"Degraded" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the colonel was degraded from his rank by the angry czar, and ordered to serve as a private in the regiment he commanded. The officer who acted as translator said something in his own tongue to the general, who ...
— A Jacobite Exile - Being the Adventures of a Young Englishman in the Service of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden • G. A. Henty
... of these forlorn wastrels people a certain corner of the mind, and one can make the ragged brigade start out in lines of deadly and lurid fire at a moment's warning, until there is a whole Inferno before one. But I shall speak no more at present of the degraded ones; I wish to gain a thought of pity for those who are blameless; and I want to stir up the blameless ones, who are generally ignorant creatures, so that they may exercise a little of the wisdom of the serpent ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... dismay seized all the Roman Catholic towns of the circle. The Bishops of Wuertzburg and Bamberg trembled in their castles; they already saw their sees tottering, their churches profaned, and their religion degraded. The malice of his enemies had circulated the most frightful representations of the persecuting spirit and the mode of warfare pursued by the Swedish king and his soldiers, which neither the repeated ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... stained with the blood of the unfortunate Shawer. For a while, the Turkish emirs condescended to hold the office of vizier; but this foreign conquest precipitated the fall of the Fatimites themselves; and the bloodless change was accomplished by a message and a word. The caliphs had been degraded by their own weakness and the tyranny of the viziers: their subjects blushed, when the descendant and successor of the prophet presented his naked hand to the rude gripe of a Latin ambassador; they wept when he sent the hair of his women, a sad emblem of their grief and terror, to excite ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... and now at another, Iris had heard of Lord Harry's faults and failings in fragments of family history. The complete record of his degraded life, presented in an uninterrupted succession of events, had now forced itself on her attention for the first time. It naturally shocked her. She felt, as she had never felt before, how entirely right her father had been in insisting on her resistance to an attachment which was unworthy of her. ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... interest, was the only good he had got out of his visit to London. The beauty of his own beautiful poems, I felt in disgust, should have made such vicious sordidness impossible. It revolted me that a man so degraded and hideous physically could write the verse I had loved ever since his Romances sans Paroles first fell into my hands, or, writing it, could be content to remain what he was. To be sure, the genius is rare whom ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... ultimately with triumphant success. This, however, he never attempted, and must therefore be classed, in this respect, with such writers as Byron, whose powers gilded their pollutions, less than their pollutions degraded and defiled their powers; nay, perhaps he should be ranked even lower than the noble bard, whose obscenities are not so gross, and who had, besides, to account for them the double palliations of passion ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... mistresses, who sold to the enemy for money his confidential disclosures—a prince who, not satisfied with introducing excesses until then unheard of among his nobles, was not ashamed to bestow the royal bounty upon the professed head of the degraded women whom he allowed to accompany the ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... brothers, that the act was calculated and passed; and as the words all the issue comprehend male and females, it is clear that both were intended to be bastardized. I must however, impartially observe that Philip de Comines says, Richard having murdered his nephews, degraded their two sisters in full parliament. I will not dwell on his mistake of mentioning two sisters instead of five; but it must be remarked, that neither brothers or sisters being specified in the act, ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... subject provinces produced to fame Their lords with scarce a less than regal name. Then blinded monarchs, flattery's fondled race, Their favourite minions stamp'd with titled grace, And bade the tools of power succeed to Virtue's place, Hence Spensers, Gavestons, by crimes grown great, Vaulted into degraded Honour's seat: Hence dainty Villiers sits in high debate, Where manly Beauchamps, Talbots, Cecils sate Hence Wentworth,(884) perjured patriot, burst each tie, Profaned each oath, and gave his life the lie: Renounced whate'er he sacred held and dear, Renounced his country's cause, and sank ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... the surviving reader who has waded through this dissertation on cookery if something should not be done to improve the degraded condition of the Bantu cooking culture? Not for his physical delectation only, but because his present methods are bad for his morals, and drive the man to drink, let alone assisting in riveting him ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... could render them no assistance. The travellers were soon surrounded by the inhabitants, to whom a number of small presents were given. These men were very inferior in appearance even to the common Taki freebooter, and extremely degraded in their habits. ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... Before such an event happens in this family and castle, the female spectre whom you have seen is always visible. She is believed to be the spirit of a woman of inferior rank, whom one of my ancestors degraded himself by marrying, and whom afterwards, to expiate the dishonour done his family, he caused to be drowned in the ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... recall the lineaments of that immortal lover. The life of the imagination was past. Realities multiplied; no doubt she was converging swiftly upon one so hideous as to make her wish she had never been born. Any day she might be formally introduced over a dish of tea to a degraded, broken creature whom all the world despised as a man, and who she would be forced to remind herself was the author of the poems of Byam Warner. Byron, at least, had never been a common drunkard. Picturesque in even his dissipations, he had been ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... in general, nine-tenths of our happiness depends upon health alone. With health, everything is a source of pleasure; without it, nothing else, whatever it may be, is enjoyable; even the other personal blessings,—a great mind, a happy temperament—are degraded and dwarfed for want of it. So it is really with good reason that, when two people meet, the first thing they do is to inquire after each other's health, and to express the hope that it is good; for good health is by far the most important element ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... trouble's in their debased personal ideals, don't you see? 'Get on' at all costs, that's the motto: slapping their money in their neighbors' faces and shouting, 'Here's what counts!'—spreading their degraded standards by example through the community—yellow materialism gone mad.... Oh, I know!—I know it isn't your slave-driving captains only. It's mainly the women pushing from behind—fat horse-leeches' daughters always screaming 'more, ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... in a vulgar household is scarcely an elevated employment, but neither is working in a sweat-shop, or belonging to a calling that is really degraded; which is otherwise about all that equal lack of ability would procure. On the other hand, consider the vocation of a lady's maid or "courier" valet and compare the advantages these enjoy (to say nothing of their ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... entreat," they said, "your serious attention to the subject of slavery; that you will be pleased to countenance the restoration of liberty to these unhappy men, who alone in this land of freedom are degraded into perpetual bondage, and who, amidst the general joy of surrounding freemen, are groaning in servile subjection; that you will devise means for removing this inconsistency from the character of the American people; that ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... is he usually in any other—one of that class of men the better part of whose existence has passed away, and who drag out the remainder in some inferior situation, with just enough thought of the past, to feel degraded by, and discontented with the present. We are unable to guess precisely to our own satisfaction what station the man can have occupied before; we should think he had been an inferior sort of attorney's clerk, or else the master of a national school—whatever ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... say the business of the missionaries, to deride and infract even the most salutary tapus. Here we see every engine of dissolution directed at once against a virtue never and nowhere very strong or popular; and the result, even in the most degraded islands, has been further degradation. Mr. Lawes, the missionary of Savage Island, told me the standard of female chastity had declined there since the coming of the whites. In heathen time, if a girl gave ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... seriousness that is necessary. For Your Lordships cannot even learn the right nature of those people's feelings and prejudices from any history of other Mahometan countries,—not even from that of the Turks, for they are a mean and degraded race in comparison with many of these great families, who, inheriting from their Persian ancestors, preserve a purer style of prejudice and a loftier superstition. Women there are not as in Turkey—they neither go to the mosque nor to the bath—it ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... revival in our age and country.[1] Typical of the thoughts and habits of our ancestors, it is no less typical of their place and share of the general system of Western Christendom, and in the heritage of human sentiment, since reverence for the dead is common to all but the most degraded races of mankind. That mutual commemoration of departed, and also of living, worth was not exclusive to this country is brought home to us by the fact that the most learned and comprehensive work on the subject, in its Christian and mediaeval ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... as teachers in a mission Sunday school, as Bible readers and tract distributors among the poor and degraded of the city where they were sojourning; doing good to bodies as well as souls—their mother supplying them with means for that purpose in addition to what she allowed them for pocket-money;—also exerting an influence for good ...
— Christmas with Grandma Elsie • Martha Finley
... very liberal of the blood of others." To which the prelate rejoined, with more warmth than breeding, "Since you are not true to your own honor, at a time like this, I shall live to see you the most degraded monarch in Spain; when you will repent too ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... backs, and others of them measuring the road to the temple by prostrating themselves every yard or two as they advance. These self-torturers are all asking the same question: 'Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord?' It sometimes rises in the thoughts of the most degraded, and it is present always with some of the better and nobler ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the objection brought by magistrates, has nothing to do with literary merit. Bad story writing is not a crime. Mr. Hall Caine walks the streets openly, and cannot be put in prison for an anticlimax. The objection rests upon the theory that the tone of the mass of boys' novelettes is criminal and degraded, appealing to low cupidity and low cruelty. This is the magisterial theory, ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... receive the answer, no longer to a man as his superior, who is but his brother, but to his God; to whom he appeals for the rectitude of his intentions, and whose aid he asks to enable him to keep his vows. No one is degraded by bending his knee to God at the altar, or to receive the honor of Knighthood as Bayard and Du Guesclin knelt. To kneel for other purposes, Masonry does not require. God gave to man a head to be borne erect, a port upright and majestic. ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... genius, exercised upon subjects of little importance. It seems to have been, in all ages, the pride of wit, to show how it could exalt the low, and amplify the little. To speak not inadequately of things really and naturally great, is a task not only diflicult but disagreeable; because the writer is degraded in his own eyes, by standing in comparison with his subject, to which he can hope to add nothing from his imagination: but it is a perpetual triumph of fancy to expand a scanty theme, to raise glittering ideas from obscure properties, and to produce to the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... oaks of Darenth Wood), was formerly captured by the aid of a net fixed to a pole 30 ft. or 40 ft. long. But accident or science discovered, however, that this wearer of Imperial purple possessed a very degraded taste, descending, in fact, from the tops of the highest oaks to sip the juices from any decaying or excremental matter. Now, therefore, the recognised bait is a dead dog or cat in a severe state ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... The price is everything: for money's sake, Men marry: women are in marriage given The churl or ruffian, that in wealth has thriven, May match his offspring with the proudest race: Thus everything is mix'd, noble and base! If then in outward manner, form, and mind, You find us a degraded, motley kind, Wonder no more, my friend! the cause is plain, And to lament ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... appointment of a relative is made on the ground of merit alone, uninfluenced by family views; nor can they ever see with approbation offices, the disposal of which they entrust to their Presidents for public purposes, divided out as family property. Mr. Adams degraded himself infinitely by his conduct on this subject, as Genl. Washington had done himself the greatest honor. With two such examples to proceed by, I should be ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... am forced to play A degraded part For its paltry pay; Freedom is a prize For no starving thing; Yet that small voice cries, "Sing, O ...
— A Little Book of Western Verse • Eugene Field
... measures for that purpose, without making any effort to reduce them to practice. It was reserved for a young physician of Zurich, Doctor Louis Guggenbuehl, whose practical benevolence was active enough to overcome any repugnance he might feel to labors in behalf of a class so degraded and apparently unpromising, to be the pioneer in an effort to improve their physical, mental, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... they discussed the wretched public taste and the wretched actors that pandered to it. The slap-stick comedy, they held, degraded a fine and beautiful art. Merton was especially severe. He always felt uncomfortable at one of these regrettable exhibitions when people about him who knew no better laughed heartily. He had never seen anything to laugh at, ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... operation. She was here to help others. As one of her friends writes, 'She helped whoever knew her.' She adopted the interests of humble persons, within her circle, with heart-cheering warmth, and her ardor in the cause of suffering and degraded women, at Sing-Sing, was as irresistible as her love of books. She had, many years afterwards, scope for the exercise of all her love and devotion, in Italy, but she came to it as if it had been her habit and her natural sphere. The friends who ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... happiness, are recognised as the universal rights of men; and whilst we are anxious to preserve these rights to ourselves, and transmit them inviolate, to our posterity, we abhor that inconsistent, illiberal, and interested policy, which withholds those rights, from an unfortunate and degraded class ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... and he sent his officers with armies at their back to depose them, and bring them as prisoners to his court. Five of his uncles were thus summarily dealt with, one committed suicide, and the other four were degraded to the rank of the people. But the Prince of Yen was too formidable to be tackled in this fashion. Taking warning from the fate of his brothers, he collected all the troops he could, prepared to defend his position ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... the humility of my situation: but not from your blow; for that has brought me to myself, not humbled me. No man can be degraded by another; it must be his own act: and you have degraded yourself, not me. My error is in having, for a moment, yielded to the impulse of passion. If you think I fear you, continue to think so; till I can shew my forbearance is from a better motive. Cowardice might make me ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... this, could the Principal and Professors of the University, the guardians of the faiths and morals of its inexperienced youth, accompany to the Common Hall, and allow to address the students a man who has degraded his powers to the life-labour of sapping and mining the foundations of the truth, and opened the fire of his fiendish raillery against the citadel of our best ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... hand, the moral standard of the nation was very low; bands of rowdies infested the city streets after nightfall; bribery and corruption were the rule in politics; and drunkenness was frightfully prevalent among all classes. Swift's degraded race of Yahoos is a reflection of the degradation to be seen in multitudes of London saloons. This low standard of morals emphasizes the importance of the great Methodist revival under Whitefield and Wesley, which began in the second quarter of the ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... a shop I stand as nigh as the nighest in the same shop, If you bestow gifts on your brother or dearest friend I demand as good as your brother or dearest friend, If your lover, husband, wife, is welcome by day or night, I must be personally as welcome, If you become degraded, criminal, ill, then I become so for your sake, If you remember your foolish and outlaw'd deeds, do you think I cannot remember my own foolish and outlaw'd deeds? If you carouse at the table I carouse at the opposite side of the table, If you meet some stranger in the streets ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... and Oliver Greenfield, and Wraysford, and Pembury, and Loman stand out with strong personality and distinctness; and especially admirable is the art with which is depicted the gradual decadence of character in Loman, step by step, entangled in a maze of lies, and degraded by vice until self-respect is ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... consider them as of that part of India, which is filled with the Hindoo race, there is but little resemblance beyond mere physical traits. Of the leading idea of the multiform incarnations of the terrible, and degraded Hindoo deities—of the burning of widows at the funereal pile—of infanticide—of the gross idolatry rendered to images, like those of Vishnoo and Juggernaut, there is nothing. The degraded forms of superstition and human vice which are practised on the Ganges and the Burrampooter, ...
— Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... moulded into harmony with a social environment which unfolds self-consciousness. They are strictly biological only when they are congenital and therefore not educable. They are social degenerates when they are the product of a degraded education. Both factors are radical. A born idiot can never be other than an idiot. On the other hand, the deprivation during childhood and youth of language and education, as shown by Caspar Hauser, or the wolf-boy of Agra, or the experiment of Emperor Akbar, leaves the ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... possible to think of digging with some cheerfulness if Nancy Lammeter were to be won on those terms; but, since he must irrevocably lose her as well as the inheritance, and must break every tie but the one that degraded him and left him without motive for trying to recover his better self, he could imagine no future for himself on the other side of confession but that of "'listing for a soldier"—the most desperate step, short of suicide, in the eyes of respectable families. No! he would rather trust to casualties ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... from the common soldier. The revolution and conscription has leveled all those distinctions. Many a youth of good birth and education is made to bear his musket in the ranks, and does not elevate his comrades to his standard, but is soon degraded to the level of their sentiments and habits. Many a French general, for instance Junot, has been raised from the ranks. Military merit or accident has elevated them to command without a corresponding elevation of sentiment or principles. It is ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... off with Safti, my faithful one-eyed Arab guide, and after three long days of riding and talking—as I had feared—Maeterlink and Tolstoy, Henley and Verlaine (this last being utterly condemned by Marnier as a man of weak character and degraded life) we saw the towers of Beni-Kouidar aspiring above the shifting sands, the tufted summits of the thousands of palm-trees, and heard the dull beating of drums and the cries of people borne to us over the spaces of which silence ...
— Desert Air - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... With manufacture and commerce it stood not a whit better. What little there was, was in the hands of the Jews and foreigners, the nobles not being allowed to meddle with such base matters, and the degraded descendants of the industrious and enterprising ancient burghers having neither the means nor the spirit to undertake anything of the sort. Hence the strong contrast of wealth and poverty, luxury and distress, that in every part of Poland, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... Such a spirit is Liberty. At times she takes the form of a hateful reptile. She grovels, she hisses, she stings. But woe to those who in disgust shall venture to crush her! And happy are those who, having dared to receive her in her degraded and frightful shape, shall at length be rewarded by her in the time of her beauty and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... and, perforce, fasten themselves like leeches on the licentious soldiery. I speak from personal knowledge, for I have visited the "hell" of Paraguay.] Between these forts and Bolivia, on the west, I have been privileged to visit eight different tribes of Indians, all of them alike degraded and sunken in the extreme; savage and wild as man, though originally made in the image ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... pathetic to see what marriage sometimes is, compared with what it might be—to see it degraded to the level of a business transaction when it was meant to be infinitely above the sordid touch of the dollar and the dime. It is a perverted instinct which leads one to marry for money, for it will not buy happiness, though it may secure an imitation which pleases some people ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... independent fortune, who have never been connected with anything in the shape of trade or even professions, except army or navy, yet whose property is too small to estimate them as belonging to the higher classes, whilst they would consider themselves as degraded by an association with even the richer tradespeople, generally coming under the denomination of middle classes. This grade, immediately below the highest classes and above the middle, is very numerous in Paris, their incomes varying ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... BOUTEFLIKA in his second term, including the ethnic minority Berbers' ongoing autonomy campaign, large-scale unemployment, a shortage of housing, unreliable electrical and water supplies, government inefficiencies and corruption, and the continuing - although significantly degraded - activities of extremist militants. Algeria must also diversify its petroleum-based economy, which has yielded a large cash reserve but which has not been used to redress Algeria's many social and infrastructure problems. ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... battles, in which the numbers of the Communists were hurled back or annihilated by the asphyxiator and the lightning gun; and finally, the most remarkable scene in all Martial history, when the last representatives of the great Anarchy, squalid, miserable, degraded, and debased in form and features, as well as indicating by their dress and appearance the utter ruin of art and industry under their rule, came into the presence of the chief ruler of the rising State—surrounded ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... of lime, as if fresh soft snow had been thrown by the handful over walls and ceilings, with the additional ornamentation of calcite crystals. In the crevice beyond rises the Church Steeple, diminishing regularly, though roughly, in size, to a height of sixty feet, but not degraded with the little squirming stairway usually seen in ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... sympathy, but by meditation on the fundamental principles of justice. The Scripture texts that startled him from the moral lethargy in which he had lived during eight years, revealed to him the blasphemy involved in the performance of acts of formal piety and works of benevolence, by men who degraded God's image in their fellow-men and sacrificed hecatombs of human victims to ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... showed that the words had told, by saying: 'Every one may have his opinion. Had I been a stranger to the Power family, the case would have been different; but having been specially elected by the lady's father as a competent adviser in such matters, and then to be degraded to the position of a mere competitor, it wounds ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... and put him in touch with his own race again? How long would it be before he could again hold discourse with reasonable beings? How much longer would he have to be stranded on this planet, surrounded by an insane society composed of degraded, ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... more endurable when I have ruined my nerves and the coats of my stomach?" It did not seem probable that it would be. If death had been the risk he might have faced it, but he recoiled from the thought of a premature and degraded old age, still chained to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... death; but the monk accuses her of the intended murder of Francoise, and produces her written order to that effect. The King can no longer be blind to his mother's crimes; she is disgraced, degraded, and condemned to pass the rest of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 539 - 24 Mar 1832 • Various
... that, long before the slave-trade began, travellers found the blacks on the coast of Africa preferring to be called Negroes" (see Purchas' Pilgrimage ...). And in all the pre-slavetrade literature the word was spelled with a capital N. It was the slavery of the blacks which afterwards degraded the term. To say that the name was invented to degrade the race, some of whose members were reduced to slavery, is to be guilty of what in grammar is called a hysteron proteron. The disgrace became attached to the name in consequence of slavery; and what we propose to do is, now that slavery ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... suffer that the few may shine. Our religion must teach the brotherhood of the race, the essential oneness of humanity, and our government must be based on the broad principles of equal rights to all. A religion that seeks to make the people satisfied in their degraded conditions, and releases them from all responsibility for its continuance, is unworthy our intelligent belief, and a government that holds half its people in slavery, practically chained where they are born, in ignorance, poverty, and vice, is ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... which had been attributed to him, were his own spontaneous act. If Merks actually made such a speech, he must have stood alone; no one was found to second it; the house voted the deposition of Richard; and eight commissioners, ascending a tribunal erected before the throne, pronounced him degraded from the state and authority of king, on the ground that he notoriously deserved such punishment, and had acknowledged it under his hand and seal on the preceding day. Sir William Thirnyng, chief justice, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... ever helpless and degraded classes. One can readily judge of the political status of a citizen by the tone of the press. Go back a few years, and you find the Irishman the target for all the gibes and jeers of the nation. You could scarce take up a paper without finding some joke about "Pat" and his last bull. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... this tube, the end of which hangs within an inch or two of my face when in bed, I can drink a cool draught at night without trouble or chance of spilling a drop. On the tank top is soap, and also a clean towel, which to-morrow will be degraded into a duster, and "relegated," the newspapers would say, to the kitchen, and from whence it will again be promoted backwards over the bulkhead to the washing-bag. This, you see, is the red-tape order of dealing with towels ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... maintain their mutual independence. But he feared for his liberty, in the first place, and in the second, abhorred the change that must come over Nancy herself. Nancy a mother—he repelled the image, as though it degraded her. ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... with tragedy and romance, mystery and crime, for the possession of which, since history began, men have been ready to give up their lives. Confident of their success, they had risked all on a turn of the wheel, and Fortune, mocking their puny efforts, had first ruined and then degraded them, afterward sending them ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... my reading I have come upon denunciations of every race and pursuit under the sun. Very respectable and well-informed men have held that Jews, Irishmen, Christians, atheists, lawyers, doctors, politicians, actors, artists, flesh-eaters, and spirit-drinkers are all of necessity degraded beings. Such statements can be easily proved by taking a black sheep from each flock, and holding him up as the type. It is more reasonable to argue a man's character from the nature of his profession; and yet even that is very unsafe. War is a cruel business; but ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... his wrathful eyes And "Why so turbulent of soul? (he cries;) Can these lean shrivell'd limbs, unnerved with age, These poor but honest rags, enkindle rage? In crowds, we wear the badge of hungry fate: And beg, degraded from superior state! Constrain'd a rent-charge on the rich I live; Reduced to crave the good I once could give: A palace, wealth, and slaves, I late possess'd, And all that makes the great be call'd the bless'd: My gate, an emblem of my ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... gamblers flock in like birds of prey. After stay of only four days, gambler leaves Bar with over a thousand dollars of miners' gold. As many foreigners as Americans on the river. Foreigners generally extremely ignorant and degraded. Some Spaniards of the highest education and accomplishment. Majority of Americans mechanics of better class. Sailors and farmers next in number. A few merchants and steamboat-clerks. A few physicians. One lawyer. Ranchero of distinguished appearance an accomplished ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... concerned, or rather the habit of exercising them, as acquired by herself, in order to appear fair: in reality, they are all the while being more strongly implanted. She loses virtue as virtue, but it is only that she may find it again in CHRIST. This degraded bride becomes, as she imagines, filled with pride. She, who was so patient, who suffered so easily, finds that she can suffer nothing. Her senses revolt her by continual distractions. She can no ...
— Spiritual Torrents • Jeanne Marie Bouvires de la Mot Guyon
... best result that had been effected in home politics, the attempt to unite the Powers of the country in Parliament had, after a short and brilliant success, led to the deepest disorder by disregarding the rights of birth. The degraded crown above all had thus become the prize of battle for Pretenders allied with France or Burgundy. But it could not possibly remain thus. The time was come to give the English realm an independent position and internal order corresponding at once ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... Therefore here you are, with almost the safety, certainly with the honour of England more intrusted to you, than ever yet fell to the lot of any British Officer. On your decision depends, whether our Country shall be degraded in the eyes of Europe, or whether she shall rear her head higher than ever; again do I repeat, never did our Country depend so much on the success of any Fleet as on this. How best to honour our Country and abate the pride of her Enemies, by defeating their schemes, must be ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... their thoughts on pain of their very silence being punished with the penalties of treason. All trust in the older bulwarks of liberty was destroyed by a policy as daring as it was unscrupulous. The noblest institutions were degraded into instruments of terror. Though Wolsey had strained the law to the utmost he had made no open attack on the freedom of justice. If he shrank from assembling Parliaments it was from his sense that they were the bulwarks of liberty. ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... Commonwealths. There is no common ground, where the theory of society grades men upon a perpendicular scale. It is a society of classes, and a society of classes can never be a community. When the whole labor of a State is performed by a degraded class, that are not included in the State as citizens or social beings, it is impossible but that the class next above them should feel the force of those theories and ideas which have produced such a state of things. It is so. The poor white population of the South is degraded. They ...
— Conflict of Northern and Southern Theories of Man and Society - Great Speech, Delivered in New York City • Henry Ward Beecher
... has issued in one long misconception of the metaphysical status of natural entities. The entity has been separated from the factor which is the terminus of sense-awareness. It has become the substratum for that factor, and the factor has been degraded into an attribute of the entity. In this way a distinction has been imported into nature which is in truth no distinction at all. A natural entity is merely a factor of fact, considered in itself. Its disconnexion from the complex of fact is a mere abstraction. It ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... temper, the habits, and understanding; and exercises an inevitable influence upon all the acts of our future life. Thus character is undergoing constant change, for better or for worse—either being elevated on the one hand, or degraded on the other. "There is no fault nor folly of my life," says Mr. Ruskin, "that does not rise up against me, and take away my joy, and shorten my power of possession, of sight, of understanding. And every past effort of my life, every ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... and again into that writhing breast. I wish I had never seen it. In fact I could not see clearly, for every thing grew misty from the sick shuddering that fell upon me. I shivered down in my seat and shut my eyes, degraded and full of self contempt, that any thing should have brought me to that ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... information he received from his conductor gave him no pleasure, when he heard of the advances of some in the school, much younger than himself, and conceived by his own deficiency that he should be degraded, and humbled, by being placed below them. This I discovered, and having committed him to the care of one of the masters, as his tutor, I assured him he should not be placed till, by diligence, he might rank with ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... who was born of a woman, and who said, "Whosoever shall do the Will of God, the same is My brother, and My sister, and My mother." Before Christ came into the world the condition of women was most miserable. They were degraded, despised, treated as slaves, and beasts of burden, as they are in heathen lands to this day. Since Christ came every good woman is loved, honoured, and respected. Jesus Christ set us the example. It ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... Englishman, with some fading signs about him of decent birth, decent education and upbringing, but such signs were blurred and almost obliterated by the habits which had degraded him. He would have been dead or in prison or the poorhouse years ago if Carmen had not chosen to rescue him, more through a whim than from genuine charity. Her mother's people had been English, and somehow she had not cared to see ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... drama was the narrative poem Troilus and Criseyde by Chaucer. Contrary to his custom, Shakespeare has degraded the characters of his original, instead of ennobling them. The camp scenes are adapted from Caxton's Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye; and the challenge of Hector was taken from some translation of Homer, probably that by Chapman. An earlier lost play on this subject by Dekker ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... her weakness, the greater his wickedness. If he could not save her from others, he could save her from himself. Then if she fell, it would at least be a natural fall. It would not be a foul betrayal of youth by age; it would not be the sort of degraded crime that makes angels weep, and ordinary people change into judges ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... David so zealous as Josiah since David himself. The king, too, was young, at most twenty years of age, in the beginning of his reformation. What might not be effected in a course of years, however corrupt and degraded was the existing state of his people? So Jeremiah might think. It must be recollected, too, that religious obedience was under the Jewish covenant awarded with temporal prosperity. There seemed, then, every reason for Jeremiah at first to suppose that bright fortunes were ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... instigation of the Gothic king, At'talus, the prefect of the city, was invested with the imperial purple, and measures were taken to compel Hono'rius to resign in his favour. But At'talus proved utterly unworthy of a throne, and after a brief reign was publicly degraded; the rest of his life was passed in obscurity under the protection of the Goths. 6. A favourable opportunity of effecting a peace was now offered, but it was again insolently rejected by the wretched Hono'rius, and a herald publicly proclaimed that in consequence ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... and guarded pocket-holes, the low collar, I should hail with pleasure; that is, for grandfathers and men of grandfatherly years. I was about to add the point-lace ruffles, cravat, and frill, but I pause in consideration of the miseries and degraded state of the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... King was not to be moved. He had been too great to sink into littleness without a struggle. He had been the soul of two great coalitions, the dread of France, the hope of all oppressed nations. And was he to be degraded into a mere puppet of the Harleys and the Hooves, a petty prince who could neither help nor hurt, a less formidable enemy and less valuable ally than the Elector of Brandenburg or the Duke of Savoy? His spirit, quite as arbitrary and as impatient of control as that of any of his predecessors, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... whom he had many, especially among the nobility, who looked upon him as a vulgar upstart, used this incident to bring him before a court-martial. It was unpatriotic, they declared, and they demanded that he be degraded and fined. His defence, which with all the records of his career are in the Navy Department at Copenhagen, was brief but to the point. It is summed up in the retort to his accusers that "they themselves should be rebuked, and severely, for failing to understand that ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... dead man in a few minutes if she had not been pulled off. But he dared not report her. She knew too much about him, and she was moved a few days afterwards to look after the sick. She it was who spoke to Zachariah. She, however, was not by any means the worst. Worse than her were the old, degraded, sodden, gin-drinking hags, who had all their lives breathed pauper air and pauper contamination; women with not one single vestige of their Maker's hand left upon them, and incapable, even under the greatest provocation, of any human emotion; who would see a dying mother call upon Christ, ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... take the mountains themselves, instead of these blocks, as steps of the investigation. Here is a view, therefore, that must convince the most scrupulous, or jealous with regard to the admitting of theory, first, that those mountains had been much higher; secondly, that they had been degraded in their present place; thirdly, that this continent has subsisted in its present place for a very long space of time, during the slow progress of those imperceptible operations; and, lastly, that much of the solid parts of this earth has been thus ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... greatest obstacles were found, not in the hopeless paganism of the degraded tribes of the Dark Continent, but in the apathy, if not antipathy, of the representatives of Christian governments. The British governor would have penned him up within the bounds of Cape Colony, lest he should complicate the relations of the settlers ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... just about to reprimand one of the men when Pilchard came in. Although it was early in May, a spell of precocious heat had taken New York by the throat, and what with the whir of rapidly turning wheels, and the smell of hot machine-oil and perspiring men, there was something filthy and degraded about the atmosphere. Swan suddenly realized this, although it was the only atmosphere he knew anything about. Glancing upward, he saw a little patch of blue sky through the top of one of the grimy windows ... a white cloud sailed past ... and then another ... something akin to longing ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... now came to her mind and imagination was the brutal, perverse man of the breakfast-room at Medford, coarse, insolent, intractable, stamping out all that was finest in her, breaking and flinging away the very gifts he had inspired her to offer him. It was nothing to him that she should stand degraded in the eyes of the world. He did not want her to be brave and strong. She had been wrong; it was not that kind of woman he desired. He had not acknowledged that she, too, as well as he—a woman as well as a man might have her principles, her standards of honour, her ideas of duty. It was not ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... a moment, during that springtime of passion which returns no more, when Vanderlyn had for a wild instant hoped that he would be able to take her away from the life in which he had felt her to be playing the terrible role of an innocent and yet degraded victim. ...
— The Uttermost Farthing • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... disciples turned with hardened hearts from the truth which was sent into the world by the grace of God, and they remained the prophets of error. The doctrines which the sages had associated with the idea of Serapis, debased and degraded by the most contemptible trivialities; lost all their worth and dignity; and after the great Apostle to whom this basilica is dedicated, had brought the gospel to Alexandria, the idol's throne began to totter, and the tidings of salvation ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... aided by Miss Robins' remarkable book "Where are you going to ...?" took a form that threatened to impose the most extraordinary restrictions on the free movements of women, and to establish a sort of universal purdah of hostility and suspicion against those degraded creatures, those stealers and destroyers of women, "the men," that the British feminist movement displayed any tendency to dissociate into ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... was enough to stir the pulses and awaken the enthusiasm of an ardent race, even though the nobler instincts had been long sleeping in the breasts of these men. They hated and distrusted their old lord with a hatred he had well merited; and degraded as they had become in his service, they had not yet sunk so low but that they could feel with the keenness of instinct, rather than by any reasoning powers they possessed, that this young knight was a man to be trusted ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... nature, it is deservedly a favourite in the drawingroom; but, like the large greyhound, it is inferior in intelligence. It has no strong individual attachment, but changes it with singular facility. It is not, however, seen to advantage in its petted and degraded state, but has occasionally proved a not unsuccessful courser of the rabbit and the hare, and exhibited no small share of speed and perseverance. In a country, however, the greater part of which is infested with wolves, it cannot be of much service, but exposed to unnecessary danger. It is bred ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... young Quaestors in general, the great attraction of the office consisted in the fact that the aspirant having once become a Quaestor was a Senator for the rest of his life, unless he should be degraded by misconduct. Gradually it had come to pass that the Senate was replenished by the votes of the people, not directly, but by the admission into the Senate of the popularly elected magistrates. ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... they were persecuted and that there was no legal protection, no respectable government. General (later Senator) Pettus said that through all the workings of the Federal Government ran the principle that "we are an inferior, degraded people and not fit to be trusted." General Clanton of Alabama further explained that "there is not a respectable white woman in the Negro Belt of Alabama who will trust herself outside of her house without some protector.... So far as our State Government is concerned, we are in the hands ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... hated the Gentiles, and would have no communication with them, they killed Gentile children at the Passover, and their law allowed them to commit any offences against all but their own people, and inculcated a low morality. When it was not morally bad, it was degraded and superstitious. Whereas the modern anti-Semite usually complains about Jewish success and dangerous cleverness, Apion accused them of having produced no original ideas and no great men, and no citizen ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... attached by the strongest ties of affection and early acquaintance, another powerfully deranging cause is at work in addition to the natural tendency to degenerate, viz. the necessity of accommodating himself to established customs and opinions. The former agent alone, we know, has often degraded Europeans. Is it to be thought wonderful then, that, where both principles operate, a man of Omai's character should speedily relinquish foreign acquirements, and retrograde into ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... each child, not for what it is to you, or to the class, or to the school, but for what it is in itself, as a precious jewel, to be loved and admired, for those immortal qualities and capacities which belong to it as a human being. No matter how degraded or depraved or forbidding in appearance that child may be, it has qualities which, if brought out, may make it more glorious than an angel. If Jesus loved him, you may love him. Jesus did not stand off at a distance ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... infant Emperor Ivan. The Russian people had with indifference submitted to this new ruler, and manifested the same subjection to him as to his predecessor. It was all the same to them whoever sat in godlike splendor upon the magnificent imperial throne—what care that mass of degraded slaves, who are crawling in the dust, for the name by which their tyrants are called? They remain what they are, slaves; and the one upon the throne remains what he is, their absolute lord and tyrant, who has the right to-day to scourge them with whips, to-morrow ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... right lay in descent from the gods, lineage was of first importance in the social world. Not that rank was independent of ability—a chief must exhibit capacity who would claim possession of the divine inheritance;[4] he must keep up rigorously the fitting etiquette or be degraded in rank. Yet even a successful warrior, to insure his family title, sought a wife from a superior rank. For this reason women held a comparatively important position in the social framework, and this place is reflected in the folk tales.[5] Many Polynesian romances are, like the Laieikawai, centered ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... a curious experience at that moment. He seemed to see, looking out from behind this external mask of degraded beauty, the semblance of what this woman might have been under more favouring circumstance of birth and environment, wherein her rich, passionate nature, potent for either good or evil, might have been trained ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Then from whom? If pure in fountain, poison'd by yourself When scarce begun to flow.—To make a man Not, as I see, degraded from the mould I came from, nor compared to those about, And then to throw your own flesh to the dogs!— Why not at once, I say, if terrified At the prophetic omens of my birth, Have drown'd or stifled me, as they do whelps Too ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... of all Republics, with the broad, plain social ethics of Christianity,—the tone of mournful familiarity (whatever his personal immunity) in which he too often speaks of the saddest pollutions that ever degraded humanity, with the spotless purity of the Christian rule of life,—the hesitating, speculative tone of the Master of the Academy with the decision and majesty of Him who 'spake with authority, and not as the Scribes,' whether Greek or Jewish.—the metaphysical and abstract character ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... accurate (i. 12): 'When I speak of the Vedic Rishis as primitive, I do not mean what Mr. A. Lang means when he calls his savages primitive.' But I have stated again and again that I don't call my savages 'primitive.' Thus 'contemporary savages may be degraded, they certainly are not primitive.' {93a} 'One thing about the past of [contemporary] savages we do know: it must have been a long past.' {93b} 'We do not wish to call savages primitive.' {93c} All this was written in reply to ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... death—between, say, 1667 and 1745—could rise from that study in no unprejudiced mood. It would be difficult for him to avoid the conclusion that the government of Ireland by England had not only degraded the people of the vassal nation, but had proved a disgrace and a stigma on the ruling nation. It was a government of the masses by the classes, for no other than selfish ends. It ended, as all such governments ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... them weep; I saw the growth of each grief-nurtured flower; I saw the gardener watching—in their sleep Wiping their tears with the napkin he had laid Wrapped by itself when he climbed Hades' steep; What wonder then I saw nor was dismayed! I saw the dull, degraded monsters nursed In money-marshes, greedy men that preyed Upon the helpless, ground the feeblest worst; Yea all the human chaos, wild and waste, Where he who will not leave what God hath cursed Now ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... effect is her saying in Romola, that "with the sinking of the high human trust the dignity of life sinks too; we cease to believe in our own better self, since that also is a part of the common nature which is degraded in our thought; and all the finer impulses of the soul are dulled." In Janet's Repentance she has finely presented this faith in sympathetic humanitarianism, showing how Janet found peace in the sick-room where all had ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... Byzantine empire, the criminal laws fail worse and worse of execution. Only last night my father, delivering a lecture, said neglect in this respect was one of the reasons of the Empire's going. Only the poor and degraded suffer penalties now. And I—pah! What have I to fear? Or thou? And from whom? When the girl's loss is discovered—you observe I am viewing the affair in its most malignant aspect—I know the course the Prince will take. He will run to the palace; there he will fall at the ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... namely, the council of his lordship the king." This last charge had reference to the recent removal of tradesmen's stalls from Chepe. No defence appears to have been allowed Hervy. The charges were read, and he was then and there declared to be "judicially degraded from his aldermanry and for ever excluded from the council of the city"; a precept being at the same time issued for the immediate election of a successor, to be presented ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... like a man. To be machines, you mean—well cared for, certainly, but machines just the same. Don't you know that we have been machines too long? Can't you see that it is because we have been degraded into machines that Society is ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... has allowed me to question her on the delicate subject of avoirdupois equivalents; and the armless fair one, whose embrace no monarch could hope to win, has wrought me a watch-paper with those despised digits which have been degraded from gloves to boots in our evolution from ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... for the purpose, rushed upon each of us, and in less time than I can express it our swords, belts, and caps were cast to the ground, our uniforms torn, and the officers of the English mission, seized by the arm and neck, were dragged, to the upper part of the hall, degraded and reviled before the whole of Theodore's courtiers ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... window. In the house he was the spirit of good nature itself. He was full of quips and pleasantries and happy turns of speech. But Laura Van Dorn had learned deep in her heart to fear that mood. She was ashamed of her wisdom—degraded by her doubt, and ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... face flamed up, and she uttered a half-choked exclamation. "Oh," she cried—"you've fallen in love with playing the martyr; it's SELF-love! You SEE yourself in the role! No one on earth could make me believe you're in LOVE with this degraded imbecile—all that's left of the wreck of a vicious life! It isn't that! It's because you want to make a shining example of yourself; you want to get down on your knees and wash off the vileness from ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... fresh every summer, the earth comes forth as a bride adorned for her husband. Not only in the dawn of our history, but now in the full brightness of its noonday, may we hear the voice of the Lord walking in the garden. I look out upon the gray degraded fields left naked of the snow, and inwardly ask, Can these dry bones live again? And while the question is yet trembling on my lips, lo! a Spirit breathes upon the earth, and beauty thrills into bloom. Who shall lack faith in man's redemption, ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... from beneath; going down into the slums of Christian cities; working among the poor and degraded of heathen lands; and seeking the lowest tribes of men from whom have been defaced almost the last vestige of humanity and restoring them to the image of God. Christ is saving the world as a whole. He is not slicing the loaf of society horizontally, cutting ...
— A Wonderful Night; An Interpretation Of Christmas • James H. Snowden
... taking a boat ride in the harbor with two of my lady assistants and six stalwart boy oarsmen, when a boat shot out at us from Blackwell's Island with four villainous men and two degraded women. Coming alongside, one of the women said to the boys: "Throw that officer overboard, and come with us; we will get you $400 a piece as bounty, then you can desert from the army, and have a jolly good time." My teachers fainted ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... party—a veritable giantess, a virago of the first magnitude—and she was evidently the only thing in the world of which Usanga stood in awe. Even though she was particularly cruel to the young woman, the latter believed that she was her sole protection from the degraded black tyrant. ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... a third, "hearken a stave of Robin Hood; maybe that shall hasten the coming of one I wot of." And he fell to singing in a clear voice, for he was a young man, and to a sweet wild melody, one of those ballads which in an incomplete and degraded form you have read perhaps. My heart rose high as I heard him, for it was concerning the struggle against tyranny for the freedom of life, how that the wildwood and the heath, despite of wind and weather, were better for a free man than the court and the cheaping-town; of the taking from the rich ...
— A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson • William Morris
... may have been one of the most memorable events of Spenser's visit to London in 1589. We would gladly think that Thalia in the Teares of the Muses refers in the following passage to Shakspere: the comic stage, she says, is degraded, ...
— A Biography of Edmund Spenser • John W. Hales
... When a person was exiled, he was generally deprived of his own title, or was degraded. Genji appears to have ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... the piety of a prince, who, both as a conqueror and legislator, had surpassed the puerile virtues of Cyrus and Themistocles. Disappointment might urge the flatterer to secret revenge, and the first glance of favour might again tempt him to suspend and suppress a libel, in which the Roman Cyrus is degraded into an odious and contemptible tyrant, in which both the Emperor and his consort Theodora are seriously represented as two demons, who had assumed a human form for the destruction of mankind. Such base inconsistency must doubtless sully the reputation ...
— The Secret History of the Court of Justinian • Procopius
... no doubt as to what the sentence of the court would be—death and degradation—but thought that physical fatigue and great depression must have caused a general breakdown. The end every one knows. He was condemned to be shot and degraded. The first part of the sentence was cancelled on account of his former services, but he was degraded, imprisoned, escaped, and finished his life in Spain in poverty and obscurity, deserted by all his friends and his wife. It was a melancholy rentree for the Duc ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... pray do not misunderstand me. I would not for worlds. I am only telling you about a book, if you will only listen. I told him that I thought the story would be ten times as interesting if, instead of being degraded, the woman were raised by the love of the man who took her away from her husband. He made the husband a snivelling little creature, and the lover good-looking—that's the old game. I would have made the lover insignificant and the husband good- looking. ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... physician were alike overpowered by heat and exhaustion. Then he had glanced towards the door, and had seen the saddened expression that clouded the open features of the Christian youth, and the look of anguish that Oriana cast on her degraded father; and then all the truths that Henrich had endeavored so simply and so patiently to impress upon his mind—all the arguments that his white friend had employed to win him from heathen darkness, and guide him into ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... times have I changed hands? I think it is twelve times—I cannot remember; and each time it was down a step lower, and each time I got a harder master. They have been cruel, every one; they have worked me night and day in degraded employments, and beaten me; they have fed me ill, and some days not at all. And so I am but bones, now, with a rough and frowsy skin humped and cornered upon my shrunken body—that skin which was once so glossy, that skin which she loved to ...
— A Horse's Tale • Mark Twain |
