"Bacchanalian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in Maguesia, Calchis in the island of Euboea, and in Corinth, "the three fetters of the Hellenes." But the strength of the kingdom lay in Macedonia. In Greece proper all moral and political energy had fled, and the degenerate, but still intellectual inhabitants spent their time in bacchanalian pleasures, in fencing, and in study of the midnight lamp. The Greeks, diffused over the East, disseminated their culture, but were only in sufficient numbers to supply officers, statesmen, and schoolmasters. All ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... societie's honor, but also of the young students' good (for the advancing of whose piety and studies you have of late erected a magnificent chapel, and since that a library), that as you have prohibited by late publicke orders, all disorderly Bacchanalian Grand-Christmasses (more fit for pagans than Christians; for the deboisest roarers than grave civill students, who should be patternes of sobriety unto others), together with all publicke dice-play ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... guest-nights, or other tournaments of deep drinking, where Trojan and Tyrian met to do battle for the credit of their respective corps—the calm, rigid face, never flushing beyond a clear swarthy brown, and the cold, bright, inevitable eyes, had stricken terror into the hearts of bacchanalian Heavies, and given consolation, if not confidence, to the Hussars, who were failing fast: these knew that though their own brains might be reeling and their legs rebelliously independent, their single champion was invincible. As the last of the Enomotae went down, he saw ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... Nor in the pride of reason curse their God. When in the vaulted arch Lucina gleams, And gaily dances o'er the azure streams; On silent ether when a trembling sound Reverberates, and wildly floats around, Breaking through trackless space upon the ear, Conclude the Bacchanalian rustic near: O'er hills and vales the jovial savage reels, Fire in his head and frenzy at his heels; From paths direct the bending hero swerves, And shapes his way in ill-proportioned curves. Now safe arrived, his sleeping rib he calls, And madly thunders on the muddy ...
— Inebriety and the Candidate • George Crabbe
... to another class, which may be found in the same collection; I mean the bacchanalian. Men are invited here to sacrifice frequently at the shrine of Bacchus. Joy, good humour, and fine spirits, are promised to those, who pour out their libations in a liberal manner. An excessive use of wine, which injures the ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... of wild scenes telescoped themselves along the White Way, but the evening was yet young and would ripen toward fulfilment as the hours progressed. Its Bacchanalian zenith would be reached after the million lights of these gilded places had died—like the snuffing of a single candle—into the five minutes of darkness ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... attentive. Evoe! my mind trembles with recent dread, and my soul, replete with Bacchus, has a tumultuous joy, Evoe! spare me, Bacchus; spare me, thou who art formidable for thy dreadful thyrsus. It is granted me to sing the wanton Bacchanalian priestess, and the fountain of wine, and rivulets flowing with milk, and to tell again of the honeys distilling from the hollow trunks. It is granted me likewise to celebrate the honor added to the constellations by your ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... Philibert's approach, but long ere he reached the door of the Chateau, a din of voices within, a wild medley of shouts, song, and laughter, a clatter of wine-cups, and pealing notes of violins struck him with amazement and disgust. He distinguished drunken voices singing snatches of bacchanalian songs, while now and then stentorian mouths called for fresh brimmers, and new toasts were drunk ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... of punch was foaming in the centre, with beams of generous Port or Madeira radiating to it from each of the table corners. You got flustered, without knowing whence; tipsy upon words; and reeled under the potency of his unperforming Bacchanalian encouragements. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... any detriment to his reputation as a perfect gentleman, would seem, in these days, a ridiculous exaggeration. The learned profession of the law was certainly not behind any other learned profession in its Bacchanalian propensities; neither was Mr. Stryver, already fast shouldering his way to a large and lucrative practice, behind his compeers in this particular, any more than in the drier parts ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... of May, during which feasts are held, being come, he caused many companies to be formed of the plebeians and very lowest of the people, and to these, dignified with splendid titles, he gave colors and money; and while one party went in bacchanalian procession through the city, others were stationed in different parts of it, to receive them as guests. As the report of the duke's authority spread abroad, many of French origin came to him, for all of whom he found offices and emoluments, ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... any eminent wine-merchant in London, and to some common friend of acknowledged taste and experience.—Mr. Rochfort was chosen as the common friend of acknowledged taste and experience; and a fashionable wine-merchant was pitched upon to decide with him the merits of these candidates for bacchanalian fame. Sir Philip, who was just going to furnish his cellars, was a person of importance to the wine-merchant, who produced accordingly his choicest treasures. Sir Philip and Clarence tasted of all in their ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... paleness, which seemed the effect of care or of dissipation, or of both these wasting causes combined. His eyes were sunk and dim, as from late indulgence in revelry on the preceding evening, while his cheek was inflamed with unnatural red, as if either the effect of the Bacchanalian orgies had not passed away from the constitution, or a morning draught had been resorted to, in order to remove the ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... spirit of the East; and did they not live on the very boundary-line between the East and the West? As those institutions were propagated farther to the west, they lost their original character. We know what the Bacchanalian rites became at Rome; and had they been introduced north of the Alps, what form would they have there assumed? But to those countries it was possible to {39} transplant the vine, not the service of the god to whom ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield
... this bacchanalian revelry of Europe found entrance into our demurely well-behaved social world, woke us up, and made us lively. We were dazzled by the glow of unfettered life which fell upon our custom-smothered heart, pining for ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... drinking songs. At that time the tenor generally sang the melody, and, as in order to show on what foundation their work rested, the Flemings retained the original words in his part, it was not uncommon to hear the tenors singing some bacchanalian verses, while the rest of the choir were intoning the sacred words of a "Gloria" or an "Agnus Dei." These abuses lasted for an incredibly long time, but finally, in 1562, the cardinals were brought together for the purification of all churchly matters, and the Council ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... soldiers for their recent distress, the king conducted them for seven days in drunken bacchanalian procession through Karmania, himself and all his friends taking part in the revelry; an imitation of the jovial festivity and triumph with which the god Dionysus had marched back from the conquest of India. (Grote's 'History of Greece,' part ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... conclusion of their meals, to challenge one another to drink, and he who empties the greatest number of goblets, is held in highest esteem. As the Turks drink no wine, their presence was some restraint that day on their usual bacchanalian contests, and as we neither could nor would compete with them, we were held in great contempt. The king was about forty years old, and of large make, with a strong resemblance to the Tartar countenance. We parted ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... circumstance, it came about that Cimarosa, Paesiello, and Rossini fed the mystic, melancholy little boy, who was more than a little intoxicated by his draughts of the Asti spumante poured out for him, instead of milk, by these bacchanalian Satyrs, and the two lively, ingenuously, lasciviously smiling Bacchante of Naples and Catania—Pergolesi ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... Honoria, sister of the Emperor Valentinian, who, years before, in a fit of female spitefulness for having been banished to Constantinople, had sent her ring as a gage d'amour to the repulsive barbarian. He then retired to the Danube by the passes of the Alps, where he spent the winter in bacchanalian orgies and preparations for an invasion of the eastern provinces. But his career was suddenly cut off by the avenging poniard of Ildigo, a Bactrian or Burgundian princess, whom he had taken for one of his numerous wives, and whose relations he ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... gold ornaments;—nearly two hundred massive finger and earrings;—rich chains—thirty of these, if I remember;—eighty-three very large and heavy crucifixes;—five gold censers of great value;—a prodigious golden punch bowl, ornamented with richly chased vine-leaves and Bacchanalian figures; with two sword-handles exquisitely embossed, and many other smaller articles which I cannot recollect. The weight of these valuables exceeded three hundred and fifty pounds avoirdupois; and in this estimate I have not included one hundred and ninety-seven ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... others caper sideways, all keep steadily circling like dervishes; spectators applaud special strokes of skill; my approach only enlivens the scene; the circle enlarges, louder grows the singing, rousing shouts of encouragement come in, half bacchanalian, half devout, "Wake 'em, brudder!" "Stan' up to 'em, brudder!"—and still the ceaseless drumming and clapping, in perfect cadence, goes steadily on. Suddenly there comes a sort of snap, and the spell breaks, amid general sighing and laughter. And this not rarely and occasionally, ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... my mysteries. And all the female seed of the Cadmeans, as many as are women, have I driven maddened from the house. And they, mingled with the sons of Cadmus, sit on the roofless rocks beneath the green pines. For this city must know, even though it be unwilling, that it is not initiated into my Bacchanalian rites, and that I plead the cause of my mother, Semele, in appearing manifest to mortals as a God whom she bore to Jove. Cadmus then gave his honor and power to Pentheus, born from his daughter, who fights against the Gods as ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... 1904, revealed to many accustomed to overpraising Diaz and Fromentin the fact that Monticelli was their superior as a colourist, and a decorator of singularly fascinating characteristics, one who was not always a mere contriver of bacchanalian riots of fancy, but who could exhibit when at his best a justesse of vision and a ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... other seasons they "wandered from place to place, taking with them a veiled image or symbol of their goddess, and clad in women's apparel of many colours, and with their faces and eyes painted in female fashion, armed with swords and scourges, they threw themselves by a wild dance into bacchanalian ecstasy, in which their long hair was draggled through the mud. They bit their own arms, and then hacked themselves with their swords, or scourged themselves in penance for a sin supposed to have been committed against the goddess. In these scenes, got ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... being stamped out by the advancing steps of civilization, are the institutions which we can yet remember as so popular in the days of our childhood, called pleasure fairs. Like that social dodo in a higher section of society, the "three-bottle man," with the stupid Bacchanalian usages of which he was the embodiment, these fairs are slowly but surely disappearing as education spreads among the masses of the people. In the country a fair is a simple and a necessary thing enough. ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... found in Derbyshire;[161] the invention of an age less refined than the present, when we have heard of globular glasses and bottles, which by their shape cannot stand, but roll about the table; thus compelling the unfortunate Bacchanalian to drain the last drop, or expose ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... Benedict XII. was an enormous eater, and such a huge wine-drinker that he gave rise to the Bacchanalian expression, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... I'll bring thee, Herrick, to Anacreon, Quaffing his full-crown'd bowls of burning wine, And in his raptures speaking lines of thine, Like to his subject; and as his frantic Looks shew him truly Bacchanalian like, Besmear'd with grapes,—welcome he shall thee thither, Where both may rage, both drink and dance together. Then stately Virgil, witty Ovid, by Whom fair Corinna sits, and doth comply With ivory wrists his laureat head, and steeps His eye in dew of ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... men use their powers rightly than to tell them that they will lose their powers some day, the answer will always be, "Well, I will wait until that losing day comes before I worry." If you tell a young man that his life is short, the old bacchanalian answer is the first one, "Live while we live." You must somehow get hold of that, you must persuade him that the true life now is the holy life, that life, this same life that he prizes, ought to breed humility and ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... most admirable! I know not who is best portrayed—the god, Plump, reeling, wreathed with vine, in whom abides Something Olympian still, or the coarse Satyrs, Thoroughly brutish. Here I scarcely miss, So masterly the grouping, so distinct The bacchanalian spirit, your rich brush, So vigorous in color. Do you find The pleasure in this treatment equals ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... the grapes in my presence. There was to be an orgy, she said, a bacchanalian affair—she was going to place the grapes where she could look at them, and look at them until she could stand the sight no more, when she would fall on them like a wolf on the fold and devour them. She talked morbidly of the grapes—almost neurotically. ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... wish to strew sugar on bottled spiders, or try to make mystical divinity out of the Song of Solomon, much less out of the erotic and bacchanalian songs of Hafiz. Hafiz himself is determined to defy all such hypocritical interpretation, and tears off his turban and throws it at the head of the meddling dervis, and throws his glass after the turban. But the love or the wine of Hafiz is not to be confounded ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... of hope flickering on the altar of her heart, she threaded her way into one of those shambles where man is made such a thing as the beasts of the field would bellow at. She pressed her way through the bacchanalian crowd who were revelling there in their own ruin. With her bosom full of "that perilous stuff that preys upon the heart," she stood before the plunderer of her husband's destiny, and exclaimed in tones of startling anguish, "Give me back ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... movement, which for a time restored the early matriarchate. The women, at first opposing, presently became converts to the Dionysusian gospel, and were afterwards its warmest supporters. Motherhood became degraded. Bacchanalian excesses followed, which led to a return to the ancient hetairism. Bachofen believes that this formed a fresh basis for a second gynaecocracy. He compares the Amazonian period of these later days with that in which marriage was first introduced, and finds that "the deep religious impulse being ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... Zosimus, l. iii. p. 196. He might be edax, vino Venerique indulgens. But I agree with La Bleterie (tom. i. p. 148-154) in rejecting the foolish report of a Bacchanalian riot (ap. Suidam) celebrated at Antioch, by the emperor, his wife, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... probability, some other Christmas customs are adopted from the festivals of the ancients, as decking with evergreens and mistletoe (relics of Druidism) and the wassail bowl. It is not surprising, therefore, that Bacchanalian illustrations have been found among the decorations in the early Christian Churches. The illustration on the following page is from a mosaic in the Church of St. ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... hung three pictures from the famous Sansevero collection: a Holy Family by Leonardo da Vinci, a triptych by Perugino, and a Madonna by Correggio. Hardly less celebrated, but sharply at odds with the ecclesiastical subjects of the paintings, was the mantle, carved in a bacchanalian procession of satyrs and nymphs—a model said to have been made by ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... while the heretic, who had dared to deride their creed and denounce their hypocrisy, was regaling himself on dry bread in one of their dungeons. The bells rang out against each other with a wild glee as I paced my narrow floor. They seemed mad with intoxication of victory; they mocked me with a bacchanalian frenzy of triumph. Yet I smiled grimly, for their clamor was no more than the ancient fool's shout, "Great is Diana of the Ephesians." Great Christ has had his day since, but he in turn is dead; dead in man's intellect, dead in ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... served as a porter's lodge, and the old woman acted as portress. On a sudden, a pretty little creature, coming from the house, entered lightly and merrily the shop. This young girl was Rose-Pompon, the intimate friend of the Bacchanal Queen.—Rose-Pompon, a widow for the moment, whose bacchanalian cicisbeo was Ninny Moulin, the orthodox scapegrace, who, on occasion, after drinking his fill, could transform himself into Jacques Dumoulin, the religious writer, and pass gayly from dishevelled dances to ultramontane polemics, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... the company of merry mates, In spite of Temperance's if's and buts, So sure as Eating is set off with plates, His Drinking always was bound up with cuts! Howbeit, such Bacchanalian revels Bring very sad catastrophes about; Palsy, Dyspepsy, Dropsy, and Blue Devils, Not to forget the Gout. Sometimes the liver takes a spleenful whim To grow to Strasburg's regulation size, As if for those ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... a false lip worship; and, like Lord Byron's buccaneers, hold out to them a picture of their own empire, built only upon sensual or upon shadowy excellences. We find continually a false enthusiasm, a mere bacchanalian inebriation, on behalf of woman, put forth by modern verse writers, expressly at the expense of the other sex, as though woman could be of porcelain, whilst man was of common earthern ware. Even the testimonies of Ledyard ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... and boot-closet. On the right was the sleeping-room, and at the foot of a neat French bed I could perceive the wine bin, surrounded by a regiment of dead men{24} who had, no doubt, departed this life like heroes in some battle of Bacchanalian sculls. The principal chamber, the very penetrale of the Muses, was about six yards square, and low, with a rich carved oaken wainscoting, reaching to the ceiling; the monastic gloom being materially increased by two narrow loopholes, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... festal dances, and funeral dances, and military dances, and "mediatorial" dances, and bacchanalian dances. Queens and lords have swayed to and fro in their gardens; and the rough men of the backwoods in this way have roused up the echo of the forest. There seems to be something in lively and coherent sounds to evoke the movement of hand and foot, whether cultured or uncultured. Men passing ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... stroked my beard coaxingly with their hands, which they then kissed, and, crowding up with a boisterous show of affection, were about to fall on my neck in a heap, after the old Hebrew fashion. The priest, clamorous for more, followed with glowing face, and the whole group had a riotous and bacchanalian character, which I should never have imagined could spring from such a passion ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... intermingled; their faces, in which the old Roman fire scarcely flickers, brutalized with excess of every kind; their heads of dishevelled hair bound with coronals of leaves, while, from goblets of an antique grace, they drain the fiery torrent which is destroying them. Around the bacchanalian feast stand, lofty upon pedestals, the statues of old Rome, looking with marble calmness and the severity of a rebuke beyond words upon the revellers. A youth of boyish grace, with a wreath woven in his tangled hair, and with red and drowsy eyes, ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... subject to the King's pleasure. Upon the 25th April, he entertained a select circle of friends at his hotel in Amsterdam, and then embarked at midnight for Embden. A numerous procession of his adherents escorted him to the ship, bearing lighted torches, and singing bacchanalian songs. He died within a year afterwards, of disappointment and hard drinking, at Castle Hardenberg, in Germany, after all his fretting and fury, and notwithstanding his vehement protestations to die a poor soldier at the feet of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... is probably the only one that represents a real person. Wine is celebrated, e.g. in i. 9; 18; 27; ii. 7; iii. 21. A tone of moderation is observed throughout the drinking-songs. It is highly probable[59] that in Od. i. 27, 1-4 the unrestrained bacchanalian spirit of Catullus (cf. c. ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... this ovation was given, for the returning hero was in the van, high above all the other figures. From the golden throne borne on the shoulders of twelve black slaves he waved his long thyrsus in greeting to the exulting multitude. Before the bacchanalian train which accompanied him, and behind the musicians who followed, moved two elephants bearing between them, as a light burden, some unrecognizable object covered with a purple cloth. Now the column had passed between ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... and various luxuries from Montreal, all served up by experienced cooks brought for the purpose. There was no stint of generous wine, for it was a hard-drinking period, a time of loyal toasts, and bacchanalian ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... see them in a so frantic mood run mad after lechery, and hie apace up and down with haste and lust, in quest of and to fix some chamber-standard in their Paphian ground, that never did the Proetides, Mimallonides, nor Lyaean Thyades deport themselves in the time of their bacchanalian festivals more shamelessly, or with a so affronted and brazen-faced impudency; because this terrible animal is knit unto, and hath an union with all the chief and most principal parts of the body, as to anatomists is evident. Let it not here be thought strange that I ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... duel; then pink shepherdesses in the style of Watteau or ladies in powdered wigs embarking in a golden gondola to the sound of lutes. To give freshness to his stock, he would interpolate a sacristy scene with much show of embroidered chasubles and golden incensaries, or an occasional bacchanalian, imitating from memory, without models, Titians' voluptuous forms and amber flesh. When the list was ended, the ciociari were once more in style and could be begun again. The painter with his extraordinary facility of execution produced two or three pictures a week, and ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... farewell, or cast a shadow upon the joy of return. Many of the marble sarcophagi were ornamented with beautiful bas-reliefs of mythical incidents, utterly inconsistent, we should suppose, with the purpose for which they were designed. Nuptials, bacchanalian fetes, games, and dances, are crowded upon their sculptured sides, in seeming mockery of the pitiable relics of humanity within. They treated death lightly and playfully, these ancient Romans, and tried to hide his terror with a mask of smiles, and to cover ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... sufficiently aroused by their potations to enter readily into any mischief. Some were smoking with all the industrious perseverance of the Hollander; others shouted forth songs in honor of the bottle, and with all the fervor and ferment of Bacchanalian novitiates; and not a few, congregating about the immediate person of the pedler, assailed his ears with threats sufficiently pregnant with tangible illustration to make him understand and acknowledge, ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... number of unbelieving and profligate persons who expected nothing new; they had assembled themselves in the catacombs and ruins, where they celebrated Bacchanalian feasts and orgies. In the ruins of Nero's Golden House a banquet on a large scale had been arranged. In the centre on the ground there burned a fire, surrounded by tables and seats. There was abundance of victuals and wine, for which they only needed to go to the store-room and cellar. ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... consequence, bullock cars and forage; wagons were converted into temporary hotels, and many a jovial party were collected in both. Military music, church bells, drinking choruses, were all commingled in the din and turmoil; processions in honor of "Our Lady of Succor" were jammed up among bacchanalian orgies, and their very chant half drowned in the cries of the wounded as they passed on to the hospitals. With difficulty we pushed our way through the dense mob, as we turned our steps towards the seminary. We both felt naturally curious to see the place where our first ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... Lyricks, such as Bons Vivants indite, In which your bibbers of Champagne delight,— The Poetaster, bawling them in clubs, Obtains a miserably noted name; And every noisy Bacchanalian dubs The Singing-Writer ...
— Broad Grins • George Colman, the Younger
... as thriftless as locusts, and in the midst of their bacchanalian revels Pierce felt very poor, very obscure. Here was the roisterous spirit of the Northland at full play; it irked the young man intensely to feel that he could afford no part in it. Laure was not long in discovering him. She sped to him with the swiftness ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... oak! to the oak!" shouted the whole bacchanalian crew; and away they flew across the park, starting the quiescent deer with their shouts, their laughter, and their revelry. Rochester took the naiad under his arm, that she might not be left behind, and dancing, capering, tumbling, and getting up again, led by ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... Their talent among friends, they never choose; Unask'd, they ne'er leave off. Just such a one Tigellius was, Sardinia's famous son. Caesar, who could have forced him to obey, By his sire's friendship and his own might pray, Yet not draw forth a note: then, if the whim Took him, he'd troll a Bacchanalian hymn, From top to bottom of the tetrachord, Till the last course was set upon the board. One mass of inconsistence, oft he'd fly As if the foe were following in full cry, While oft he'd stalk with a majestic gait, Like Juno's priest in ceremonial-state. ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... kept two ordinary in-door servants to assist in the work of the house; one, an antiquated female named Sally, who was more devoted to her tea-pot than ever was any bacchanalian to his glass. Were there four different teas in the inn in one evening, she would have drained the pot after each, though she burst in the effort. Sally was, in all, an honest woman, and certainly a religious one;—she never neglected her devotional ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... these manifestations seems to have been the wild revels of St. John's Day. In those revels sundry old heathen ceremonies had been perpetuated, but under a nominally Christian form: wild Bacchanalian dances had thus become a semi-religious ceremonial. The religious and social atmosphere was propitious to the development of the germs of diabolic influence vitalized in these orgies, and they were scattered far and wide through large tracts ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... for the loss of Eurydice caused him to treat with contempt the Thracian women among whom he dwelt, and they in revenge tore him to pieces, under the excitement of their Bacchanalian orgies. His head was given by the Hebrus to the sea, and finally carried to the island of Lesbos, where it was ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... doing the same, to discover that this dark beverage—which, from Armstrong's manner, I had been prepared to find something at least as wicked as absinthe—was simply and solely Bordeaux of a mild quality. After this Bacchanalian proceeding we went out into the orchard, which was reserved for family use, and sat on a bench under an apple-tree. Armstrong called his little boy who had been at supper with us and gave him a whispered message, together with some small change. ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... Well chastened by the Church. This pastoral staff Mine oaken Pax Vobiscum, sent 'em home To think about their sins, with watering eyes. You never saw a bunch of such blue faces, Bumpy and juicy as a bunch of grapes Bruised in a Bacchanalian orgy, dripping The reddest wine a man could wish ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... emancipation of the individual had come with the Revolution. Between MALHERBE and CHATEAUBRIAND, that is for almost two hundred years, poetry that breathes the true lyric spirit is practically absent from French literature. There were indeed the chansonniers, who produced a good deal of bacchanalian verse, but they hardly ever struck a serious note. Almost the most genuinely lyric productions of this long period are those which proceed more or less directly from a reading of Hebrew poetry, like the numerous paraphrases of the Psalms or the choruses of RACINE'S biblical plays. ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... she had performed various tricks, such as nipping off the tails of sucking calves, catching chickens in her manger, and making various pieces of them, and kicking in the ribs of strange dogs and horned cattle. But to the eccentric habits and bacchanalian customs of her ex-military master, the old mare's dormant ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... electorate of Brandenburg, which has since grown into the kingdom of Prussia. The elector, an ambitious man, who subsequently took the title of king, received them with an extravagant display of splendor. At one of the bacchanalian feasts, given on the occasion, the bad and good qualities of Peter were very conspicuously displayed. Heated with wine, and provoked by a remark made by La Fort, who was one of his embassadors, he drew his sword and called upon La Fort to defend himself. The embassador humbly bowed, folded ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... of dress which the change of season imposes. There are members of the House of Commons who can claim to wear the very first white hat of the season. Sir Wilfrid Lawson has a sombre creed and a Bacchanalian spirit; and, accordingly, the very first time a mere stray gleam of sunshine streaks the wintry gloom Sir Wilfrid wears ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... of his patronage, gave them every encouragement in his power; favouring them, when the general attention was diverted from his proceedings, with many nods and winks and other tokens of recognition, and occasionally touching his nose with a corkscrew, as if to express the Bacchanalian character of the meeting. In truth, perhaps even the spirits of the two Miss Pecksniffs, and the hungry watchfulness of Mrs Todgers, were less worthy of note than the proceedings of this remarkable boy, whom nothing disconcerted or put out of his way. If any piece of crockery, ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... doubted by any one acquainted at all with his general habits of thought and sentiment. These lyrics of the philosopher appear on the whole to prove too much; looked at from a literary point of view merely, they remind one forcibly of the attempts of Mr. Silence at a Bacchanalian song. 'I have a reasonable good ear in music,' says the unfortunate Pyramus, struggling a little with that cerebral development and uncompromising facial angle which he finds imposed on him. 'I have a reasonable good ear in music: let us have ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... religion, the more fanatical had thrown off every vestige of decency and indulged in Bacchanalian worship of a so-called "Goddess of Reason." This was a lewd female from the Paris half-world, flower-chapleted, flimsily draped, prancing in drunken frenzy atop a table surrounded ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... the mystics of Islam, and their poetry, while often externally anacreontic—bacchanalian and erotic—possesses an esoteric, spiritual signification: the sensual world is employed to symbolise that which is to be apprehended only by the inward sense. Most of the great poets of Persia, Afghanistan, and Turkey are generally ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... from these things. As she was indifferent, why need he care? He cared no longer. There was no more law that term; no more eulogy from gratified Mr. Die; but of jovial days at Richmond or elsewhere there were plenty; plenty also of jovial Bacchanalian nights in London. Miss Waddington had been very prudent; but there might perhaps have been a ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... have one more story of the bacchanalian sort, in which Clarence and York, and the very highest personage of the realm, the great Prince Regent, all play parts. The feast took place at the Pavilion at Brighton, and was described to me by a gentleman who was present at the scene. In Gilray's caricatures, and ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Bacchanalian scene proceeded, Julian had wrapt himself closely in his cloak, and stretched himself on the couch which they had shown him. He looked towards the table he had left—the tapers seemed to become hazy and dim as he gazed—he heard the sound of voices, ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... minutes of grace remaining to the child Monona, she was spinning on one toe with some Bacchanalian idea of making the most of the present. Di dominated, her ruffles, her blue ...
— Miss Lulu Bett • Zona Gale
... look for male society, Do one thing and another In which mother Shouldn't mix; But revels Bacchanalian Are—or should be—quite alien To you a married person, ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... bankrupt condition of Yussuf, and who was anxious to know how he had got on after the fetva had been promulgated, sent for his vizier Giaffar. "I wish to ascertain," said the caliph to the vizier, "if the unlucky Yussuf has managed to provide for his bacchanalian ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... Ariadne" in the National Gallery. How brimful they are of exuberant joy! you see no sign of a struggle of inner and outer conditions, but life so free, so strong, so glowing, that it almost intoxicates. They are truly Dionysiac, Bacchanalian triumphs—the triumph of life over the ghosts that love the gloom and chill and hate ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... were up and into the formation. The air crackled with the sound of Lewis-gun fire, machines reeled and staggered like drunken men, Tam's fighting Morane dipped and dived, climbed and swerved in a wild bacchanalian dance. Airplanes, British and German alike, fell flaming to the earth before the second in command of the enemy squadron ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... one. 'The gentleman is very unfortunate,' cried another. 'Really a loss,' said a third, &c, &c. The body was dragged from the dining hall, and the feast went on; and at the close, one of the gentlemen, and the very one, I believe, whose hand had done the homicide, shouted, in bacchanalian bravery, and southern generosity, amid the broken glasses and fragments of chairs, 'LANDLORD! PUT THE NIGGER INTO THE BILL!' This was that murdered young man's requiem ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... encloses them are little emblematic figures, of a relief exceedingly low, of dead and dying animals, and little winged genii, and female forms bending in groups in some funereal office. The high reliefs represent, one a nautical subject, and the other a Bacchanalian one. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... council of their own relations.[224] Though the evidence in these cases is not by any means satisfactory, yet we can hardly doubt that there was a tendency among women of the highest rank to give way to passion and excitement; the evidence for the Bacchanalian conspiracy of 186 B.C., in which women played a very prominent part, is explicit, and shows that there was a "new woman" even then, who had ceased to be satisfied with the austere life of the family and with the mental comfort supplied by the old ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... women in shoulderless, sleeveless, backless gowns, men in dinner-coats, girls in street clothes with yard-long feathers, youths in check suits, old men in staid business frock coats—what a motley throng! All were busily engaged in the orgy of a bacchanalian dance in which couples reeled and writhed, cheek to cheek, feet intertwining, arms about shoulders. Instead of enjoying themselves the men seemed largely engaged in counting their steps, and watching ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... in the worship of Dionysus,—so that the inspiration of joy must not be taken for the frenzy of intoxication, though the symbol of the vine has often led to just this misapprehension. Besides, Dionysus must not be too closely identified with the Bacchanalian orgies, which were only a perversion of rites which retained their original purity in the Eleusinia: and this latter institution, it must be remembered, was from the first under the control of the state,—and that ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... excited her. Wherever she might be she had only to imagine a ballroom and a blaze of light, and swift circling round to the sound of music, and her heart would burn within her, her eyes would glow with a strange lustre, a smile would wander around her lips, a kind of bacchanalian grace would seem to diffuse ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... isolated grandeur; some pitched on their sides, others standing erect, still others suspended, as it were, in mid-air. It seemed to him that these boulders had formerly served for the games of bacchanalian Titans, who, after having used them as skittles or jack-stones, had ended by hurling them at one another's heads. It is most probable that He who constructed the Albula Pass, alarmed and confused by the hideous aspect of his work, did justice to it by breaking it ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... Up-to-Date Version of a celebrated Bacchanalian ditty, as it might be revised by Dr. Mortimer Granville and Mr. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 3rd, 1891 • Various
... though under other designations. In the reign of Richard II., when it was first established, it was styled the Painted Tavern, from the circumstance of its outer walls being fancifully coloured and adorned with Bacchanalian devices. But these decorations went out of fashion in time, and the tavern, somewhat changing its external features, though preserving all its internal comforts and accommodation, assumed the name ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... of all this Latin rigmarole written down in honest Hungarian by the morning and to encourage him in his task he gave him two guldens and an order on the butler for as much punch as he could drink. By the morning all the punch was drunk, but the translation also was finished, to the tune of bacchanalian songs which Margari kept up with great spirit ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... in launches, dinghies, and longboats—came with laughter, came with rejoicing, for they were to dine with the senor of the open hand, Senor Howland, who always opened wine as they would open tins of beef. The gods never repaired more blithely to a Bacchanalian revel on Parnassus. Two by two, in rigid order of rank they were escorted into the saloon, and the eloquent popping of corks was as music in their ears. The Admiral took his place at the head of the table; the ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... these distinct divisions of non-laughers and over-laughers would be entertained by reading The Rape of the Lock, or seeing a performance of Le Tartuffe. In relation to the stage, they have taken in our land the form and title of Puritan and Bacchanalian. For though the stage is no longer a public offender, and Shakespeare has been revived on it, to give it nobility, we have not yet entirely raised it above the contention of these two parties. Our speaking on the theme of Comedy will appear almost a libertine proceeding to one, while the other ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... inflamed to madness by the recollection of the really affecting incidents of the massacre of the grandchildren of their prophet, and by the images of their tombs, and their sombre music,[8] crosses that of the Holi[9] (in which the Hindoos are excited to tumultuous and licentious joy by their bacchanalian songs and dances) every thirty-six years; and they reign together for some four or five days, during which the scene in every large town is really terrific. The processions are liable to meet in the street, and the lees of the wine of the Hindoos, or the red powder which is substituted ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... song!" roared five or six at once; when the trooper proceeded, in a fine, full tone, to sing the following words to a well-known bacchanalian air, several of his comrades helping him through the chorus with a fervor that shook the crazy edifice ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... a joyous meeting," Burns writes, "that Mr. Masterton and I agreed, each in our own way, that we should celebrate the business," and Burns's celebration of it was the famous bacchanalian song,— ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... with Alberigo da Barbiano Italian armies and leaders appeared upon the scene, the chances of founding a principality, or of increasing one already acquired, became more frequent. The first great bacchanalian outbreak of military ambition took place in the duchy of Milan after the death of Giangaleazzo (1402). The policy of his two sons was chiefly aimed at the destruction of the new despotisms founded by the Condottieri; and from the greatest of them, Facino ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... bibacity, drunkenness, carousal, guzzling, intemperance. Antonyms: temperance nephalism, abstinence, teetotalism. Associated Words: bibacious, bibulous, bibitory, dipsomania, alcoholism thirst, nectar, hobnob, bacchanalian, inebriant, potatory, oenomania, symposium, crapulence, supernaculum convivial, conviviality, tankard, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... Yorkers revel in a luxuriousness that is absolutely startling in its license. Thousands are expended on a single banquet, while the flower bills for a single year of some of these modern Luculli would support a family of five people for three or four years! Bacchanalian orgies that dim even those of the depraved, corrupt, and degenerate Nero are of nightly occurrence.[AI] Drunkenness, lechery, and gambling are the sports and pastimes of these ultra rich men, and it is even whispered that milady is not much behind milord in ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... is Burns's middle mood, lying between the black melancholy of his poems of despair and remorse and the exhilaration of his more exalted bacchanalian and love songs—the mood, we may infer, of his normal working life. We may again observe the correspondence between the change of dialect and change of tone in stanzas nine and ten, the increase of artificiality coming with his literary English and culminating in ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... low obeisance, departed without further speech, and in a few moments ushered in from the bacchanalian revels a maid ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... of monkish decorated writing in the world that is not tainted with some ill-meant vileness of grotesque,— nay, the very leaves of the twisted ivy-pattern of the fourteenth century can be followed back to wreaths for the foreheads of bacchanalian gods. And truly, it seems to me, as I gather in my mind the evidences of insane religion, degraded art, merciless war, sullen toil, detestable pleasure, and vain or vile hope, in which the nations of the world have lived ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... appearance, of a much lower order of comedy than Ralph Roister Doister, though it is also more spontaneous, less imitative, and, in short, more original. The best thing about it is the magnificent drinking song, "Back and Side go Bare, go Bare," one of the most spirited and genuine of all bacchanalian lyrics; but the credit of this has sometimes been denied to Still. The metre of the play itself is very similar to that of Ralph Roister Doister, though the long swinging couplet has a tendency to lengthen itself still further, to ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... in Bacchanalian measure! One time he gave an unconscious exhibition of his technical ability that, while regrettable, would have been of immense interest to psychologists who are seeking to prove that music depends upon a separate operation of a special "faculty." During his American tours I ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... stare blankly in return, and with evident embarrassment; but as these actions may have been attributable to weak eyes, or to the confusion consequent upon being publicly recognized by the quondam associates of bacchanalian hours, the suggestive facts only served to throw his eccentricities in ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... broke out into a loud Bacchanalian hymn, in which Philip could find no mirth, and from which the ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... month, the past year, while the birds were singing their matutinal songs from the trees, I sallied forth from the dormitory of my seminary to enjoy the reflections so well suited to that auspicious occasion. I had not proceeded far before my ears were accosted with certain Bacchanalian sounds of revelry, which proceeded from one of those haunts of vicious depravity located at the cross-roads, near the place of my boyhood, and fashionably denominated a doggery. No sooner had I passed beyond the precincts of this diabolical rendezvous ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... Capitoline Museum. We have a note of tonic banter to Tibullus, "jilted by a fickle Glycera," and "droning piteous elegies" (I, xxxiii); a merry riotous impersonation of an imaginary symposium in honour of the newly-made augur Murena (III, 19), with toasts and tipsiness and noisy Bacchanalian songs and rose-wreaths flung about the board; a delicious mockery of reassurance to one Xanthias (II, iv), who has married a maidservant and is ashamed of it. He may yet find out that though fallen into obscurity she is in truth ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... till we talked and sung all together; and then we rose and danced on the deck a set of dances, which in one sense of the word at least, were very intelligibly and appropriately entitled reels. The passengers, who lay in the cabin below in all the agonies of sea- sickness, must have found our bacchanalian merriment ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... with silent and self-respecting dignity through the crowds, gazing with quiet and observant eyes upon the shifting phantasmagoria that filled the circus grounds and the streets nearby. With these, too, there mingled a few of both old and young who, with bacchanalian enthusiasm, were swaggering their way through the crowds, each followed by a company of friends good-naturedly ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... of red wine, but sometimes of white, with the addition of sugar and spices. Sir Walter Scott ("Quarterly Review," vol. xxxiii.) says, after quoting this passage of Pepys, "Assuredly his pieces of bacchanalian casuistry can only be matched by that of Fielding's chaplain of Newgate, who preferred punch to wine, because the former was a liquor ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... serpent-like around that dreaded plague spot of the city were deserted; but from many a dirty window, and through many a red, dingy curtain, streamed forth into the darkness rages of ruddy light, while the sounds of the violin, and the noise of Bacchanalian orgies, betokened that the squalid and vicious population of that vile region were ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... in all things; he feigned excesses that he never knew. He a bacchanalian, a royster! HE! No. We will talk ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... joyous spirits have devised some scheme of irregular, sensual gratification,—of Bacchanalian revelry;—or, perhaps, two or three dunces, whose intellects and moral feelings are of such a stamp, as to render them rather impracticable subjects for academical discipline, have contrived some plan of impotent resistance to the college authorities, or some plot of petty ...
— Advice to a Young Man upon First Going to Oxford - In Ten Letters, From an Uncle to His Nephew • Edward Berens
... and, what was rather remarkable, there was another young sprig of the Church to keep him in countenance, who was also a private in the same troop of yeomanry. Although I sometimes made one of the bacchanalian party of our Curate, yet I felt most severely the difference between this society ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... social recollections of Baltimore are by no means exclusively bacchanalian. British stock, lamentably at a discount in other parts of the Union, is, perhaps, a trifle above par here. The popularity of our representatives—masculine and feminine—may have something to do with this; at any rate, the avenues of the best and ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence |
