, speaking of one who had commerce with spirits, blames him, though he imagines him one of the best kind who dealt with them ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... a sin which very easily besets him. If Paul needed something to keep him humble when favored with revelations, why not Abram? Abram was then in the body—compassed with infirmity—liable to temptation, and prone to seduction. God knew his state—corrected him therefore, to give him a sense of demerit, when he received him into covenant and ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... The business of school-keeping stands wide open for his reception; and here he sinks to the bottom, for want of capacity to support himself. Has any one ruined himself, and done all he could to corrupt others by dissipation, drinking, seduction, and a course of irregularities? Nay, has he returned from a prison, after an ignominious atonement for some violation of the laws? He is destitute of character, and can not be trusted; but presently he opens ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... I had known her a long, long time. There was something about her that was not seduction; but far, far above it. Somewhere I had seen her, had known her. She was looking and she was waiting for me. There was something about her that was super feminine. I thought it then, and ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... Saints endured,—persecutions which patience overcame, which the power of God subdued. Here are traced the causes of dissension in the Church; the schisms and heresies which arose; the errors which the pride and passions of bad men gave birth to; the obstinacy of the wicked,—the seduction of the innocent,—the labors and sufferings of the just; the conflicts which took place between light and darkness,—between truth and error; the triumph, at one time of the city of God, at another, the ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... Esther Waters we must go back to December, 1891, and to Mr. Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles. It happens that a certain similarity in the motives of these two stories makes comparison easy. Each starts with the seduction of a young girl; and each is mainly concerned with her subsequent adventures. From the beginning the advantage of probability is with the younger novelist. Mr. Moore's "William Latch" is a thoroughly natural figure, and remains a natural figure to the end of the book: an uneducated ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... is a sophism," cried Durtal, growing angry. "God has left to every man his liberty; no one is tempted beyond his power. If in certain cases, he allows the seduction to overpass our means of resistance, it is to recall us to humility, to bring us back to Him by remorse, for other causes which we know not, which it is not His business to show us. Then probably those transgressions ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... something reposeful in this lucid intellectual curiosity. He wanted above all things to get away from sentiment, from seduction, from the moods and impulses and flashing contradictions that were Susy. Susy was not a great reader: her store of facts was small, and she had grown up among people who dreaded ideas as much as if they had been a contagious disease. But, in the early days especially, when Nick had put a book in ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... instructed her in the more useful and homely arts of cooking, sewing, knitting, &c. and she had even taught her to spin; for she lived before the establishment of any, or many, of those institutions for the increase of illegitimate children, ignorance, immorality, suicide, seduction, murder, &c.—I mean cotton factories. The comparatively affluent circumstances of her family had, however, rendered it unnecessary for her to practise this last accomplishment. With all these charms in her ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... friendless unprotected wretch was thrown upon the town. When the last accounts are opened, oblivious General Croker will find an ell-long score of crimes laid to his charge, whereof he little reckons in his sear and yellow leaf. The trusting victim of seduction has a legion of excuses for the ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... or legislation. Your judges, who now sustain so masculine an authority, will appear more on their trial than the culprits they have before them. The awful frown of criminal justice will be smoothed into the silly smile of seduction. Judges will think to insinuate and soothe the accused into conviction and condemnation, and to wheedle to the gallows the most artful of all delinquents. But they will not be so wheedled. They will not submit even to the ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... progressive ideas, and hatred of superstition and intolerance, all the better to instil the slow but deadly poison. By honeyed words, a studied candor, a dazzle of erudition, they have spread their "gossamer nets of seduction" over the world. The press teems with books and journals in which doctrines subversive of religion and morality are so elegantly set forth, that the unguarded reader is very apt to be deceived by the fascination of false charms, and to mistake a most hideous ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... decidedly more thoroughgoing in its psychology: it goes to the very core of personality, where the earlier book was in some instances satisfied with sketch-work. In "Adam Bede" the freshness comes from the treatment rather than the theme. The framework, a seduction story, is old enough—old as human nature and pre-literary story-telling. But in "The Mill on the Floss" we have the history of two intertwined lives, contrasted types from within the confines of ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... expression of his eyes changed, and they became fixed over my shoulder, while on his lips the words "You must come, you must come," trembled, hardly audible. I could only shake my head. At once he stepped back as if resigning. He was giving me up—and it occurred to me that if the danger of his seduction was over, there remained the danger of arrest just outside ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... per se, morally indifferent (neither moral nor immoral) like any other bodily function, but it may easily become immoral per accidentem, i.e., from the special circumstances under which it takes place, and whereby it acquires the character of an act of injustice or treachery, such as seduction of a friend's wife or daughter."[918] A very influential Socialist writer asks: "Is chastity a virtue, and is there such a vice as unchastity?" and he answers his question by quoting the above statement of Bax.[919] "If it be asked, Is marriage a failure? the answer ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... attraction; loadstone; magnet, magnetism, magnetic force; allectation|, allective|; temptation, enticement, agacerie[obs3], allurement, witchery; bewitchment, bewitchery; charm; spell &c. 993; fascination, blandishment, cajolery; seduction, seducement; honeyed words, voice of the tempter, song of the Sirens forbidden fruit, golden apple. persuasibility[obs3], persuasibleness[obs3]; attractability[obs3]; impressibility, susceptibility; softness; persuasiveness, attractiveness; tantalization[obs3]. influence, prompting, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... only that poetry has a moral effect, but that the moral value is the main intention. He then proceeds to elucidate the story of Danae as signifying that women have been and will be overcome by money. The story of Io's seduction by the bull shows that beauty may overcome the best of women. From Icarus we should learn that every man should not meddle with things above his compass, and from Midas, to avoid covetousness. As a Protestant he explains St. Christopher and St. George ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... time was in the territory of Sind, laying it waste with fire and sword, no troops scarcely being opposed to his sudden invasion. He received the ambassador with mortifying haughtiness, bidding him return to his master, and inform him that he never would forgive the seduction of his daughter, in revenge for which he had taken a solemn oath to overturn the kingdom of Sind, raze the capital, and feast his eyes with the blood of the old sultan and his son. On receipt of this ungracious reply to his proposals, the sultan and Eusuff had no alternative but to oppose ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... 12. SEDUCTION AND RUIN.—That son next courts another virtuous fair one, engages her affections, and ruins her, or else leaves her broken-hearted, so that she is the more easily ruined by others, and thus prepares the way for her becoming an inmate of a house ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... Captivating as all this undoubtedly was, and fascinated as I felt in being the lion of London, the courted and sought after by the high, the titled, and the talented of the great city of the universe, yet amidst all the splendor and seduction of that new world, my heart instinctively turned from the glare and brilliancy of gorgeous saloons, from the soft looks and softer voice of beauty, from the words of praise as they fell from the lips ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... step, his debut in the ecclesiastical career, had been distinguished by a veritable seduction and capturing of souls, by a success which had been a perfect triumph and indeed almost a scandal. After taking the catechism classes for a year in the parish of B——, the archbishop had appointed him to other work, putting another priest in his place. The result ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... municipal council which in 1648, had levied war against the government; the mob-army which had fought, and terrified that government into forgiveness; were the strong memorials on which the anarchists of 1793 founded their seduction. The perpetual ridicule of the national belief was kept alive among them. The populace of the provinces, whose religion was in their rosary, were prepared for rebellion by similar means and the terrible and fated ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... of his seduction from the paths of poetry by the wiles of philosophy is that physiology acted as the go-between. His brother Luke had come up to London to walk the hospitals, and young Samuel's insatiable intellectual curiosity immediately inspired him with a desire to share ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... effrontery, or that the words that passed her lips bore habitual testimony to the disorders of her existence, but that under a calm and sedate demeanour there lurked a secret and indefinable charm. Many other women possessed more regular features, but none of them had a greater power of seduction. We must add that she owed that power entirely to her physical perfections, for except in regard to the devices necessary to her calling, she showed no cleverness, being ignorant, dull and without inner resources of any kind. As her temperament led her to share the desires she excited, she was ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - LA CONSTANTIN—1660 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... political stage the resources of their finesse, their dissimulation, or their courage. The Palatine did not fall below the level of those adventurous heroines. In the midst of those intrigues, of that puerile ambition, of those turnings and windings, perfidy, seduction, manoeuvring promises, of those negotiations in which Mazarin infused all his Italian cunning, the Queen her feminine impatience and her Spanish dissimulation, De Retz his genius of artist-conspirator, ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... plod slowly along, through wet and weary ways, in frost and in fog, have undoubtedly a stronger temptation to indulge in that cordial and reviving stimulus, than we water-drinkers, sitting in warm and comfortable rooms, can readily imagine. For certain, our drover could never resist the gentle seduction of the gin-bottle, and being of a free, merry, jovial temperament, one of those persons commonly called good fellows, who like to see others happy in the same way with themselves, he was apt to circulate it at his own expense, to the great improvement of his popularity, ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... phase of sexual gratification, it is assumed that the woman has these relations with various men. We purposely eliminate from this discussion the deliberate seduction of pure girls for the purpose of sexual gratification, as such seduction is a heinous offense against the victim and against society, for which offense the man is legally responsible. We are here discussing not the crimes of ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... made for each other; a sleepy, stupid solemnity marks every muscle of the divine, and the nasal droning of the lay brother is most happily expressed. Accompanied by her child and mother, the unfortunate victim of his seduction is here again introduced, endeavouring to enter the church, and forbid the banns. The opposition made by an old pew-opener, with her bunch of keys, gave the artist a good opportunity for indulging his taste in the burlesque, and he has ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... entertain some slight degree of suspicion lest evil communication, the alluring nurse of the vices, should lend an unhappy impulse to your still tender mind, especially as I am not ignorant with what facility the external senses yield to seduction. I have therefore sent you this treatise, not only as a monitor, but even as an importunate and sometimes impudent dun, who in this turn of life may convoy you beyond the rocks of adulation; and may not merely offer you advice, but confine you to the path which you have entered, and if you should ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... ever studiously consulted, she never racked her pupils with unconscionable extortions, nor ever put their hard earnings, as she called them, under the contribution of poundage. She was a severe enemy to the seduction for innocence, and confined her acquisitions solely to those unfortunate young women, who, having lost it, were but the juster objects of compassion: among these, indeed, she picked out such as suited her views and taking them under her protection, rescued them from the ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... mine deeply for new Sick must have somewhat wherewith to busy their thoughts Single combats between dead authors and living housemaids Singular inability to weigh the value of testimony Special gift of the man born for a teacher Student must not be led away by the seduction of knowledge Sweeping statistical documents Take down your sign, or never put it up The withered branch of science: medicine They are not well if they do not have them Time is a very elastic element in Geology and Prophecy True meaning of the word "cure" Trust more in nature and less in ...
— Widger's Quotations from the Works of Oliver W. Holmes, Sr. • David Widger
... seduction of young orators, the influence of the crown, and the corruption of our glorious constitution: Old and new nobility: Poor old England: Necessary precautions: The man with ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... most miserable and wretched, whom I had seen for years as beggars in the streets;-young women,—perhaps the unhappy victims of seduction, who, having lost their reputation, and being turned adrift in the world, without a friend and without a home, were reduced to the necessity of begging, to sustain a miserable existence, now recognized me as their benefactor; and, with tears dropping fast from ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford
... not conclude this address to THE LOVER without something on the subject of seduction and inconstancy. In, perhaps, nineteen cases out of twenty, there is, in the unfortunate cases of illicit gratification, no seduction at all, the passion, the absence of virtue, and the crime, being all mutual. But, there are other cases of a very different description; and where a man goes coolly and deliberately to work, first to gain and rivet the affections of a young girl, then to take advantage of those affections ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... grown very corrosive after Twenty Years. He admits, with all the satire: "I naturally felt myself attached to him; for he had wit, graces; and moreover he was a King, which always forms a potent seduction, so weak is human nature. Usually it is we of the writing sort that flatter Kings: but this King praised me from head to foot, while the Abbe Desfontaines and other scoundrels (GREDINS) were busy defaming me in Paris at ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... well-known axiom, that the author of a riot is responsible for all the outrages committed in it, and it is undeniable that the whole insurrection was his work. I am quite aware that the man had amiable, even fascinating qualities, and great enthusiasm, but here lay the great danger and seduction to young minds, and though I can perfectly understand the warm sympathy and generous sentiment that actuates my young friends, and though I much regret the being obliged to deny the first request of one to whom, I may say, I owe my life, I must distinctly refuse to take any part in ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in particular interested me. The Pine-chafer emits a musical note. The female is as gifted as the male. Does the lover make use of his faculty as a means of seduction and appeal? Does the female answer the chirp of her innamorata by a similar chirp? That this may be so under normal conditions, amidst the foliage of the pines, is extremely probable; but I can make no assertion, as I have never heard anything ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... in so many legends of witchery and seduction since the Odyssey the [Greek: thespesie aoide] has borne its part. "But," the Wanderer might say, replying against Circe's warning, "have we not learned prudence and self-command from Athene, the chaste Tritonid? Have not ten years under shield before Troy, and a thousand leagues of ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... Napoleon, up to the popular summit of his glory. He had already tainted it by many acts of violence, and by an exclusive devotion to personal ends, in defiance of justice and liberty. Henceforward and under the disastrous inspirations of a mad ambition, victory itself was to become a fatal seduction which by inevitable degrees draws us on to ruin. Great and terrible lesson of Divine justice on the morality of nations! Starting from the violation of the peace of Amiens, and in spite of the glory of the sun of Austerlitz, the history of the glory of the conqueror includes in germ ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... but what there are persons trying to seduce his servants to leave him; and, when they have done this, the poor wretches are obliged to rob their master in order to obtain a subsistence; all those, therefore, who are concerned in this seduction, are ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... of poisoning and in the use of drugs. The reputed witch, both in ancient and modern times, very often belonged, like the Ovidian Dipsas, to the real and detestable class of panders: wrinkled hags were experienced in the arts of seduction, as well as in the employment of poison and drugs more familiar to the wealthier class (Sat. vi.). The great Satirist wrote in the latter half of the first century of Christianity; but even in the Augustan period such crimes were prevalent enough to make Ovid enumerate them among ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... of the seduction of Danae, the mother of Perseus, by Jupiter, in the form of a shower of gold, has been thus explained by some of the ancient writers. Acrisius, hearing of a prediction that Danae, his daughter, should bring ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... little tempered by humanity or by common sense. Sharp laws were passed against betting. It was enacted that adultery should be punished with death. The illicit intercourse of the sexes, even where neither violence nor seduction was imputed, where no public scandal was given, where no conjugal right was violated, was made a misdemeanour. Public amusements, from the masques which were exhibited at the mansions of the great down to the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... natural endowment, with every acquired advantage, graced with the borrowed as well as native ornaments of humanity, he found no joy in his inheritance, but sacrificed it all, and crawled through life a gross and earthy man. The seduction of Emma, young as he was when he committed that offence, was, by many, not the first crime for which—not, thank Heaven! without some preparation for his trial—he was called suddenly to answer. As a boy, he had grown ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... as he caught me in his arms. 'We're going to celebrate. Dress up in that lacy black thing—you are seduction itself in it.' ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... Peter—really—the artist, you understand, sees all this as a pure question of colour, of pattern; and it's a point of honour with the MAN to steel himself against the personal seduction." ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... in innumerable ways, such attachments are particularly alarming to the truly enlightened and independent patriot. How many opportunities do they afford to tamper with domestic factions, to practice the art of seduction, to mislead public opinion, to influence or awe the public councils! Such an attachment of a small or weak toward a great and powerful nation dooms the former to be the satellite of ...
— Key-Notes of American Liberty • Various
... fathom Spenser's meaning in regard to the relations between Menalcas and Rosalinde, and it is clear that he had a poor opinion of the moral character of the former, and plainly charges him with seduction. ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... thousands employed by the company. Only a small share goes to the workers, a third, or a fourth, perhaps, the remainder being divided among people who have done none of the work. It may happen, does happen in fact, that, an old profligate whose delight is the seduction of young girls, a wanton woman whose life would shame the harlot of the streets, a lunatic in an asylum, or a baby in the cradle, will get more than any of the workers who toil before the glaring furnaces ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... received, from one stage to another; and that, receiving more particulars at the White Hart touching Sir Launcelot, he had formed the scheme in which Crabshaw was an involuntary instrument towards the seduction of ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... have here matter sensational enough for the most exacting novelist; but we disclaim all effort to play upon the passions, or add another work of fiction to the mass of irreligious trash so powerful in the employ of the evil one for the seduction of youth. In the varied scenes of life there are many actions influenced by secret motives known only to the heart that harbors them. Not all are dishonorable. It takes a great deal of guilt to make a person as black as he is painted by his enemies. Many ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... Antonio learned that the cause of the quarrel which had been so happily ended was a challenge sent to the father of the latter by the fathers of Teodosia and Leocadia, under the belief that he had been privy to the acts of seduction committed by his son. The two challengers having found him alone would not take any advantage of him, but agreed to fight him one after the other, like brave and generous knights. The combat, nevertheless, must have ended in the death of ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... was steadfastly declined. The young man, whose judgment was as precocious as his eloquence, saw that his time was coming, but was not come, and was deaf to royal importunities and reproaches. His Majesty, bitterly complaining of Pitt's faintheartedness, tried to break the coalition. Every art of seduction was practised on North, but in vain. During several weeks the country remained without a government. It was not till all devices had failed, and till the aspect of the House of Commons became threatening, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Christmas? What seduction hath Yule Tide for these phantastic fellows, that it lures them from their warm fireplaces? Is it that the cool snow is grateful after the fervours of their torrid zone, where even the pyrometer would fail to record the temperature? Is it that Dickens is responsible ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... boat with a bound, and grasping my hands with a thousand pardons, insisted I should not ascend the river till I had dined with him. He promised a plate of capital soup;—and where, I should like to know, is the son of France or Italy who is ready to withstand the seduction of such a provocative? Besides this, he insisted on dressing me from his scanty wardrobe; but as he declined all subsequent remuneration, I confined my bodily improvement to a clean shirt and ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... a rale ruction hath a swate seduction, For us Oirish, BULL, though it mayn't be your way. PARNELL's a rum fish, and he seems to "scumfish" That Grand Ould Gintleman paping in at the doorway. Ye may call it "Rixe," Though I can't quite fix Its mayning; ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. March 7, 1891. • Various
... consciousness of the obscene. The obscene is, therefore, the purely sexual, not in its naive normality, but as a force inimical to a value, as a rule to the value of personality. The obscene expresses scorn and hatred for personal love. It is the seduction of the primitive which is no longer something earlier, but something baser (for every age must gauge all things by its own standard). The aesthetic principle—in this connection the sense of the beauty of the human form—so powerful an element in ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... writings of Plato than William Archer Butler, and his conclusions in regard to this subject are presented in the following words: "As, on the one hand, he maintained a strict system of dualism, and avoided, without a single deviation, that seduction of pantheism to which so many abstract speculators of his own school have fallen victims; so, on the other hand, it appears to me that he did not scruple to place this principle, the opposite of the Divine intelligence, in a sphere independent ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... the undesirable secrecy, but you build normally on modesty; you lay foundations for a true sense of shame, disgust, and disgrace; and in doing so, set up one of the strong defenses against perversions and prurient allurement and seduction. ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... and story of Measure for Measure the Poet was ultimately indebted to Cinthio, an Italian novelist of the sixteenth century. The original story makes the eighty-fifth in his Hundred Tales. A youth named Ludovico is there overtaken in the crime of seduction: Juriste, a magistrate highly reputed for wisdom and justice, passes sentence of death upon him; and Ludovico's sister, a virgin of rare gifts and graces, goes to pleading for his life. Her beauty and eloquence have ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... uneasiness and dissatisfaction to those who have not attained to its questionable privileges, its exemption from the prompt and efficient inquisition appertaining to slavery, makes it an important instrument in the corruption and seduction of those, who yet remain the property of their masters.' * * * 'Who would not rejoice to see our country liberated from her black population? Who would not participate in any efforts to restore those children of misfortune to their native shores, and kindle the lights ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... As soon as the flame of life burns more dimly, the demons regain their influence and their wanton tricks are more successful. Lucia's maternal instincts were satisfied, and her allurement, which had always seemed the same as seduction to me, lost its power and was most easily evaded. But the old tormenting life in the big cities began anew, not easier but harder to bear with the advancing years, for the shame and the self-contempt are greater; and the contrast ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... if we should have never known such words as "golden shower," "lap," "beguile," "temples of the heavens," or others in that passage, unless Terence had brought a lewd youth upon the stage, setting up Jupiter as his example of seduction. ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine |
