"Barbaric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the glitter of the stage is very characteristic of De Banville. In his Deidamie (Odeon, Nov. 18th, 1876) the players who took the roles of Thetis, Achilles, Odysseus, Deidamia, and the rest, were accoutred in semi-barbaric raiment and armour of the period immediately preceding the Graeco-Phoenician (about the eighth century B.C.). Again we notice the touch of pedantry in the poet. As for the play, the sombre thread in it is lent ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... and on the hills where the white flocks roamed, to the plaintive notes of the mystic pipes of Pan. He beheld the flaunting banners and flashing steel of victorious hosts and heard the wild, weird chants of wandering, barbaric hordes that conquered and destroyed. The flash and roar of artillery of recent times but intensified the gloom that brooded over the world. The struggle was unending. Men still remained the victims and slaves of passion and desire. Their sighs and curses and groans and cries ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... moments into a nightmare, it has still infinite plasticity and buoyancy. What perceptions are retained merge in those haunting and friendly presences, they have an intelligible and congenial character because they appear as parts and effluences of an inner fiction, evolving according to the barbaric prosody of an ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... Manzoni, and Victor Hugo, and in England by Walter Scott, Pugin, Ruskin, and above all by Wordsworth, came in to give strength to this barrier. Under the magic of the men who led in this reaction, cathedrals and churches, which in the previous century had been regarded by men of culture as mere barbaric masses of stone and mortar, to be masked without by classic colonnades and within by rococo work in stucco and papier mache, became even more beloved than in the thirteenth century. Even men who were repelled by theological ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... and no "punch." He is wrong, although an imperfect abstract like mine cannot convict him. For the narrative presents an unforgettable portrait of wistful hero-worship, set in the dim mists of a Russian river against the barbaric splendor of an Easter midnight mass. To force a climax upon this poignant story would be to spoil it. And when it appears, as it will, in reprint, in some periodical anthology of current fiction, it will not fail to ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... province of animism because I know that my life-work upon this subject can never now be completed. It having been necessary for me to destroy my papers and those specimens which, at hideous cost, I had accumulated during twenty years of travel through some of the most barbaric as well as the most civilized parts of the world, this present brief verbal account of the most important inquiry of all shall alone survive me. ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... the thin, smiling Jew Ahasuerus. She came thus with bare feet into the Court of Stars, where the proconsul lay on the divan as though he had not ever moved from there. To-night he was clothed in scarlet, and barbaric ornaments dangled from his pierced ears. These glittered now that his head moved a little as he silently dismissed Ahasuerus from the ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... of their entire organism, yet science has been a tolerably faithful interpreter of cause and effect, and has not failed to recognize those organic qualities, and the structural adaptability of the African race, which qualify it for its mission as the representative of barbaric fury and degradation, and the type, in human form, of that chaotic element of self-annihilation, which nature has kindly restricted to the fewest number of the lowest orders of animated being.[4] The inhabitants of Southern and Central Africa, from whence our slaves are drawn, the ...
— The Right of American Slavery • True Worthy Hoit
... and Sinope as the mother-city of Kotyora, had suffered at their hands, in violation of common Hellenic kinship. If such proceedings were continued, he intimated that Sinope would be compelled in her own defence to seek alliance with the Paphlagonian prince Korylas, or any other barbaric auxiliary who would lend them aid against the Greeks. Xenophon replied that if the Kotyorites had sustained any damage, it was owing to their own ill-will and to the Sinopian governor in the place; that the generals were under the necessity of ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... Freddie Palmer proposing tea! What a changed hooligan—how ridiculously changed! The other Freddie Palmer—the real one—the fascinating repelling mixture of all the barbaric virtues and vices must still be there. But how carefully hidden—and what strong provocation would be needed to bring that savage to the surface again. The Italian in him, that was carrying him so far so cleverly, ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... epoch between the hieroglyphic system of Egypt and the Greek alphabet. But whatever may be said of its origin, affinities, changes, or character, it is clear that this simple alphabet spread westward among the barbaric nations of Europe, changing, in some measure, in its forms of notation and the articulate sounds it represented, until it reached the utmost limits of its western and northern coasts and islands. Here it served as the means of recording human utterance, until it was supplanted and obliterated ...
— Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... tableau" of the martial queen standing in a bower of lances, the rescued princess gracefully fainting in her arms, and the vanquished demon scowling fiercely under her foot, while four-and-twenty dishevelled damsels sang a song of exultation, to the barbaric music of ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... French army of those days still hovered the lustre bestowed upon it by the deeds of the great Napoleon, which their recent exploits in the Crimea had not diminished. There were among them regiments of fierce and romantic looking zouaves, with Oriental complexions and semi-barbaric attire, marching with a long swing, and appearing savage and impetuous enough to annihilate anything; and there was also a brigade, the special designation of which I have forgotten, every man of which was a trained athlete, and ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... we reached Santa Fe in safety, in a few days, and commenced making preparations for our return to the East. The kind-hearted Mexican women overwhelmed my wife with attentions, and she was soon provided with apparel more suitable than the barbaric, although beautiful, Indian costume. My principal difficulty was the want of money, and I was much perplexed to know how to secure a sufficient sum to enable us to return to our friends. It is probable that had I freely stated our circumstances and narrated our sad story, generous hearts ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... mountain. There being no room in the channel, now filled by the former lurid stream, which had pursued a northwesterly course, the fresh lava was forced to take a new direction towards the southeast, where it entered the bed of another river with a barbaric name. Here it pursued a course similar to that which flowed through the channel of the Skapta, filling up the deep gorges, and then spreading itself out into great fiery lakes ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... leaders in battle, as was inevitable with such a people, were chosen by reason of their personal prowess. The legal functions were exercised by the priesthood, and punishments were thus held to be sanctioned by the gods. Among this barbaric people the female sex was held as absolutely sacred, the functions of wife and mother being accounted among the highest possible to humanity, and we observe in ancient accounts of the race that typically Teutonic conception of the woman as seer or prophetess ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... silversmiths' work, ostrich feathers, and the like. To either side the main street lay long narrow dark alleys, in which flared single lights, across which flitted mysterious long-robed figures, from which floated stray snatches of music either palpitatingly barbaric or ridiculously modern. There the authority of the straight, soldierly-looking Soudanese policemen ceased, and it was not safe to wander ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... first of all I'd like to speak a moment with Ichabod." His face changed suddenly. "For Heaven's sake, Eleanor, if he must alter his name, why did he choose such a barbaric ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... something much deeper than any such recrimination lies behind the use of the word on either side. When the German Emperor complains of our allying ourselves with a barbaric and half Oriental power, he is not (I assure you) shedding tears over the grave of Kosciusko. And when I say (as I do most heartily) that the German Emperor is a barbarian, I am not merely expressing any prejudices I may have against the profanation of churches or of children. My countrymen ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... here mentioned had probably become fashionable since a direct intercourse had been opened in the last reign with Russia, from which country ambassadors had arrived, whose barbaric splendor astonished the eyes of the good people of London. The affectation of wearing by turns the costume of all the nations of Europe, with which the queen herself was not a little infected, may be traced partly to the practice of importing articles ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... and such playing! I stopped talking to listen. It was music of a kind I had never heard before. It was music that demanded physical response, patting of the feet, drumming of the fingers, or nodding of the head in time with the beat. The barbaric harmonies, the audacious resolutions, often consisting of an abrupt jump from one key to another, the intricate rhythms in which the accents fell in the most unexpected places, but in which the beat was never lost, produced ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... privileges; a class from whence all the art and letters and accomplishments of the time emanated, allied in blood as much with the low as the high, the aristocracy of intellect, and the pioneers of scientific and material progress. The model farming of the 13th century would be regarded as barbaric by our modern theorists; but such as it was, it was only to be met with on the demesne lands of the larger monasteries, and was a prodigious advance upon the petite culture of the open fields. The Priory at Norwich made an income out of its garden in the days of Edward III., and probably ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... recognized the curious, the almost barbaric picturesqueness of light and grouping; but her eyes had barely skimmed the scene when the meaning of the hush that filled the place was brought home to ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... stepped noiselessly to and fro, handing dishes, replenishing glasses, anticipating desires. A tremendous fire glowed in its massive cage; a crimson carpet and curtains of almost barbaric gravity contributed to the admirable temperature and deadened unruly noise. A brace of shaded candles to each small table made up nine several nebulae, whose common radiance provoked an atmosphere of sober mystery, dim and convenient. Light so subdued ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... attaining the highest intellectual culture, and a corresponding moral elevation, his career commanded universal respect in Europe and America, wherever he was known. He died the Minister of the United States to a civilized nation in the land whence his barbaric ancestors were stolen. To God, who "hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation" (Acts xvii: 26), be the glory. "How ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... Fantastic, barbaric scene—it seemed hardly modern. Mountain defiles were swarming with white invaders, making ready, but not ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... church founded, His guns built and tested, His people trained. The Terranovans were as civilized as He could make them in one generation. They had literary societies, newsstands, stock markets, leisure and working classes, baseball leagues, armies.... They had had to give up their barbaric comfort, of course; so much the better. Life was real, life was earnest—Weaver had ...
— The Worshippers • Damon Francis Knight
... silver coins looped around her olive neck. Her bare arms were encircled by bracelets—some cheap and gaudy, others well wrought from gold and silver. From her ears depended ornaments fashioned from gold coins. Her whole appearance was barbaric, her occupation cast a sinister haze about her; and yet her eyes seemed fashioned for laughter and her lips ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... lilting, and finds himself in a kind of sleep. That dreaming personality, with eyes half closed and poppy-decorated hair, could never live in the bondage of the city cage. The spirit must get free, and the longing for such freedom has been well called "a barbaric passion, a nostalgia for the life of the moor ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... great words, are only too easy to translate. We shall be well content if our version also gives some inkling of his qualities; not only of what Erasmus called his "wonderful vocabulary, his many pithy sayings, and the excellent variety of his images"; but also of his feeling for grouping, his barbaric sense of colour, and his stateliness. For he moves with resource and strength both in prose and verse, and is often only hindered by his own wealth. With no kind of critical tradition to chasten him, his force is often misguided ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... shaggy dog, just unchained, scouring the beaches of the world and baying at the moon. And when was an echo more curiously like a satire, than when Mr. Spencer found his Synthetic Philosophy reverberated from the other shores of the Atlantic in the "barbaric yawp" ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... glance at Eugenia now, caught on her face an expression which she took to be annoyance at a breach of manners. She reflected, "Eugenia must find Neale's abrupt American ways perfectly barbaric." And she was surprised to feel for the first time a rather scornful indifference to all that was involved in Eugenia's finding them barbaric. Heavens! What did it matter? In a world so filled with awful and portentous and glorious human ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... party had some time before endeavored to regain the ascendency, by aid of the Phocian mercenaries of Phalaecus; but they had been defeated by the troops of Arcadia and Elis.] he plotted lately to get Megara: neither Hellenic nor Barbaric land contains the man's ambition. [Footnote: So ...
— The Olynthiacs and the Phillippics of Demosthenes • Demosthenes
... gangrenes and cancers, Alexander put to death Callisthenes, and Parmenio, and Philotas; while he himself submitted to be completely outwitted by such as Agnon, and Bagoas, and Agesias, and Demetrius, who worshipped him and tricked him up and feigned him to be a barbaric god. So great is the power of flattery, and nowhere greater, as it seems, than among the greatest people. For their thinking and wishing the best about themselves makes them credit the flatterer, and gives him courage.[443] ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... toward the back of the lodge. Isaac stepped forward and went through another large room, evidently the chief's, as it was fitted up with a wild and barbaric splendor. Isaac hesitated before a bearskin curtain at the farther end of the chief's lodge. He had been there many times before, but never with such conflicting emotions. What was it that made his heart ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... move. The breeze of the unseasonably warm and brilliant day fluttered her thick, loosely gathered hair about her brow. Her strange, barbaric little face suggested that the wind was blowing across it a throng of emotions like the clouds of ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... abodes of wealth with spacious grounds, where, in many instances, scarcely any place is found for small fruits. "It is cheaper and easier to buy them," it is said. This is a sorry proof of civilization. There is no economy in the barbaric splendor of brass buttons and livery, but merely a little trouble (I doubt about money) is saved on the choicest luxuries of the year. The idea of going out of their rural paradises to buy half-stale fruit! But this class is largely ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... belief that there may have been navigators of the Great Lakes before the Indians, and it is generally believed that the latter were not the first occupants of the Lake Superior region. It is said that the Lake Superior country was frequently visited by a barbaric race, for the purpose of obtaining copper, and it is quite possible that these people may ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... common with me the superintendence of the public business, who was entrusted with so many cities, so many legions,—when he sees that this man has now abandoned all his ancestors' habits of life, has emulated all alien and barbaric customs, that he pays no honor to us or to the laws or to his fathers' gods, but worships that wench as if she were some Isis or Selene, calling her children Sun and Moon, and finally himself bearing the title of Osiris ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. III • Cassius Dio
... well-nigh perfect. There was something a little fantastic, indeed, in the facial style that he used; and that blemish was enhanced by the display of a wild beast's head on the back of one of Othello's robes. The tendency of that sort of ornamentation—however consonant it may be deemed with the barbaric element in the Moor—is to suggest him as heedful of appearances, and thus to distract regard from his experience to his accessories. But the spirit was true. Simplicity, urged almost to the extreme of barrenness, would not be out of place in Othello, and ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... condensing, developing and multiplying the rich products of his research with marvellous facility and skill; now pondering fondly over some piece of exquisite loveliness, brought from an unknown recess, now tracing out the hidden germ of the eldest, and most barbaric theories, and now calling fantastic spirits from the vasty deep, where they have slept since the dawn of reason. The term 'myriad-minded' which he has happily applied to Shakspeare, is truly descriptive of himself. He is not one, ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... of that gala day was a glorious evening. Rich and warm and beautiful, self-indulgent nature had swaddled herself about in barbaric bands of colour, a drowsy opulence of green and scarlet, soft-toned amber and pale, veiled azure. It was an hour when the senses riot in carnival, when colour sings and sound seems pink and gold, when light is fragrant and ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... banquets dull By drinking whiskey from a loyal skull,— But let us guard, till this sad war shall cease, (God grant it soon!) the graceful arts of peace: No foes are conquered who the victors teach Their vandal manners and barbaric speech. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... conclusion may seem barbaric to elders who have to pay for new clothes to replace the torn ones, And according to their light perhaps the elders see clearly. But the grown-up people forget that their wisdom has impaired their vision to see as boys ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... threadbare peddler had been touched by some miraculous hand. The lavish hand of the West had showered her favors on him. They resembled in some degree the barbaric pearl and gold of the East. He glowed with prosperity. Diamonds and ruffled linen and Scotch plaid and red silk on his neck and a blue band on his hat and a smooth-shorn face and perfumery were the glittering details that surrounded the person ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... the nations that have come up out of barbaric obscurity to become the world power today—England, Germany, the United States. What has thus lifted them to their peerless position? They acknowledge God to be their God and King of all kings and all nations. Surely, then, this is a nation's palladium, just as it is the individual standard ...
— The Mystery of Monastery Farm • H. R. Naylor
... the great dining hall. He also was in full panoply, and Dorothy counted ten of the heavy bracelets upon his right arm as he led them to places near his own. The room was a replica of the other Osnomian dining hall they had seen and the women were decorated with the same barbaric splendor of ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... with good fortune." Again we heard the brushwood crackle, and a second man, resembling the first in appearance and dress, came forward, and together they held a conversation, interspersed largely with the gestures which play so prominent a part in the language of barbaric tribes. ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... a meal that was barbaric in its simplicity and abundance, for men live and eat in Homeric fashion in the Northwest, and when the green tea was finished and the officer pushed the whisky across, his guest laughed as he ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... years of age, in a language spoken by all mankind, 'Gentlemen, after studying and examining carefully the objects found in the depths of our soil, after deciphering some symbols and translating a few words, we can without the shadow of a doubt conclude that these objects belonged to the barbaric age of man, to that obscure era which we are accustomed to speak of as fabulous. In short, gentlemen, in order that you may form an approximate idea of the backwardness of our ancestors, it will be ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... unpolished, uncouth; plebeian; incondite^; heavy, rude, awkward; homely, homespun, home bred; provincial, countrified, rustic; boorish, clownish; savage, brutish, blackguard, rowdy, snobbish; barbarous, barbaric; Gothic, unclassical^, doggerel, heathenish, tramontane, outlandish; uncultivated; Bohemian. obsolete &c (antiquated) 124; unfashionable; newfangled &c (unfamiliar) 83; odd &c (ridiculous) 853. particular; affected &c 855; meretricious; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... was swung open to admit this barbaric procession, they entered the fort with stately tread and in grave silence, led by the mighty chief, who, with proudly lifted head and flashing eyes, looked every inch a forest king. Suddenly he started, uttered a deep ejaculation, and half turned ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... was his long bow, carefully wrapped in water-resistant flying-dragon skin, and from the belt which supported his short breeches of tanned duocorn hide swung a two-foot blade—half wood-knife, half sword. To the eyes of his Terran forefathers he would have presented a barbaric picture. In his own mind he was amply clad and armed for the man-journey which was both his duty and his heritage to make before he took his place as a full adult in ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... man viewing it from behind, the nut-brown hair was a wonder and a mystery. Under the black beaver hat, surmounted by its tuft of black feathers, the long locks, braided and twisted and coiled like the rushes of a basket, composed a rare, if somewhat barbaric, example of ingenious art. One could understand such weavings and coilings being wrought to last intact for a year, or even a calendar month; but that they should be all demolished regularly at bedtime, after a single day of permanence, seemed a ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... great specialist,—Thornton, the skin doctor. At last he reached the ground floor and the gusty street. Across the way stood a line of carriages waiting for women who were shopping at the huge dry-goods emporium, and through the barbaric displays of the great windows Sommers could see the clerks moving hither and thither behind the counters. It did not differ materially from his emporium: it was less select, larger, but not more profitable, considering the amount of capital employed, ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... the case during the times of Apicius. Indeed, the Roman idea of good cheer during earlier epochs was provincial enough. It was simply barbaric before the Greeks showed the Romans a thing or two in cookery. The methods of fattening fowl introduced from Greece was something unheard-of! It was outrageous, sacrilegious! Senators, orators and other ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... the huge, brutal giant of Russian force, flash on the world like a zigzag meteor, lighting up his imperial dominions with barbaric splendor. ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... her government, under the administration of the dogmatists, was an absolute despotism. But, as the legislative continued to show traces of the ancient barbaric rule, her empire gradually broke up, and intestine wars introduced the reign of anarchy; while the sceptics, like nomadic tribes, who hate a permanent habitation and settled mode of living, attacked from time to time those who had organized ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... of language, race, or clime. The communion of saints is not a bygone tale, for my saints, redeemed from every age and every nation under heaven, still live, and love, and help and intercede. The union of heaven and earth is not a barbaric myth; for I have still my miracles, my Host, my exorcism, my absolution. The present rule of God is still, as ever, a living reality; for I rule in His name, ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... fripperies, in cooking or dressing, will give way before enlightenment, just as do the skin paintings, tattooings, gaudy colors, glass beads and tinsel, and other absurdities of savage tribes; just as have done the barbaric customs and splendors of the barbaric ages. Woman is not quite out of her barbaric stage yet. At any rate, she is not fully enlightened. The desire for that redundancy of adornment which is in bad taste still remains. In the process of evolution, the nose-ring has been cast ...
— A Domestic Problem • Abby Morton Diaz
... third lot sprang O'er the inverted helmet's brazen rim, To dash his stormers on Neistae gate. He wheels his mares, who at their frontlets chafe And yearn to charge upon the gates amain. They snort the breath of pride, and, filled therewith, Their nozzles whistle with barbaric sound. High too and haughty is his shield's device— An armed man who climbs, from rung to rung, A scaling ladder, up a hostile wall, Afire to sack and slay; and he too cries, (By letters, full of sound, upon the shield) Not Ares' self shall cast me from the wall. ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... the archives file was opened today. We are not certain that it does not constitute some sort of barbaric practical joke. Note that the forms involved have been superseded several dozen times over since they were originally ...
— If at First You Don't... • John Brudy
... on hunting ethics. Furnishing such arguments to a professional harpooner was a waste of words. Ned Land stared at Captain Nemo and obviously missed his meaning. But the captain was right. Thanks to the mindless, barbaric bloodthirstiness of fishermen, the last baleen whale will someday disappear from ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... large families are apt to be lonely folk, somewhat retired and individualistic in their enthusiasms. I was such a child, blessed by circumstances with few playfellows and rather inclined to sedentary joys. Even when I reached the barbaric stage of evolution where youth is gripped by enthusiasm for the main pursuits of his primitive ancestors, I was fain to enjoy these in the more sophisticated forms natural to a ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... splendid alliance. Lord Blessington was a veritable Croesus among Irish landlords, with a rent-roll of L30,000 a year; allied, it is true, to an extravagance more than commensurate with his revenue. He had a passion for all things theatrical, and an almost barbaric taste in the gorgeous furnishings with which he loved to surround himself; and this taste his wife ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... pencil-cases and gold watches to meritorious railway conductors and hotel clerks, as a testimonial of the sense we entertain of their private characters and public services. The gorgeous East herself never showered on her kings barbaric pearl and gold with a richer hand than the city of Mexico poured out the glittering rain over the portly person of the happy G——. Saturated at length with the golden flood and its foam of pearl and diamond,—if, indeed, singer were ever capable of such saturation, and were ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... sovereign of this gnarl'd realm, Lurking in hidden barbaric grim recesses, Acknowledging rapport however far remov'd, (As some old root or soil of earth its last-born flower or fruit,) ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... Slabbertian command of that barbaric language of the Englanders evoked her surprise, but the painful squeeze he gave her arm compelled attention. "Next time the English Commandant to the house shall come, you to listen at ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... wildness made it popular; of foreign origin, it was in time partly Hellenized and in Athens took its place in the regular national worship; some of its foreign features were taken up in the mysteries. These latter, with their enthusiasm and their half-barbaric ceremonies, excited the contempt of most of the educated class.[2025] These cults were Asiatic—not Semitic—but probably a product of a non-Hellenic population of Asia Minor (Phrygia and other regions), developed during a period the history of ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... is over, with its mad tossing of flowers and bonbons, its showering of confetti, its brilliantly draped balconies running over with happy faces, its barbaric races, its rows of joyous contadine, its quaint masquerading, and all the glad folly of its Saturnalia. For Saturnalia it is, in most respects just like the festa of the Ancient Romans, with its Saturni septem dies, its uproar of "Io Saturnalia!" ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... slightest aesthetic discomfort. Little children are arrayed in clothing that would doubtless put Joseph's coat of many colors quite out of countenance. Combinations and brilliancy that to the Western eye of culture seem crude and gaudy, typical of barbaric splendor, are in constant use, and are apparently thought to be fine. The Japanese display both taste and its lack in the choice of colors for clothing; this contradiction is the more striking in view of the taste manifest in the decorations of the homes of ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... Silver Cloud, and the old walls of the castle certainly seldom, if ever, rang with such music as was discoursed there that night. The domestics had so far recovered from their fright that they now crowded the adjoining hall to hear the singing. So ravishing was the harmony to their semi-barbaric ears that, conjoined with the marvelous manner of their coming among them, these poor creatures were ready to fall down and worship them as heavenly visitants. The Count himself seemed to enjoy the music exceedingly, and encored long and loudly. When they separated ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... time there lived a semi-barbaric king, whose ideas, though somewhat polished and sharpened by the progressiveness of distant Latin neighbors, were still large, florid, and untrammeled, as became the half of him which was barbaric. He was a man of exuberant fancy, and, withal, of an authority so irresistible ...
— The Lady, or the Tiger? • Frank R. Stockton
... spread over Europe after the fall of Constantinople I need on Europe the birth-place of painting as of other arts, that Greek painting which illustrated early Christianity, was painting in its decline and decay, borrowing not only superstitious conventionalities, but barbaric attributes of gilding and blazoning to hide its infirmity and poverty. Virgins of the same weak and meaningless type, between attenuated saints or angels, and doll-like child-Christs in the one invariable attitude holding up two fingers of a baby hand to bless the spectator and worshippers, were ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... kingly freedom; and around which the Italian confederacy, as an aggregate of free urban communities essentially homogeneous and cognate with the Roman, and the body of extra-Italian allies, as an aggregate of Greek free cities and barbaric peoples and principalities—both more superintended, than domineered over, by the community of Rome—formed a double circle. It was the final result of the revolution—and both parties, the nominally conservative as well as the democratic party, had co- operated ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... as the bankers were. He must be a large cotton-planter, one of a class with whom a fondness for jewels serves as a means of dozing away life in a kind of crystallization. He otherwise adorns his stately person, till he has a Sublime Porte indeed, the very vizier of a fairy tale glittering in barbaric gems and gold. His taste, to speak it mildly, is expressed rather than subdued—not to be compared with the quiet elegance of your husband or lover, madam or miss, but not unsuited to his showy style, for all that. As the crimson-purple, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... an intense, glowing epic of the great desert, sunlit barbaric, with its marvelous atmosphere ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... sight-seeing. What has become of all the marvels gathered together within the grim fortress walls in the heart of the ancient Russian capital? Of the jewelled ikons, of the priceless sacerdotal vestments, of the gorgeous semi-barbaric Byzantine temples, of the galleries of historic paintings, of the raiment, the boots and the camp-bed of Peter the Great? One wearied of wandering from basilica to basilica, from edifice to edifice and ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... Songs the perfection of an Eastern love-poem. Well and what then? He will certainly get less of "The Cotter's Saturday Night" into it, and certainly more of the truth of the East. There he will feel the whole splendid barbaric story for himself: the flocks of Abraham and Laban: the trek of Jacob's sons to Egypt for corn: the figures of Rebekah at the well, Ruth at the gleaning, and Rispah beneath the gibbet: Sisera bowing in weariness: Saul—great ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... brilliant hair, at the arch of the proud brows, at the dreaming, imperial eyes; it was a face singularly dazzling, impressive, and beautiful at all times; most so of all in the dusky shadows of the waving desert banners, and the rough, rude, barbaric life of the Caserne, where a fille de joie or a cantiniere were all of her sex that was ever seen, and those—poor wretches!—were hardened, and bronzed, and beaten, and brandy-steeped out of all likeness to the fairness ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... brief abstractions. Thus "he showed him all the kingdoms of the earth," is expanded, without offence to the nicest religious scruple, into that matchless succession of pictures, which bring before us the learned glories of Athens, Rome in her civil grandeur, and the barbaric splendor of Parthia. The actors being only two, the action of "Paradise Regained" is unavoidably limited. But in respect of composition, it is, perhaps, more elaborately finished than ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... "You are not going to look at my Sheffield figures, even, before the morning. Oh, you'll be surprised when you see them! You've a wonderful case. Some of the fortunes that have been made there—that are being made there now—are barbaric. I mustn't talk about it, or I shall get ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... how the white man makes the black one work for him here in America. That, however, is the few toiling for the million. In Europe the case is reversed. There, in every country, you see the million toiling for the few—toiling to support an oligarchy in luxurious case, or a monarch in barbaric splendour." ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... occasion was one of barbaric splendor, and such as might be expected of a warlike king in those rude times. The road from the palace to the baptistery, over which the king was to pass, was curtained with silk, mottoes, and banners, like a triumphal way. The houses of Rheims were hung with festive ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... Continental Greece within the limits of the kingdom is by race half Slav and half Albanian. We must not, however, attach too much importance to this fact, for in all times the Greeks have been a little people, grafting themselves on to various barbaric stocks. Race is a small thing by the side of national spirit, and in national spirit the Greeks are as little Slav as the Italians are Teutonic. Even the corrupting influence of long slavery—and it was deep indeed—had not touched this spirit, and the very thieves and robbers of the ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... was the central emporium of a commerce which in turn enriched every country of Western Asia, elevated the merchants of Tyre to the rank of princes, fostered the renown of the Ptolemies, rendered the wealth and the precious products of Arabia a gorgeous mystery[1], freighted the Tigris with "barbaric pearl and gold," and identified the merchants of Bagdad and the mariners of Bassora with associations of adventure and romance. Yet, strange to say, the native Singhalese appear to have taken no part whatever in this exciting and ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... the soul is quite an exploded theory. It was always a ridiculous one. We have quite enough to vex us in our present life, and why men ever set about inventing another is more than I am able to understand. It was a most foolish and barbaric superstition." ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... all things, a woman of the moment—fair, almost florid, a little thick-set, with tightly-laced, yet passable figure. Her eyes were blue, her hair light-colored. She wore magnificent furs, and, as she threw aside her boa, she disclosed a mass of jewelry around her neck and upon her bosom, almost barbaric in its profusion ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... from the clouds of barbaric invasion, and had come into calm waters, society was found to be organised on a basis of what has been called feudalism. That is to say, the natural and universal result of an era of conquest by a wandering people is that the new settlers hold their possessions from the conqueror ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... quivering with the unwonted joy of action. All the energy stored up in those years of repose came in a flood at this moment of need. Standing in the darkness of the cell, he saw, as in a map of fire, the outlines of the great Barbaric host, the line of the river, the position of the settlements, the means by which they might be warned. Silently he waited in the shadow until the moon had sunk. Then he flung himself upon the dead man's horse, guided it down the gorge, ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... towns of Asia's peopled realms! Woe to the land of Persia, once the port Of boundless wealth! All, at a blow, has perished! Ah me! How sad his task who brings ill tidings! But, to my tale of woe—I needs must tell it. Persians—the whole barbaric host has fallen! ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... when the Moros gave full rein to their barbaric fury, was from the beginning of the year 1645, for then they were freed from the terror that had been caused them by Corcuera who had just been succeeded in the government of the islands by the master-of-camp ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... of hands and a Highland cheer, the launch glided alongside the pier, and, supported on his faithful friend's arm, the panic-stricken Tulliwuddle staggered ashore. Before his dazed eyes there seemed to be arrayed the vastest and most barbaric concourse his worst nightmare had ever imagined. Six pipers played within ten paces of him, each of them arrayed in the full panoply of the clan; at least a dozen dogs yelped their exultation; and from the surrounding ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... everywhere. Moreover, these were centuries full of change. The ancient Achaean palaces were becoming the ruins which we still behold. The old art had faded, and then fallen under the disaster of the Dorian conquest. A new art, or a recrudescence of earlier art, very crude and barbaric, had succeeded, and was beginning to acquire form and vitality. The very scene of life was altered: the new singers and listeners dwelt on the Eastern side of the Aegean. Knights no longer, as in Europe, fought from chariots: war was conducted by ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... sooner said than done. To see this fierce-looking Kickapoo clad in robes of savagery, and gleaming in all the paint of the war-path, seated on Miss Slopham's refrigerator, and looking about on either side with barbaric curiosity at her array of shelves of jars and bottles, while he ate raspberry jam out of a rare and elegant saucer with an exquisite silver spoon, might have seemed a ludicrous spectacle to anybody less austere than Miss Slopham. But she only gave a sigh of relief, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... were some really good-looking brunettes, had all adopted the English fashion of dress, with parts of native costume retained. Some wore head-dresses of gorgeous colouring, composed of ribbons, flowers, and feathers in great profusion, but as no head-dress, however strongly marked by barbaric splendour, can excel the amazing feminine crests in present use among the civilised, we refrain from attempting description! Most of the men also wore European costume, or portions thereof, some being clad ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... well-disciplined cavalry, although the latter defect was largely supplied by the Cossacks, a peculiar body of riders from the Volga and the Don, who paid the rental of their lands to the crown by four years' military service at their own charges. Then, as now, they fought with barbaric ferocity; they attacked in open formation, each man for himself, and gave no quarter until the Czar offered a ducat for every live Frenchman. They were known to ride a hundred miles in twenty-four hours, and their services in pursuing an enemy ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... white light, but as the natural oil which it requires can only be obtained by mining in one of several widely separated and remote localities it is seldom used by these creatures whose only thought is for today, and whose hatred for manual labor has kept them in a semi-barbaric state ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... her feet. The Constant, you will remember, I got because you admired it. It is here in all its florid splendor, the whole dominated by a glowing sensuosity. The drapery of the female figure is as wonderful as you said; the fabric all barbaric pearl and gold, painted with an easy, effortless voluptuousness, and that white, gleaming line of African coast in the background recalls memories of you very precious to me. But it is useless to deny that Constant irritates me. Though I ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... the people began the dance. Three rows were formed, one of women between two of men, in Indian file facing the veranda. Haabunai and Song of the Nightingale brought forth the drums. These were about four feet high, barbaric instruments of skin stretched over hollow logs, and the "Boom-Boom" that came from them when they were struck by the hands of the two strong men was thrilling ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... murdered Hypatia in Alexandria. But this view does not give the whole truth. To shut out a wicked and sensual world, with its manifold temptations, seemed the only possible way to live purely. To get far beyond the influence of a barbaric society, utterly antagonistic to peaceful religious observance, was clearly the surest means of achieving personal holiness. Monachism was a system designed for these ends. Throughout the Middle Ages it was the ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... on the brow, in token of his royalty, he wore a golden circlet in which was set a single blood-red stone. Before him walked a sword-bearer carrying a sword of ceremony, a magnificent ivory-handled weapon encrusted with rough gems and inlaid with gold, while behind him, clad in barbaric pomp, marched a number of counsellors and attendants, huge and half-savage men who glared wonderingly at the splendour of the place and its occupants. As the king came, Sakon rose from his chair of state and, advancing down the hall, took him by the ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... grandeur of these two terminal objects is harmoniously supported by the 10 romantic circumstances of the flight. In the abruptness of its commencement and the fierce velocity of its execution we read an expression of the wild, barbaric character of the agents. In the unity of purpose connecting this myriad of wills, and in the blind but unerring aim at a 15 mark so remote, there is something which recalls to the mind those almighty instincts that propel the migrations of the swallow ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... characteristic of the more deplorable forms of insurgence against civilized morals that they originate either in a race permanently alien to (though present in) the unity of the Roman Empire, or in those barbaric provinces which were admitted to the European scheme after the fall of Rome, and which for the most part enjoyed but a brief and precarious vision of the Faith between their tardy conversion and the schism of the sixteenth century. ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... descended in great floods upon their bare backs and shoulders. But the savages, as if entranced, seemed to take no heed of all these earthly things. They lay grovelling in the mud before some unseen power; and beating their tom-toms in unison, with barbaric concord, they cried aloud once more as Felix appeared, in a weird litany that overtopped the tumultuous noise of the tempest, "Oh, Storm-God, hear us! Oh, great spirit, deliver us! King of the Rain and Queen of the Clouds, befriend ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... in Peking at last, the beautiful, barbaric capital of China, the great, gorgeous capital of Asia. For Peking is the capital of Asia, of the whole Orient, the center of the stormy politics of the Far East. We are established at the Grand Hotel des ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... shall afford the greatest amount of good or happiness to all the people. In considering the clearness and startling significance of these truths, we discover the cruel, criminal wrong of any system of competition, based on the old barbaric law of the survival of the fittest, which in its application means the pleasure and happiness of the few at the expense of the toil, pain and misery of the many. In this connection we note that man, in his ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... Roxholm thoughtfully as he turned the stem of his glass, keeping his eyes fixed on it as though solving a problem for himself. "A barbaric fancy that a woman needs a master. She who is strong enough is her own conqueror—as a man should be master ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... personifications of natural phenomena, suggested the theory which philosophical considerations had already foreshadowed in the works of Hume and Comte, and which the exhaustive analysis of Greek, Hindu, Keltic, and Teutonic legends has amply confirmed. Let us now, before proceeding to the consideration of barbaric folk-lore, briefly recapitulate the results obtained by modern scholarship working strictly within the limits of ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... the Cafe. If a Fra Diavolo, he was at least not disguised in his monk's cowl, either because the April day was too hot or because he had never owned one. But he stood appareled in his banditti role, very picturesque and barbaric and malevolent. And though he posed heavily, he yet had that Satanic fascination which the beautiful of the masculine and the sinister of the devil cannot help having. His battered magnificence of a ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... river. The Detroit River presented an animated picture. Edging their way through a maze of boats and batteaux, and in marked contrast to the scarlet-coated soldiers and blue-shirted sailors, bark canoes on which were drawn in flaring colours a variety of barbaric designs, flitted here and there, their crews of half-naked savages fearsome in fresh war-paint and gaudy feathers. Coo-ees, shrieks and shrill war-whoops—"Ah-oh! Ah-oo!" like the dismal yells of a pack of coyotes—rent the air, the discordant din ever and ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... coast of the island, like a row of semi-precious stones set in a barbaric brooch, are the states of British North Borneo, Brunei, and Sarawak. Their back-doors open on the wilderness of mountain, forest and jungle which marks the northern boundary of Dutch Borneo; their ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... civil law. Having heard of his marvelous faculty of memory a company of gentlemen requested from him an exhibition of his power. Six Venetian noblemen were judges, though there were many other witnesses of the feat. Muretus dictated words, Latin, Greek, barbaric, disconnected and connected, until he wearied himself and the man who wrote them down, and the audience who were present. Afterward the young man repeated the entire list of words in the same order, then backward, then every other word, ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... exotic, and owing to various circumstances, the government and constitution are too experimental and provisional in their nature, and possess too few elements of permanence to engross the profound interest of the foreign residents, although for reasons of policy they are well inclined to sustain a barbaric throne. In spite of a king and court, and titles and officials without number, and uniforms stiff with gold lace, and Royal dinner parties with menus printed on white silk, Americans, Republicans in feeling, really "run" the government, and in state affairs there is a taint of that combination ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... evening. What had Sylvia found to be lacking in her philtre? For what had she gone to the woods this morning? What mystery was contained in the white bag which she defended with such zeal? Dunham felt as if his brain were softening. It was the limit of absurdity to be connecting these semi-barbaric fantasies with this sane and charming girl. He saw how Edna had been confounded and annoyed. Submerged by the Idea, he could not at once lift his eyes to Sylvia, although it stirred him to believe that those bright drops he had ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... invitation to visit one of the large public schools up town. The teachers were pleased to see them, and arranged an exhibition of special exercises by the scholars, which they thought would be most likely to gratify their barbaric visitors. At the close of these exercises, one old chief arose, and simply said: "This is all new to us. We are mere unlearned sons of the forest, and cannot understand what we ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton |
