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More "Dilapidation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the town they soon came in sight of a deserted house. It evidently had been abandoned, for it was in a bad state of dilapidation. ...
— The Circus Boys on the Plains • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... the purchasers, is disagreeable to the eye. Those articles which, properly and decently arranged, look creditable and handsome, have then a paltry and wretched appearance; and the apartments, stripped of all that render them commodious and comfortable, have an aspect of ruin and dilapidation. It is disgusting also, to see the scenes of domestic society and seclusion thrown open to the gaze of the curious and the vulgar; to hear their coarse speculations and brutal jests upon the fashions and furniture to which they are unaccustomed,—a frolicsome humour much cherished ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... wreck, destruction, undoing, dilapidation, disorganization, perdition, ruination, subversion, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... spirit in rough contrast with the forbearance and good-fellowship of the French. Disliking the brusqueness of the new rulers, the Algonquins now shunned the city. Even the fort had been burned to the ground, and the Hebert homestead alone made a sweet oasis in a desert of neglect and dilapidation. ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... is now following a vocation which, if less agreeable, is certainly more profitable to himself. Occasionally one of these professional bookstallers blossoms into a shopkeeper in some court or alley off Holborn; but more generally they are too far gone in drink and dilapidation to get out ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... village in southern Mississippi, which had been, in the days of slavery, a somewhat famous resort, but which had lost its prestige, and entered upon a general decline; the hotel and all its surroundings presenting the appearance of general dilapidation. I remained here with the doctor for two weeks—until they succeeded in getting another person to care for him. I then took a run down to ...
— Thirty Years a Slave • Louis Hughes
... council. Having found such a volume it was left about in the dust, on the stove, on the ground, in the kitchen, and even in what the clerks called the "chamber of deliberations"; and thus it obtained a mouldiness to delight an antiquary, cracks of aged dilapidation, and broken corners that looked as though the rats had gnawed them; also, the gilt edges were tarnished with surprising perfection. As soon as the book was duly prepared, the entries were made. The following extracts will ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac
... the thought of progress, of accumulation, of increasing light, or of any other image by which it may please us to represent the improvement of the species? The hundred years that followed the usurpation of Henry IV., were a hurling-back of the mind of the country, a dilapidation, an extinction; yet institutions, laws, customs, and habits, were then broken down, which would not have been so readily, nor perhaps so thoroughly destroyed by the gradual influence of increasing knowledge; and under the oppression of which, if they had continued to ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... dead walls and bolted doors. There was nothing behind the walls, and the doors led no-whither: he had sounded and listened often enough to be sure of that. Now he felt like a traveller who, exploring some ancient ruin, comes on an inner cell, intact amid the general dilapidation, and painted with images which reveal the forgotten uses ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... Shore, Maryland, near Easton, the county town of that county, there is a small district of country, thinly populated, and remarkable for nothing that I know of more than for the worn-out, sandy, desert-like appearance of its soil, the general dilapidation of its farms and fences, the indigent and spiritless character of its inhabitants, and the prevalence ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... corner of Ireland, burthened with successive families of numerous daughters, so that he was forced to continue in the service, and the marriage had been hastened by the embarkation of the regiment for India only two days later. The Rectory had, however, been found in such a state of dilapidation, that demolition was the only cure; and thus the Reverend Julius and Lady Rosamond Charnock were to begin their married life in ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... here, as I felt afterwards at Arles, that one of the profane, in the presence of such a monument, can only admire and hold his tongue. The great impression, on the whole, is an impression of wonder that so much should have survived. What remains at Nimes, after all dilapidation is estimated, is astounding. I spent an hour in the Arenes on that same sweet Sunday morning, as I came back from the Roman baths, and saw that the corridors, the vaults, the staircases, the external casing, are still virtually there. Many of these parts are wanting in the Colosseum, ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... in getting a shop in which to carry on your business in this district cannot say that I had. I was offered this place by the Busta trustees. It was in a state of dilapidation when I took it, and they offered it to me on condition that I would make the necessary repairs ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... whatever at the moment for the panelling on the staircase, or the delicate ironwork of the broken balustrade. Rather it seemed to her, as she looked into some of the half-open doors of the swarming rooms she passed, or noticed with disgust the dirt and dilapidation of the stairs, and the evil smells of the basement, that the house added one more to the standing shames of the district—an opinion doubly strong in her when at last she emerged from her gropings among the dens of the lower regions, ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... garden alleys to the kitchen entrance of the house. A single candle burned in the great paved kitchen, which was destitute of the customary furniture; and as the party proceeded to ascend from thence by a flight of winding stairs, a prodigious noise of rats testified still more plainly to the dilapidation ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... next two years be engaged, for the municipality of the city. The window is, as regards dimensions, the finest in all Italy—a noble work of the later but still brilliant period of the art. The state of dilapidation into which it had been allowed to fall was such that, coming restored as it will from Signor Moretti's workshop, it will in many parts be almost equivalent to a new work. The five or six full-sized figures which we saw restored are very grand. I do not know who the original ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... out of the shadow of the lemon-house on to the roof of the section below us. When we came to the brink of the roof I sat down. The padrone stood behind me, a shabby, shaky little figure on his roof in the sky, a little figure of dilapidation, ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... so increases the rate of growth; that is, it will increase the size produced, if not the size retained. Which effect of use does use-inheritance transmit in such cases—the increased rate of growth, or the dilapidation of the worn-out parts? We can hardly suppose that both these effects of use will be inherited. Would shaving destroy the beard in time or strengthen it? Will the continued shearing of sheep increase or lessen the growth of wool? What will be the ultimate effect of plucking geese's ...
— Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? - An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and Darwin • William Platt Ball
... yet, to find people who ought to know, and perhaps do know, better, blaming Knox and his co-reformers for the dilapidation and desecration of our ancient fanes. The blame belongs to the "rascal multitude," and to the rapacious laymen who were served heirs to the properties of the despoiled Church. What is the Church the better ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story
... Councillors of State on mission in the year IX.) Report by Lacuee on the first military division. Three central schools at Paris, one called the Quatre-Nations. "This school must be visited in order to form any idea of the state of destruction and dilapidation which all the national buildings are in. No repairs have been made since the reopening of the schools; everything is going to ruin.... Walls are down and the floors fallen in. To preserve the pupils from the risks which the occupation of these buildings ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... no means the dirtiest individual in the land of Cho-sen, at least as far as it was my good fortune to see. Nevertheless, his clothes are invariably in a state of dilapidation, and, though intended to be white, are usually black with grease and dirt. As he is employed by the Government he wears the deepest mourning; his face, and one half of his body being actually hidden under the huge hat provided ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... tortures of those passions prematurely force into destructive action. The sound by nature undergo these tortures, and are racked, shaken, shattered; their beauty and bloom perish, but life remains untouched. They are brought to a certain point of dilapidation; they are reduced to pallor, debility, and emaciation. People think, as they see them gliding languidly about, that they will soon withdraw to sick-beds, perish there, and cease from among the healthy and happy. This does not ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... found Swinton friends; family connections, and some interested considerations of Middleton the Commissioner, joined to procure his safety, and he was dismissed, but after a long imprisonment, and much dilapidation of his estates. It is said that Swinton's admonitions, while confined in the Castle of Edinburgh, had a considerable share in converting to the tenets of the Friends Colonel David Barclay, then lying there in the garrison. This was the father of Robert Barclay, author of ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... his private reading. They were not boys' books, books of adventure and the like. His favourite author was one writing of Heroes, in (so she esteemed it) a style resembling either early architecture or utter dilapidation, so loose and rough it seemed; a wind-in-the-orchard style, that tumbled down here and there an appreciable fruit with uncouth bluster; sentences without commencements running to abrupt endings and smoke, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... We met nobody the whole way except a man with a cartload of wood, who greeted the Oberforster with immense respect, and some dilapidated little children picking wild strawberries. I wanted to remark on their dilapidation, which seemed very irregular in this well-conducted country, but thought I had best leave reasoned conversation alone till I've had time to learn more German, which I'm going to do diligently here, and till the Oberforster has discovered he needn't shout in order to make me understand. ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley
... grumbling all the while to himself as he surveyed the condition of each bird, and blaming alternately the carelessness of the under-falconer, and the situation of the building, and the weather, and the wind, and all things around him, for the dilapidation which time and disease had made in the neglected hawking establishment of the Garde Doloureuse. While in these unpleasing meditations, he was surprised by the voice of his beloved Dame Gillian, who seldom ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... Hildebrod, before opening what he had to say, made an accurate survey of the apartment, laying, from time to time, his finger on his nose, and winking on Nigel with his single eye, while he opened and shut the doors, lifted the tapestry, which concealed, in one or two places, the dilapidation of time upon the wainscoted walls, peeped into closets, and, finally, looked under the bed, to assure himself that the coast was clear of listeners and interlopers. He then resumed his seat, and beckoned confidentially ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... under foreclosure, appointing receivers in the interest of the debtor, etc., he is in many States so delayed in getting possession of his security that by the time he acquires it he will find it burdened with overdue taxes and in a state of general dilapidation. We have already alluded to the practice in California of compelling the executor of a mortgage to submit himself to the jurisdiction of the local public administrator, which practically results in a sequestration of a ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... mansion had been the town residence of the first Duke of Touraine, Archibald the Tineman. It had been occupied by the English for military purposes during their tenancy of the city, and now that they were gone, it had escaped by its very dilapidation the fate of the other possessions of the house of ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... was a small irregularly shaped space, surrounded by miserable hovels, with high pointed roofs, most of which were in a state of dangerous dilapidation; the broken casements in every instance replaced by rags or straw; the doors ill-hung and swinging upon their rusty hinges, and the whole of the buildings lost in dirt and wretchedness. The inhabitants of this filthy nook were of the lowest and most depraved ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... the Oratoire, a seminary for education, which is now suppressed. The building is immense, and admirably calculated for the purpose, but is already in a state of dilapidation; so that, I fear, by the time the legislature has determined what system of instruction shall be substituted for that which has been abolished, the children (as the French are fond of examples from the ancients) will take their ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... other side no small degree of haste and consternation prevailed. Colonel Gansevoort had been placed in command at the fort with a garrison of seven hundred and fifty men. But he found it in a state of perilous dilapidation. Originally a strong square fortification, with bomb-proof bastions, glacis, covered way, and ditch outside the ramparts, it had been allowed to fall into decay, and strenuous efforts were needed to bring it into ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... walls which had here and there intersected the broad park were, in many places, broken down, so as no longer to answer their original purpose as fences; piers were now and then to be seen, but the gates were gone; and, to add to the general air of dilapidation, some huge trunks were lying scattered through the venerable old trees, either the work of the winter storms, or perhaps the victims of some extensive but desultory scheme of denudation, which the projector had not capital or perseverance ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... public expense; its dangling non-descript ornaments, and tiresome acclivity and descent of forty steps each. "What," said he, "notwithstanding the protection by centinels of this precious memento of vitiated taste, has it become the prey of dilapidation?" ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... as he surveyed himself in a glass in his new equipment; for it was now eight months since he had landed in the Crimea, and the dilapidation of his garments had from that time been rapid. The difficulties of toilet had, too, been great, and white shirts were things absolutely unknown; so that Jack had never felt really presentable from the ...
— Jack Archer • G. A. Henty
... himself in a small, neglected garden; in front of him, to the right, a wretched, weather-stained house, bearing every mark of poverty and dilapidation, while to the left there stretched out from the house a long glass structure, also in miserable condition—a sculptor's studio, ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a melange of the work of at least three epochs, a not unusual feature in some of the smaller cathedrals. It has a mean little house built into its northwest corner, a crude and ugly clock-face stuck unmeaningly on its facade, and a general air of dilapidation, with respect to the statues originally contained in its archivolts and niches, which, to say the least, is not creditable to those who have been responsible for its care. It would seem that so lively and important a centre of local activity might have devoted a little more thought ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... given the name to the one they founded in the New World. Boston is full of ancient structures, among them Shodfriars Hall, one of the most elaborate half-timbered buildings in the Kingdom. The hotels are quite in keeping with the dilapidation and unprogressiveness of the town and there is no temptation to linger longer than necessary to get an idea of the old Boston ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... search. This had been patiently waited for a good while by those posted without, when suddenly, as rats are seen to issue from a rick when the ferret is in it, Johnny Darbyshire was seen ascending hurriedly a broken staircase, that was partly exposed to the open day by the progress of dilapidation, and terminated ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... United States. Although this country returned all mission buildings to the control of the Church, their reason for being had vanished; they were sold, or destroyed, or feebly maintained on funds insufficient to forestall dilapidation. Fortunately the Franciscan friars had built for beauty as well as for use; the architecture which they devised in skillful adaptation of their native Spanish type displayed originality and picturesque charm. Hence, of late years, Californians have come to feel a worthy pride in the ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... about us will dwindle by degrees, until at length our concerns are shrunk to the dimensions of our minds. It is not a predilection to mean, sordid, home-bred cares that will avert the consequences of a false estimation of our interest, or prevent the shameful dilapidation into which a great empire must fall by mean ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... business was in the year 1797, in a small workshop and smithy situated in Wells Street, Oxford Street. It was in an awful state of dirt and dilapidation when he became its tenant. He entered the place on a Friday, but by the Saturday evening, with the help of his excellent wife, he had the shop thoroughly cleaned, whitewashed, and put in readiness for beginning work on the next ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... it in this half-concealed dilapidation than ever it had been in the pride of its perfection. Then it had stood boldly out against the landscape, naked and aggressive; to-day, clothed in Nature's soft greenery, it had become so dim a heritage that it might easily have receded into the past ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... roof. They stood upon a gentle slope; a group of pines formed a shelter from the north, the moorland rose behind them, and the river sang through a contiguous glen. My first glance told me that they had not long been out of occupation. They showed no marks of dilapidation, and the little gardens, though weed-grown, gave signs of recent care. A woman whom I met told me their history. They had long been inhabited by two families, father and son. A few months previously these families ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... people by order of the petty-governor of the nearest village. The "Tribunal," which served the double purpose of Town Hall and Dak Bungalow for wayfarers, was often a hut of bamboo and palm-leaves, whilst others, which had been decent buildings generations gone by, lapsed into a wretched state of dilapidation. In some villages there was no Tribunal at all, and the official business had to be transacted in the municipal Governor's house. I first visited Calamba (La Laguna) in 1880, and for 14 years, to my knowledge, the headmen had to meet in a sugar-store ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... above, and it will be seen that it has suffered some little dilapidation since the last published engraving of it. The legs have been cut down to suit the height of one of his successors in the ministry!! With regard to the pulpit, an old resident in Bedford says—The celebrated John Howard presented a new pulpit in the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... estate, formerly the property of Lord Byron's family, which, amongst other matters, contain some severe remarks on the conduct of one of its proprietors, the great uncle and predecessor of our great poet, and having reference to dilapidation. Mr. Pettigrew, in his ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... political services, so that the efforts of its agents cannot be ascribed to cupidity. Also it must be admitted that the kingdom of Serbia, with its capital Belgrade, thanks to the internal chaos and dynastic scandals of the previous forty years, resulting in superficial dilapidation, intellectual stagnation, and general poverty, lacked the material as well as the moral glamour which a successful Piedmont should possess. Nobody could deny, for instance, that, with all its natural advantages, Belgrade was at first ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... in which he found her was a small ruinous building, sagged and jutting forward, as if struggling to sustain itself against time and dilapidation. The windows were broken; the doors and shutters unhung, except a solitary one of the latter, which creaked as it flapped to and fro in the wind; and this was ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... galloped out the gate, after practice and receipt of grave courtesy, so much did temple differ from shrine in its contact with secular life. The assembled multitude departed; much edified by the day's proceedings, and with low comment to each other on the dilapidation of Tamiya, its fall from the one time spruce and flourishing state. "Introduce a spendthrift in the door, and the wealth leaks from every crevice. The spirit of Tamiya Matazaemon must grieve at this sight. But why did he bring ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... litigious agent suggested to him a plan for raising it, by demanding a considerable sum from the executors of the late Dr. Leicester, for what is called dilapidation. The parsonage-house seemed to be in good repair; but to make out charges of dilapidation was not difficult to those who understood the business—and fifteen hundred pounds was the charge presently made out against the executors of the late incumbent. It was invidious, it was odious for the new vicar, in ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... set on foot in 1864, and Sir Gilbert Scott reported that L15,000 was necessary to make good the dilapidation and decay which extended, in his opinion, from the foundations to the roof. The necessary amount was not forthcoming for several years. Then a new committee was appointed, with Sir Edmund Lechmere as its chairman. In 1875 the restoration began, the choir being undertaken ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Abbey Church of Tewkesbury - with some Account of the Priory Church of Deerhurst Gloucestershire • H. J. L. J. Masse
... means an inviting place. It was an old stone edifice, two stories high, which had once been covered with, stucco; but the stucco had fallen off in most places, disclosing the rough stones underneath, and giving it an air of dilapidation and squalor. The front was by the road-side. A door opened in the middle, on each side of which was a small, dismal window. In the second story were two other small, dismal windows. At the end they law a window on each story, and a third in the attic. These were all small and dismal. Some of ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... lantern. Mr. Archer greeted him with civility; but the old man was in no humour of compliance. He guided the newcomer across the court-yard, looking sharply and quickly in his face, and grumbling all the time about the cold, and the discomfort and dilapidation of the castle. He was sure he hoped that Mr. Archer would like it; but in truth he could not think what brought him there. Doubtless he had a good reason—this with a look of cunning scrutiny—but, indeed, the place was quite unfit for any person of repute; he himself ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the castle looked down upon the house and church. The house, built of pebbles and mortar, had but one story surmounted by an enormous sloping roof with gable ends, in which were attics, no doubt empty, considering the dilapidation of their windows. The ground-floor had two rooms parted by a corridor, at the farther end of which was a wooden staircase leading to the second floor, which also had two rooms. A little kitchen was at the back of the building in a yard, where were the stable and coach-house, ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... meeting in 1853, had to borrow chairs from an adjoining office as the sheriff had walked away with their own for debt. Even a railroad with such a territory as the Hudson River Valley, and extending from New York to Albany existed in a state of chronic dilapidation; and the New York and Harlem, which had an entrance into New York City as an asset of incalculable value, was looked upon merely as a vehicle for Wall ...
— The Railroad Builders - A Chronicle of the Welding of the States, Volume 38 in The - Chronicles of America Series • John Moody
... at the southern end, we saw the wreck of a ship in the last stages of dilapidation. It had been a great vessel of three masts, but had lain so long exposed to the injuries of the weather that it was hung about with great webs of dripping seaweed, and on the deck of it shore bushes had taken root, and now flourished thick with flowers. It was a ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... signs of dilapidation. The belfry on the roof had been torn away and the old rusty bell, silent for many years, stood exposed to the ravages of summer and winter. Its only purpose now seemed to be to afford a shelter for the wasps which from year to year built their nests in its dome. The brick chimney, ...
— The Deacon of Dobbinsville - A Story Based on Actual Happenings • John A. Morrison
... existence with its sleek brown leather covering, and by its side stood the two leather armchairs, with their high, straight backs and awkwardly turned feet. No one had taken the trouble to repair these inroads of dilapidation, and, long as they had been expecting the Electoral Prince, no preparations whatever had been made for his reception. Four years had passed over these chambers without leaving any further trace of their presence ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... that almost hid her face. The twain were set a-sneezing by the fumes of sulphur, and Rooney swore afterwards that there were little things at the end of the yard with grinning faces and lights on the ends of their tails. Old Hollands are heady. Dirck began to chaff the beldam on her dilapidation, but she stopped his talk by dipping something from a caldron behind her and flinging it over both of her visitors. Whatever it was, it burned outrageously, and with a yell of pain they leaped the wall more briskly than they had jumped it ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... the city is in ruins, the Afghans having destroyed it in 1722. The principal buildings are mainly composed of mosques and sepulchres (for Koom is second only to Meshed in sanctity), but most of them are in a state of decay and dilapidation. The mosque containing the Tomb of Fatima is the finest, its dome being covered with plates of silver-gilt—the natives say of pure gold. The sacred character of this city is mainly derived from the fact that Fatima, surnamed "El Masouna" ("Free from sin"), died here ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... situated on a magnificent bay, a little below the confluence of three noble rivers, which drain a country of surpassing richness, and though the centre of the finest rice-growing district in the world, the town is dead. Every thing about it wears an air of dilapidation. The few white men you meet in its streets, or see lounging lazily around its stores and warehouses, appear to lack all purpose and energy. Long contact with the negro seems to have given them his ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... licensers of the press, 220; slaves employed to copy, 398; of the Vision of Alberico, preserved in the king's library at Paris, 422: of Galileo's annotations on Tasso, 444; destruction of Hugh Broughton's, by Speed, 445; destruction of Leland's, by Polydore Vergil, ib.; dilapidation of the Harleian, 446; suppression of one relating to Sixtus IV. by Fabroni, ib.; of the Marquis of Halifax suppressed, 447; Earl of Pulteney's and Earl of Anglesea's MS. Memoirs suppressed, ib.; anecdotes of the suppression ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... the architect's calling. But he had the good sense not to be above his trade, and he had the resolution to work his way upward, so that he only got a fair start. One hot day in July a friend found him sitting astride of a house roof occupied with his dilapidation business. Drawing his hand across his perspiring countenance, he exclaimed, "Here's a pretty business for a man who has been all over Greece!" However, he did his work, such as it was, thoroughly and well; he persevered until he advanced by degrees to more remunerative ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... rocking. Little and Grace went on to the next, and he smashed the roof in, and then the ceiling, and Grace and he were getting the people out, when the house they had just left melted away, all but a chimney-stack, which adhered in jagged dilapidation to the ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... in the above, due to the dilapidation of the MS., render it impossible to translate ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 • Emma Helen Blair
... narrowly the real aspect of the building. Its principal feature seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity. The discoloration of ages had been great. Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the eaves. Yet all this was apart from any extraordinary dilapidation. No portion of the masonry had fallen; and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individual stones. In this there was much that reminded me ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... on the suit-case gazed about him at the general air of dilapidation and neglect characteristic of a country town on the down grade, and recalled the congenial life of the city which he had left, with all its busy competition, with all its absorbing activities, the companionship of the men he loved, and the restful, inspiring intimacy with a certain ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... able to keep their feet for six paces together, the ladies are taken out of their litters, and placed, each between two careful persons; while others of the thirty hold by their skirts, to prevent their falling forward—a necessary precaution, tending to the immediate and hopeless dilapidation of their apparel. The rather heavy gentleman is abjured to leave his litter too, and be escorted in a similar manner; but he resolves to be brought down as he was brought up, on the principle that his fifteen bearers are not likely to tumble all at once, and that ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... it. It was with some difficulty that I found my way to it. It stood, as I have already observed, in a meadow, and was on almost every side surrounded by majestic hills. To give any clear description of this ruined pile would be impossible, the dilapidation is so great, dilapidation evidently less the effect of time than of awful violence, perhaps that of gunpowder. The southern is by far the most perfect portion of the building; there you see not only walls but roofs. Fronting you full ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... dilapidation, which you will observe includes the total loss of the date, signature and stamp, I am forced to the reluctant conclusion that your bankers will show a marked disinclination to honour what was once a ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... have been appropriated; while the broken galleries outside, intricate and black and cavernous, like Piranesi's etchings of the 'Carceri,' present the wildest pictures of greatness in decay, fantastic dilapidation. The ruins of the smaller theatre, again, with their picturesquely grouped fragments and their standing columns, might be sketched for a frontispiece to some dilettante work on classical antiquities. For the rest, perhaps the Aliscamps, or ancient Roman burial-ground, is the most interesting ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... whole families of dolls, from the aged grandmother in a white frilled cap, to the tiny china specimen that was too small to be dressed. There were Noah's arks that held animals that would have astonished old Noah himself, and rocking-horses in various stages of dilapidation, from the bright new one with only a scratch on his leg, to the headless and tailless steed that rocked in a melancholy way in the corner. Then there was a swing that hung from the ceiling, and a springy teeter-board that could bounce the little ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... the very name of which has been transformed by time. It is now known as the 'Talbot,' but the inscription above the doorway contradicts the modern signboard and proclaims the house to be 'The Ancient Tabard Inn.' The whole yard is redolent of dilapidation. Facing the visitor on entering is an interesting block of old buildings, forming part of the left side, and the bottom of what once was an ample courtyard. This part of the building contains not improbably the shell of the corresponding portion of ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... private shack (from which Norton and his wife had removed after the death of the elder Hollis), the stable, and one other building for the storing of miscellaneous articles. Hollis inspected them all and was not quite convinced that they had reached the stage of dilapidation ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... billingsgate with which his vocabulary had been furnished in the forecastle of the "Gil Blas." His criticism of the real Jim was by no means agreeable to the patrons of the fictitious one. In a moment there was a row; and the result was, that Lunes after a thorough dilapidation of his finery departed in custody of the police, more, however, for the negro's protection than ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... its dilapidation, there was something picturesque and attractive about the old homestead—a mingling of rude taste and neglect, unthrifty, but suggestive of innate character. Mary Fuller looked around her, with that keen relish of gay colors and rude outline, that ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... Moorish architecture; and indeed as I had occasional glimpses of it through the trees, the effect was exceedingly picturesque. This posting town is in truth very delightfully situated. While the horses were being changed, I made our way for the monastery; which I found to be in a state rather of dilapidation than of ruin. It had, indeed, a wretched aspect. I entered the chapel, and saw lying, transversely upon a desk, to the left—a very clean, large paper, and uncut copy of the folio Rouen Missal of 1759. Every thing ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... them. A few sheets of lead put in time upon the roof, a few dead leaves and sticks swept in time out of a water-course, will save both roof and walls from ruin. Watch an old building with an anxious care; guard it as best you may, and at any cost, from every influence of dilapidation. Count its stones as you would jewels of a crown; set watches about it as if at the gates of a besieged city; bind it together with iron where it loosens; stay it with timber where it declines; do not care about the unsightliness ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... wayfarer. The door stood wide open, and admitted us into a small court-yard. Thence we passed through a Gothic portal into the chapel, without seeing a human being. We then traversed two interior cloisters, equally vacant and silent, and bearing a look of neglect and dilapidation. From an open window we had a peep at what had once been a garden, but that had also gone to ruin; the walls were broken and thrown down; a few shrubs, and a scattered fig tree or two, were all the traces of cultivation ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... a shriek that was followed by a hubbub of tumult. John Bulmer sat erect in bed. He heard a medley of yelling, of musketry, and of crashes, like the dilapidation of falling battlements. He knew well enough what had happened. Cazaio and his men were making a night attack ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... case of fire, and for other obvious reasons. So by 1458, the Cordeliers having been duly "approached" on the subject, the "Fontaine de Massacre" was established at the foot of the belfry, and is drawn by Lelieur as a Gothic pyramid with five sides, as tall as the arcade. It showed signs of extreme dilapidation by the eighteenth century, and the wags wrote squibs about the broken statues of the Virgin and bishops by Pol Mansellement (or Mosselmen, see Chap. X.), in elegiacs as imperfect as their subject. So the Duke of Montmorency-Luxemburg, the Governor of Rouen and Normandy in 1728, magnanimously ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... exercise hospitality, to spend large revenues, to diffuse information, and to improve manners? This evil is a very serious one to Ireland; and, as far as we see, incurable. For if the present large estates were, by the dilapidation of families, to be broken to pieces and sold, others equally great would, in the free circulation of property, speedily accumulate; and the moment any possessor arrived at a certain pitch of fortune, he would probably choose to reside in the better country—near the Parliament, ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... Master of Cumnor Place conducted his worthy visitant was of greater extent than that in which they had at first conversed, and had yet more the appearance of dilapidation. Large oaken presses, filled with shelves of the same wood, surrounded the room, and had, at one time, served for the arrangement of a numerous collection of books, many of which yet remained, but torn and defaced, covered with dust, deprived of their ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... a gentleman in Monmouthshire, which exhibits the pride of ancestry in a curious point of view. His house was in such a state of dilapidation that the proprietor was in danger of perishing under the ruins of the ancient mansion, which he venerated even in decay. A stranger, whom he accidentally met at the foot of the Skyrrid, made various enquiries respecting the country, the prospects, and the neighbouring houses, and, among ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... the mines in Celtiberia. On the ground, at its base, and arranged in the form of a cross, were large gold shields and monster close-necked silver vases, of extravagant shape and unfitted for use; it was customary to cast quantities of metal in this way, so that dilapidation and even removal ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... the fireplace took up a large part of the room, and the rest was nearly filled with the confusion of odds and ends that make up the belongings of such a home. A feeble fire rested on the uneven bricks of the fireplace, and the chimney above was covered with newspapers in the last stages of dilapidation and dirt. There was no window, but a little sliding shutter, moved aside a few inches, admitted light enough to make the darkness visible as it fell on the smoke-stained boards, and the dusky faces of the inmates seated close to ...
— American Missionary, Vol. XLII., May, 1888., No. 5 • Various
... which an outrageously prickly variety of the cactus made itself conspicuously apparent to the touch; while, more than half hidden by the undergrowth, there were dotted here and there a few sepulchral stones and monuments in the very last stage of irretrievable dilapidation. Add to these sombre surroundings the melancholy sighing of the night-wind through the branches of the trees overhead, and the occasional weird cry of some nocturnal bird, and it will not be wondered at if I confess I felt a strong desire to get beyond the precincts of the ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... Way, with their gigantic height, breadth, and solidity, defying time and the elements, and far too mighty to be demolished by an ordinary earthquake. Here you may see a modern dwelling, and a garden with its vines and olive-trees, perched on the lofty dilapidation of a tomb, which forms a precipice of fifty feet in depth on each of the four sides. There is a home on that funereal mound, where generations of children have been born, and successive lives been spent, undisturbed by the ghost of the stern Roman whose ashes were ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... military strength of the respective countries. It requires no mean share of political wisdom to mitigate an encounter with the financial difficulties by which every contest is beset. The evils of the political and social state of France were brought to a head by the dilapidation of its revenues, and occasioned, not the Revolution itself, but the disorders by which it was accompanied. And more than half of our national revenue is appropriated to the payment of our own debt; in other words, every acre of land, besides the support of its owner ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... to perfection, and beheld it in its lustre, the labour of so much opulent magnificence and curious art, and designed to be 'exceeding magnifical, of fame, and of glory throughout all countries', should be occupied with the prospect of its utter ruin and dilapidation, and that too under the 'opprobrium' of God's vindictive judgment upon it, nor to imagine how that strain of sinister prophecy, that forebodes of malediction, should be ascribed to him, if he ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... repair and there were only traces left of former coats of paint. Of the picket fence which had once bounded her possessions in front, not even a post remained. Years before, the slats had begun to decay, until the dilapidation became an eyesore to even Miss Elizabeth herself. But when the cow-boys in search of their charges that always pastured along the sides of the road, rattled their sticks over its surface, it became a nuisance she could no longer stand. ...
— The Little Gold Miners of the Sierras and Other Stories • Various
... contemplate two countries—the one possessed by the Normans, wealthy and exonerated from public burdens, the other enslaved and oppressed with a land tax—the former full of spacious mansions, of walled towns, and moated castles—the latter occupied with thatched cabins, and ancient walls in a state of dilapidation. This peopled with the happy and the idle, with soldiers, courtiers, knights, and nobles—that with miserable men condemned to labour as peasants and artisans. On the one side he beholds luxury and insolence, on the other poverty and envy—not the envy of the poor at the sight of opulence ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... work and duties, and finally have to be transferred to an insane asylum. Here they show nothing characteristic of the well-known dementing processes, as hebephrenia, for example; but very frequently, although quite young, their entire manner and behavior suggest a certain dilapidation and deterioration. ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... were all of wicker, and though in various stages of dilapidation, were cool and comfortable. A table in the center was covered with a white cloth, and the sofa pillows were ...
— Patty's Summer Days • Carolyn Wells
... shake hands. I got Uncle George to follow along with hammer and nails to mend the chaise, as the floor was so broken I could not put my feet on it, and the bag of oats had dropped through on the way. I had tied the halter to the dasher and wound it round the bag, so there was no loss. The dilapidation was a pleasing reminiscence of old times, and George was pleased enough to earn a quarter by patching it up. Then I drove on to the house, where are only a Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair left in charge. ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... indications around the house do not denote thrift. Quite the reverse. As the neighbors expressed it, "there was a screw loose with Lacey," the owner of this place. It was going down hill like its master. A general air of neglect and growing dilapidation impressed the most casual observer. The front gate hung on one hinge; boards were off the shackly barn, and the house had grown dingy and weather-stained from lack of paint. But as you entered and passed from the province of the master to that of the mistress a new ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... to sea is keeping close to the shore Can leave it without regret Dependent upon imagination and memory Great part of the enjoyment of life Luxury of his romantic grief Picturesque sort of dilapidation Rest is never complete—unless he can see somebody else at work Won't see Mt. Desert till midnight, and ...
— Widger's Quotations of Charles D. Warner • David Widger
... stated to have been made for thirty men to garrison it. In all probability, the change produced in the art of warfare, by the introduction of cannon, caused it silently to pass into insignificance, and then gradually to sink into its present wretched state of dilapidation. Towards the close of the seventeenth century, an hospital was established within its walls; and the same still subsists, but in great poverty, in consequence of the funds having been alienated, or lost, during ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... three-legged stool and a door-mat, would have been more fitly designated as the hall. Between this Salle d'Attente and the den in which he slept, ate, smoked, and received his friends, lay the studio—once a stately salon, now a wilderness of litter and dilapidation. On one side you beheld three windows closely boarded up, with strips of newspaper pasted over the cracks to exclude every gleam of day. Overhead yawned a huge, dusty skylight, to make way for which a fine old painted ceiling had been ruthlessly knocked ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... have closed any bargain to escape a Sunday in the Plaster Cove hotel. There are different sorts of hotel uncleanliness. There is the musty old inn, where the dirt has accumulated for years, and slow neglect has wrought a picturesque sort of dilapidation, the mouldiness of time, which has something to recommend it. But there is nothing attractive in new nastiness, in the vulgar union of smartness and filth. A dirty modern house, just built, a house smelling of poor whiskey and vile tobacco, its white paint grimy, its floors unclean, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... nowhere to be seen. Pym hastily returned to the hallway, and discovering a stair leading to a small cellar, he descended. The cellar was filled with debris, two small window casements opening to the exterior air were broken and decayed to the last degree of dilapidation, and the icy wind whistled through the rubbish of the doleful spot. He ran back to the laboratory, where Peters was hunting about, hoping to find Masusaelili alive, yet fearing to find his emaciated form lying ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... The chateau bore abundant signs of it. It was a burnt red pile standing four-square on a little eminence, about the base of which the river went winding turbulently; it was turreted at each of its four angles, imposing in its way, but in a sad state of dilapidation ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... which I write, as we steamed up the harbour towards our moorings, the quays looked gay and lively, the town very picturesque. It is so in truth, though some of its picturesqueness is the result of antiquity, dirt and dilapidation. But the fresh green trees lining the quay looked bright and youthful; a contrast with the ancient grey walls that formed their background. Vessels were loading and unloading, people hurried to and fro; many had evidently ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 1, January, 1891 • Various
... street toward the quarter in which she lived. It had been dark for some time, but the street was well lighted and Evelyn had no difficulty in recognizing him. Indeed, she watched him for a few moments while he passed on into a more shadowy region, where the gloom and dilapidation of the first small frame houses were noticeable. Beyond them there was scarcely a light at all; the neighborhood looked mysterious, and she wondered what kind of people inhabited it. She did not think that Mrs. Nairn ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... and his party would have settled near Monticello, perhaps, but for the system of slavery, which perpetuated a wasteful mode of farming, and disfigured the beautiful land with dilapidation. ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... vehicle, that Mr Dombey had been doubled up, ably to his old recommendation, and Miss Dombey abducted. This gentleman awakened in Miss Nipper some considerable astonishment; for, having been defeated by the Larkey Boy, his visage was in a state of such great dilapidation, as to be hardly presentable in society with comfort to the beholders. The Chicken himself attributed this punishment to his having had the misfortune to get into Chancery early in the proceedings, when he was severely fibbed by the Larkey one, and heavily ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... printing in colours, developed in the Yangtze valley, was adopted by Japan and found its highest refinement there. But the Ming are also famous for their monumental architecture which largely followed Mongol patterns. Among the most famous examples is the famous Great Wall which had been in dilapidation and was rebuilt; the great city walls of Peking; and large parts of the palaces of Peking, begun in the Mongol epoch. It was at this time that the official style which we may observe to this day in North China was developed, the style employed everywhere, until in the age of ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... his dead wife, all that remained unmortgaged of a vast colonial estate on Crab Island in the bay, consisting of several thousand acres of land and water,—mostly water,—a manor house, once painted white, and a number of outbuildings in various stages of dilapidation and decay. ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith
... was at the head of affairs, and, indeed, for a year afterwards, he would accept no national recompense. Sometime after we went to visit the palace of the 18th Brumaire. Bonaparte liked it exceedingly, but all was in a state of complete dilapidation. It bore evident marks of the Revolution. The First Consul did not wish, as yet, to burden the budget of the State with his personal expenses, and he was alarmed at the enormous sum required to render St. Cloud habitable. Flattery had not yet arrived at the degree of proficiency which it subsequently ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... themselves for the night, with no change of clothing, scarcely the removal of shoes. Change the box house to a tent, put the fire in the centre, and with less furniture, but no more smoke or dirt, you have the tepee home of the Indian. Match the dilapidation and the dirt, the narrow quarters and the large family, and you have the cabin home in the Georgia swamps and the lowlands of Louisiana. The conditions in the main are the same—an untutored father and mother, no books, no pictures, ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 42, No. 12, December, 1888 • Various
... women, in garments of universal dirt colour, stood at the doors; ragged children ran and shrieked after the coach, the church had a hole in the roof, and stood tottering in spite of rude repairs; the churchyard was trodden down by cattle, and the whole place only resembled the pictures of Irish dilapidation. ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... picket fence behind which, crowding up to the sociable road, stands the house. As I drive that way it always seems to look out at me like some half-earnest worker, inviting a chat about the weather or the county fair; hence, probably, its good-natured dilapidation. At the gate I heard a voice, and a boy about three years old, in a soiled gingham apron, a sturdy, blue-eyed little chap, whose face was still eloquent of his recent breakfast, came running to meet me. I stopped the ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... antiquity about it all that was, at least to the nostrils of the outsider, not unpleasing. And when the ships were painted, and had departed, it resumed very easily its more regular aspect of picturesque dilapidation. For in spite of its sordid surroundings and its occasional lapses into bustle, Blackpool Dock, as Rainham would sometimes remind himself, when its commercial motive was pressed upon him too forcibly, was deeply permeated by the spirit of ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... women in sulphur shawls and children in variegated rags were sunning themselves and passing the time of day. On the other side, a tumble-down wall of brick, that once was red, rose out of the water in such formless dilapidation that one could not tell where the reality merged into the reflection; while masses of verdure from a hidden garden tossed their heads above it, or tumbled over it as if enchanted to get a glimpse of themselves in the dark, cool water below. A wooden bridge spanned the canal, glassed perfectly ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... the discoverer of the mines in Celtiberia. On the ground, at its base, and arranged in the form of a cross, were large gold shields and monster close-necked silver vases, of extravagant shape and unfitted for use; it was customary to cast quantities of metal in this way, so that dilapidation and even removal should be ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... first establishments, if not the very first, of the South Australian Company was on Kangaroo Island, on the shores of Nepean Bay. Here the town of Kingscote was laid out, and some very good houses built, which are now falling to dilapidation and decay, since it has been abandoned by the Company's servants for some years. Nevertheless Kingscote is a very pretty sea-port town, and the harbour is undoubtedly good. The bay is large enough to hold a number of ships, and is secure from all winds, being ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... stands near the entrance into the chancel of the church. According to village tradition, this rare relic was found on some of the neighbouring hills. It is curiously ornamented with symbolic devices in bold relief. "It has suffered dilapidation from the culpable neglect of those who should have felt an interest in its preservation. About two feet of the top of the shaft is wanting, as may be seen by reference to the engraved sketch, (See the Cut,) which was taken in the year 1815." The sexton of the church, who was then an old man, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 563, August 25, 1832 • Various
... was its lavish splendor that even at the present day the stranger, wandering through its silent courts and deserted halls, gazes with astonishment at gilded ceilings and fretted domes, the brilliancy and beauty of which have survived the vicissitudes of war and the silent dilapidation of ages. ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... does not become again a part of nature, as stone walls do in England; some dry and dusty grass sprouts along the ledges of a ruin, as in the Coliseum; but there is no green mantle of ivy spreading itself over the gray dilapidation." We stumbled upon the Fountain of Trevi in one of our early rambles, not knowing what it was. "One of these fountains," writes my father, referring to it, "occupies the whole side of a great edifice, and represents Neptune and his steeds, who seem to be sliding down ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... was the best motto afloat. Rosamund noticed the peculiarity of the books he selected for his private reading. They were not boys' books, books of adventure and the like. His favourite author was one writing of Heroes, in (so she esteemed it) a style resembling either early architecture or utter dilapidation, so loose and rough it seemed; a wind-in-the-orchard style, that tumbled down here and there an appreciable fruit with uncouth bluster; sentences without commencements running to abrupt endings and smoke, like waves against a sea-wall, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... upon the ruins of the once famous inn the very name of which has been transformed by time. It is now known as the 'Talbot,' but the inscription above the doorway contradicts the modern signboard and proclaims the house to be 'The Ancient Tabard Inn.' The whole yard is redolent of dilapidation. Facing the visitor on entering is an interesting block of old buildings, forming part of the left side, and the bottom of what once was an ample courtyard. This part of the building contains not improbably the shell of the corresponding portion of ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... sleeping on the rocks or bobbing about in the water as of old. Sutro's gardens were a disappointment, as they seemed to have been allowed to go to decay. Of all the beautiful statuary representing the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome, all were in a state of dilapidation—arms, legs and heads broken off and covered with moss and dirt. Many of the glass houses in the gardens were in a like state. We did not stay long there, but took cars for Golden Gate Park, which is kept up by the Government and everything is kept in a perfect state ...
— Some Reminiscences of old Victoria • Edgar Fawcett
... under thee, and the worm covers thee. There are the mats and the carpets that lie under, and there are the state and the canopy that hang over the greatest of the sons of men. Even those bodies that were the temples of the Holy Ghost come to this dilapidation, to ruin, to rubbish, to dust; even the Israel of the Lord, and Jacob himself, hath no other specification, no other denomination, but that vermis Jacob, thou worm of Jacob. Truly the consideration of this posthume death, this death after burial, ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... the annual ranching failures in the West. The MacDavid establishment bore a well-ordered aspect, unlike many of the unthrifty, ramshackle ranches, of his neighbours. The fencing was of the best, and there were no signs of decay or dilapidation in any of the buildings. Dwarf pines were planted about and a Morning Glory vine over-ran the house, giving the place an air of restful domesticity. As they entered the store the trio noticed a saddle-horse ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... years; how I sometimes remained away for months at a time, and how once an office boy mis-addressed me to a lady in New Jersey who very graciously herself forwarded me to my parent; how my poor parent was obliged at length by the increasing dilapidation of my appearance to go to the expense of having me completely re-typed by a public typist, and how directly after this he entirely re-wrote, expanded, and elaborated me at the instigation of one firm of publishers; how I was read by a delightful old ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... different type of parish priest in his boyhood, and this is how he introduces him. He has been describing, with an unmitigated realism, the village poorhouse, in all its squalor and dilapidation:— ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... Anglia and the southern counties even the smallest hamlets have often a good church, with a conspicuous tower or spire; but in how many villages in this riding do you find no church at all, as in the case of Staithes and Runswick? Many of the old churches of Yorkshire were in a state of great dilapidation at the beginning of last century, and a great effort having been initiated by the then Archbishop, a fund was instituted to help the various parishes to restore their buildings. It was a period when architecture was at a low ebb, and the desire to sweep away ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... Clarke were from Westminster School (Campbell's Chancellors, v. 176). The schoolhouse, famous though it was, was allowed to fall into decay. A writer in the Gent. Mag. in 1794 (p. 413) says that 'it is now in a state of dilapidation, and unfit for the use of either the master ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... and shingles from the roof. The frame was out of repair and there were only traces left of former coats of paint. Of the picket fence which had once bounded her possessions in front, not even a post remained. Years before, the slats had begun to decay, until the dilapidation became an eyesore to even Miss Elizabeth herself. But when the cow-boys in search of their charges that always pastured along the sides of the road, rattled their sticks over its surface, it became a nuisance she ...
— The Little Gold Miners of the Sierras and Other Stories • Various
... beautiful was it in this half-concealed dilapidation than ever it had been in the pride of its perfection. Then it had stood boldly out against the landscape, naked and aggressive; to-day, clothed in Nature's soft greenery, it had become so dim a heritage that it might easily have receded into the past and been forgotten ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... found in the wall of Confucius's old house, and was deciphered and edited by K'ung An-kwo. The present Work is by Wang Su of the Wei (Q) dynasty, grounded professedly on the older one, the blocks of which had suffered great dilapidation during the intervening centuries. It is allowed also, that, since Su's time, the Work has suffered more than any of the acknowledged Classics. Yet it is a very valuable fragment of antiquity, and it would be worth while ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) • James Legge
... iron knockers, and queer old lamps; dreary balconies on the first floor, with here and there a plaster vase containing some withered member of the palm tribe, or a faded orange-tree; everywhere and in everything an air of dilapidation and decay; faded curtains, that had once been fine, flapping in the open windows; Venetian shutters going to ruin; and the only glimpse of brightness or domestic comfort confined to the humble parlour of the portress, who kept watch and ward over one of the dismal mansions, ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... archaeologist; and I felt here, as I felt afterwards at Arles, that one of the profane, in the presence of such a monument, can only admire and hold his tongue. The great impression, on the whole, is an impression of wonder that so much should have survived. What remains at Nimes, after all dilapidation is estimated, is astounding. I spent an hour in the Arenes on that same sweet Sunday morning, as I came back from the Roman baths, and saw that the corridors, the vaults, the staircases, the external casing, are still virtually there. Many of these parts are wanting in the ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... Washingtons took great and proper pride, that it was "the lodestone which draws the wandering Washingtons back to the old haunts," I was greatly shocked on visiting the house to see the shameful state of dilapidation into which it has been allowed to pass. The porches and steps have fallen down, the garden is a disreputable tangle, and the graves in the yard are heaped with tumble-down stones about which the cattle graze. The only parts of the building in good repair are those ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... a gentle slope; a group of pines formed a shelter from the north, the moorland rose behind them, and the river sang through a contiguous glen. My first glance told me that they had not long been out of occupation. They showed no marks of dilapidation, and the little gardens, though weed-grown, gave signs of recent care. A woman whom I met told me their history. They had long been inhabited by two families, father and son. A few months previously these families had sailed ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... even yet, to find people who ought to know, and perhaps do know, better, blaming Knox and his co-reformers for the dilapidation and desecration of our ancient fanes. The blame belongs to the "rascal multitude," and to the rapacious laymen who were served heirs to the properties of the despoiled Church. What is the Church the better for their enrichment? ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story
... remarkable chiefly for the extent of the gardens attached to the house, and for the singularly advanced state of dilapidation in which everything was allowed to remain. Beyond the gardens the woods stretched down to the sea, unpruned and thick with a heavy undergrowth; from the road the gardens were hidden by thick hedges, and by the forbidding gray front of the building. It was not an attractive ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... suitable conditions: very different from the guide and cicerone business, which belongs to later hours of the day. I stand in the open place, under its shadow, and lift my eyes with wonder to the amazing and crowded cluster of spires and towers: its antique air, and even look of shattered dilapidation showing that the restorer has not been at his work. There was no smugness or trimness, or spick-and-spanness, but an awful and reverent austerity. And with an antique appropriateness to its functions the Flemish women, crones ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... common schools, or to enter one of the professions, which at that time did not place so much importance as at present upon lengthy preparation and a degree. The expenses were as light as was the fare. The rooms were scantily furnished; chairs, tables and beds were in the last stages of dilapidation from the rough usage of a generation of students. No one felt or was held responsible for their condition. Some of the students boarded themselves in the dormitory, which did not add to the tidiness and order of their rooms. Books, clothing, plates and pots, wood and food were scattered ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... the paternal home began to present an air of neglect and even dilapidation, which occasionally attracted my attention and caused, as I incidentally discovered, a great deal of unfavorable comment among my neighbors, who thought that I should go to work and at least earn money enough ...
— My Terminal Moraine - 1892 • Frank E. Stockton
... they would look at the wild night, and conclude that something had happened. So would the doctor, who would hear the summons from his bed. What would they all say to him, Guthrie Carey, with his good seaman's record behind him, when he brought his wife home in such a state of dilapidation? However, all's well that ends well. Let him only have her safely there, and he would not mind what anybody said; and he'd take precious good care not to run any risks with ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... about them a number of little flags stuck on long poles, which fluttered about in the breeze. According to the account of our interpreter, which had to pass from Thibetian into Hindostanee before it could clothe itself in English, the cause of this dilapidation was the state of wealth and ambition at which the Lamas had arrived, and the consequent interposition of Gulab Singh to take down their pride and ease them of a little of their wealth, both of which he accomplished in the ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... author introduces us to an interesting family of girls, who, in default of the appearance of the rightful heir, occupy an old, aristocratic place at Arrochar. Just as it has reached the lowest point of dilapidation, through lack of business capacity on the part of the family, Osborne appears to claim his inheritance, and the interesting problem presents itself of marrying one of the daughters or turning the family out. The author thus gives herself a fair field to display ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... strangely attuned our spirits to the enjoyment of the fake antiquities, the broken arches, pediments, columns, statues, which, in a region glutted with ruin, the landscape architect of the Villa Borghese had fancied putting about in pleasing stages of artificial dilapidation. But there was nothing faked in the dishevelled grass of the little stadium, with its gradines around the sides, and the game of tennis which some young girls were playing in it. Neither was there anything ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... emitted from a low chimney, the din of the workman's hammer, and the dull heavy sound of the bellows, is distinguished as the abode of the village Vulcan; while the surrounding yard, with drays in various stages of dilapidation, wheels, poles, axles, and other dismemberments strewing the ground, presents the appearance of a perfect vehicular golgotha. With one or two wool-laden drays drawn up before a public-house, in which the guardians of the tractive animals, and who ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... change of clothing, scarcely the removal of shoes. Change the box house to a tent, put the fire in the centre, and with less furniture, but no more smoke or dirt, you have the tepee home of the Indian. Match the dilapidation and the dirt, the narrow quarters and the large family, and you have the cabin home in the Georgia swamps and the lowlands of Louisiana. The conditions in the main are the same—an untutored father and mother, no books, ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 42, No. 12, December, 1888 • Various
... around the house do not denote thrift. Quite the reverse. As the neighbors expressed it, "there was a screw loose with Lacey," the owner of this place. It was going down hill like its master. A general air of neglect and growing dilapidation impressed the most casual observer. The front gate hung on one hinge; boards were off the shackly barn, and the house had grown dingy and weather-stained from lack of paint. But as you entered and passed from the province of the master to that of the mistress a new element was apparent, ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... highest refinement there. But the Ming are also famous for their monumental architecture which largely followed Mongol patterns. Among the most famous examples is the famous Great Wall which had been in dilapidation and was rebuilt; the great city walls of Peking; and large parts of the palaces of Peking, begun in the Mongol epoch. It was at this time that the official style which we may observe to this day in North China was developed, the style employed everywhere, until in ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... foreplane of trees, with branches which interlaced at the top, made, with the addition of a stone wall below, an encasement for the picture proper, which lay beyond. The lower line, i.e., the stone wall, was in constant process of change, obliterated by shadow or despoiled by natural dilapidation, sometimes vine-grown. In its several stages it showed always the most critical weighing of the part, and a consummate ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... of existence almost any garment may be made to last and wear to preserve an appearance of respectability by a judicious and persevering use of needle and thread. But boots, especially boys' boots, are unmanageable in a woman's hands, and, indeed, in any hands beyond a certain stage of dilapidation; and every one knows, that whatever else may be old, and patched, and shabby, good boots are absolutely indispensable to the keeping up of an appearance of respectability, and, indeed, one may say, with some difference, to the ...
— The Inglises - How the Way Opened • Margaret Murray Robertson
... had done in Kousminski. Besides this, he wished to find out all he could about Katusha and her baby, and when and how it had died. He got to Panovo early one morning, and the first thing that struck him when he drove up was the look of decay and dilapidation that all the buildings bore, especially the house itself. The iron roofs, which had once been painted green, looked red with rust, and a few sheets of iron were bent back, probably by a storm. Some of the planks which covered the house from outside were torn away in several places; these ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... interest was heightened when I entered his rooms. He occupied two rooms at the top of a dreary building devoted to men of law. The rooms were well enough in themselves, but the furniture was in the last stage of dilapidation, there were holes in the carpet, and everything looked forlorn and poverty-stricken. I glanced at my companion. Certainly, his clothes were a little shabby, but quite good, and he was oblivious to the decayed atmosphere ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... though not in his regular line of study, interested Somerset more than the architecture, because of their singular dilapidation, it occurred to his mind that he had in his youth been schoolfellow for a very short time with a pleasant boy bearing a surname attached to one of the paintings—the name of Ravensbury. The boy had vanished he knew not how—he thought he had been removed from school suddenly on account ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... small, neglected garden; in front of him, to the right, a wretched, weather-stained house, bearing every mark of poverty and dilapidation, while to the left there stretched out from the house a long glass structure, also in miserable condition—a sculptor's ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the chambers formerly occupied by Rodin. Arrived at the landing-place she ascended another ruinous staircase, steep as a ladder, and with nothing but an old rope for a rail. She at length reached the half-rotten door of a garret, situated in the roof. The house was in such a state of dilapidation, that, in many places the roof gave admission to the rain, and allowed it to penetrate into this cell, which was not above ten feet square, and lighted by an attic window. All the furniture consisted of an old straw mattress, laid upon the ground, with the straw peeping out from a rent in its ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... the Appian Way, with their gigantic height, breadth, and solidity, defying time and the elements, and far too mighty to be demolished by an ordinary earthquake. Here you may see a modern dwelling, and a garden with its vines and olive-trees, perched on the lofty dilapidation of a tomb, which forms a precipice of fifty feet in depth on each of the four sides. There is a home on that funereal mound, where generations of children have been born, and successive lives been spent, undisturbed by the ghost of the stern Roman ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... formerly the property of Lord Byron's family, which, amongst other matters, contain some severe remarks on the conduct of one of its proprietors, the great uncle and predecessor of our great poet, and having reference to dilapidation. Mr. Pettigrew, in ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... of Gaunt; also, here was the shrine of the little Saint Hugh, that Christian child who was fabled to have been crucified by the Jews of Lincoln. The Cathedral is not particularly rich in monuments; for it suffered grievous outrage and dilapidation, both at the Reformation and in Cromwell's time. This latter iconoclast is in especially bad odor with the sextons and vergers of most of the old churches which I have visited. His soldiers stabled their steeds in the nave of Lincoln Cathedral, and hacked and hewed the monkish sculptures, ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... broad. On the north-eastern corner there are fragments of an old building, supposed to have been a fortress, while about half-way up the accent there are similar indications of a church now in a state of complete dilapidation. There is preserved, however, a large font of an octagon form, composed of red and white marble; as also pieces of broken pillars ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... assembling slowly in dozens and half dozens straggling along, no great enthusiasm apparent at all. The great majority wore corduroys of a great many varieties of color and states of preservation or dilapidation. The irrepressible small boys were clustering over the slight fence that surrounded the platform, crawling under it, roosting on top of it, squatting round my chair and smiling up at me as if they expected a universal pat on ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... and sofas were all of wicker, and though in various stages of dilapidation, were cool and comfortable. A table in the center was covered with a white cloth, and the sofa pillows ...
— Patty's Summer Days • Carolyn Wells
... were mostly closed. A mysterious and unusual stillness prevailed. The brown leaves fluttered about, unswept from the dreary avenues. Decayed branches obstructed the paths; and every object wore a look of wretchedness and dilapidation. The only sign of occupancy and life was one grey wreath of smoke, curling heavily from its vent, as if oppressed with the gloom by which it was surrounded. The melancholy note of the redbreast was the only living sound, as the bird came hopping towards him ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... morning of which I write, as we steamed up the harbour towards our moorings, the quays looked gay and lively, the town very picturesque. It is so in truth, though some of its picturesqueness is the result of antiquity, dirt and dilapidation. But the fresh green trees lining the quay looked bright and youthful; a contrast with the ancient grey walls that formed their background. Vessels were loading and unloading, people hurried to and ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 1, January, 1891 • Various
... grass and stunted shrubs, among which an outrageously prickly variety of the cactus made itself conspicuously apparent to the touch; while, more than half hidden by the undergrowth, there were dotted here and there a few sepulchral stones and monuments in the very last stage of irretrievable dilapidation. Add to these sombre surroundings the melancholy sighing of the night-wind through the branches of the trees overhead, and the occasional weird cry of some nocturnal bird, and it will not be wondered at if I confess I felt a strong desire to get beyond the precincts ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... county town of that county, there is a small district of country, thinly populated, and remarkable for nothing that I know of more than for the worn-out, sandy, desert-like appearance of its soil, the general dilapidation of its farms and fences, the indigent and spiritless character of its inhabitants, and the prevalence ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... side, and fifteen pyramids, each nearly as large in the base as Cheops. "The city is indeed of vast extent . . . the whole ground, over a space of five or six miles in diameter, is covered with heaps of ruins—ruins which at first make no impression, so complete is their dilapidation." He asserts the great antiquity of these ruins, because he found the very highways of the ancient city to be composed of broken bricks and pottery, the debris left by earlier populations. "This continent," he says (page 43), "is the land of mysteries; we here enter an infinity whose limits ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... have originated during the day, and it is indispensable to assume that there is a sleeping state of the psychic life. Thus, even the theory of partial sleep has come into play; but the characteristics of the sleeping state have been found not in the dilapidation of the psychic connections but in the cessation of the psychic system dominating the day, arising from its desire to sleep. The withdrawal from the outer world retains its significance also for our conception; though not the only factor, it nevertheless helps the regression ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... this, the bureau had to take a like journey, for it had, strangely enough, fallen into sudden dilapidation. All the locks were out of order, half the knobs were off, there was not a drawer that didn't require the most accurate balancing of forces in order to get it shut after it was once open, and it showed premonitory symptoms of shedding its skin like a snake. A five dollar bill ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur
... name of any student to whom a manuscript is delivered for his researches was ever made, before or since, or in the nature of things will ever be, this memorandum must involve our female historian in the obloquy of this dilapidation.[288] Such dishonest practices of party feeling, indeed, are not peculiar to any party. In Roscoe's "Illustrations" of his Life of Lorenzo de' Medici, we discover that Fabroni, whose character scarcely ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... he said, pointing to some mutilated wooden statues in the poor, scantily furnished sacristy, "here are some images which cannot be used, they are so broken, and here are more," he added, opening some drawers and displaying four or five smaller figures in various stages of dilapidation. Thus, for some time he continued to call my attention to different curious relics with such interest and reverence that I was almost sorry when Father Joaquin appeared. It was sad to see the altar of the church defaced and cracked, and its statues, brought a hundred ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... they would hardly have given the name to the one they founded in the New World. Boston is full of ancient structures, among them Shodfriars Hall, one of the most elaborate half-timbered buildings in the Kingdom. The hotels are quite in keeping with the dilapidation and unprogressiveness of the town and there is no temptation to linger longer than necessary to get an idea of the old Boston ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... then went with him to McComb, a village in southern Mississippi, which had been, in the days of slavery, a somewhat famous resort, but which had lost its prestige, and entered upon a general decline; the hotel and all its surroundings presenting the appearance of general dilapidation. I remained here with the doctor for two weeks—until they succeeded in getting another person to care for him. I then took a run down ...
— Thirty Years a Slave • Louis Hughes
... poverty, no want, no taxes—not any sign of dilapidation or squalor anywhere in the principality of Monaco. Yet the "people," so called, have been known to lapse into a state of discontent. They sometimes "yearned for freedom." Too well fed and cared for, too rid of dirt and debt, too flourishing, they "riz." Prosperity grew monotonous. ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... each with a tower a hundred feet high on it. Your first impression must have been that Pekin is the greatest city in the world. You came in by a street two hundred feet wide, with shops on each side; but when you have seen more of it, you will find dilapidation and decay, and about the same filth you have observed in other Chinese cities. But it is one of the most ancient cities in the world, for this or another city stood here twelve hundred years before Christ. ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... to be that of an excessive antiquity. The discoloration of ages had been great. Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine, tangled web-work from the eaves. Yet all this was apart from any extraordinary dilapidation. No portion of the masonry had fallen; and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individual stones. In this there was much that reminded me of ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... maid-servant, opened the door, and in the spacious, dusky entrance-hall, where the bales of leather were packed closely together, did not notice the dilapidation of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of progress, of accumulation, of increasing light, or of any other image by which it may please us to represent the improvement of the species? The hundred years that followed the usurpation of Henry IV., were a hurling-back of the mind of the country, a dilapidation, an extinction; yet institutions, laws, customs, and habits, were then broken down, which would not have been so readily, nor perhaps so thoroughly destroyed by the gradual influence of increasing knowledge; and under the oppression of which, if they had continued to exist, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... countries—the one possessed by the Normans, wealthy and exonerated from public burdens, the other enslaved and oppressed with a land tax—the former full of spacious mansions, of walled towns, and moated castles—the latter occupied with thatched cabins, and ancient walls in a state of dilapidation. This peopled with the happy and the idle, with soldiers, courtiers, knights, and nobles—that with miserable men condemned to labour as peasants and artisans. On the one side he beholds luxury and ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... possessed by every city which had once been represented there, and this equally whether summoned or not, if we may credit Capmany, [51] must have gone far to preserve the popular branch from the melancholy state of dilapidation to which it was reduced in Castile by the arts of despotic princes. Indeed, the kings of Aragon, notwithstanding occasional excesses, seem never to have attempted any systematic invasion of the constitutional rights of their subjects. They well knew, that the spirit of liberty was too high among ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... have half a mind thus to spend one of my three remaining days. True, the Coliseum will seem vaster close at hand, but from no point can it be seen so completely and clearly, in its immensity and its dilapidation combined, as from that. The Tarpeian Rock seems an absurd fable—its fatal leap the daily sport of infants—but in all ancient cities the same glaring discrepancy between ancient and modern altitudes is presented, and especially, ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... deserve credit for the substantial style in which they have repaired one end of it, to prevent farther dilapidation, and for the manner in which the road is diverted from it on both sides in a handsome sweep, leaving a green space in the middle, in which the arch stands. We returned to it immediately after breakfast, and our ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... soon came in sight of a deserted house. It evidently had been abandoned, for it was in a bad state of dilapidation. ...
— The Circus Boys on the Plains • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... seldom—once a year? I know that bonnet well, because it has been sent to me often for renovation. On one particular occasion it arrived in a cardboard box. On the top of the bonnet was a bunch of flowers, beautiful enough to make any bonnet accompanying it welcome, in whatever state of dilapidation. Aunt Cecilia has a knack of sending just the right sort of flowers, and they always bring a message, which ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss
... to the village of which he was the chief proprietor. He was aware, however, that his property there, including the old hall itself, was, to quote Mr. Ball, "somewhat out of repair"; and he rejoiced in the prospect of the opportunity its dilapidation might present of turning to good account some considerable portion of his ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth
... as the floor was so broken I could not put my feet on it, and the bag of oats had dropped through on the way. I had tied the halter to the dasher and wound it round the bag, so there was no loss. The dilapidation was a pleasing reminiscence of old times, and George was pleased enough to earn a quarter by patching it up. Then I drove on to the house, where are only a Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair left in charge. Mrs. S. was very polite, and asked me up into our old parlor, which did not look as pleasant as ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... a delicate situation enough here,' he wrote to his friend Croker: 'bound to secure the Government interests, if possible, from dilapidation, but still more bound to faint with horror at the mention of money transactions, to threaten the unfortunate culprits with impeachment if they hint at an impure return, and yet to prevent those strongholds, ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... the church, overtopped by its triangular gable. Behind this wall is a yard or atrium, the pavement grass-grown, the walls stained with great patches of mildew, and showing here and there in their dilapidation the shaft and capital of a bricked-up Ionic pillar. The place tells of centuries of neglect, of the gradual invasion of resistless fever; and it was fitly chosen, some fifty years ago, for the abode of a community of Trappists. In the reign of Innocent VIII. it was still nominally ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... is now almost forgotten. A marble statue, which was erected to his memory in the crypt of the chapel, is now in the last state of dilapidation. The wind whistles through the broken windows of its funereal abode; and the plaster of the roof, detached from its skeleton of laths, powders his enormous wig, and soils the imperial robe that drapes his shoulders. But the spirit of the master of Cannons may console itself; for in the verses ...
— Sketch of Handel and Beethoven • Thomas Hanly Ball
... man once in high power expressed himself under such a change of fortune, found Swinton friends; family connections, and some interested considerations of Middleton the Commissioner, joined to procure his safety, and he was dismissed, but after a long imprisonment, and much dilapidation of his estates. It is said that Swinton's admonitions, while confined in the Castle of Edinburgh, had a considerable share in converting to the tenets of the Friends Colonel David Barclay, then lying there in the garrison. This was the ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... regarded as by any means a novel one, I had thought out for myself, and which possessed for me, in consequence, the charm of originality. In these poor creatures, I thus argued, we find, amid much general dilapidation and brokenness of mind, certain instincts and peculiarities remaining entire. Here, in Angus, for instance, there is that instinctive cunning which some of the lower animals, such as the fox, possess, existing in ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... choicest billingsgate with which his vocabulary had been furnished in the forecastle of the "Gil Blas." His criticism of the real Jim was by no means agreeable to the patrons of the fictitious one. In a moment there was a row; and the result was, that Lunes after a thorough dilapidation of his finery departed in custody of the police, more, however, for the negro's ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... cannot be ascribed to cupidity. Also it must be admitted that the kingdom of Serbia, with its capital Belgrade, thanks to the internal chaos and dynastic scandals of the previous forty years, resulting in superficial dilapidation, intellectual stagnation, and general poverty, lacked the material as well as the moral glamour which a successful Piedmont should possess. Nobody could deny, for instance, that, with all its natural advantages, Belgrade was at first sight not nearly such an ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... State on mission in the year IX.) Report by Lacuee on the first military division. Three central schools at Paris, one called the Quatre-Nations. "This school must be visited in order to form any idea of the state of destruction and dilapidation which all the national buildings are in. No repairs have been made since the reopening of the schools; everything is going to ruin.... Walls are down and the floors fallen in. To preserve the pupils from the risks which the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the petty-governor of the nearest village. The "Tribunal," which served the double purpose of Town Hall and Dak Bungalow for wayfarers, was often a hut of bamboo and palm-leaves, whilst others, which had been decent buildings generations gone by, lapsed into a wretched state of dilapidation. In some villages there was no Tribunal at all, and the official business had to be transacted in the municipal Governor's house. I first visited Calamba (La Laguna) in 1880, and for 14 years, to ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... which were springing up at that time. There they have since remained. Their country-houses, if inhabited at all, are occupied only for a few months in summer, and too often present a melancholy spectacle of neglect and dilapidation. In the Black-earth Zone, on the contrary, where the soil still possesses enough of its natural fertility to make farming on a large scale profitable, the estates are in a very different condition. The owners cultivate at least a part of their property, and can easily let to the peasants at a ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... the draughtsman to represent it under those conditions, and with that amount of age-mark upon it which may best exalt and harmonize the sources of its beauty: this is no pursuit of mere picturesqueness, it is true following out of the ideal character of the building; nay, far greater dilapidation than this may in portions be exhibited, for there are beauties of other kinds, not otherwise attainable, brought out by advanced dilapidation; but when the artist suffers the mere love of ruinousness to interfere with his perception of ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... travels has omitted to expatiate on the temple of the Clitumnus, between Foligno and Spoleto; and no site, or scenery, even in Italy, is more worthy a description. For an account of the dilapidation of this temple, the reader is referred to Historical Illustrations of the Fourth Canto of ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... is told of a gentleman in Monmouthshire, which exhibits the pride of ancestry in a curious point of view. His house was in such a state of dilapidation that the proprietor was in danger of perishing under the ruins of the ancient mansion, which he venerated even in decay. A stranger, whom he accidentally met at the foot of the Skyrrid, made various enquiries ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... with surveying from a distance the fine effect produced by the light streaming from the multitude of windows, and exhibiting to the whole country round the gorgeous nature of the decorations within. To own the truth, I could scarcely forbear regretting, as I surveyed them, the gloomy dilapidation of the venerable mansion. This modernized antiquity was a very different thing from the massy grandeur of its neglected years; and I am afraid I loved the old house better with the weeds springing from its crevices, than with all this ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... dead leaves and sticks swept in time out of a water-course, will save both roof and walls from ruin. Watch an old building with an anxious care; guard it as best you may, and at any cost, from every influence of dilapidation. Count its stones as you would jewels of a crown; set watches about it as if at the gates of a besieged city; bind it together with iron where it loosens; stay it with timber where it declines; do not care about ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... the glow of his own lantern. Mr. Archer greeted him with civility; but the old man was in no humour of compliance. He guided the newcomer across the court-yard, looking sharply and quickly in his face, and grumbling all the time about the cold, and the discomfort and dilapidation of the castle. He was sure he hoped that Mr. Archer would like it; but in truth he could not think what brought him there. Doubtless he had a good reason—this with a look of cunning scrutiny—but, indeed, the place was quite unfit for any person of repute; he himself was eaten ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... yet to stand, Dilapidation's wasting hand Shall tear thy pond'rous walls, to guard The slumb'ring steed, or fence the yard; Or wheels shall grind thy pride away Along the turnpike road to HAY, Where fierce GLENDOW'R'S rude mountaineers Left war's attendants, blood and tears, And spread their terrors ...
— The Banks of Wye • Robert Bloomfield
... it broke into a froth of exquisite purple and faint green, and for a week the garland of blossoms, murmurous with bees, lay clean and lovely against the narrow, old bricks which had once been painted yellow. Outside, the house had a distinction which no superficial dilapidation could mar; but inside distinction was almost lost in the commonplace, if not in actual ugliness. The double parlors on the right of the wide hall had been furnished in the complete vulgarity of the sixties; on the left was the library, which had long ago been taken by Mrs. ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... going to sea is keeping close to the shore Can leave it without regret Dependent upon imagination and memory Great part of the enjoyment of life Luxury of his romantic grief Picturesque sort of dilapidation Rest is never complete—unless he can see somebody else at work Won't see Mt. Desert till midnight, and then ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Charles Dudley Warner • Charles Dudley Warner
... bears and wolves were on the floor, and there was a general air of the room being lived in—though magnificence and dilapidation mingled everywhere. The very rich brocade on one of the sofas had the traces of great rents. And while one table held cigarette cases and cigar boxes in the most exquisitely fine enamel set with jewels, on another would be things of the roughest wood. And a cabinet at the side filled with a priceless ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... first place, that if he visited the great Abbey now, he would not have noticed that look of dilapidation at which he hints—and perhaps had a right to hint—some forty years ago. Dilapidation, dirt, and negligence are as hateful to us now, as to the builder of the newest house outside. We too, for more than a generation past, have felt, in common ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... would join him in the vestibule directly I could find you. Where have you been all this time? You were not in the Lancers. Such a pretty set. Oh, here is Mrs. Scobel!" as the Vicar's wife approached them on her partner's arm, in a piteous state of dilapidation—not a bit of tulle putting left, and all her rosebuds ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... trio was galloping through a little-frequented street toward the northern, hilly environs of Lustadt. They rode in silence until they came to an old stone building, whose boarded windows and general appearance of dilapidation proclaimed its long tenantless condition. Rank weeds, now rustling dry and yellow in the November wind, choked what once might have been a luxuriant garden. A stone wall, which had at one time entirely surrounded ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... be shaken, and it was a moist hand. He looked like a Gibson young man who has grown elderly. He had the manly profile and shoulders, but they sagged and stooped. There was a dilapidation about him, a look of blurred edges. His hair lay on his forehead in disorder, and his tie had been put on carelessly and had wriggled up to ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... semicircular battery, to the northward of the lighthouse, and exploding, committed great damage to the enemy. At length, the fire from most of the forts being silenced, and the batteries on the mole being in a state of dilapidation, the ammunition of the attacking ships falling short, Lord Exmouth took advantage of a light air of wind off the land to cut his cables, and stand out of fire, ordering the other ships to follow his example. Severe as had been the punishment inflicted on the Algerines, the allied squadrons suffered ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... through some error of the builders or owing to the damp caused by long-continued rains which loosened the stones. About that time I, Johann Scherban Kantakosino Beserab Voivode, in the name of God, was entrusted with the government of my ancestors. As soon as I became acquainted with the dilapidation of the monastery, I at once resolved to restore the building of my ancestors in order that the memory of that famous prince (Nyagoe) might not be forgotten, and I sent our boyard Dona Pepano as superintendent with numerous workmen, and thereupon restored the whole building where it had suffered ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... dim outlines of a house, and was correspondingly disappointed when, upon riding forward, I perceived that it was but a deserted ruin I was approaching, whose fallen chimneys and broken windows betrayed a dilapidation so great that I could scarcely hope to find so much as a ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... covered with ivy, and a general air of fitness for a sketch; indeed, the photograph of it in its present beautified state will not stand a comparison with our drawings of it, in those days of dilapidation in the middle of the untidy churchyard, with little boys astride on the sloping, sunken lichen- grown headstones, mullein spikes and burdock leaves, more graceful than the trim borders and zinc crosses which are pleasanter to ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... eagerly handled and smelt. I observe, too, that the most ancient romances are not in every case the most severely worn. It is the pace that tells in horses, men, and books. There are Nestors wonderfully hale; there are juveniles in a state of dilapidation. One of the youngest books, "The Old Curiosity Shop," is absolutely falling to pieces. That book, like Italy, is possessor of the fatal gift; but happily, in its case, every thing can be rectified ay a new edition. We have buried warriors and poets, princes and queens, ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... observes the same writer, "have found a footing in the crevices, and branches from the walls shook in undulating monotony, and with a gloomy and spiritual murmur, that spoke to the ear of time and events gone by, and lost in oblivion and dilapidation. At the end, immediately beneath the colossal window, grows an alder of considerable luxuriance, which, added to the situation of every other object, brought Mr. Southey's pathetic ballad of 'Mary the Maid of the Inn,' so forcibly before ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 356, Saturday, February 14, 1829 • Various
... was a rough, long and weary one. The drawing-room car was badly lighted and not heated. One feels the dilapidation of France in this wretched railway accommodation. At Vierzon we bought a pheasant, a chicken, and two bottles of wine for supper. Then we wrapped ourselves up in our rugs and cloaks and ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... hopes and visions that had come to her the first day she and her father had come to the farm, and through all its dilapidation and neglect, she had seen that it could be made into a home of comfort and prosperity, and now the dream had come true. The Watson family were thriving; their farm had not failed them; comforts, and even a few luxuries were theirs, and ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... in a court where the living green combined with age to glorify the buildings. We did not see the dilapidation, we did not smell the dirt, we did not feel the squalor. A woman was lighting a fire in a brazier on her doorstep. She looked hostilely at us. We beamed in counteraction. She looked more hostilely. As the Artist wanted to sketch her house, some words seemed ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... mews where he kept his hawks, grumbling all the while to himself as he surveyed the condition of each bird, and blaming alternately the carelessness of the under-falconer, and the situation of the building, and the weather, and the wind, and all things around him, for the dilapidation which time and disease had made in the neglected hawking establishment of the Garde Doloureuse. While in these unpleasing meditations, he was surprised by the voice of his beloved Dame Gillian, who seldom was an early riser, and yet more ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... leaves, shut in among the green, stood a small cottage, or hut. My second glance showed it to be tenantless, for the thatch was partly gone, the windows were broken, and the door had long since fallen from its hinges. Yet, despite its forlornness and desolation, despite the dilapidation of broken door and fallen chimney, there was something in the air of the place that drew me strangely. It was somewhat roughly put together, but still very strong, and seemed, save ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... listeners as you two, I could go on forever. Consider yourselves clapped jovially on the back, my gentle Briggs; I can't get up to do it from the hollow of your bed here. As you were saying, the wonder about these elderly widows who keep boarding-houses is the domestic dilapidation they fall into. If they've ever known how to cook a meal or sweep a room or make a bed, these arts desert them in the presence of their boarders. Their only aim in life seems to be preventing the escape of their victims, and they either let them get into debt for their board or borrow money ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... of Trahoir was a small irregularly shaped space, surrounded by miserable hovels, with high pointed roofs, most of which were in a state of dangerous dilapidation; the broken casements in every instance replaced by rags or straw; the doors ill-hung and swinging upon their rusty hinges, and the whole of the buildings lost in dirt and wretchedness. The inhabitants of ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... walls and battered furniture were just of a piece with the creeping figure. What she did not understand was that Mrs. Minto was so used to the furniture, which she had known during the whole of her married life, that she did not recognise its dilapidation. But Sally had no time for thought of her mother. She was excited. Her tongue came out between her teeth, and she looked at the ceiling. At last, in a laconic voice, ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... for visitors only a three-legged stool and a door-mat, would have been more fitly designated as the hall. Between this Salle d'Attente and the den in which he slept, ate, smoked, and received his friends, lay the studio—once a stately salon, now a wilderness of litter and dilapidation. On one side you beheld three windows closely boarded up, with strips of newspaper pasted over the cracks to exclude every gleam of day. Overhead yawned a huge, dusty skylight, to make way for which ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... following a vocation which, if less agreeable, is certainly more profitable to himself. Occasionally one of these professional bookstallers blossoms into a shopkeeper in some court or alley off Holborn; but more generally they are too far gone in drink and dilapidation to get ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... Lilias—'for that name, as well as Darsie, properly belongs to you—it is the leading feature in my uncle's character, that he has applied every energy of his powerful mind to the service of the exiled family of Stuart. The death of his brother, the dilapidation of his own fortunes, have only added to his hereditary zeal for the House of Stuart a deep and almost personal hatred against the present reigning family. He is, in short, a political enthusiast of the ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... in this obscene state of dilapidation but a Nuisance? What is a man in your obscene state of dilapidation but a Nuisance? Then, as you very well know, you cannot do without an audience, and your audience is a Nuisance. You attract all the disreputable vagabonds and prowlers within ten miles around, by ...
— Tom Tiddler's Ground • Charles Dickens
... and hair that almost hid her face. The twain were set a-sneezing by the fumes of sulphur, and Rooney swore afterwards that there were little things at the end of the yard with grinning faces and lights on the ends of their tails. Old Hollands are heady. Dirck began to chaff the beldam on her dilapidation, but she stopped his talk by dipping something from a caldron behind her and flinging it over both of her visitors. Whatever it was, it burned outrageously, and with a yell of pain they leaped the ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... silent corner of the house. As he passed before the players' waiting room, he had peeped through the open doors and noticed the utter dilapidation of the vast chamber, which looked shamefully stained and worn in broad daylight. But what surprised him most as he emerged from the darkness and confusion of the stage was the pure, clear light and deep quiet at present ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... Loglukabad are in an advanced state of dilapidation, and do not repay the trouble of ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... lighted with gas from a natural spring near by), Industry, and Beaver; you smile at the sign of the "Golden Rule Distillery;" and you wonder at the broken fences, unpainted houses, and tangled and weed-covered grounds, and that general air of dilapidation which curses a country producing petroleum and ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... possession under foreclosure, appointing receivers in the interest of the debtor, etc., he is in many States so delayed in getting possession of his security that by the time he acquires it he will find it burdened with overdue taxes and in a state of general dilapidation. We have already alluded to the practice in California of compelling the executor of a mortgage to submit himself to the jurisdiction of the local public administrator, which practically results in a sequestration of a considerable portion of the property. For ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... eyes became, accustomed to the tobacco smoke, he surveyed the room. There was a bowl on the floor, the chair where it belonged being occupied. There was a very inhospitable looking bed, two shake-downs, and four Windsor chairs in more or less state of dilapidation—all occupied likewise. A country glass lamp was balanced on a rough shelf, and under it a young man sat absorbed in making notes, and apparently oblivious to the noise around him. Every gentleman ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... private office of the editor of "The Financial Pilot" had fallen into a state of sordid dilapidation. If the janitor had received orders never to use a broom or a duster there, he obeyed them strictly. Disorder and dirt reigned supreme. Papers and manuscripts lay in all directions; and on the broad sofas the mud from the boots of all those who had lounged upon them had been drying for months. ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... years be engaged, for the municipality of the city. The window is, as regards dimensions, the finest in all Italy—a noble work of the later but still brilliant period of the art. The state of dilapidation into which it had been allowed to fall was such that, coming restored as it will from Signor Moretti's workshop, it will in many parts be almost equivalent to a new work. The five or six full-sized figures which we ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... be ruined for its original purpose before it will be accepted. Sooner or later, indeed, it will be accepted. For though most of our buildings seem even in decay to resist the harmonizing hand of Nature, and to grow only ghastly and not venerable in dilapidation, yet leave them long enough and what of beauty was possible to them will appear, though it be only a crumbling heap of bricks where the chimney stood, or the grassy slope where ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... But he's not rich; quite the contrary, he's very poor for a baronet; and I incline to think that is one of the reasons that influenced your father. Being so fond of the Elliotts, he wished to repair, in some degree, the dilapidation of their ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 452 - Volume 18, New Series, August 28, 1852 • Various
... over the wire. But the other world in which Miss Rogers lived was very different; the world bounded by the four walls of a back room at Miss Betsey Kling's. It must be confessed that there are more pleasing views than sheds in greater or less degrees of dilapidation, a sickly grape-vine, a line of flapping sheets, an overflowing ash barrel; sweeter sounds than the dulcet notes of old rag-men, the serenades of musical cats, or the strains of a cornet played upon ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... establishment of provincial assemblies, a regulation of the corn trade, the abolition of corvees, and a new stamp tax, it broke up on the 25th of May, 1787. It spread throughout France what it had discovered respecting the necessities of the throne, the errors of the ministers, the dilapidation of the court, and the irremediable miseries ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... scattered irregularly over a space of half an acre, which might be called a clearing, inasmuch as only a few stumps and broken trees were to be seen. But nothing in the way of corn or vegetables was growing, and the air of dilapidation, untidiness and squalor pervading the whole scene, was characteristic of the race, and was that which robs it of the romance which in the minds of many attaches to the name of the ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis
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