"Incest" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... descriptions of the erratic conduct of Messalina, with her extravagant lewdness (XI. 26-8), Nero, with his abominable pollutions (XVI. 37), and that Emperor's mother, Agrippina, with her monstrous incest (XIV. 2). These matters, even if true of the ancient Romans in the first century of our aera, Tacitus, we may be certain, would have avoided as not coming within the scope of the historian's province, and as being altogether ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... supper or a glass of beer—though afterwards they claim it was champagne—all take delight in contemplating that you, or any other good looking royal woman, are Frankenstein's succuba or worse. Didn't they accuse your grand-aunt, Marie Antoinette, of incest with her son and gave him to the cobbler to thrash the immorality ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... of excesses Are the effects of love, forgive them Easily; and, therefore, pleasure Following tears, some consolation In her miseries was effected; Though, in fact, they were so great, That united in one person She saw violence, violation, Incest, nay, adultery even, Against God who was her spouse, And a sacrilege most dreadful. Finally we left that place, Being carried to Valencia By two steeds that well might claim From the winds to be descended: Feigning that she was my wife, ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... planet entered into a sign, they made of this conjunction a marriage, an adultery, an incest.* Having said that the planet was hid or buried, when it came back to light, and ascended to its exaltation, they said that it had died, risen again, was carried into ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... made in the shape of a thing they name a Cross, Said to be blest and Sanctyfyed by the poluted words and hands of a wretched priest, a Spawn of the whore of Babylon, who is a Monster of Nature and a Servant to the Devill, Who for a Riall will pretend to absolve them from perjury, Incest and parricide, and Cannonize them for Cruelties Committed to we Herreticks, as they stile us, and Even Rank them in the Number of those Cursed Saints who by their Barbarity have Rendered their Names Immortall and Odious to all ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various
... gave you entrance to Antonia's chamber; It was I who caused the dagger to be given you which pierced your Sister's bosom; and it was I who warned Elvira in dreams of your designs upon her Daughter, and thus, by preventing your profiting by her sleep, compelled you to add rape as well as incest to the catalogue of your crimes. Hear, hear, Ambrosio! Had you resisted me one minute longer, you had saved your body and soul. The guards whom you heard at your prison door came to signify your pardon. But I had already triumphed: My plots had already succeeded. Scarcely ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... did Amnon, craftily Feigning to eat of cakes of rye, Deflower his sister fair to see, Which was foul incest; and hereby Was Herod moved, it is no lie, To lop the head of Baptist John For dance and jig and psaltery; Good luck has he ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... shalt recognise on the altar the unbloody sacrifice of the Body and Blood of Christ: thou shalt beseech the blessed martyrs and all the saints to intercede with Christ on thy behalf: thou shalt restrain womanish apostates from unnatural vice and public incest: thou shalt do many things that thou art undoing, and wish undone much that thou art doing. Furthermore, I promise and undertake to show, when opportunity offers, that the Synods of other ages, and notably the ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... is the connexion thus formed deemed in the Greek Church, that a marriage between god-parents of the same child is regarded as the worst kind of incest, is considered illegal, and is dissolved by law; and this absolute prohibition extends even to the children of one of the sponsors as regards those of ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... polyandry. There is a general community of women and of men, but also a community of children, Strabo reports (sixty-six years before our reckoning) that, among the Arabians, brothers cohabited with sisters and with their own mother. On any route other than that of incest, the increase of population is nowhere possible, if, as alleged in the Bible also, descent from one couple is granted. The Bible itself contradicts itself on this delicate point. It is stated there that Cain, after he had murdered his brother ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... corruption. But he will not admit it is in himself. He creeps about in self-conceit, transforming his own self-loathing. With what satisfaction did he reveal corruption—corruption in his neighbours he gloated in—letting his mother know he had discovered her incest, her uncleanness, gloated in torturing the incestuous King. Of all the unclean ones, Hamlet was the uncleanest. But he accused only ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... 'Aeolus,' Macareus violates his own sister; in 'The Clouds,' this incest, which Euripides introduced upon ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... having entertained a criminal passion for her father, Nycteus, the Gods, to punish her incest, transform her into an owl. Apollo pierces the breast of Coronis with an arrow, on the raven informing him of the infidelity of ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... meetings in the dark, killed young babes, fed themselves with men's flesh, and, like savage and brute beasts, did drink their blood? in conclusion, how that, after they had put out the candles, they committed adultery between themselves, and without regard wrought incest one with another: that brethren lay with their sisters, sons with their mothers, without any reverence of nature or kin, without shame without difference; and that they were wicked men without all care of religion, and without any opinion of ...
— The Apology of the Church of England • John Jewel
... placed them in that invidious position. They were practically without any defence. They were ignorant, poor, and half-starved. Thriftless, like their landlords, they ate up in the autumn what harvests they gathered, and begged for their winter's support. Adultery and incest were common and bred a body of lawless creatures, who herded together like wild beasts and became ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... judgit by the fruit," (as Christ Jesus affirmeth, that it must be,) than of necessitie it is that your Prelattis, and the hole rable of thair clergie, be evill treeis. For yf adultrie, pryde, ambitioun, dronknes, covetousnes, incest, unthankfulnes, oppressioun, murther, idolatrie, and blasphemye, be evill fructis, thare can none of that generatioun, whiche clame to thame selfis the title of Churche men,[782] be judged gud treeis; for all these pestilent and wicked fruittis do they bring furth in greittest habundance: ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... Ismail, but who had secretly returned to his allegiance and acted as a spy on the Imperial army, was deputed to treat with him. As soon as he arrived, Ali began to enact a comedy in the intention of rebutting the accusation of incest with his daughter-in-law Zobeide; for this charge, which, since Veli himself had revealed the secret of their common shame, could only be met by vague denials, had never ceased to produce a mast unfavourable impression on Noutza's ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... castell in Wales for his safetie, Aurelius and Vter both brethren returne into Britaine, they assalt the vsurper Vortigerne, and with wildfire burne both him, his people, his fort, and all the furniture in the same, Vortigerne committeth incest with his owne daughter, feined and ridiculous woonders of S. Germane, a sheepherd ...
— Chronicles 1 (of 6): The Historie of England 5 (of 8) - The Fift Booke of the Historie of England. • Raphael Holinshed
... fairly apply to women. Before marriage free intercourse between the sexes is the rule, though certain conventional precautions are taken to prevent it. Marriages rarely produce more than three children and often none at all. Divorce is rare, unfaithfulness after marriage not common and incest unknown. By preference the Andamanese are exogamous as regards sept and endogamous as regards tribe. The children are possessed of a bright intelligence, which, however, soon reaches its climax, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... food and clothing! As if whips, chains, thumb-screws, paddles, blood-hounds, overseers, drivers, patrols, were not all indispensable to keep the slaves down, and to give protection to their ruthless oppressors! As if, when the marriage institution is abolished, concubinage, adultery, and incest, must not necessarily abound; when all the rights of humanity are annihilated, any barrier remains to protect the victim from the fury of the spoiler; when absolute power is assumed over life and liberty, it will not be wielded with destructive ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass
... observed," replied Berkley coldly, "that those who are of kindred souls, rarely wed together; almost as rarely as those who are akin by blood. There seems, indeed, to be such a thing as spiritual incest. Therefore, mad lover, do not think to persuade thyself and thy scornful lady, that you have kindred souls; but rather the contrary; that you are much unlike; and each wanting in those qualities which most mark and distinguish the other. Trust me, thy courtship will then be more ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... storehouse of fearful and ferocious happenings; it was a catalogue, an inventory of disease, seduction, theft, robbery, larceny, assassination, murder, catastrophe, pest, incest, suicide, duel, bankruptcy, and the never ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... enough that delicate modesty, like a woman's, which had made it almost impossible for the Colonel to mention the affair, did not seem to trouble her. To live with another man's wife was in the Colonel's eyes a sin little short of incest, and more shocking than many kinds of murder. But his wife, with a deeper comprehension of the powers of her sex, of the appeal of woman to man, saw in it merely a weakness that threatened to become a family disgrace. When she found ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... moral offence charged upon him than that his sister could be guilty of inventing the story and then of perjuring herself to support it, we can but reply, that Lady Rocheford, wife of Anne Boleyn's brother, testified that Anne had been guilty of incest with that brother, and afterward, when about to die, admitted that she had perjured herself. Of the two offences, supposing Lady Richmond to have sworn away her brother's life, that of Lady Rocheford was by far the more criminal, and it is beyond all doubt. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... and filthiness, adultery, fornication, incest, bestiality, sodomy, lasciviousness, promiscuous dancing, stage plays, excessive drinking, vanity in apparel, and the like abominable unchastity and incentives to it. Much stealing, robbery and oppression, grinding the faces of ...
— The Auchensaugh Renovation of the National Covenant and • The Reformed Presbytery
... selfishness, vanities of everyday life. And therefore, come happiness or sorrow, the happiest man will be he within whom the greatest idea shall burn the most ardently. Had fate so desired it, Antoninus also, perhaps, had been guilty of incest and parricide; but his inward life would not have been crushed thereby, as was that of Oedipus; nay, these very catastrophes would have given him mightier strength, and destiny would have fled in despair, strewing the ground by the emperor's palace with her nets and her blunted weapons; ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... the crime and consequences of incest is so plain in 'Manfred,' that it is astonishing that any one can pretend, as Galt does, that ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... famous poetical curse "To the Lord Chancellor." While the poem stands as a masterpiece of lyric invective it did not mend matters for Shelley in England. In many of his other poems his detractors saw nothing but the glorification of revolution, incest, and atheism. When he wrote a satirical drama on so delicate a subject as the unhappy affairs of Queen Caroline, even his publisher turned against him. Yet the charm and beauty of Shelley's purely lyric pieces was such that he must ever stand as one of ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... crime of unlawfully knowing a girl under the age of sixteen years, even with consent. Assume that with her invitation the man committed himself. Go further, and establish the sin of incest. The latter sin ought to be totally ignored in dealing with the ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... ice upon an April morning. It was enough, he thought, to hurl the glove of defiance boldly at the tyrant's face—to sow the "Necessity of Atheism" broadcast on the bench of Bishops, and to depict incest in his poetry, not because he wished to defend it, but because society must learn to face the most abhorrent problems with impartiality. Gifted with a touch as unerring as Ithuriel's spear for the unmasking of hypocrisy, he strove to ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... practically all other animals have. (2) The number of young born in the human species is on the whole much smaller than in any other animal species. (3) The dependence of offspring upon parents is far longer in the human species than in any other species. (4) Man has an antipathy to incest or close inbreeding which seems to be instinctive. This is not found clearly in any animal species below man. (5) There is a tendency among human beings to artificial adornment during the period of courtship, but not to natural ornament to any extent, as among many animal species. (6) The ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... course, different from those established by the mediaeval church, and brother weds brother's widow in good archaic fashion. Foster-sister and foster-brother may marry, as Saxo notices carefully. The Wolsung incest is not noticed by Saxo. He only knew, apparently, the North-German form of the Niflung story. But the reproachfulness of ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... then the offense is still further multiplied and the guilt aggravated. Blood-relationship adds a specific malice of its own, slight or grievous according to the intimacy of said relationship. Fornication, adultery, sacrilege and incest—these, to give to things their proper names, are terms that specify various degrees of malice and guilt in this matter; and although they do not sound well or look well in print, they have a meaning which sensible folks should ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... pornography; pin-up, cheesecake; beefcake; Playboy[magazines with sexual photos], Esquire, Hustler. [unorthodox sexual activity] perversion, deviation, sexual abnormality; fetish, fetishism; homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexuality; sodomy, buggery; pederasty; sadism. masochism, sado-masochism; incest. V. mate, copulate; make love, have intercourse, fornicate, have sex, do it, sleep together, fuck[vulg.]; sleep around, play the field.. masturbate, jerk off[coll.], jack off[coll.], play with oneself. have the hots[coll]; become aroused, get hot; have an erection, get it up. come, climax, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... slight manner. Hence the law-maker's interference with his private life seems to him a customary and not too injurious encroachment on his individuality."[197] It thus comes about that a great many acts, of for the most part unquestioned immoral character—such as incest, the procuring of women for immoral purposes, and acts of a homosexual character—which, when adults are alone concerned, the French leave to be dealt with by the social reaction, are in Germany directly dealt with by the law. These things ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... serious charges included incest with his sister Pauline and his stepdaughter Hortense, and the poisoning of his plague-stricken soldiers ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... "a native of Mbau, who lived for some years near the Nanga, assured me that the visit of the women to the Nanga resulted in temporary promiscuity; all tabus were defied, and relations who could not speak to one another by customary law committed incest" (op. ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... that in her sanctuary on the Aventine she was represented by an image copied from the many-breasted idol of the Ephesian Artemis, with all its crowded emblems of exuberant fecundity. Hence too we can understand why an ancient Roman law, attributed to King Tullus Hostilius, prescribed that, when incest had been committed, an expiatory sacrifice should be offered by the pontiffs in the grove of Diana. For we know that the crime of incest is commonly supposed to cause a dearth; hence it would be meet that atonement for the offence should be made ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... indulge in abnormal ones. We should not be surprised, therefore, to find that the Puritans had an itching for the details of the morbid and the sensational. The nature of revelations seldom, if ever, grew too repulsive for their hearing, and if the case were one of adultery or incest, it was sure to be well aired. There was a possibility that if an offender made a thorough-going confession before the entire congregation or community, he might escape punishment, and on such occasions it would seem that the congregation ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... avoid marriages of consanguinity. Bowdich, indeed, assures us that a man may not look at nor converse with his mother-in-law, on pain of a heavy, perhaps a ruinous fine; "this singular law is founded on the tradition of an incest." ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... Promiscuity. Reformatory Movements. Incest. Relative harmfulness of such unions. Natural ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas
... "atheist!" which Byron had amiably struck out with his pen, the laureate caught at this and gave out that the two friends had declared themselves to be atheists. He attributed their friendship to infamous motives; he spoke of incest and of other abominations, so odious, that Byron's friends deemed it prudent not to speak to him a word of all this at the time. He only ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... as the Pope called it, brought against the infallible Pope seventy-two charges—the murder of Pope Alexander V, rape, adultery, sodomy, incest, simony, corruption, poisoning, denying the resurrection and ...
— John Hus - A brief story of the life of a martyr • William Dallmann
... add but one thing. There are many who set perilous snares for married folk, especially in case of incest; and when any one (for these things can happen, nay, alas! they do happen) has defiled the sister of his wife, or his mother-in-law, or one related to him in any degree of consanguinity, they at once deprive him of the right to pay the debt of matrimony, and nevertheless ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... Her husband, dissembling, earnestly demanded the cause of her smiling, and the explanation of the matter. Overcome by his entreaties, she answered: "The man to whose fold this ram belongs, has an adulterous wife, at this time pregnant by the commission of incest with his own grandson." The husband, with a sorrowful and dejected countenance, replied: "You deliver, indeed, an oracle supported by too much truth, which I have so much more reason to lament, as the ignominy ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... Hell; there hide thy Head lower than Darkness. Wou'd thou hadst been acting Incest, Murder, Witchcraft, when thou cam'st to pray: Thou hadst in any thing sinn'd less ...
— Representation of the Impiety and Immorality of the English Stage (1704); Some Thoughts Concerning the Stage in a Letter to a Lady (1704) • Anonymous
... of a wretched ancestress of mine, of whose crimes a black and fearful catalogue is recorded in a family history in my charter- chest. The recital of them would be too horrible; it is enough to say, that in yon fatal apartment incest and unnatural murder were committed. I will restore it to the solitude, to which the better judgment of those who preceded me had consigned it; and never shall any one, so long as I can prevent it, be exposed to a repetition of the supernatural horrors which could ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... still deeper remained a blind devoted superstition. Vitellozzo Vitelli, as Machiavelli tells us, while being strangled by Caeesar Borgia's assassin, implored his murderer to procure for him the absolution of that murderer's father. Gianpaolo Baglioni, who reigned by parricide and lived in incest, was severely blamed by the Florentines for not killing Pope Julius II. when the latter was his guest at Perugia. And when Gabrino Fondato, the tyrant of Cremona, was on the scaffold, his only regret was ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... said, whose gorbellied works I enjoy reading in the original, writing of incest from a standpoint different from that of the new Viennese school Mr Magee spoke of, likens it in his wise and curious way to an avarice of the emotions. He means that the love so given to one near in blood is covetously ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... a man who did not refrain from doing deeds of incest and murder, should be so scrupulous about violating an oath that ought never to have been sworn? You have thought that you were bound to go through with your engagement, because you had pledged yourself, although you know that it would ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... that it is unsafe to trust it to administer a government in accordance with republican ideas; for it acknowledges a higher law than even the human conscience, in the will of a person whom it professes to believe a vicegerent of Divinity, and in obedience to whom perjury, robbery, incest, and even murder, may be justifiable,—for his commands are those of Heaven. It is obvious that it is fruitless to anticipate fair dealing from a people professing such doctrines; and the result has shown, that, in transactions with Mormons, even under oath, no one who does ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... According to Augustine (Contra Faust. xxii, 43), Lot was to be excused from incest on ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... nearly of the age I have just mentioned,—a celebrated Speaker, whose genius may be easily decided from his Orations. For, among several others, we have a noble Speech of his for Ser. Fulvius, in a prosecution for incest. When we were children, it was esteemed the best then extant; but now it is almost overlooked among the numerous performances of the same kind which have been lately published."—"I am very sensible," replied Brutus, "to whom we are obliged for the numerous performances you speak of."—"And ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... the Divine Law. His appeal in these matters was neither to Moses nor to Tertullian, but to "the genius of the race which invented the Muses, and Chivalry, and the Madonna." And yet he disliked the "enfranchising measure" quite as keenly as the clergyman who wrote to the Guardian about incest, though indeed he expressed his dislike in a very different form. Here, as always and everywhere, he betook himself to his "sinuous, easy, unpolemical" method, and thereby made his repugnance to the proposed change felt and understood in quarters which ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... important change to consider. Again the rights of the patriarch have to be restricted; a bar has to be raised to prevent his adding his daughters to his wives. Only by overcoming this habit of paternal incest can further social evolution ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... took all the blame for the rift with Shelley upon herself and transferred the physical alienation to the break in sympathy with Godwin. That she turned these facts into a story of incest is undoubtedly due to the interest which she and Shelley felt in the subject at this time. They regarded it as a dramatic and effective theme. In August of 1819 Shelley completed The Cenci. During its progress he had talked over with Mary the arrangement of ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... greatest Grecian in strength of body, second only to his cousin Hercules, each reveling in the god-like antics of seduction, incest, ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... sexual conjunction; (illicit) fornication, bawdry; prostitution, putage; adultery; incest; rape; (unnatural) sodomy, buggery, pederasty; (of birds) tread. Antonyms: continence, chastity, virginity. Associated Words: venereal, incontinence, incontinent, unchastity, copulatory, gonorrhea, clap, syphilis, cenogamy, infibulation, intromittent, access, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... of Supremacy and Uniformity. It altered or amended the Statutes of Schools and Colleges; it claimed the right of deprivation of clergy and held them at its mercy; it passed from decisions upon heresy, schism, or nonconformity to judgment and sentence upon incest and similar crimes. It could fine and imprison at will, and employ any measures for securing information or calling witnesses. The result was that all nonconformists and all Puritans drew closer together under trial. Another result was that the Bible was studied ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... O dishonest wretch! Wilt thou be made a man out of my vice? Is't not a kind of incest to take life From thine own sister's shame? What should I think? Heaven shield, my mother play'd my father fair! For such a warped slip of wilderness Ne'er issued from his blood. Take my defiance; Die! perish! might but my bending down, Reprieve thee from thy fate, it should proceed. ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... Monmouth was much worse than the Comte de Guiche; because, although a bastard, he was the son of Madame's own brother; and this incest doubled the crime. Madame de Thiange, sister of Madame de Montespan, conducted the intrigue between the ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans
... utterly lacking.[3304] To abstain from eating human flesh, from killing useless or burdensome aged people, from exposing, selling or killing children one does not know what to do with, to be the one husband of but one woman, to hold in horror incest and unnatural practices, to be the sole and recognized owner of a distinct field, to be mindful of the superior injunctions of modesty, humanity, honor and conscience, all these observances, formerly unknown and slowly established, compose the civilization ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the forbidden fruit; for that had been done long before. It was not murder; for Cain had murdered his brother. It was not drunkenness; for Noah, though a preacher of righteousness, did get drunk. It was not incest; for Lot, another preacher of righteousness, committed that. It was not that of one brother selling his own brother as a slave, to be taken to a strange land; for Joseph's brethren did that, and lied ...
— The Negro: what is His Ethnological Status? 2nd Ed. • Buckner H. 'Ariel' Payne
... Son, Two Daughters, Two Mothers, A Grandfather, a Grandmother, a Granddaughter, An Uncle and an Aunt—their Niece follow'd after. This catalogue of persons mentioned here Was only five, and all from incest free. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 576 - Vol. 20 No. 576., Saturday, November 17, 1832 • Various
... of Northern and Central Australia are governed in their social life by marriage laws and class systems of the most intricate kind. It is generally supposed that these laws have for their object prevention of consanguinity and incest. The laws are strictly adhered to, any offender against them being punished by death. I owe the information on this subject to Mr. Stretch, who took great pains to make clear to me the fundamental principles, from which I have worked out the various combinations. ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... exercise of the law, perpetrated with impunity the wildest excesses of fantastic oppression and cruelty. In Auvergne alone, a report was made of more than three hundred of these independent nobles, to whom incest, murder, and rapine were the most ordinary ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... brooding dread, the pollution, the curses; the "insane and beastlike cruelty," as an ancient Greek commentator calls it, of piercing the exposed child's feet in order to ensure its death and yet avoid having actually murdered it (Schol. Eur. Phoen., 26); the whole treatment of the parricide and incest, not as moral offences capable of being rationally judged or even excused as unintentional, but as monstrous and inhuman pollutions, the last limit of imaginable horror: all these things take us back to dark regions of pre-classical and even pre-homeric belief. We have ...
— Oedipus King of Thebes - Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes • Sophocles
... me of my senses! And was Mrs Waters, then—but why do I ask? for thou must certainly know her—If thou hast any affection for me, nay, if thou hast any pity, let me beseech thee to fetch this miserable woman back again to me. O good Heavens! incest——with a mother! To what am I reserved!" He then fell into the most violent and frantic agonies of grief and despair, in which Partridge declared he would not leave him; but at last, having vented the ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... inclinations; whence it was that he had criminal conversation with his own sister; [10] from which occasion chiefly it was also that a bitter hatred first sprang up against him among the citizens, that sort of incest not having been known of a long time; and so this provoked men to distrust him, and to hate him that was guilty of it. And for any great or royal work that he ever did, which might be for the present and for future ages, ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... entirely from that of a male. She would rather be guilty of incest than reveal to a man the hidden thoughts which sometimes, without the least scruple, she will confide to another woman. Friendship between men is a very different thing. Something honest and frank, from which consequently they withdraw without anger, mutual obligation, or fear. Friendship ...
— The Dangerous Age • Karin Michaelis
... taboo is the central object of communal vengeance in primitive society. The most striking instance of such a taboo-breaker is the man or woman who disregards the prohibition against marriage within the kin—in other words, violates the law of exogamy. To be thus guilty of incest is to incite in the community at large a horror which, venting itself in what Bagehot calls a "wild spasm of wild justice," involves certain death for the offender. To interfere with a grave, to pry into forbidden mysteries, to eat forbidden meats, and so on, are further examples ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... utterly impersonal, and where incidentally he shows any human feelings they are as a rule far from creditable to him. He created the universe from mechanical instinct or blind desire, and committed or tried to commit incest with his daughter (the accounts are various). He has begotten both the gods and the demons, devas and asuras, who are constantly at war with one another. The gods, who are embodiments of "truth" (that is to say, correct knowledge of the law of ritual), have ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... crowded out of the active consciousness and have been relegated to the pseudo-dormant consciousness. This has been brought about by a "process of selection out of an infinity of possible elements solely on the grounds of utility." Thus the cause for our horror of incest is hidden away in our subliminal consciousness; yet we cannot but think, with Westermarck, that this instinct is but the result of natural selection,[102] the utility of the factor or factors occasioning ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... help it. The Canonists and Schoolmen were with me. 'Thou shalt not wed thy brother's wife.'—'Tis written, 'They shall be childless.' True, Mary was born, But France would not accept her for a bride As being born from incest; and this wrought Upon the king; and child by child, you know, Were momentary sparkles out as quick Almost as kindled; and he brought his doubts And fears to me. Peter, I'll swear for him He did believe the bond incestuous. But wherefore am I ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... her brother were to be tried on the following Monday. Their crime was not adultery only, but was coloured with the deeper stain of incest. On the Friday, while the other prisoners were at the bar, "Letters patent were addressed to Thomas, Duke of Norfolk, Treasurer and Earl Marshal of England, setting forth that the Lady Anne, Queen of England, ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... the highly concentrated essence of all conceivable wickedness. Theft, robbery, pollution, unbridled passion, incest, cruelty, cold-blooded murder, blasphemy, and defiance of the laws of God. It teaches children to disregard parental authority. It tears down the marriage altar, and tramples its sacred ashes under its feet. It creates and nourishes polygamy. ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... adultery is punished severely, often with death. Anything approaching the crime of incest, in which they include marriages out of the right line, they hold in the greatest abhorrence, closely assimilating in this last point with the North American Indians, of whom it is said in ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... you, under the sentence of death. We will and command you, upon sight hereof, to let the said prisoner depart to his own habitation, whether he stands condemned for murder, sodomy, rape, sacrilege, incest, treason, blasphemy, &c., for which this shall be your sufficient warrant. And it you fail hereof, G—d—mn you and yours to all eternity. And so we bid you heartily farewell. ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... Addressing the cardinal, Pasquin expresses his perplexity respecting the place where his Eminence will find an abode. The French dislike him so much, that they will have him neither as master nor as servant; the Italians know his tricks; the Spaniards cannot endure his rage; the Germans abhor incest; the English and Scotch hold him to be a traitor; the Turk and the Sophy are Mohammedans, while the cardinal believes in nothing! Heaven is closed against the unbeliever, the devils would be afraid to ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... a step leading up to the tribal stage of morality, and it may be that the idea of incest marks the social stage in which the moral sphere was conterminous with the family, corresponding to the institution of exogamy in the ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... After what manner he eats. Chast himself, and requires his Attendants to be so. He committed Incest, but such as was allowable. His Pride. How the People address to the King. They give him Divine Worship. Pleased with high Titles. An instance or two of the King's haughty Stomach. He slights the defection of one of his best Generals. He scorns to receive his own Revenues. The Dutch ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... are two sorts of madness, the one that which the revengeful Furies send privily from hell, as often as they let loose their snakes and put into men's breasts either the desire of war, or an insatiate thirst after gold, or some dishonest love, or parricide, or incest, or sacrilege, or the like plagues, or when they terrify some guilty soul with the conscience of his crimes; the other, but nothing like this, that which comes from me and is of all other things the most desirable; which happens as ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... down to the debauchery of a rich old man, and everything was believed except the truth. The father's sentiment for Marguerite had, in truth, so pure a cause that anything but a communion of hearts would have seemed to him a kind of incest, and he had never spoken to her a word which his daughter might not ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils
... case as strongly as I please. I will suppose a prince limited by laws like ours, yet running into a thousand caprices of cruelty like Nero or Caligula. I will suppose him to murder his mother and his wife, to commit incest, to ravish matrons, to blow up the senate, and burn his metropolis, openly to renounce God and Christ, and worship the devil. These and the like exorbitances are in the power of a single person to commit ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... Agrippina and the freedmen, who feared as well as hated her, than to accept the authority of Tacitus and Juvenal. On the death of Messalina, Agrippina married her uncle, and the Senate sanctioned the union, which was incest by ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... banquet, and she swore to be revenged on me. How she did so is mixed up with the history of a young man called Luigi Pulci, who had recently come to Rome. He was the son of one of the Pulcis, who had been beheaded for incest with his daughter; and the youth possessed extraordinary gifts for poetry together with sound Latin scholarship; he wrote well, was graceful in manners, and of surprising personal beauty; he had just left the service of some bishop, whose name I do not remember, and was thoroughly tainted ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... long tongue's gain is such. While Juno's watchman Ioe too much eyed, Him timeless[245] death took, she was deified. I saw one's legs with fetters black and blue, By whom the husband his wife's incest[246] knew: More he deserved; to both great harm he framed, The man did grieve, the woman was defamed. 50 Trust me all husbands for such faults are sad, Nor make they any man that hears them glad. If he loves not, deaf ears thou dost importune, Or if he loves, thy tale breeds his misfortune. ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... a sister of either. He may not marry his daughter, stepdaughter, or adopted daughter. He may not marry his sister, or his brother's widow, or a first cousin by blood or adoption. Sexual intercourse between persons in the above relations is considered incest, and does not often occur. The line of kin does not appear to be traced as far as second cousin, and between such there are ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... Lucretia in this fashion: Adultery and promiscuous intercourse were the fashion in Rome at the time of Alexander VI. Nobody thought anything of them. And to have accused the Borgia girl, or her relatives, of such inconsiderable lapses would have been to evoke mere shrugging. But incest, of course, was horrible. The writers paid by the party antagonistic to the Borgia growth in power therefore slung the more scurrile accusation. But there is, in truth, just about as much foundation for the charge as there is for the other, that Lucretia was a poisoner. The answer ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... This is little more than a dialogue depicting the attempted seduction of a maiden by a wanton cleric. The only other surviving fourteenth-century interlude, that of Dux Maraud, is, on the other hand, the dramatization of a tragic tale of incest and murder. This is, however, somewhat exceptional, and may perhaps be regarded as belonging rather to a type of miracle play not common in England, in which the intervention of some heavenly power affects the lives of men. At any rate, it is probable ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... same restraint which characterizes the style of "Mr. Incoul's Misadventure," a restraint seldom to be encountered in Saltus's later fictions. One of the angles of the plot in which an irate father attempts to suppress a marriage by suggesting incest, bobs up twice again in his stories, for the last time nearly thirty years later in "The Monster." Irony is the keynote of the work, a keynote sounded in the dedication, "To my master, the philosopher of the unconscious, Eduard ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... great majority of savages extend their idea of incest much further than we do. The reason of this has been much discussed. It was formerly said that consanguineous marriage was contrary to the commandments of God; that it offended the natural sentiment of modesty; that it obscures relationship, ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... transgresse the law. Howbeit, hee deliuered her vnto him, although they both refused as much as they could. Wherefore carying them to bed, they constrained the youth, lamenting and weeping, to lie down and commit incest with his brothers wife. To be short, after the death of their husbands, the Tartars wiues vse very seldome to marrie the second time, vnlesse perhaps some man takes his brothers wife or his stepmother in marriage. They make no difference ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... Prophet of Nazareth," by E.P. Meredith, notes, pp. 225, 226). Mr. Meredith then points out how in Rome, in Lyons, in Vienne, "the Christians were actually accused of murdering children and others—of committing adultery, incest, and other flagrant crimes in their secret lovefeasts. The question, therefore, arises—were they really guilty of the barbarous crimes with which they were so often formally charged, and for the commission of which they ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... same time enriching himself with plunder, the Pope being attended by the whole College of Cardinals with all their luxurious equipage. For it could not be supposed that he was withheld by any promptings of goodness or scruples of conscience; because in the breast of a profligate living in incest with his sister, and who to obtain the princedom had put his nephews and kinsmen to death, no virtuous impulse could prevail. So that the only inference to be drawn was, that men know not how to be splendidly wicked or wholly good, and shrink in consequence from such crimes as ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... is all very sad and pitiful, but that a man who defiled his profession of letters by the guilt of incest deserves to suffer. It is true that he confessed his guilt, but it is an open question whether he did so because he was guilty or because he feared an even heavier punishment if he denied it. For Domitian ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... sister, and after her death the bishop's court was proceeding to annul the marriage and bastardize the issue, the court of king's bench granted a prohibition quoad hoc; but permitted them to proceed to punish the husband for incest[e]. These canonical disabilities, being entirely the province of the ecclesiastical courts, our books are perfectly silent concerning them. But there are a few statutes, which serve as directories to those courts, of which it will be proper to take ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... takes away the eternity of punishment only, and not punishment itself; everyone must be punished or rewarded according to his works. He who will be soiled by a parricide or an incest will bear a chastisement different in pain and length to him who has not committed them; equality in expiatory suffering, in reparative pain, does ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... and the grammatical difficulties, the spectacle of the chorus chanting grotesquely, helping out protagonist and antagonist, masked and buskined, with the telling of incomprehensible parricides, of inexplicable incest, of gods faded beyond symbolism, of that Relentless Law we did not believe in for a moment, that no modern western European can believe in. We thought of the characters in the unconvincing wigs and costumes of our school performance. No Gilbert Murray had come as yet to touch ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... ruling power is asleep; then the wild beast within us, gorged with meat or drink, starts up and having shaken off sleep, goes forth to satisfy his desires; and there is no conceivable folly or crime—not excepting incest or any other unnatural union, or parricide, or the eating of forbidden food—which at such a time, when he has parted company with all shame and sense, a man may not be ready ...
— The Republic • Plato
... old man took his youngest daughter by the hand, and gave her to the wise prophet immediately for his wife, who without further ceremony took the damsel and deflowered her. Thus for some time they continued in acts of incest and adultery, until that period which made the fatal discovery, and introduced the bloody scene of ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt
... Cheerfulness, a twelfth Exercise, a thirteenth Sobriety, etc. They are elected to duties of that kind, each one to that duty for excellence in which he is known from boyhood to be most suitable. Wherefore among them neither robbery nor clever murders, nor lewdness, incest, adultery, or other crimes of which we accuse one another, can be found. They accuse themselves of ingratitude and malignity when anyone denies a lawful satisfaction to another of indolence, of sadness, of anger, of scurrility, of slander, and of lying, ...
— The City of the Sun • Tommaso Campanells
... this view of the matter has been further extended by the distinguished French sociologist, Durkheim. Investigating the origins of the prohibition of incest, and arguing that it proceeds from the custom of exogamy (or marriage outside the clan), and that this rests on certain ideas about blood, which, again, are traceable to totemism,—a theory which we need not here discuss,—Durkheim is brought face ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... disease, and he speaks unclean things from perfect inanition. The very concubine of so impure a wretch as Leigh Hunt would be to be pitied, but alas! for the wife of such a husband! For him there is no charm in simple seduction; and he gloats over it only when accompanied with adultery and incest. ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... miscellaneous orgie, a great burlesque ball, which allowed of every kind of union, especially between near kindred. According to those authors, who would make us groan with horror, the main end of the Sabbath, the explicit doctrine taught by Satan, was incest; and in those great gatherings, sometimes of two thousand souls, the most startling deeds were done ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... Uniformity fell within its cognizance. A right of deprivation placed the clergy at its mercy. It had power to alter or amend the statutes of colleges or schools. Not only heresy and schism and nonconformity, but incest or aggravated adultery were held to fall within its scope; its means of enquiry were left without limit, and it might fine or imprison at its will. By the mere establishment of such a court half the work ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... misery lies at his mother's door; it is her conduct that has put out the light of her son's life. She who had been to him the type of all excellence, she whom his father had idolized, has within a month of his death married his uncle, and is living in habitual incest—for as such, a marriage of the kind was then unanimously regarded. To Hamlet's condition and behaviour, his mother, her past and her present, is the only and sufficing key. His very idea of unity had ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... presumed offence. Mr Crawley belonged to the other party, and Mrs Proudie was a thorough-going partisan. I know a man,—an excellent fellow, who, being himself a strong politician, constantly expresses a belief that all politicians opposed to him are thieves, child-murderers, parricides, lovers of incest, demons upon earth. He is a strong partisan, but not, I think, so strong as Mrs Proudie. He says that he believes all evil of his opponents; but she really believed the evil. The archdeacon had called Mrs Proudie a she-Beelzebub; but that was a simple ebullition of mortal hatred. He believed ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... public. He speaks, as an eye-witness, of the processions, like those of a triumphing monarch. But the horrible stories were then still fresh at Rome of the late Pope Alexander and his children, the murder of his brother, the poisoning, the incest, and other crimes. Of the then Pope, Julius II., Luther heard nothing reported, except that he managed his temporal affairs with energy and shrewdness, made war, collected money, and contracted and dissolved, entered into and broke, political alliances. At the time of Luther's ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... bowers, Till lured by wealth the hardy Portuguese,[17] Seeks the green waters of his Eastern seas, And venturous nations more excursive grown, Scan his glad coast from radiant zone to zone, Then Fortune's minion in a foreign clime, Cursed by his own and damned to later time, Of incest born and by the chances thrown A tainted alien on a ravished throne, Gapes the foul flatteries of a fawning train, And fatuous mock'ries, which themselves disdain, A fancied monarch, but the witless sport ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... course brings out Ford's weakness, not merely in execution, but in design; not merely in accomplishment, but in the choice of means for accomplishment. Shakespere had no need of the haut gout of incest, of the unnatural horrors of the heart on the dagger. But Ford had; and he in a way (I do not say fully) justified his ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... poisoning a wife more criminal than the poisoning a whole hospital of wounded soldiers; or the assisting to kill some confined persons, suspected of being enemies, more atrocious than the massacre in cold blood of thousands of disarmed prisoners? Is incest with a sister more shocking to humanity than the well-known unnatural pathic but I will not continue the disgusting comparison. As long as Napoleon is unable to acquit himself of such barbarities and monstrous crimes, he has no right to pronounce Lucien unworthy to be called his brother; ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... against them; but in sleep it escapes the observation of people and the law, and, being as far as possible removed from fear or modesty, gives every passion play, and excites its depravity and licentiousness, for, to borrow Plato's expression,[217] "it attempts incest with its mother, and procures for itself unlawful meats, and abstains from no action whatever," and enjoys lawlessness as far as is practicable in visions and phantasies, that end in no complete pleasure or satisfaction, but can only stir up and inflame the passions ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... [FN198] Incest is now abominable everywhere except amongst the overcrowded poor of great and civilised cities. Yet such unions were common and lawful amongst ancient and highly cultivated peoples, as the Egyptians (Isis and Osiris), Assyrians and ancient Persians. Physiologically they are injurious only when ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... you say that you have not legislated personal virtue in America?" he asked. "You have laws, I believe, against theft and murder, and slander and incest, and ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... relapse in Fornication, or hath once fallen in Adultery, 26. Sabbaths, and these sins to be confessed both in one viz. in Sackcloth, Quadrilapse in Fornication and relapse in Adultery, three quarters of a Year, Incest or Murder a Year, or 52. Sabbaths, in case the Magistrate do not his duty in punishing such crimes capitally; They that fall in Fornication or relapses therein, are first to confesse their Sin before the Session, and thereafter before the Congregation; ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland
... discovered with regard to the infamy of his daughter, seems sufficient to exonerate his memory from so odious a charge. Besides, is it possible that he could have sent her into banishment for the infamy of her prostitution, while (upon the supposition of incest) she was mistress of so important a secret, as that he himself had been more criminal with her than any other man ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... bed with my husband but I wished myself in the arms of his brother; and though his brother never offered me the least kindness that way after our marriage, but carried it just as a brother out to do, yet it was impossible for me to do so to him; in short, I committed adultery and incest with him every day in my desires, which, without doubt, was as effectually criminal in the nature of the guilt as if I had ...
— The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders &c. • Daniel Defoe
... phantoms, like a row of statues, Stood dull as in our temples, but she still Embraced me, while I shrunk from her, as if, In lieu of her remote descendant, I Had been the son who slew her for her incest.[25] Then—then—a chaos of all loathsome things Thronged thick and shapeless: I was dead, yet feeling— 160 Buried, and raised again—consumed by worms, Purged by the flames, and withered in the air! I can fix nothing further of my thoughts, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... from the social instincts, excepting in so far as the rule is grounded on the judgment of the community. How so many strange superstitions have arisen throughout the world we know not; nor can we tell how some real and great crimes, such as incest, have come to be held in an abhorrence (which is not however quite universal) by the lowest savages. It is even doubtful whether in some tribes incest would be looked on with greater horror, than would ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... drives out another: but above all things the man thus afflicted should be advised what madness love is: for of all the perturbations of the mind, there is not one which is more vehement; for, (without charging it with rapes, debaucheries, adultery, or even incest, the baseness of any of these being very blameable; not, I say, to mention these,) the very perturbation of the mind in love is base of itself, for, to pass over all its acts of downright madness, what weakness do not those very things which are ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... is the rigor][181] denies children begotten in Adultery or incest aliments, which tho harsh, condemning the innocent for the guilty, yet they think it may serve to deterre the parents ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... came upon the Stage, it was already known to all the audience. And the people, as soon as ever they heard the name of OEDIPUS, knew as well as the Poet, that he had killed his father by a mistake, and committed incest with his mother, before the Play; that they were now to hear of a great plague, an oracle, and the ghost of LAIUS: so that they sate, with a yawning kind of expectation, till he was to come, with his eyes pulled out, and speak a hundred or two of verses, ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... is a sort of rape and incest, a crime by which earth and man are made viler. If I had doubted of its influence on man I needed but to go to the Ural goldfields. A more drunken, murderous, brother-hating population than that of this district I have not seen in all Russia. It was a great sorrow to see ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... to their preserving an interest with their Creator, have constantly met with opposition. It was this which produced the premature death of John the Baptist. It was the cutting charge of adultery and incest, which excited the resentment of Herodias, who never ceased to persecute him, until she had accomplished his destruction. The same observation is equally applicable to the Jewish doctors, in their treatment of our blessed Lord and Saviour JESUS CHRIST. In the sudden martyrdom ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... the Puritans and the stage grew greater as the years went on. There were riotous excesses. The later comedy after Shakespeare was incredibly gross. The tragedies were shallow, they turned not on grave scenes of conscience, but on common and cheap intrigues of incest and murder. In the mean time, "the hatred of the Puritans for the stage was only the honest hatred of God-fearing men against the foulest depravity presented in poetic and dramatic forms." The Bible was laying ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... other things, his great and dreadful uncleanness of adultery and incest, his drunkenness, his dissembling both with God and men, and performing his promises, where his engagements were ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... League of Nations conceivable to us will be able to save us from war. Rend your hearts and not your armaments. Let us learn to look War in the face, and while the blood is cold, so that we may know what we are meaning to do. Let us put a moral taboo upon it, such as we have put upon parricide, or incest, or cannibalism. For certain, in those matters, the reason has put a sanction on the conscience. So will it in the matter of aggressive war. Side by side with that, as we now see, we must change the ...
— The Village Wife's Lament • Maurice Hewlett
... benefit, to outrage natural and Christian morality? Was it morally lawful, for the purpose of loading with furs the Quebec stores and the Rochelle ships, to instil into the Indian veins the accursed poison which inflamed them to theft, rape, incest, murder, suicide—all the frightful frenzy of bestial passion. As it was practised, the liquor traffic could have no other result. A powerful consensus of evidence established this truth above all discussion. For ...
— The Great Intendant - A Chronicle of Jean Talon in Canada 1665-1672 • Thomas Chapais
... Lot. Ammon and Moab derived their origin from the nephew of Abraham, not from the patriarch himself, the ancestor of Ammon being Ben-Ammi, "the Son of Ammi," the national god of the race. It was said that the two peoples were the offspring of incest, and the cave was pointed out where they had been born. Ammon occupied the country to the north which in earlier days had been the home of the aboriginal Zuzini or Zamzummim. But they had been treated as the Canaanites were treated by the Israelites in later days; their cities were captured ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... as chiefs, nor have they anything to say in the council. A chief would be deposed for any conduct causing general disgust or dissatisfaction, such as incest (marrying within his gens) or lack of generosity. Though crime in the abstract would not tend to create dissatisfaction with a chief, yet if he murdered, without sufficient cause, one whose kindred were numerous, a fight between the two bodies of kindred would result ...
— Siouan Sociology • James Owen Dorsey
... of the French epics, we lay no stress on the story of his incest with his sister, Gilain, "whence sprang Roland." The House of Thyestes, whence Agamemnon sprang, is marked by even blacker legends. The scandal is mythical, like the same scandal about the King Arthur, who in romance is so much inferior to his knights, a reflection of feudal jealousies and hatreds. ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... in the extreme, buried in vice, and of all nations the most ignorant of the rudiments of the faith." In support of this severe censure, he accuses the Irish of "despising matrimony, of being addicted to incest, of refusing to pay tithes, and of totally neglecting attendance at Church." In another place he writes, that the people in many districts continued still to be pagans, through the indifference of the clergy. St. Bernard draws a picture ...
— Pope Adrian IV - An Historical Sketch • Richard Raby
... assertion which has been established, in this way—"If she has had a child, she has laid with a man. But she has had a child." This then is established. "Therefore she has lain with a man." If you are unwilling to draw this inference, and prefer inferring what follows, "Therefore she has committed incest," you will have terminated your argumentation but you will have missed an ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... of Herakles, which line we may well apply to Kimon according to the account of him given by Stesimbrotus. While he was still young he was accused of incest with his sister. Indeed Elpinike is not recorded as having been a respectable woman in other respects, as she carried on an intrigue with Polygnotus the painter; and therefore it is said that when he painted the colonnade which was then called the Peisianakteum, ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... me to pay you a compliment, I will tell you that you are pretty enough to make incest legitimate." "What a barbarian!" murmured Laura, half laughing, ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... film before her eyes. There was a gaunt priest, with canonical robes, stood before the gates of heaven. Before him and through him was the way to an eternal happiness, below him was a fiery hell; and he shouted with hoarse voice, Incest, incest, incest!—And ever as he shouted, he pointed with his finger of scorn at this Christian hell, and she conjured up in her mind the old stories of this priest, until she saw the livid flames rising up higher till they encircled her form, and then the priest screamed with fury, Anathema ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... a blaze of light for me to see any chance of escape or mitigation. Even if Evelyn were the daughter of Alice by another, she would be forever separated from me. The mother and the child! there is a kind of incest even in that thought! But such an alleviation of my anguish is forbidden to my reason. No, poor Alice, I will not disturb the repose thou hast won at last! Thou shalt never have the grief to know that our error ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... blame me, Cecile: I felt for you a friendship dating from childhood, one of those fraternal friendships which impart to the love which springs from them a disquieting appearance of incest.'" ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... consultation with her legal advisers demanded a separation from her husband. It is a matter of common knowledge that in 1869 Mrs Beecher Stowe affirmed that Lady Byron expressly told her that Byron was guilty of incest with his half-sister, Mrs Leigh; also that in 1905 the second Lord Lovelace (Lord Byron's grandson) printed a work entitled Astarte which was designed to uphold and to prove the truth of this charge. It is a fact that neither Lady Byron ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... lighter and requiring less of experience, are given to the little boys, the 'controversiae' to the bigger lads. But—oh heavens, what they are—what miserable compositions!" Then he tells us the subjects selected. Rape, incest, and other horrors are subjected to the lads for their declamation, in order that they may ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... repentance in its bitterest shape. When the prophet Nathan reproved him for the murder of Uriah, he confessed his sin with tears, fell on his face before God, bravely accepted the most terrible punishment: incest and murder in his family, the rebellion and death of his son, treason, misery, and a desperate flight in the woods; and with what urgency he implores for pardon in the 'Miserere,' with what love and contrition he cries to the God ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... believed to have been mainly due to the heroic conduct of a young slave, who, presented of his own free will to the torture, bore the anguish of the rack, the scourge and the fire without uttering a word that might incriminate his master.[840] The free employment of such methods in trials for incest throws a grave doubt on the value of the judgment which they elicited; and, when a court is established for the purpose of appeasing the popular conscience, a part at least of its conduct may be easily suspected of being preordained. Cassius's rigour in this matter was thought ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... always wrought his conclusions. Arbaces has failed, and the piece of luck which keeps his failure innocent is rejected by every right-feeling spectator. In one of John Ford's tragedies, the situation which in A King and No King is only apparent, becomes real, and incest is boldly made the subject of the play. Ford pushed the morbid and unnatural in character and passion into even wilder extremes than Beaumont and Fletcher. His best play, the Broken Heart, is a prolonged and ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... together. But, if all tales were true, she had no reason to regard him as a very faithful husband or a blameless man. She may not have known (for nobody but Merlin apparently did know) the early and unwitting incest of the King and his half-sister Margause; but the extreme ease with which he adopted her own treacherous foster-sister, the "false Guinevere," and his proceedings with the Saxon enchantress Camilla, were very strong "sets off" to her own conduct. Also she had a most disagreeable[37] ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... which worship is twofold; viz. spiritual, consisting in devotion of the mind to God; and corporal, consisting in sacrifices, oblations, and so forth. Now men are hindered in the spiritual worship by sins, whereby men were said to be polluted, for instance, by idolatry, murder, adultery, or incest. From such pollutions men were purified by certain sacrifices, offered either for the whole community in general, or also for the sins of individuals; not that those carnal sacrifices had of themselves the power of expiating sin; but that they signified that expiation of sins which was ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... denied, indeed, that he had any thought the child would perish, and declared he intended it as a present to a gentleman at whose gate it was laid; butas he appeared to be a hardened miscreant, devoid of humanity, stained with the complicated crimes of tyranny, fraud, rapine, incest, and murder, very little credit is due to his declaration.—In the course of the same month, part of Westminster was grievously alarmed by a dreadful conflagration, which broke out in the house of a cabinet-maker near Covent-garden, raged with great fury, and reduced near twenty houses ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... morning, may be minus his head before sunset. Although a Persian would indignantly deny it, some of their punishments are nearly as cruel as the Chinese. For instance, not so very long ago a man in Southern Persia was convicted of incest, for which crime his eyes were first torn out with pincers, and his teeth then extracted, one by one, sharpened to a point, and hammered, like nails, through the top of his skull. It should be said in justice that the present Shah has done all he can to stop the torture system, and ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... Through many a labour'd tome, Rankly embalm'd in thy too natural pages. Faith, friend De Foe, thou art quite at home! Not one of thy great offspring thou dost lack, From pirate Singleton to pilfering Jack. Here Flandrian Moll her brazen incest brags; Vice-stript Roxana, penitent in rags, There points to Amy, treading equal chimes, The faithful ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... were from the South or the North: they only knew that they hated one another, and their father worse than all. They could not trace back their ancestry, without finding, at each descent, or rape, or incest, or parricide." Henry II. quarrelled with all his sons, and they all did him all the mischief they could, under the advice and direction of their excellent mother, whom Henry imprisoned. A priest once sought to effect a reconciliation between ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... descent of property, and from other still more recondite reasons; but I cannot accept this view, seeing that the savages of Australia and South America,[268] who have no property to bequeath or fine moral feelings to confuse, hold the crime of incest in abhorrence. ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... which my play is founded; the chief circumstance of which I have touched very delicately; for my principal doubt as to whether it would succeed as an acting play hangs entirely on the question as to whether any such a thing as incest in this shape, however treated, would be admitted on the stage. I think, however, it will form no objection; considering, first, that the facts are matter of history, and, secondly, the peculiar delicacy with which I have treated it. (In speaking ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... Heath, 313, 326. Whitelock, 528, 542. Journals, Nov. 19. Leicester's Journal, 129. The English judges were astonished at the spirit of litigation and revenge which the Scots displayed during the circuit. More than one thousand individuals were accused before them of adultery, incest, and other offences, which they had been obliged to confess in the kirk during the last twenty or thirty years. When no other proof was brought, the charge was dismissed. In like manner sixty persons were charged with witchcraft. These were also ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc |
