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More "Lunacy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with the spurs, he went on, pursued by the maledictions of Sir Asinus. He had cause. Jacques had charged him with lunacy; said he designed assassinating the King; kept from him the very names of the combatants; and was going ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... hand, certain plants have been credited at most periods with hurtful and injurious properties. Thus, there is a popular idea that during the flowering of the bean more cases of lunacy occur than at any other season. [17] It is curious to find the apple—such a widespread curative—regarded as a bane, an illustration of which is given by Mr. Conway. [18] In Swabia it is said that an apple plucked from a graft on the whitethorn ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... Horace Father Goriot The Atheist's Mass Cesar Birotteau The Commission in Lunacy Lost Illusions A Distinguished Provincial at Paris A Bachelor's Establishment The Secrets of a Princess The Government Clerks Pierrette A Study of Woman Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Honorine The Seamy Side of History The Magic Skin A Second Home Letters ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac
... nature of sin. It is no wonder that such a rule of life had not infrequently the most distressing consequences. Newton himself admits that his preaching had the reputation of driving people into lunacy. In a letter asking that steps may be taken to remove one poor victim to an asylum he says: "I hope the poor girl is not without some concern for her soul; and, indeed, I believe a concern of this kind was the beginning of her disorder. I believe," he continues, ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... insanity begins. I was discussing this question lately with the Superintendent of a large lunatic asylum. We agreed that, while putting no premium on crime, we have to recognize that in many cases there is no real responsibility where in general it would be expected. The whole study of lunacy strongly indicates that there is a necessity for a process of elimination and development under more favorable conditions than the present life ordinarily supplies. And we may be sure that if there is such a necessity, it ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... brow, though the day was cold. He had done his duty to the community by shutting up a wandering and probably dangerous maniac. Smith isn't a hard man at all, but he had room in his brain only for that one idea of lunacy. He was not imaginative enough to ask himself whether the man might not be perishing with cold and hunger. Meantime, at first, the maniac made a great deal of noise in the lodge. Mrs. Smith was screaming upstairs, where she had locked herself in her bedroom; ...
— Amy Foster • Joseph Conrad
... the 'Broken Heart.'" This referred to Charles Lamb, who likened the "transcendent scene [of the Spartan boy and Calantha] in imagination to Calvary and the Cross." Now Gifford had never heard of the personal history of Lamb, nor of the occasional fits of lunacy to which his sister Mary was subject; and when the paragraph was brought to his notice by Southey, through Murray, it caused him unspeakable distress. He at once wrote to Southey [Footnote: When the subject of a memoir of Charles Lamb by Serjeant Talfourd was under consideration, ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... he endeavours to excuse the levity of Philander, the more he rends her heart, and sets her on the rack; and concluding him false, she could no longer contain her rage, but broke out into all the fury that madness can inspire, and from one degree to another wrought her passion to the height of lunacy: she tore her hair, and bit his hands that endeavoured to restrain hers from violence; she rent the ornaments from her fair body, and discovered a thousand charms and beauties; and finding now that both his strength and reason were too weak to prevent the mischiefs ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... blossom again; they conquered other tribes, and Manitou declared them his chosen ones, from whom alone he would accept sacrifice. But their chief became so ambitious that he wanted to supplant the Manitou in the worship of the people, and finally, in a lunacy of self-conceit, he challenged the god to ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... said Hoover. He was used to the extremely cunning ways of gentlemen off their balance, and he had a profound belief in Simms and Cavendish, whose names endorsed the certificate of lunacy he had received with the newcomer. He was also a man ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... approximated more to that black magic which desires power for the sake of power alone than to any transcendental type. Thus it included the power to render the magician invisible, to change his bodily shape, to produce an enchanted sleep, to induce lunacy, and to inflict death ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... and the great soul, with all its capacities, its solemn attributes, and sounding claims, is, while on earth, but a jest to this mountebank,—the body,—from the dream which toys with it for an hour, to the lunacy which shivers it into a driveller, laughing as it plays with its own fragments, and reeling benighted and blinded ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... prisons, continuing this task until past her seventy-fifth year. "Her frequent visits to our institutions of the insane now, and her searching criticisms," wrote a leading alienist, "constitute of themselves a better lunacy commission than would be likely to be appointed in many of our states."[17] The last five years of her life were spent as a guest in the New Jersey State Asylum at Trenton, it being fit that one of the thirty-two hospitals she had been the means ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... broken-down express-wagon, and consorts with movie actresses and red agitators! Must the police wait until his seditious doctrines have fanned the flames of mob violence beyond control? Must they wait until he has gathered all the others of his ilk, the advocates of lunacy and assassination about him, and caused an insurrection of class envy and hate? We call upon the authorities of our city to act and act at once; to put this wretched mountebank behind bars where he belongs, ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... move the omission of the item for his nephew's pay.' [Footnote: Mr. Ralph Charlton Palmer was Lord Selborne's second cousin, and secretary to Lord Selborne in the Lord Chancellor's Office. He was afterwards a Commissioner in Lunacy.] ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... the multitude hurried on, passing, repassing, encountering, evading, vanishing into shop-doors and emerging from them, dispersing down the side streets, and swarming out of them. It was a scene that possessed the beholder with singular fascination, and in its effect of universal lunacy, it might well have seemed the last phase of a world presently to be destroyed. They who were in it but not of it, as they fancied, though there was no reason for this,—looked on it amazed, and at last their own errands being accomplished, and themselves so far cured of the madness ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... "I can do nothing with Mr. Dartrey. He has just decided that our whole scheme of life is absurd, that politics and power are shadows, and that work for others is lunacy. All that he wants is your cottage, a fishing rod and a ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... winter at Corfu, while Kinglake pursued his way alone, returning to England in October, 1835. {8} On his return he read for the Chancery Bar along with his friend Eliot Warburton, under Bryan Procter, a Commissioner of Lunacy, better known by his poet-name, Barry Cornwall; his acquaintance with both husband and wife ripening into life-long friendship. Mrs. Procter is the "Lady of Bitterness," cited in the "Eothen" Preface. As Anne Skepper, before her marriage, she was much admired by Carlyle; ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... have been more astonished than he had been at the unaccountable change of heart of Jethro Bass. He did not know what to make of it, and told his colleagues so; and at first they feared one of two things,—treachery or lunacy. But a little later a rumor reached Mr. Balch's ears that Jethro's hatred of Isaac D. Worthington was at the bottom of his reappearance in public life, although Jethro himself never mentioned Mr. Worthington's name. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Colonel Chabert A Bachelor's Establishment A Start in Life The Commission in Lunacy The ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... decadently, to have survived. It is as if you saw it. In truth, Merimee was the unconscious parent of much we may think of dubious significance in later French literature. It is as if there were nothing to tell of in this world but various forms of hatred, and a love that is like lunacy; and the only other world, a world of ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... boys among these men who, in spite of their lunacy, had an eye to business, and begged pathetically for coppers, though of what use they could be to them in that place I cannot imagine. I saw no girls under twelve years of age. There were several boys who ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... The day before, the community had been shocked to learn from some one who happened in just in time to prevent the tragedy that Mrs. Martin had gone suddenly insane and had tried to murder both of her children. She must go to the asylum, of course; but pending the preliminary trial for lunacy she lay silent on her bed with staring, horrified eyes, surrounded by watchful neighbors. Suddenly toward night she had grown restless and had implored them to send for the Methodist preacher. To quiet her the ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... what little doubt I might have entertained of my poor friend's insanity was put finally at rest. I had no alternative but to conclude him stricken with lunacy, and I became seriously anxious about getting him home. While I was pondering upon what was best to be done, Jupiter's voice was ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... had followed the child's death! Cyriax raved as if he had really been seized with the lunacy whose pretence helped him to beg his bread. Besides, he gave himself up to unbridled indulgence in brandy, and, when drunk, he was capable of the most brutal acts. The dead Juli's mother, who, spite of an evil youth and a lenient conscience, was ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... door to freedom. And, after all, if we have to choose our masters, it is less disgrace to put up with Roman emperors than with German priestesses.' Thus the common people: the chieftains used more violent language. 'It was Civilis' lunacy that had driven them to war. He wanted to remedy his private troubles[555] by ruining his country. The Batavians had incurred the wrath of heaven by blockading Roman legions, murdering Roman officers, and plunging into a war which was useful for one of them and deadly for the ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... song is rather of the Bloomfield sort, too largely ballasted with prose. His ethics are of the Poor Richard school, and the main chance which calls forth all his energy is altogether of the belly. He never has those fine intervals of lunacy into which his cousins, the catbird and the mavis, are apt to fall. But for a' that and twice as muckle 's a' that, I would not exchange him for all the cherries that ever came out of Asia Minor. With whatever faults, he has not wholly forfeited ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... them—when he was bringing desolation on my hearth, and destruction on my household gods—did he think that, in less than three years, a natural event—a severe domestic, but an expected and common calamity—would lay his carcass in a cross-road, or stamp his name in a Verdict of Lunacy! Did he (who in his sexagenary * * *) reflect or consider what my feeling must have been, when wife, and child, and sister, and name, and fame, and country, were to be my sacrifice on his legal altar—and this at a moment when my health was declining, my fortune embarrassed, and my mind ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 471, Saturday, January 15, 1831 • Various
... What then? He that says that the doctor's skill is wanted in the case of a slight skin-eruption or whitlow, but is not needed in the case of pleurisy, fever, or lunacy, in what respect does he differ from the man that says that schools and teaching and precepts are only for small and boyish duties, while great and important matters are to be left to mere routine and accident? For, as the man is ridiculous who says we ought ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... revolutions of the mode. I remember a student in the temple, who, after a long and learned investigation of the to kalon, or beautiful, had resolution enough to let his beard grow, and wore it in all public places, until his heir at law applied for a commission of lunacy against him; then he submitted to the razor, rather than run any risque of being found ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... grossly as the few? And faultless kings run down by common cry, For vice, oppression, and for tyranny. What standard is there in a fickle rout, Which, flowing to the mark, runs faster out? Nor only crowds but Sanhedrims may be Infected with this public lunacy, And share the madness of rebellious times, To murder monarchs for imagined crimes. 790 If they may give and take whene'er they please, Not kings alone, the Godhead's images, But government itself at length must fall ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... how I'd test a brave man. I'd line the competitors up, and then spring a fright behind them. Last man to cross the mark is the bravest man—still, he might only be the poorest runner. With fellers like me, it ain't courage at all. It's lunacy. I ain't in my right mind when a sharp turn comes. Why, I've gone cold a year after, thinking of things I laughed my way through when they happened. But I'm not quarrelling with fate—I thank the good Lord I'm built as I am, and don't feel scornful ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... The doctor was not noted for his gentle speech. "Silly fool, you know what I told you, that it means death in your case, with perhaps a spell of lunacy first—that is, if you're not really a lunatic already. You had better get some other medical man to attend you next time." He slashed at an overhanging bough with his frayed old whip, and apparently the action relieved him, for he went ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... all last year, How honestly and well— Alas! would weary you to hear, And torture me to tell; I raved beneath the midnight sky, I sang beneath the limes— Orlando in my lunacy, And Petrarch in my rhymes. But all is over! When the sun Dries up the boundless main, When black is white, false-hearted one, I may be ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... little as the brother intended to excuse himself thereby. How, indeed, should he excuse himself? Louie's character was a fixed quantity to be reckoned on by all who had dealings with her. One might as well excuse oneself for letting a lunatic escape by the pretext of his lunacy. Dora perfectly understood his tone. Yet in her heart of hearts she forgave him—for she knew not what!—became his champion. There was a dry sharpness of self-judgment, a settled conviction of coming ill in all he said which wrung her heart. And how blanched he was by that unknown misery! ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... atoms? Why are these Straits the cockpit of the world? What is it all about? What on earth has happened to sanity when the whale and elephant are locked in mortal combat making between them a picture which might be painted by one of H.M.'s Commissioners in Lunacy to decorate an asylum ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... suffered very little, mentally a good deal at sight of the others' torments— but only from time to time. By the fourth day (the eleventh after the Eurotas went down) we were all more or less mad, I reckon. But my lunacy took the form of light-headedness with a strange, almost persistent, sense of exaltation. I kept my strength so much better than they that almost unconsciously they left most of the trimming and steering in my hands. And I sat and steered ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... visitations yet wider in their desolation. Sickness and commercial ill-luck, if narrower, are more frequent scourges. And most of all, or with most darkness in its train, comes the sickness of the brain—lunacy—which, visiting nearly one thousand in every million, must, in every populous nation, make many ruins in each particular day. 'Babylon in ruins,' says a great author, 'is not so sad a sight as a human soul overthrown by lunacy.' ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... the Vicar's magic-lantern and the try-your-weight machine opposite the post office, and you practically eliminated the temptations to tread the primrose path. The only young men in the place were silent, gaping youths, at whom lunacy commissioners looked sharply and suspiciously when they met. The tango was unknown, and the one-step. The only form of dance extant—and that only at the rarest intervals—was a sort of polka not unlike the movements of a slightly inebriated boxing ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... had deliberately and, as some may think, in a very cold-blooded fashion, endeavored to discover what they actually were. He had observed that a good deal of prose followed the poetry of wooing and the lunacy of the honeymoon; and he thought it might be well to criticise a little before marriage as well as ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... three hundred feet. But the first glider of whom we have any full knowledge is Otto Lilienthal of Berlin. He devoted his whole life to the study of aviation at a time when in Germany people looked upon such a pursuit as little better than lunacy. The principal professor of mathematics at the Berlin Gewerbe Academie, on hearing that Lilienthal was experimenting with aeronautics, advised him to spend no money on such things—a piece of advice which, Lilienthal remarks, was unhappily quite superfluous. ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... made on the characteristic distinction of Caesar, in comparison with other revolutionary disturbers; for, whereas others had attempted the overthrow of the state in a continued paroxysm of fury, and in a state of mind resembling the lunacy of intoxication, that Caesar, on the contrary, among that whole class of civil disturbers, was the only one who had come to the task in a temper of sobriety and moderation, (unum accessisse sobrium ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... with William was not a form of romantic idealism bordering on lunacy; it was instead a token of his blundering stupidity; also in a sense his four-square frankness in owning that Prussia was playing second fiddle to Austria, at this interesting moment. And, in truth, ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... morning, Katharine," he resumed, with a change of voice, "to ask you to forget my folly, my bad temper, my inconceivable behavior. I came, Katharine, to ask whether we can't return to the position we were in before this—this season of lunacy. Will you take me back, Katharine, once ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... nothing to Sigismund. And he is still short of money; and will forever be. Why could not he give up Brandenburg altogether; since, instead of paying, he is still making new loans from Burggraf Friedrich; and the hope of ever paying were mere lunacy! Sigismund revolves these sad thoughts too, amid his world-wide diplomacies, and efforts to heal the Church. "Pledged for 100,000 gulden," sadly ruminates Sigismund; "and 50,000 more borrowed since, by little and little; and more ever needed, especially for this grand Spanish journey!" ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... to interest her; the mamma slightly flabbergastered at the rather revolutionary nature of the communications; and our host every now and then throwing in a rude or caustic remark. I dreaded to think what might have been the result of a domiciliary visit paid by a Commissioner in Lunacy ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... cried he, interrupting her and pushing back her hands, "what lunacy are you uttering? Do you imagine that I go about fiddling for ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... if her awkward body were a burden. "Is the instant response to an obvious truth—platitude even—always a diagnosis of lunacy? I state a thought so old no one knows who first expressed it and a hearer feels bound to choose between offense to himself and contempt for the speaker. Believe me, Weener, I was offering no exclusive indictment: ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... anybody else. There was always some diverting bit of individual lunacy to make his proceedings interesting. This morning Riverton discovered that Emma Campbell was going away, too. Emma appeared in a black cashmere dress, a blue-and-white checked gingham apron on which a basket of flowers was embroidered in red cross-stitch, and a white bandana handkerchief wound ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... would surely find himself in the claws of a commission de lunatico. But such acts of miserly folly are just what our present society is doing daily under the compulsion of a supposed necessity, which is nothing short of madness. I beg you to bring your commission of lunacy against ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... day, and to tell you that some time soon we are going to cease to be lunatics, and that then you will have to chase your own balls! And don't, in your amusement over this illustration, lose sight of the serious nature of what I am talking about—the horrible economic lunacy which is known as poverty, and which is responsible for most of the evils we have in this world to-day—for crime and prostitution, suicide, insanity and war. My purpose is to show you, not by any guess of mine, ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... education is to get experience out of ideas. Shame, conscience, and reason continually disallow and ignore what consciousness presents; and what are they but habit and latent instinct asserting themselves and forcing us to disregard our midsummer madness? Idiocy and lunacy are merely reversions to a condition in which present consciousness is in the ascendant and has escaped the control of unconscious forces. We speak of people being "out of their senses," when they have in fact fallen back into them; or of those who have "lost their ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... lunacy strike you, Bertie, as being a very eerie thing? It is a disease of the soul. To think that you may have a man of noble mind, full of every lofty aspiration, and that a gross physical cause, such as the fall of a spicule of bone from the inner table of his skull on to the ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... as well as a beautifier, and the old fancy of partial madness when the moon was at the full (from which the word "lunacy") was not altogether unwarranted by reality. At sea, in the tropics, a night on deck under the broad full moon stiffens and entirely maddens, if it does not kill; here the madness is only partial and it has a general reference to mischief and the opposite ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... Appeal in Lunacy. No other appeals save in Lunacy lie from the Court of Chancery to the King in Council, and these are very rare. Drax v. Grosvenor is reported ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... stalk past as if we'd both got the plague or something. And if I'm with you, Kennedy suddenly remembers an appointment, and dashes off at a gallop in the opposite direction. If I had to award the bronze medal for drivelling lunacy in this place, you would get it by a narrow margin, and Kennedy would be proxime, and honourably ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... I keep a cow. I can recommend this cow, if anybody wants one, as a steady boarder, whose keeping will cost the owner little; but, if her milk is at all like her voice, those who drink it are on the straight road to lunacy. ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Charles Dudley Warner • Charles Dudley Warner
... when the auld man had gone ashore: 'We're to creep round a' the south coast, standin' in for orders his weather, too. There's no question o' his lunacy now.' ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... odious plague or jaundice, fanatic phrensy or lunacy, distresses; those who are wise avoid a mad poet, and are afraid to touch him; the boys jostle him, and the incautious pursue him. If, like a fowler intent upon his game, he should fall into a well or a ditch while he belches out his fustian verses and ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... "worn down to a state of extreme nervous misery by attention to needle-work all day and by watching with her mother at night, broke into uncontrollable insanity, and seizing a knife from the table spread for dinner, stabbed her mother to the heart. The coroner's jury brought in a verdict of lunacy." ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... assumed proportions which twenty years previously could not have entered into the wildest dreams. Indeed, had a prophet stood in Hanover square at that epoch, and portrayed the future, he would have been met with the charge of lunacy. $30,000 rent for a store was not more absurd than the idea that trade would ever wing its way to a neighborhood chiefly known through the police reports, and only visited by respectable people in the work of ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... ludicrous description of Menou see the Memoirs of Marmont:— "Clever and gay, he was an agreeable talker, but a great liar. He was not destitute of some education. His character, one of the oddest in the world, came very near to lunacy: Constantly writing, always in motion in his room, riding for exercise every day, he was never able to start on any necessary of useful journey. . . . When, later, Bonaparte, then First Consul, gave him ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... he might have suborned witnesses to prove that there was black blood in the veins of Valentine Hawkehurst. If he had not been opposed to so strong an opponent as Dr. Jedd, he might have tried to get a commission of lunacy to declare Charlotte Halliday a madwoman, and thus invalidate her marriage. As it was, he knew that he could do nothing. He had failed. All was said in those ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... A Bachelor's Establishment Colonel Chabert A Start in Life A Woman of Thirty The Commission in Lunacy The Government Clerks A Distinguished Provincial at Paris Scenes from a Courtesan's Life A Man of Business ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... frenzy, madness, alienation, dementia, hallucination, mania, craziness, derangement, lunacy, monomania. ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... will already. And I understand why Mr. MacColl, with his passionate pleading for a living national architecture, for official recognition of past and present English art, is thought by many good people quite odd. How he managed to attract the notice of any but the Lunacy Commissioners I cannot conceive. Valued critic, admired artist, model keeper, I only hope he will attract no ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... gone; even then, Ahab, in his hidden self, raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form. Ahab's full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge. But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab's ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... resolved to vote against them. Then the minister explained that, since he had been unable to prepare a suitable address, Mr. Oldfield had kindly consented to read some precious records recently discovered by him. A little rustling breath went over the audience. So this amiable lunacy had its bearing on the economy of life! They were amazed, as may befall us at any judgment day, when grays are strangely ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... Vocco. "I must say it sounds like lunacy. But all Almo's words and all the small details of his behavior show no signs of derangement. Up to the last report he slept well, ate well, looked well, talked sensibly, in respect to all minor matters acted like a rational being, ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... than the rest of mankind, is subject to all the defects and failings of it. He may therefore be incapable of directing the government and dispensing the public treasure, &c. either by absence, by infancy, lunacy, deliracy, or apathy, whether by nature or casual infirmity, or lastly, by some invincible prejudices of mind, contracted and fixed by education and habit, with unalterable resolutions superinduced, in matters wholly inconsistent and incompatible with the laws, religion, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Lunacy! There isn't a fellow at Guy's who wouldn't laugh at me if I told him what the guvnor does. Rich, old girl, I'm sick of it! It was madness for me to go through all this training, when I might have been earning ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn
... now," the good old soul went on to say, "if Simon's wentured out without his hat to cool a head-ache: his grand-father—peace be with him! died, poor man, in a Lunacy 'Sylum: alack, Si, I wish you mayn't be going the same road. No, no, I hope not—he's always so prudent-like, and wise, and good; so kind, too, to a poor old fool like me:" and the poor old fool began ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... service through which I and my two comrades contributed materially to his relief, as an illustration of that infirmity which besieges the nervous system of our nation. It is a sensitiveness which sometimes amounts to lunacy, and sometimes even tempts to suicide. It is a mistake, however, to suppose this morbid affection unknown to Frenchmen, or unknown to men of the world. I have myself known it to exist in both, and particularly in a man that might be said to live in the street, such was the American publicity ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... for a moment that "to exist a mastiff or a mule" is absolutely the same as "to be a mastiff or a mule."' Declining to admit their identity, I have not preserved all my senses; and, accordingly—though it may be in me the very superfetation of lunacy—I would caution the reader to keep a sharp eye on my arguments, hereabouts particularly. The Cretan, who, in declaring all Cretans to be liars, left the question of his veracity doubtful to all eternity, fell into a pit of his ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... estate, or whatever it is, had taken such an unhealthy hold upon his imagination, that he was half-way to insanity. If Gramarye is permitted again to take the helm.... Well, the ship is half-way across—half-way across those narrow straits which divide reason from lunacy. We've got to take the helm and put it over just as hard as ever we can. You understand? In a word, if, for instance, Major Lyveden were to revisit Gramarye, I think the game would be up. That, of course, can't happen. But it is, in my opinion, of the highest importance, not ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... ground Cladh Ronain. St. Ronan is said to have been Abbot of Kingarth, Bute, where he died in 737. Holy wells bear his name at Strowan (Perthshire), Chapelton in Strathdon (Aberdeenshire), and the Butt of Lewis; the latter is famed for the cure of lunacy. ...
— A Calendar of Scottish Saints • Michael Barrett
... anyway," he persisted. "But it won't stand against Huskisson's documentary proof of lunacy. . . . You see, the greater part of the property was entailed, and the poor old fool couldn't touch it. But there's an unentailed estate in Devonshire—Downton by name—worth about two thousand a year. By a will made in '41, when his mind was admittedly sound, he left it to me with a charge upon ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... fellow to play the madman in my presence?" Thus it was that David was rescued. Thereupon he composed the Psalm beginning with the words, "I will bless the Lord at all times," which includes even the time of lunacy. (46) ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... to the case of Richard, fifth Viscount Wenman, against whom Cowper, in 1709, granted a commission of lunacy. He was under the care of Francis Wroughton, Esq., whose sister, Susannah, he had married in the early part of 1709. His brother-in-law sued him for payment of his sister's portion, and asked that trustees be appointed for his ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... a bad hour, a hard hour with Waring. Calmness was ineffective, clear reasoning impossible. The accusation of drug-using was vehemently denied, and it was only the doctor's courageous threat to have him arrested and tried on a lunacy charge that broke down the ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... jumped astride his hobby horse. "War me no war, it's all lunacy! And look, look—look at those red trousers that you can see miles away! They must do it on purpose for soldiers to be killed, that they don't dress 'em in the ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... which every one who has mastered the peculiarities of the Otto speaks of it would be considered as evidence in its favor, if we were not all considered by other cyclists to be in various stages of lunacy. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 447, July 26, 1884 • Various
... he wrote to her, "Before you receive this, all will be over with Denmark. Either your Nelson will be safe, and Sir Hyde Parker victor, or your own Nelson will be laid low." What deep and genuine love-lunacy to be found in a terrific warrior, whose very name terrified those who had the honour to fight against him! The incongruity of it baffles one's belief, and seems to reverse the very order of human construction. In matters ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... "there's seventy-five thousand people in this town, and there'll be seventy-five thousand bankrupts if this lunacy goes on. And there's seventy-five thousand maggots in your brain, and seventy-five thousand in John Pintard's; and if you two live to see nineteen hundred, you'll have twice five million two hundred and fifty-seven ...
— The Story of a New York House • Henry Cuyler Bunner
... toward the hall door. "Very good!" he observed with grim determination. "I think he'll cure your lunacy." ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln
... fifty-twa; and sae when King Charles the Second came in, wha was in sic favour as the Laird of Redgauntlet? He was knighted at Lonon court, wi' the king's ain sword; and being a redhot prelatist, he came down here, rampauging like a lion, with commissions of lieutenancy (and of lunacy, for what I ken) to put down a' the Whigs and Covenanters in the country. Wild wark they made of it; for the Whigs were as dour as the Cavaliers were fierce, and it was which should first tire the other. Redgauntlet ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... me, and talk, so he said, about something of great importance. He had, it appeared, been spending some weeks in the south of France, and was full of a project the value of which had, so he said, been amply proved by experiment. To me at first sight it seemed no better than lunacy. I could not for some time even bring myself to consider it seriously. This project was to play a new system at Monte Carlo. It was a system founded on one which, devised by Henry Labouchere, had been—such was Beckett's contention—greatly improved ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... infernall terror? Myne eyes want teares thus to bewayle my woe, My brayne is dry with weeping all too long; My sighes be spent with griefe and sighing so, And I want words for to expresse my wrong. But still, distracted in loues lunacy, And Bedlam like thus rauing in my griefe, Now rayle vpon her hayre, now on her eye, Now call her Goddesse, then I call her thiefe; Now I deny her, then I doe confesse her, Now I doe curse her, then againe ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... puzzled because he could not believe Sumner so mad as to quarrel both with Fish and with Grant. A quarrel with Seward and Andrew Johnson was bad enough, and had profited no one; but a quarrel with General Grant was lunacy. Grant might be whatever one liked, as far as morals or temper or intellect were concerned, but he was not a man whom a light-weight cared to challenge for a fight; and Sumner, whether he knew it or not, was a very light weight in the Republican Party, if separated from his ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... surrounding him, or her, that it has nothing to fear—that the person is essentially gentle and benignant. On the contrary, cruel people attract malevolent phantoms, distinguishable also to the cat by their smell, a smell typical of cruelty—often of homicidal lunacy (I have particularly noticed how cats have shrunk from people who have afterwards become dangerously insane). Is this sense of smell, then, the keynote to the halo of mystery that has for all times surrounded the cat—that has led to its bitter persecution—that has made it the hero of fairy lore, ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... with false certificates of lunacy, to show on an emergency, and also a copy of his marriage certificate: he knew how unwilling strangers are to interfere between man ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... dignify such tactics and antics by the title of "political propaganda." The proper name for them is sheer organized lunacy. The militants have erected militancy into a principle. I am beginning to think that a good many of them are more concerned with the success of their method than with the success of their cause. They would rather not have the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... Father Goriot Eugenie Grandet Cesar Birotteau Melmoth Reconciled Lost Illusions A Distinguished Provincial at Paris The Commission in Lunacy Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Modeste Mignon The Firm of Nucingen Another Study of Woman A Daughter of Eve The ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... 1610 and 1618, and father of the first Earl of Craven. In both houses she was doubtless treated with all respect, and she must have occupied a position in them something between that of a paying-guest and a lunatic living in the private house of a doctor—not that there was any lunacy in the mind of Lady Elizabeth. ...
— The Curious Case of Lady Purbeck - A Scandal of the XVIIth Century • Thomas Longueville
... able to give each of the officers a drop of whiskey from my flask, and I never saw men drink so thirstily. Their hands and lips trembled as they took it, and their eyes shone like lunacy, as the hot drops sank to the cold vitals, and pricked the frozen blood. Mingling with the privates, I stirred up some native specimens of patriotism, that appeared to be in great doubt as to the causes and ends of the war. They were very much in the political condition ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... Imperial jurisdiction, and he questioned if it had delegated any power to the colonial authorities to legislate away any rights enjoyed by the subjects of the British Empire. He dwelt strongly upon the insanity question, and said the jury were convinced of the prisoner's lunacy, hence ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... (see 'Letters', vol. i. p. 9, 'note' 2 [Footnote 3 of Letter 3]), who had long known the Hansons, from whose house he married his first wife, married, March 7, 1814, Mary Anne, eldest daughter of John Hanson. A commission of lunacy was taken out by the brother and next heir, the Hon. Newton Fellowes; but Lord Chancellor Eldon decided that Lord Portsmouth was capable of entering into the marriage contract and managing his own affairs. The commission was, however, ultimately granted. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... heavenly week of silliness, and by dint of concealing our real relations from the general public, I fancy we escaped harsh criticism. There is a very large percentage of lunacy anyway in Ireland, as well as great leniency of public opinion, and I fancy there is scarcely a country on the map in which one could be more foolish without being found out. Visit each other we ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... rejoined Mr Lillyvick. 'If my niece and the children had known a word about it before I came away, they'd have gone into fits at my feet, and never have come out of 'em till I took an oath not to marry anybody—or they'd have got out a commission of lunacy, or some dreadful thing,' said the collector, quite trembling as ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... foolscap with a bare—he called it a detached—statement of the facts about Irish lunacy. He had just begun to recount his own experience when there was a knock at the door. The housekeeper, a legacy from Dr. Farelly, came in to tell him that Constable Malone wished to speak to him. Dr. Lovaway left his MS. with a sigh. He found Constable Malone, ...
— Lady Bountiful - 1922 • George A. Birmingham
... lack-lustre eye he noticed the amusement of his friends at his last vagary; but when Winifred Ames entered the ballroom a nervous vivacity shook him, as it has shaken ploughmen under similar conditions, and for just a moment he felt ill at ease in the lonely lunacy of his flowered waistcoat and olive-green knee-breeches. He danced with her, then took her to a scarlet nook, apparently devised to hold only one person, but into which they gently squeezed, ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... but the peace and tranquillity of the family had been marred, and I no longer found my place the pleasant one which it had formerly been; there was nothing but gloom in the house, for the youngest daughter exhibited signs of lunacy, and was obliged to be kept under confinement. The next season I attended my master, his son, and eldest daughter to London, as I had previously done. There I left them, for hearing that a young baronet, an acquaintance ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... intrigues which drive serious opera-composers crazy. Several of Richard's pieces had been played; he had occupied one responsible position and been asked to take another; he had the finished score of his opera; and he was young and by nature sanguine to the verge of lunacy. He thought he had only to call on the Intendant of the opera with his masterpiece and its production would be assured. He did call, and soon he received a promise that his work would be done. But Leipzig was now Mendelssohn's stronghold and no rival could be tolerated. One of the great man's ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... for him! Who could expect to free him from his prejudices? He hated Moses for his fate, and Rebekkah for her forms of worship. He was insane on Judaism. He was a monomaniacal Gentile. Who could make out a mental diagnosis, or anticipate the conduct of a mule afflicted with religious lunacy? Well for your correspondent had he discovered beforehand the bias of the brute, or suspected he was a quadruped zealot! Much might have been saved to him, and more to a number of unoffending gentlemen from church, ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... irreparable disgrace and ruin. In either case, as long as she was in New York she was personally safe; and as her disclosures had been restricted to very few persons, she might have withdrawn from the public institution, and in privacy have passed away her life, "alike unknowing and unknown." Lunacy itself could only have instigated a woman situated as she was, to visit Montreal, and there defy the power, and malice, and fury of the Roman Priests, and their myrmidons; by accumulating upon them charges of rape, infanticide, ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... complaint, he franticly snatched up a pitch-fork, drove it at me, and, I luckily avoiding it, struck the prongs into the barn-door; with the exclamation, 'Damn your soul! I'll make you feel me!' The moment after he was seized with a sense of his own lunacy, turned as pale as death, and stood aghast with horror! My supposed crime was that I had eaten some milk, the last of which I myself had seen the dog lap. Perceiving the terror of his mind, I took courage and told him, 'Jowler eat the milk: I saw him, just as ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... madness; and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is, that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... were to dig a large hole in a field, a quarter fill it with liquid mud, and then invite four or five comrades, all arrayed in much warlike impedimenta, but lacking more extra covering than a waterproof sheet each, to the hole to spend two nights and a day in it—I should be credited with lunacy. Yet I should be offering a fair sample of front-line accommodation ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... in our coachmen, as well as in the names of the horses, that had brightened our journey. In spite of Juliet, whose disdain of the virtue or the charm that lies in a name is no more worthy of respect than is any lover's opinion when in the full-orbed foolishness of his lunacy, I believe names to be a very effective adjunct to life's scenic setting. Most of the horses we had had along these Normandy high-roads, had answered to names that had helped to italicize the features of the country. Could Poulette, the ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... himself out worse than he is. I should rather call him an inverted idealist, for, with high hopes and generous expectations, he entered into the world, and lacerated by rage at the cruelty, foulness, and lunacy he there discovered, he poured out his denunciations upon the crawling forms of life whose filthy minds were well housed in their apelike and corrupting flesh—a bag of loathsome ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... learning which desired to be something for itself, even though you demeaned yourselves as if you merely haughtily despised all this. As far as you possibly could, you held from you the men who did such things as well as their propositions; the reproach of lunacy, or the advice that they be sent to the mad-house, was the thanks from you on which they might usually count. They, in their turn, did not venture to express themselves regarding you with the same frankness, since they were dependent upon you; but their innermost thought was this, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... our time the name is altered; and the fashionable who squanders his father's estate, or murders his best friend—who breaks his wife's heart at the gaming-table, and his own neck at a steeple-chase—escapes the sentence which morality would pass upon him, by the plea of lunacy. "He was a rascal," says Common-Sense. "True," says the World; "but he ...
— English Satires • Various
... voice unfolded his philosophy, and as he did so Marty became dazed and aghast, gazing at his boss as if Joe had turned into some unthinkable zoological oddity. Into Marty's prim-set life, with its definite boundaries and unmysterious exactness, was poured a vapor of lunacy. Finally Joe wound ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... was light this long while and not good in the head, and at the last lunacy came on her and she was tied and bound. Sometimes singing and dancing she does ...
— New Irish Comedies • Lady Augusta Gregory
... the same for both sexes among married people (i.e., 8.5), but for the single it is larger among the men (4.8 to 4.5), as also it is among the widowed (17.9 to 13.9) (Fifty-sixth Annual Report of the Commissioners in Lunacy, England and Wales, 1902, p. 141). This would seem to indicate that when living apart from men the tendency to insanity is less in women, but is raised to the male level when the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... in a double sense," said one of the party; "they can do nothing which it is worth one's while to be made a dupe by. The humblest wayside juggler in India could mystify them to the verge of lunacy." ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... 'insanity,' 'lunacy,' 'unsoundness of mind,' 'mental derangement,' 'madness,' and 'mental alienation or aberration,' are indifferently applied to those states of disordered mind in which the person loses the power of regulating his actions and conduct according to the ordinary rules of society. The reasoning ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... behalf of a poor woman whose dead body is now in that room. I told you, if she had to be moved, it would kill her. Your agent drove her out, and she lies here dead! It has made her husband crazy—a temporary lunacy, I trust—but, whatever it is, there you see ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... mankind presents no parallel tale to that we have told. It was an instance of insanity placed in power, of lunacy ruling over ignorance and fanaticism; and the doings of John of Leyden in Muenster may be presented as an example alike of the mad extremes to which unquestioned power is apt to lead, and the vast capabilities of faith and trust ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... sheer lunacy, but—I've a sort of idea that if I'm to go on at all, myself, it must be on those lines. Modern poetic drama—It's that or ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... dissolved; and it was declared illegal for them to take cognizance of any matter of property, belonging to the subjects of this kingdom. But, in plantation or admiralty causes, which arise out of the jurisdiction of this kingdom, and in matters of lunacy and ideocy (being a special flower of the prerogative) with regard to these, although they may eventually involve questions of extensive property, the privy council continues to have cognizance, being the court of appeal in such causes: or, rather, the appeal lies ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... Tara he knew. "Very well. Why accuse me of incipient lunacy? I care, too. Always have done. Think how topping it would be, you and I together, exploring all the wonderland of our Game and Mummy's tales—Udaipur, Amber, Chitor, perhaps the ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... chronicle, fewer still to read, the sad history of a sick-bed. Of mine, I know but little. The throbbing pulses of the erring brain, the wild fancies of lunacy, take no note of time. There is no past nor future; a dreadful present, full of its hurried and confused impressions, is all that the mind beholds; and even when some gleams of returning reason flash upon the mad confusion of ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... cruel, is it heartless, is it barbarous to use something of the same care in breeding men and women as in breeding horses and dogs? Here is a determining question: Knowing yourself doomed to hopeless idiocy, lunacy, crime or drunkenness, would you, or would you not, welcome a painless death? Let us assume that you would. Upon what ground, then, would you deny to another a boon that you ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... a liven soul, gentle or simple, can stand on level ground. As to getten up hill to the church, 'tis perfect lunacy. And I speak of foot-passengers. As to horses and carriage, 'tis murder to think of 'em. I am going to send straight as a line into the breakfast-room, and say 'tis a closer.... Hullo—here's Clerk Crickett and John Day ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... extraordinary notion about being able to paint was a natural consequence of the pathetic delusion to which he had given utterance yesterday. And she wondered what would follow next. Who could have guessed that the seeds of lunacy were in such a man? Yes, harmless lunacy, but lunacy nevertheless! She distinctly remembered the little shock with which she had learned that he was staying at the Grand Babylon on his own account, as a wealthy visitor. She ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... "ninety-nine times as high as the moon, to sweep the cobwebs off the sky"—in other words, to set the Church, our cathedrals and bishops' palaces in order—and augured well; but this old woman journeyed not alone, in her hand she carried a broom (Brougham). It may have been a case of ultra-lunacy this journey of ninety-nine times as high as the moon, and "one cannot help thinking," said a writer of that period, "of the song, 'Long life to the Moon'; but this saying became common, 'If that time goes the coach, pray ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... gathered who these people were, than he burst open the coach-door somehow or other, and came tumbling out among them; and as if the lunacy of Mr Tapley were contagious, he immediately began to shake hands too, and exhibit every ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... may be quite right. I may be a lunatic. I feel much like one just now. It is lunacy to go climbing back to a level in society from which I have been kicked. But as I knelt there by that little fire, before you came, yearning sprang up in me—and I had thought all that sort of yearning was dead in me. A moment later came habiliments of a gentleman, borne ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... up here, and write, and read Renan's ORIGINES, which is certainly devilish interesting; I read his Nero yesterday, it is very good, O, very good! But he is quite a Michelet; the general views, and such a piece of character painting, excellent; but his method sheer lunacy. You can see him take up the block which he had just rejected, and make of it the corner-stone: a maddening way to deal with authorities; and the result so little like history that one almost blames oneself for wasting time. But the time is not wasted; the conspectus is always good, ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... built some years ago by Chinese merchants, and supported by them at an annual cost of $16,000. In it nothing European, either in the way of drugs or treatment, is tried. There is a dispensary connected with it, where advice is daily given to about a hundred and twenty people; and, though lunacy is rare in China, they are building a lunatic asylum at the back of ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... renouncing her heart, denying her purpose. For days she would tie her kerchief over her ears and eyes, and crouch in a corner, strangling her impulses. She even malingered, refused food, became dumb. And she might have succeeded in making herself salable through incipient lunacy, if through no other way, had she been able to maintain her role long enough. But some woman or baby always was falling into some emergency of ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... allotriophagical symptoms, a consequence of his ascetical mode of living; nymphomania of old age; hypochondriacal fancies: all symptoms that are frequently found together. To second his morbid intention of changing his diet and habits would be sheer lunacy; nay, worse, it would be actual murder. Yet first I must win his confidence as a physician, so that he may trust me and take my advice. I embraced him, and thanked him most heartily and tenderly for his kind intentions, ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... his prejudices? He hated Moses for his fate, and Rebekkah for her forms of worship. He was insane on Judaism. He was a monomaniacal Gentile. Who could make out a mental diagnosis, or anticipate the conduct of a mule afflicted with religious lunacy? Well for your correspondent had he discovered beforehand the bias of the brute, or suspected he was a quadruped zealot! Much might have been saved to him, and more to a number of unoffending gentlemen from church, ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... in the first rank, but attractive by reason of their relation to the spirit of their age, and of the seal of intimite set upon their work have passed. In the last century and the beginning of this, our present preoccupation with Botticelli would have passed for a mild lunacy, because he has none of the qualities then most in vogue and most enthusiastically studied, and because the moment in the history of culture he so faithfully represents, was then but little understood. The prophecy of Mr. Ruskin, the tendencies of our best contemporary art in Mr. ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... sae when King Charles the Second came in, wha was in sic favour as the laird of Redgauntlet? He was knighted at Lonon Court, wi' the king's ain sword; and being a red-hot prelatist, he came down here, rampauging like a lion, with commission of lieutenancy (and of lunacy, for what I ken), to put down a' the Whigs and Covenanters in the country. Wild wark they made of it; for the Whigs were as dour as the Cavaliers were fierce, and it was which should first tire the other. Redgauntlet was aye ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... and aghast, gazing at his boss as if Joe had turned into some unthinkable zoological oddity. Into Marty's prim-set life, with its definite boundaries and unmysterious exactness, was poured a vapor of lunacy. Finally ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... manager. Up by daybreak, after Communion she soaps and washes all the linen herself, makes the sheets and shirts, mends the Abbe's gowns, and lives with amazing economy, while taking care that her master wants for nothing. Such a sagacious apprehension of the conduct of life has no connection with lunacy or delirium." ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... Burke said that few are the partisans of a tyranny that has departed: he might have added that fewer still are the critics of a tyranny that has remained. Burke certainly was not one of them. While lashing himself into a lunacy against the French Revolution, which only very incidentally destroyed the property of the rich, he never criticised (to do him justice, perhaps never saw) the English Revolution, which began with ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... expression at all in his voice. "They used to put lunatics in snake-pits. When they were people who'd taken to lunacy for escape from reality, it made them go back to reality to escape from the snakes. Shock-treatments used to be used, later, for the same effect. We're too soft to use either treatment now. But Johnny gave himself the works. The odds are that from now ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... Under the pressure of the present necessity he felt able to accomplish better things. Something must be done which would produce fifteen, or at least ten, dollars a week. It was no use to think it couldn't be done; it must be done. It looked like a species of lunacy on his part to flatter himself that it was possible to make even more than a ...
— Make or Break - or, The Rich Man's Daughter • Oliver Optic
... seconded Mr. Gordon's Bill, and first came publicly forward in support of measures designed to advance the interests of the insane. A laborious and sometimes fruitless examination of Hansard, from the earliest period of lunacy legislation, has been necessary in order to present a continuous narrative of the successive steps by which so great a ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... the administration department went down and all the wards in that part of the building collapsed. Twelve attendants were killed and Dr. Kelly, second assistant physician, was crushed to death. There were 1,100 patients in the hospital. C. L. Seardee, secretary of the state commission in lunacy, who was in Agnews and attending to official business, declared that it was a marvel that many more were not killed. Dr. T. W. Hatch, superintendent of the state hospitals for insane, was in charge of ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... priest of Such-zen looking for a River, address care of Tirthankars' Temple, Benares. P. M.—Please note boy is apple of eye, and rupees shall be sent per hoondi three hundred per annum. For God Almighty's sake." Now, is that ravin' lunacy or a business proposition? I ask you, because I'm fairly at my ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... title of it, as a feather in one's cap, is worth nothing to Sigismund. And he is still short of money; and will forever be. Why could not he give up Brandenburg altogether; since, instead of paying, he is still making new loans from Burggraf Friedrich; and the hope of ever paying were mere lunacy! Sigismund revolves these sad thoughts too, amid his world-wide diplomacies, and efforts to heal the Church. "Pledged for one hundred thousand gulden," sadly ruminates Sigismund; "and fifty thousand more borrowed since, by little and little; and more ever needed, especially ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... a vicious institution, that was but another phase of the partial lunacy which affected him: for to no man were purity and fidelity more essential elements in the idea of real love. Again, De Quincey speaks of Shelley's "fearlessness, his gracious nature, his truth, his purity from all ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... can do nothing with Mr. Dartrey. He has just decided that our whole scheme of life is absurd, that politics and power are shadows, and that work for others is lunacy. All that he wants is your cottage, a fishing rod and ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... mass of foliage. Dozens of similar examples might be cited, of the most extraordinary invention, which the metal-workers of the seventeenth century particularly gave their imaginations licence to construct. Indeed, the German artists of that period seem to have had a spice of lunacy in their compositions, and the works of Breughel were rivalled and outdone by many others whose fancies were of most unearthly type. Salvator Rosa in Italy, and Callot in France, occasionally depicted what their grotesque and mystic imaginings suggested, and Teniers ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... he is no worse; but as ill-used as ever—mewed up, kept in solitary confinement. They mean to make either an idiot or a maniac of him, and take out a commission of lunacy. Horsfall starves him; you ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... Loveyet, you run on in such a surprising manner with your narrations, imprecations, admirations, and interrogations, that, upon my education, sir, I believe you are approaching to insanity, frenzy, lunacy, madness, distraction,—a ...
— The Politician Out-Witted • Samuel Low
... without any of the power to prophesy like her, or to construct a connected sentence like anybody else. We have already had a Monomaniac; and we designate you 'The Mad Poet of the Batch;' as being mad not in one direction only, but in all. A little lunacy, like a little knowledge, would be ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... he, interrupting her and pushing back her hands, "what lunacy are you uttering? Do you imagine that I go about fiddling for ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... indicative of elegance, of taste, of refinement, of wit, of intelligence. Weakly marked eyebrows indicate a feeble constitution and a tendency to melancholia, Deep sunken eyes are selfish, while eyes in which the whole iris shows indicate erraticism, if not lunacy. Round eyes are indicative of innocence; strongly protuberant eyes of weakness of both mind and body. Eyes small and close together typify cunning, while those far apart and open indicate frankness. The normal distance between the eyes is ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... into his confidence,' returned the lawyer. 'But I may say one thing: if he's your advertiser (and he may be, for he seems to have been seized with criminal lunacy) you can go ahead with a clear conscience, for I hold him in ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... seated on horseback a few paces off, had a mind to ride forward and protest. To his mind the order spelt sheer lunacy. The barrier, to begin with, stood close on twenty feet high, built of rough timbers staked in the ground and densely packed with furze. Nothing could be seen behind it but the top of the second barrier, which at fifty yards distance guarded the approach from Helleston. ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... obliged to Confederate with Nature, and with-hold the Birth-right of Brains, which otherwise the young Gentleman might have enjoy'd, to the great support of his Family and Posterity. Thus the famous Waller, Denham, Dryden, and sundry Others, were oblig'd to condemn their Race to Lunacy and Blockheadism, only to prevent the fatal Destruction of their Families, and entailing the Plague of Wit ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... wife, must have something wrong about his mind. And something wrong about St. John's mind there ultimately proves to be. It flashes across Isola that this is the case, and before long her worst suspicions are confirmed. At last St. John breaks out into open lunacy, and dies deranged—a fate which is partly the cause, and partly the consequence, of his continual indulgence in such wild theories about the relations of man and wife. It is not every day that we have the valuable lesson of the rights of wives so plainly or so practically put before ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... most portentous pauses (which a delectable and lazy conference of leaves made eloquent) because of many unfinished sentences. "Oh, YOU know what I mean, dear!" one would say as a last resort. And she-why, bless her heart! of course, she always did. . . . Heigho, youth's was a pleasant lunacy. . . . ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... the hall door. "Very good!" he observed with grim determination. "I think he'll cure your lunacy." ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln
... rather too skeptical. Well, Mr. Cathcart believes both in indigestion, so to speak, and the devil. He believes that those evil spirits are at us all the time, trying to get in at any crack they can find—that in one person they produce lunacy—I must say it seems to me rather odd the way in which lunatics so very often become horribly blasphemous and things like that—and in another just shattered nerves, and so on. They take advantage, he says, ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... you to work your way out upon that limb as far as you can. If you see anything strange, let me know." By this time what little doubt I might have entertained of my poor friend's insanity, was put finally at rest. I had no alternative but to conclude him stricken with lunacy, and I became seriously anxious about getting him home. While I was pondering upon what was best to be done, Jupiter's voice was ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... at the physiognomy above him on the wharf, he was obliged to dismiss the notion of common, crude lunacy. It was truly most unusual talk. Then he remembered—in his surprise he had lost sight of it—that Heyst now had a girl there. This bizarre discourse was probably the effect of the girl. Davidson shook off the absurd feeling, and asked, ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... heartless lunacy that runs through the sickly plagiarism of the Book of Mormon, pervades all this, and instead of the odor of sanctity you notice the flavor of bilge water, and the emigrant's own hailing sign, the ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... must say it sounds like lunacy. But all Almo's words and all the small details of his behavior show no signs of derangement. Up to the last report he slept well, ate well, looked well, talked sensibly, in respect to all minor matters acted like a rational being, and seemed to thrive. But ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... regard to your daughter-in-law. I shall be waiting to see you at eleven o'clock to-morrow morning. The matter is so utterly vital to the happiness of all your family, that I cannot imagine you will fail to come." Now, what's the meaning of it? Is it sheer impudence, or lunacy, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... who are born to become insane do not necessarily spring from insane parents, or from any ancestry having any apparent taint of lunacy in their blood, but they do receive from their progenitors certain impressions upon their mental and moral, as well as their physical beings, which impressions, like an iron mould, fix and shape their ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... feel sure that, however others may have referred it to stupidity, ignorance, or lunacy, you took it as the sign of a modest, simple, unspoiled, unsophisticated soul. Absolute confidence in such matters comes dangerously near audacity and impudence. My first wish would be to make no such blunder; my second ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... brainless observer you may be quite right. I may be a lunatic. I feel much like one just now. It is lunacy to go climbing back to a level in society from which I have been kicked. But as I knelt there by that little fire, before you came, yearning sprang up in me—and I had thought all that sort of yearning was dead ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... back, remembering the tales that Mrs. Jobson had told, and not being by any means sure but that the Colonel was in a dangerous condition of lunacy. ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... off on a further search. "First" has no other intelligible sense or meaning than this. "First" in relation to a given cluster of phenomenon we may grant; "First" in the sense of calling for no further explanation is downright theological lunacy. ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... the present inhabitants of England are mentally fit, and could therefore not have descended from an ancestry of undiluted lunacy he brushes aside with the assertion that insanity is not necessarily hereditary; and that even though it was, in many cases a return to natural conditions from the state of high civilization, which is thought to have induced ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... in use, pure, duke, tune, tube, blue, duty, flew, new, student, subdue, pursue, absolute, illumine, tumult, suit, during, pursuit, presume, lunacy, Tuesday, numeral. ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... also because I had reached the conclusion that he was simply a shallow dissembler and rascal. In a minute more I had cause to reconsider my charge of hypocrisy, and to question whether he might not lay claim to the nobler distinction of lunacy. The conductor came down the car, picking out Troubletonians with his undeceivable eye, and leaned toward us with outstretched fingers. Mr. Riley rose to his whole gaunt height at a jerk, and laid his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... and seized the required number, including their owners. I engaged two wild young Arabs of eighteen and twenty years of age, named Bacheet and Wat Gamma: the latter being interpreted signifies "Son of the Moon." This in no way suggests lunacy, but the young Arab had happened to enter this world on the day of the new moon, which was considered to be a particularly fortunate and brilliant omen at his birth. Whether the climax of his good fortune had arrived at the moment ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... we are permitted to know what took place—for the House of Commons had another Secret Session—in both Houses it was Ireland, Ireland all the way. The Commons began by granting a return relating to Irish Lunacy accounts, and then by an easy transition passed to the report of the Sinn Fein rebellion ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 3, 1916 • Various
... them—like the unscrupulous God-forsaken clerk that he is—he will defend himself as though it were the Peace for which he was being tried. Not that he wishes to account for more than is charged against him—that would be lunacy. No! He sees rather that in all his own proceedings no good can be found—that his crimes are his whole history; while a defence of the Peace, if it has no other merits, has at least the kindly sound of the name to recommend it. {96} I fear, indeed, men of Athens, I fear that, ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... before they turned the lights out and went up-stairs it was thoroughly understood between them that Mrs. Vertrees should seek the earliest opportunity to obtain definite information from Sibyl Sheridan concerning the mental and physical status of Bibbs. And if he were subject to attacks of lunacy, the unhappy pair decided to prevent the sacrifice they supposed their daughter intended to make of herself. Altogether, if there were spiteful ghosts in the old house that night, eavesdropping upon the woeful comedy, they must ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... had not considered the subject in that light, and had founded his conclusions on the alleged lunacy of the bull, he allowed himself to be put down for the present. But he sat turning it over in his mind, with such an obvious intention of fixing Mrs Pipchin presently, that even that hardy old lady deemed it prudent to retreat until he ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... might, the knowledge came to her that Mariana and a Polder—that name she never repeated—a married Polder without his wife, were poking over the hills together at Shadrach? She would have him, Howat, examined for lunacy. Mariana demanded too much. He told her this with ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... people stare by doing better than others, why, make them stare till they stare their eyes out. But consider how easy it is to make people stare by being absurd. I may do it by going into a drawing-room without my shoes. You remember the gentleman in The Spectator, who had a commission of lunacy taken out against him for his extreme singularity, such as never wearing a wig, but a night-cap. Now, Sir, abstractedly, the night-cap was best; but, relatively, the advantage was overbalanced by his making the boys ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... an Appeal in Lunacy. No other appeals save in Lunacy lie from the Court of Chancery to the King in Council, and these are very rare. Drax v. Grosvenor is reported in ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... head, "I fear your charge of lunacy will not stand upon such ground as that. 'Tis ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... age of forty-five, I succeeded in achieving the most sublime folly of my life. I should have taken a degree in madness and been raised to a professor's chair in some college of lunacy! Herbert, at the age of forty-five I fell in love with and married a girl of sixteen out of a log cabin! merely, forsooth, because she had a pearly skin like the leaf of the white japonica, soft gray eyes like a timid ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... my brain," Thomson continued, "a secret weakness, perhaps even a dash of lunacy, and I might be quite reasonably the master-spy of the world. I was in Berlin six weeks ago, Ambrose. There wasn't a soul who ever knew it. I made no ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... action was brought which resulted in the affirmation of the mother's right to its custody. The circumstance in which a fourth sister who joined the community was abducted by her brothers led to an inquiry in lunacy and to her final settlement at Spaxton. A few years after the establishment of the "Abode of Love,'' a peculiarly gross scandal, in which Prince and one of his female followers were involved, led to ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... enough for you to try to prevent your ruining your life by a single piece of lunacy," he told her as he sought to steady her with the directness of his gaze. "You don't have to go on with Holbury if you choose to leave him, but this is the one place of all others for you to avoid." He cast a hasty glance about ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... from thinking of itself, because such work, not being of a religious character, partook of the nature of sin. It is no wonder that such a rule of life had not infrequently the most distressing consequences. Newton himself admits that his preaching had the reputation of driving people into lunacy. In a letter asking that steps may be taken to remove one poor victim to an asylum he says: "I hope the poor girl is not without some concern for her soul; and, indeed, I believe a concern of this kind was the beginning of her disorder. I believe," he continues, "my name is up about the county ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... heart—" But still the multitude hurried on, passing, repassing, encountering, evading, vanishing into shop-doors and emerging from them, dispersing down the side streets, and swarming out of them. It was a scene that possessed the beholder with singular fascination, and in its effect of universal lunacy, it might well have seemed the last phase of a world presently to be destroyed. They who were in it but not of it, as they fancied, though there was no reason for this,—looked on it amazed, and at last their ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... tempers. 'I would add a touch of earthquake, Miss Ilchester, just to make sure that all the party know one another's edges before starting.' This was too far a shot of nonsense for Janet, whose native disposition was to refer to lunacy or stupidity, or trickery, whatsoever was novel to her understanding. 'I, for my part,' said he, 'stipulate to have for comrade no man who fancies himself a born and stamped chieftain, no inveterate student of maps, and no dog with ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... very wild improbable circumstance were to occur, I should be heartily sorry for poor Adelais! Only imagine me with such a wife as she would make! Why I wouldn't have so transparent, white- skinned a beauty about my house all day for a mine of gold! I should be seized with lunacy before long, through mere contemplation of her very unearthliness, and be goaded into fancying her a picture, and hanging her up framed and glazed over my drawing-room mantelpiece! No, no, I'll leave Miss Cameron ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... under it, that prescribes the rule to govern conduct and warns against transgression.[810] In contrast, the Court sustained as neither too vague nor indefinite a State law which provided for commitment of a psychopathic personality by probate action akin to a lunacy proceeding, and which was construed by the State court as including those persons who, by habitual course of misconduct in sexual matters, have evidenced utter lack of power to control their sexual impulses and are likely to inflict injury. The underlying conditions, i.e., habitual course of misconduct ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... was clearly useless to resist a legalised process, I gave in, and thus was I, a perfectly sane man, incarcerated in a lunatic asylum! There I had to remain while Sir Lockesley saw my solicitors, communicated with the Commissioners in Lunacy and others, and after much correspondence and innumerable interviews, at last secured my release; but not until I had endured more than a week's confinement in that ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... self-expression, is very great, and is, of course, reformatory in its action; it is somewhat similar to that endured by other Egos, who are linked to bodies human in form, but without normal brains—those we call idiots, lunatics, &c. Idiocy and lunacy are the results of vices different in kind from those that bring about the animal servitude above explained, but the Ego in these cases also is attached to a form through ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... Anything in the wide world. He could have gone to the world's end. I would have helped him. I made him, didn't I, Polly? Didn't I create that man? Doesn't he owe everything to me? And to reward me, just when everything was nicely arranged, by this lunacy that ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... is possessed only by him who is afflicted over much with himself because he has been crazed by others and made mad by his escape from them. I suppose I am mad, for to believe myself perfectly sane in a greatly mad world is surely a subtle species of lunacy. And yet I am compelled to act towards others as if they were more sane than I. To feel as if one were eternally in a court-room trial, with lean lunatics for lawyers and fat philistines for judges, this ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... little, mentally a good deal at sight of the others' torments— but only from time to time. By the fourth day (the eleventh after the Eurotas went down) we were all more or less mad, I reckon. But my lunacy took the form of light-headedness with a strange, almost persistent, sense of exaltation. I kept my strength so much better than they that almost unconsciously they left most of the trimming and steering in my ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and destruction on my household gods—did he think that, in less than three years, a natural event—a severe domestic, but an expected and common calamity—would lay his carcass in a cross-road, or stamp his name in a Verdict of Lunacy! Did he (who in his sexagenary * * *) reflect or consider what my feeling must have been, when wife, and child, and sister, and name, and fame, and country, were to be my sacrifice on his legal altar—and this at a moment when my health was declining, my fortune embarrassed, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 471, Saturday, January 15, 1831 • Various
... more gracious in her own house. I have her formal word that I am to come. Soon, not too soon, I will come over; and you shall meet me and take me to see her. There is something in her opposition that I can't fathom: I wondered twice was lunacy her notion: she looked at ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... said Aubrey. "Let's get back to Brooklyn as soon as we can. God only knows what may have happened. Fool that I was, to go away and leave those women all alone. Triple-distilled lunacy!" ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... Does not lunacy strike you, Bertie, as being a very eerie thing? It is a disease of the soul. To think that you may have a man of noble mind, full of every lofty aspiration, and that a gross physical cause, such as ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... unpoetical past all degree, never leave it except to get drunk. Their money gone, back they go to get fresh strength and more pelf for another orgie; but if by chance they abandon the wild, free life, they soon drink themselves to lunacy or death, and their last babblings are of the glorious wilderness they all love." [Footnote: "The Great Deserts and Forests of North America," p. 22.] This is the too exuberant expression of one who had probably never had a hearth of his own in France, but it gives some intimation ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... tolerate any man's difference of opinion, but let him tell it me without getting himself up as a lunatic. At this stage of the world, if a man wants to be taken seriously, he must keep clear of melodrama. Don't misunderstand me. I am not suspecting you of setting up any lunacy on your own account. I only think you might easily be led arm in arm with a lunatic, especially if he wanted defending. You have a passion for people who are pelted, Dan. I'm sorry for them too; but so far as company goes, ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... the Turkish Knight with three attendant monsters, severally named the Good, the Beyootiful, and the Ter-rew, and representing in themselves the current forms of Religion, Art, and Science. These three Snt George successively challenges, tackles, and flattens out—the first as lunacy, the second as harlotry, the third as witchcraft. But even so the play would not be long enough had I not padded a good deal of buffoonery into the scene where the five corpses ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... cheaper; and as to making the slightest difference in style on account of our late pursuits, as whether, for instance, we were a retired candlestick-maker, or a Lord Chancellor, or a physician, the very idea would savour of lunacy. Not so Jacques Coeur. This man wished, in dying, to leave a beautiful shell behind him, so that the passers-by might say: 'Here lived a great merchant; he had a wife, sons, and a daughter, and numerous domestics. He liked his money, but loved art more. He kept a negro; he ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... "enlist our strongest and angriest feelings. It is held that only wickedness or lunacy can resist the evidence that has convinced a vast majority. By arithmetical calculation the chances that twelve men are wrong and twelve thousand [11] right, on a matter of inductive or deductive proof, are found to amount to what must be taken for practical certainty; ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... danseuse could not throw a glance to the conductor of the band without the juggler being jealous, the Variety Profession was coming to a pretty pass. She also remarked that for a girl to entrust her life's happiness to a jealous man would be an act of lunacy. And then "Little Flouflou, the Juggling Genius," who was dying to marry her, would suffer tortures. He tried hard to conquer his failing, but it must be owned that Clairette's glances were very expressive, and that she distributed them indiscriminately. ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... replied: 'A conviction of your lunacy would prevent my taking offence, though I might wish you enclosed ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... below the circles of fire. Still we slept sometimes, and always we lay for seven hours. Again and again Bill asked us how about going back, and always we said no. Yet there was nothing I should have liked better: I was quite sure that to dream of Cape Crozier was the wildest lunacy. That day we had advanced 11/2 miles by the utmost labour, and the usual relay work. This was quite a good march—and Cape Crozier is 67 ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... merely a madness; and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is, that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... sort of pre-Raphaelite tendency which does not suit my aged feelings. I am for Love, or the World well lost. But I forget that, if I live beyond the 21st of next November, I shall be seventy-four years of age. I have been obliged to resign my Commissionership of Lunacy, not being able to bear the pain of travelling. By this I lose about L900 a year. I am, therefore, sufficiently poor, even for a poet. Browning, as you know, has lost his wife. He is coming with ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... Portsmouth (see 'Letters', vol. i. p. 9, 'note' 2 [Footnote 3 of Letter 3]), who had long known the Hansons, from whose house he married his first wife, married, March 7, 1814, Mary Anne, eldest daughter of John Hanson. A commission of lunacy was taken out by the brother and next heir, the Hon. Newton Fellowes; but Lord Chancellor Eldon decided that Lord Portsmouth was capable of entering into the marriage contract and managing his own affairs. The commission was, however, ultimately granted. Byron swore an affidavit ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... forfeited by the sovereign: that to dethrone a king and to elect his successor, was a practice quite unknown to the constitution, and had a tendency to render kingly power entirely dependent and precarious: that where the sovereign, from his tender years, from lunacy, or from other natural infirmity, was incapacitated to hold the reins of government, both the laws and former practice agreed in appointing a regent, who, during the interval, was invested with the whole power of the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... spirituality, as to natural physical health. It is no use saying they are so few. Two millenniums ago, how many were the Anglo-Saxons? Three millenniums ago, how many were the Latins? Supposing the white race in America failed. The statistics of lunacy—of that alone—are a fearful Mene, Tekel Upharsin written on our walls, for any Daniel with vision to read. I think Naure must also take into account these possibilities. Does she keep in reserve hereditary streams and racial stocks other than her great and main ones, in case of accidents? ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... term "Insane Diathesis." This diathesis may be inherited or acquired. Those who are born to become insane do not necessarily spring from insane parents or from an ancestry having any apparent taint of lunacy in the blood. But they do receive from their progenitors oftentimes certain impressions upon their mental and moral, as well as upon their physical being, which impressions, like iron molds, fix ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... is very bad for any man not to have a fixed occupation; however great his natural energy may be, it either relaxes with time, or expends itself uselessly. The mere thinker often ends by hovering on the confines of lunacy. ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... attempt to absolve himself or mitigate his offense by telling her that he loved her. He was voiceless—he could not control his speech. He did not dare to show such presumption as talk of love must seem to be to her. He knew he must not speak of love; such proffer to her would be lunacy. But this greater presumption, this blind capture of her in his arms—this was something which he had not intended any more than a sane man considers flight ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... Fancy lunacy, etc., coming out of the primary fact that one's nth ancestor lived between tide-marks! I declare it's the grandest suggestion I have heard of for ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... squat little man rolled forward, affectionate concern on his great ugly face, and he set one of his podgy hands on his godson's shoulder. "Now listen to me, Andre," he reasoned. "This is sheer knight-errantry—moonshine, lunacy. You'll come to no good by it if you persist. You've read 'Don Quixote,' and what happened to him when he went tilting against windmills. It's what will happen to you, neither more nor less. Leave things as they are, my boy. I wouldn't have ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... are pretenders in a double sense," said one of the party; "they can do nothing which it is worth one's while to be made a dupe by. The humblest wayside juggler in India could mystify them to the verge of lunacy." ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... Ahab, in his hidden self, raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form. Ahab's full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge. But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab's ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... goal of human endeavour on that day of long ago when she named her first-born Samuel? Or was hers the stubborn obstinacy of the ox? the fixity of purpose of the balky horse? the stolidity of the self-willed peasant-mind? Was it whim or fancy?—the one streak of lunacy in what was otherwise an eminently rational mind? Or, reverting, was hers the spirit of a Bruno? Was she convinced of the intellectual rightness of the stand she had taken? Was hers a steady, enlightened opposition to superstition? ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... chez les Grecs: 6 tomes: Groningue—1840), alleges a case (which, however, we do not remember to have met) where the client ventured to object:—"Mon roi Apollon, je crois que tu es fou." But cases are obvious which look this way, though not going so far as to charge lunacy upon the lord of prophetic vision. Battus, who was destined to be the eldest father of Cyrene, so memorable as the first ground of Greek intercourse with the African shore of the Mediterranean, never consulted the Delphic ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... at this sudden outbreak of the clergyman, for it verged upon lunacy, and lunacy is to them a fearsome and supernatural thing. One of them rode forward and spoke with the Emir. When he returned he said something to his comrades, one of whom closed in upon each side of the ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... the floor as if her awkward body were a burden. "Is the instant response to an obvious truth—platitude even—always a diagnosis of lunacy? I state a thought so old no one knows who first expressed it and a hearer feels bound to choose between offense to himself and contempt for the speaker. Believe me, Weener, I was offering no exclusive indictment: I too am guilty—infinitely ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... afraid that in this respect I resemble Gontcharov, whom I don't like, who is ten heads taller than I am in talent. I have not enough passion; add to that this sort of lunacy: for the last two years I have for no reason at all ceased to care about seeing my work in print, have become indifferent to reviews, to literary conversations, to gossip, to success and failure, to good pay—in short, I have gone downright silly. There is a sort of stagnation in my soul. ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... of that name, and other resinous plants, curing ulcerated lungs, &c. Sardinia, melancholy and madness, replanted with true Anticyran hellebore, was famous; whilst Thusus (especially in Summer) brought almost all the inhabitants to lunacy and distraction for want of it. And what the effects and benefit of such plantations have produc'd, is conspicuous in one of the most celebrated cities of the East, the famous Ispahan, clear'd of the pestilence, since the surrounding ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... Smith is about to run for a special licence in order to marry one of the women in the house, and the other boarders have just paired off when a telegram posted by one of the ladies in a misapprehension brings two lunacy experts around in a cab. Smith adds to the excitement of the moment by putting a couple of bullets through a ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... operation; it may destroy the lives of some, and the senses of others; but either of these effects will answer the purposes of the ministry, to whom it is indifferent, provided the nation becomes insensible, whether pestilence or lunacy prevails among them. Either mad or dead, the greatest part of the people must quickly be, or there is no hope of the continuance of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... "Lunacy is mighty becoming, Polly. Try it again," answered Tom, watching her as she went laughing away, looking all the prettier for her dishevelment. "Dress that girl up, and she 'd be a raving, tearing ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... an annual cost of $16,000. In it nothing European, either in the way of drugs or treatment, is tried. There is a dispensary connected with it, where advice is daily given to about a hundred and twenty people; and, though lunacy is rare in China, they are building a lunatic asylum at the back ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... was so at variance with Mr. Athel's views of life that it made him seriously uncomfortable. It suggested criminality, or at least lunacy, both such very unpleasant things to be even remotely connected with. Poverty he could pardon, but suicide was really disreputable. From the philosophic resignation to which he had attained, he fell back into petulance, always easier to him ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... The lieutenant of the Britomart and the Superintendent of Enlistments were in a state of incipient lunacy. Oh, the fool! They would break him if they could. They would write to the Secretary. They would—but as they growled and cursed behind him, Eben McClure suddenly remembered that Julian Wemyss and my Lord Erskine were first cousins, and that so long as the government ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... it inhabits the thickest sort of cover in a sheer mountainous country; its senses are wonderfully acute; and it is very wary. A man might, once in a blue moon, get one by happening upon it accidentally, but deliberately to go after it was sheer lunacy. So we were told. As a matter of fact, we thought so ourselves, but Greater Kudu was as ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... selling the bodies of deceased inmates of her public institutions for money. General Butler's charges were refuted to the public satisfaction by the simple certificate of Mrs. Clara Leonard, a member of the State Board of Lunacy and Charities, who knew all about the matter, and in whose high integrity and capacity to decide the question ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... that the abbess had refused to deliver up her lunatic husband to her care. While she was speaking, her real husband and his servant Dromio, who had got loose, came before the duke to demand justice, complaining that his wife had confined him on a false charge of lunacy, and telling in what manner he had broken his bands, and eluded the vigilance of his keepers. Adriana was strangely surprised to see her husband, when she thought he had ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... Simon is one of Exmoor's greatest pals; and it would ruin that cousin of the Eyres that's standing for us at Bradford. Besides, old Soap-Suds was sick enough at not getting his peerage last year; he'd sack me by wire if I lost him it with such lunacy as this. And what about Duffey? He's doing us some rattling articles on "The Heel of the Norman." And how can he write about Normans if the man's only a solicitor? Do ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... begun to grumble. It seemed just as if Long Tom Lane was making game of an old man in trouble. 'Twas either that or lunacy. And there was no time for nonsense off the Gingerbread coast in ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... Sumner publicly cut his acquaintance. Adams was the more puzzled because he could not believe Sumner so mad as to quarrel both with Fish and with Grant. A quarrel with Seward and Andrew Johnson was bad enough, and had profited no one; but a quarrel with General Grant was lunacy. Grant might be whatever one liked, as far as morals or temper or intellect were concerned, but he was not a man whom a light-weight cared to challenge for a fight; and Sumner, whether he knew it or not, was a very light weight in the Republican Party, if separated from his Committee ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... Commissioners of Lunacy committed to the asylum Mr. James R. Colston, a writer of some local reputation, connected with the Messenger. It will be remembered that on the evening of the 15th inst. Mr. Colston was given into custody by one of his fellow-lodgers in the Baine House, who had observed him ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... continuance of any man's affection? Would it not be painful to owe his appearance of regard more to his honour than his love? and is not my person, already faded, likelier to fade sooner, than his? On the other hand, is his life a good one? and would it not be lunacy even to risque the wretchedness of losing all situation in the world for the sake of living with a man one loves, and then to lose both companion and consolation? When I lost Mr. Thrale, every one was officious to comfort and to soothe me; but which of my children or quondam friends would look with ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... "the other night I had d.t.—just a mild attack. Ask any doctor and he'll tell you about it. Those things I said to you I didn't say, really. They were just lunacy. There was an Indian student at the hospital who used to assure us solemnly that delirious or drugged or drunk people were possessed by the spirits of dead folks; drunkards by drunkards' spirits who wanted drink so badly they got into living bodies to satisfy their craving that even death ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... Delphine de Father Goriot The Thirteen Eugenie Grandet Cesar Birotteau Melmoth Reconciled Lost Illusions A Distinguished Provincial at Paris The Commission in Lunacy Scenes from a Courtesan's Life The Firm of Nucingen Another Study of Woman A Daughter of ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... man of sense, the lunatic and the man of genius, there are degrees—streaks—of idiocy and lunacy. How many expectant politicians elected to Congress have entered Washington all hope, eager to dare and do, to come away broken in health, fame and fortune, happy to get back home—sometimes unable to get away, to linger on in obscurity and poverty to a squalid and wretched ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... a powerful drug. There came, amongst other evils, materialism and covetousness and irreligion; overweening arrogance, an impatient contempt for the rights of the weak, a mania for world dominion, and a veritable lunacy of power worship. There came also a fixed and irrational distrust of the intentions of other nations, for the evil which had crept into their own souls made them see evil in others, and that distrust was nurtured carefully and deliberately by ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... others whom I may call the Precedenters; who flourish particularly in Parliament. They are best represented by the solemn official who said the other day that he could not understand the clamour against the Feeble-Minded Bill, as it only extended the principles of the old Lunacy Laws. To which again one can only answer "Quite so. It only extends the principles of the Lunacy Laws to persons without a trace of lunacy." This lucid politician finds an old law, let us say, about keeping lepers in quarantine. ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... not insisting that all books admitted should be models of style; even a purist must admit that one of the greatest charms of literature is its infinite variety. But when book after book is filled with such specimens of literary lunacy as this, one is tempted to believe that Homer and Shakespeare, to say nothing of Thackeray and Hawthorne, have ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... change in their constitution, and Prussia has put an army into readiness, for marching, at a moment's warning, on the frontier of Poland. These events are too recent, to see, as yet, what turn they will take, or what effect they will have on the peace of Europe. So is that also, of the lunacy of the King of England, which is a decided fact, notwithstanding all the stuff the English papers publish, about his fevers, his deliriums, &c. The truth is, that the lunacy declared itself almost at once, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... gaped at this local magnate in wonder, and thought that sudden lunacy had seized him. He blurted out, "Surely, Mr. J——, you have not lost your ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... Swift's way. He has been called an inverted hypocrite, as one who makes himself out worse than he is. I should rather call him an inverted idealist, for, with high hopes and generous expectations, he entered into the world, and lacerated by rage at the cruelty, foulness, and lunacy he there discovered, he poured out his denunciations upon the crawling forms of life whose filthy minds were well housed in their apelike and corrupting flesh—a bag of loathsome carrion, animated by ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... him?" On the eve of the battle of Copenhagen he wrote to her, "Before you receive this, all will be over with Denmark. Either your Nelson will be safe, and Sir Hyde Parker victor, or your own Nelson will be laid low." What deep and genuine love-lunacy to be found in a terrific warrior, whose very name terrified those who had the honour to fight against him! The incongruity of it baffles one's belief, and seems to reverse the very order of human construction. In matters concerning his profession and highly ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... been,' exclaimed Thomas Idle, casting up his eyes, 'over a lunatic asylum! Not content with being as great an Ass as Captain Barclay in the pedestrian way, he makes a Lunacy ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... Katharine," he resumed, with a change of voice, "to ask you to forget my folly, my bad temper, my inconceivable behavior. I came, Katharine, to ask whether we can't return to the position we were in before this—this season of lunacy. Will you take me back, Katharine, ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... a toy, an absurd and pitiful toy. Real genius and lunacy had many an over-lapping line, Jerry reflected as he approached to look inside. But he found Winslow in a room surrounded by a network of curving, latticed struts. The machine was no makeshift of a demented ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... of nourishment, and purged from the spleen"; Gk. melancholia, black bile. See Sams. Agon. 600, "humours black That mingle with thy fancy"; and Nash's Terrors of the Night (1594): "(Melancholy) sinketh down to the bottom like the lees of the wine, corrupteth the blood, and is the cause of lunacy." ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... just strong enough to make him a visible object; for, suddenly, ping! something hit him violently on the leg and bowled him over like a rabbit into a providential shell-hole. And there he lay quaking for a long time, while the lunacy of his adventure coarsely ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... which is extended beyond common effects, or comprises many intermediate operations. Many that presume to laugh at projectors, would consider a flight through the air in a winged chariot, and the movement of a mighty engine by the steam of water as equally the dreams of mechanick lunacy; and would hear, with equal negligence, of the union of the Thames and Severn by a canal, and the scheme of Albuquerque, the viceroy of the Indies, who in the rage of hostility had contrived to make Egypt a barren desert, by turning the Nile into ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... illustrated during the past forty years in the flourishing county of Glamorgan in Wales, as is shown by Dr. R.S. Stewart ("The Relationship of Wages, Lunacy, and Crime in South Wales," Journal of Mental Science, January, 1904). The staple industry here is coal, 17 per cent of the population being directly employed in coal-mining, and wages are determined by the sliding scale as ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... Mercy, and (let philosophers and theologians explain it as they may) instantaneous peace of mind followed the sight, or fancied sight, of that noon-tide star! The load was removed which threatened to crush my brain into lunacy, the "salt surf waves of bitterness" were stilled, and within me there ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... swung themselves from their saddles, at last bowed to me. They were a little pale, but quite collected. "Excellency," they said, "forgive him; it is not his fault. He has been frightened into semi-insanity." "Hsia hu-tu-lo," they said. Yes, that is the phrase, frightened into semi-lunacy. They are employing this for everyone. The tragedy has been so immense, the strain has been endured for so many months, there has been so much of it, that all minds excepting those of the common people have become a little unhinged. Half the time you speak to men you are not understood; they ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... description of Menou see the Memoirs of Marmont:— "Clever and gay, he was an agreeable talker, but a great liar. He was not destitute of some education. His character, one of the oddest in the world, came very near to lunacy: Constantly writing, always in motion in his room, riding for exercise every day, he was never able to start on any necessary of useful journey. . . . When, later, Bonaparte, then First Consul, gave him by special favour the administration of Piedmont, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... this as a mild form of lunacy, and have no disposition to debate with men who indulge in such delusions, which have prevailed to some extent, at different times, in all countries, but whose life has been brief, and which have ever shared the fate of other popular delusions. ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... and then invite four or five comrades, all arrayed in much warlike impedimenta, but lacking more extra covering than a waterproof sheet each, to the hole to spend two nights and a day in it—I should be credited with lunacy. Yet I should be offering a fair sample of front-line accommodation during the ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... always were, and will be; but, Betsy, I have this wery momink fixed him up with a shoehorn in his mouth, as was lying round providential, and the strings of my bonnet, and the last word as he will say this blessed night was some lunacy about "denouncing the clogeure," as won't give ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... cry, For vice, oppression, and for tyranny. What standard is there in a fickle rout, Which, flowing to the mark, runs faster out? Nor only crowds but Sanhedrims may be Infected with this public lunacy, And share the madness of rebellious times, To murder monarchs for imagined crimes. 790 If they may give and take whene'er they please, Not kings alone, the Godhead's images, But government itself at length must fall ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... in the cause of education in the State, as president of the board of education, and in visiting schools and colleges for personal inspection. He also carefully watched over the several State institutions for correction, for reform, and for lunacy and charity, encouraging, as opportunity offered, both officers and inmates, and, at the same time, unsparing in merited ...
— Bay State Monthly, Volume I, No. 2, February, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... well-known symptom of solitary confinement; it is by shattering a man's nerves all to pieces that it prepares the way for his death, which death comes sometimes in raging lunacy, of which eight men have died under Mr. Hawes's reign. Here is the list of deaths by lunacy from breach of Rule 37, eight. You will have the particulars by ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... she?" said Andrew. He dropped into a chair and looked at his wife. There was something about the intense interchange of confidence of delight between these two faces of father and mother which had almost the unrestraint of lunacy. Andrew's jaw fairly dropped with his smile, which was a silent laugh rather than a smile; his eyes were wild with delight. "She has, ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... wandered and I spoke Thus unto myself. How strange! Lunacy itself sits there Singing on ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine
... tennis, she suddenly, muttering her strange language and dancing new corroboree steps, clad only in her black skin, came up. Matah told her to go away, but she only corroboreed round him and said she wanted to see me. I have the most morbid horror of lunacy in any form. I was once induced to go over a lunatic asylum—the horror of it haunts me still. However, I thought it would never do to show the coward I was, so though I felt as if I had been scooped out and filled up with ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... terms in which every one who has mastered the peculiarities of the Otto speaks of it would be considered as evidence in its favor, if we were not all considered by other cyclists to be in various stages of lunacy. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 447, July 26, 1884 • Various
... feeling that the whole affair was stark lunacy. Here were we three simpletons sitting in a London flat and projecting a mission into the enemy's citadel without an idea what we were to do or how we were to do it. And one of the three was looking at the ceiling, and whistling softly through his teeth, and another was playing Patience. The farce ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... through which I and my two comrades contributed materially to his relief, as an illustration of that infirmity which besieges the nervous system of our nation. It is a sensitiveness which sometimes amounts to lunacy, and sometimes even tempts to suicide. It is a mistake, however, to suppose this morbid affection unknown to Frenchmen, or unknown to men of the world. I have myself known it to exist in both, and particularly in a man that might be said to live in the street, such was ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... if, having got an aim on a soldier's baby, they had started to pick off its hands and feet, saying to the soldier: "Yield, or we will finish your baby." Either the military ratiocination is thus, or the deed is simple lunacy. ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett
... strictly correct in saying that in half a century, while the population increased by seventy-five per cent., lunacy had increased by two hundred ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... and a desperado's egotistical ambition. The apparatus of infernal cruelty, the dead man's hand, the semblances of murdered sons and husband, the masque of madmen, the dirge and doleful emblems of the tomb with which she is environed in her prison by the torturers who seek to goad her into lunacy, are insufficient to disturb the tranquillity and tenderness of her nature. When the rope is being fastened to her throat, she does not spend her breath in recriminations, but turns ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... to state here, as an act of justice to others, and to save myself from the charge of lunacy, that the Markerstown was a mere interloper. Our covetous, good old uncle had set his eye on the regular steamer of the line, and his greedy fingers had taken her away to Dixie, where her decks were now swarming with blue coats ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... becomes Enormous! My house is at this moment virtually ready for patients. Patients may present themselves in a week's time. Patients may communicate with Mr. Armadale, or Mr. Armadale may communicate with patients. A note may be smuggled out of the house, and may reach the Commissioners in Lunacy. Even in the case of an unlicensed establishment like mine, those gentlemen—no! those chartered despots in a land of liberty—have only to apply to the Lord Chancellor for an order, and to enter (by heavens, to enter My Sanitarium!) and search the house ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... Mr. Parris. The man was surely more than mortal. His voice, hollow and sepulchral, seemed to issue from the tomb. His thin, cadaverous face was sufficient in itself to inspire wonder. Those great, blazing eyes had within them all the fires of lunacy, fanaticism and cunning. Mr. Parris was nothing more than an unscrupulous bigot. He was ambitious, as is proven by his machinations in getting himself declared the pastor of Salem. He was greedy, as is shown by his taking the parsonage and lands as well as demanding an increase in ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... indications of lunacy. He marched up to the road-gate, and stood close to it, so that the barbed wire top was even with his hair; then he backed off, and gazed first at the gate, then at the bewildered Hicks, while he grinned at the dazed squad ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... of intense low speech, crowded with gestures: and suddenly the Captain's face, till now haggard, reddened; out went his shaken fist; with eyes blazing like lunacy, up he flew to the bridge; and now he is bending down with howling ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... to allow of men raising their heads above the water, there, 5 for scores of acres, were to be seen all forms of ghastly fear, of agonizing struggle, of spasm, of death, and the fear of death—revenge, and the lunacy of revenge—until the neutral spectators, of whom there were not a few, now descending the eastern side of the lake, at length 10 averted their eyes in horror. This horror, which seemed incapable of further addition, was, ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... accepted the whole Christian dogma, but conceived himself to be the second embodiment [of Christ], and proclaimed himself as such and summoned the missionaries to acknowledge him." It sounds much like blasphemy, or mere lunacy; but in India one learns not to be shocked at what in Europe would be rankest blasphemy; the intention must decide the innocence or the offence. Hakim Singh "professed to work miracles, preached pure morality, but also venerated the cow,"—strange ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... the most criminal act of this generation. Germany has nothing but friendship for England. I ask you, what British interests are threatened by this inevitable clash between the Slav and the Teuton? It is miserable enough for France to be dragged in. It would be lunacy for England. Therefore, though it is true that serious matters are pending, though, alas! I must return at once to see what help I can afford my country, never for a moment believe, any of you, that there exists the slightest chance of war between ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
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