"Bacchanalian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... figures, of a relief exceedingly low, of dead and dying animals, and little winged genii, and female forms bending in groups in some funereal office. The high reliefs represent, one a nautical subject, and the other a Bacchanalian one. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... were prosecuting Wilkes for a libel, the Lords also continued the prosecution. Wilkes, in conjunction with Potter, a dissipated son of Archbishop Potter, during some of their bacchanalian revels, had written a blasphemous and obscene poem, after the model of Pope's Essay on Man, called An Essay on Woman. The satire was not published, but a few copies of it were printed privately for the authors. Lord Sandwich had contrived to secure a copy of it, and read ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... lights, which change suddenly to purple, a blue, or a green. Some very weird effects are made, the lights being so manipulated that the dancers' shadows are thrown, greatly magnified, on walls and floor. At intervals a rain of bright-colored confetti pours down from above. The scene becomes bacchanalian. Color, light, music, confetti, the dance, together combine to produce an intense and voluptuous intoxication which the ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... them. With Diana for his wife, he flies the halls where she sits severe and serene, and is to be found (shrouded in smoke, 'tis true,) in those caves where the contrite chimney-sweep sings his terrible death chant, or the Bacchanalian judge administers a satiric law. Lord Knightsbridge has his faults, then; but he has the gout at Rougetnoirbourg, near the Rhine, and thither his wife is ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... on errands into the town, and be always in the way till five o'clock. From that hour until about two in the morning Mr. Miles devoted to amusement, returning with his latch key, and often rousing the night owl and his servant with a bacchanalian or Anacreontic melody. In short, Mr. Miles was a loose fish; a bachelor who had recently inherited the fortune of an old screw his uncle, and was spending thrift in all the traditional modes. Horses, dogs, women, ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... meeting," Burns writes, "that Mr. Masterton and I agreed, each in our own way, that we should celebrate the business," and Burns's celebration of it was the famous bacchanalian song,— ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... and being a night effect, the shadows are amazingly rich. In the passage leading to the garden are the two ivory cups by Frainingo. One is much better carved than the other; it is copied from an antique vase. The figures are Bacchanalian. ...
— Recollections of the late William Beckford - of Fonthill, Wilts and Lansdown, Bath • Henry Venn Lansdown
... then been in existence more than two hundred years, though under other designations. In the reign of Richard II., when it was first established, it was styled the Painted Tavern, from the circumstance of its outer walls being fancifully coloured and adorned with Bacchanalian devices. But these decorations went out of fashion in time, and the tavern, somewhat changing its external features, though preserving all its internal comforts and accommodation, assumed the name of the Three Crowns, under which title it continued ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... in guileless youth, Flies tow'rds her Love with trusting wing, Bruises her heart 'gainst broken truth, And falls, like thee, a crippled thing. How man in bacchanalian sphere Soars to the heat of Pleasure's sun, Then, by gradations dark and drear, Sinks low as thee, poor wingless one: How hearts from proud Ambition's height Have drooped to darkest, lowest hell— From blazing noon to pitchy night, With pangs a demon-tongue may tell: How aspirations glory-fraught ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... Senate often met in the temple of Duellona or Bellona, the goddess of War. Duellona and Bellona are the same. Compare the Bacchanalian Inscription, and Livius (28, c. ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... singing their matutinal songs from the trees, I sallied forth from the dormitory of my seminary to enjoy the reflections so well suited to that auspicious occasion. I had not proceeded far before my ears were accosted with certain Bacchanalian sounds of revelry, which proceeded from one of those haunts of vicious depravity located at the cross-roads, near the place of my boyhood, and fashionably denominated a doggery. No sooner had I passed beyond the precincts of this diabolical rendezvous of rioting ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... old Brother John with a wreath of flowers—I noted in disgust that they were orchids—hanging in a bacchanalian fashion from his dinted sun-helmet over his left eye. He was in a furious rage and reviling Bausi, who literally crouched before him, and I was in a furious rage and reviling him. What I said I do not remember, but ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... a new emancipation of the individual had come with the Revolution. Between MALHERBE and CHATEAUBRIAND, that is for almost two hundred years, poetry that breathes the true lyric spirit is practically absent from French literature. There were indeed the chansonniers, who produced a good deal of bacchanalian verse, but they hardly ever struck a serious note. Almost the most genuinely lyric productions of this long period are those which proceed more or less directly from a reading of Hebrew poetry, like the numerous paraphrases of the Psalms or the choruses ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... "If we compare our Bacchanalian Christmasses and New Year's Tides with these Saturnalia and Feasts of Janus, we shall finde such near affinytie betweene them both in regard of time (they being both in the end of December and on the first of January), and in their manner of solemnizing (both of them being spent ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... designs, but no one who has read his metrical translation of the Psalms of David will be troubled again with doubts whether he was the writer also of "Macbeth," "Othello," and "Lear." Compared with these sterile, bald, and mechanical quatrains, the sacred hymns of Isaac Watts are howling and bacchanalian anacreontics, to be hiccoughed by drunkards in their ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... habit, in these cases of Bacchanalian emergency, to stagger obstinately into his room on the ground-floor, to take the model-ship out of the cupboard, and to try if he could proceed with the never-to-be-completed employment of setting up the rigging. When he had smashed the tiny spars, and snapped asunder the delicate ropes—then, ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... continues until daylight, it resembles a bacchanalian fete in the days of the Romans. But all through it, one is impressed by its artistic completeness, its studied splendor, and permissible license, so long as a costume (or the lack of it) produces an artistic result. One sees the mise en scene of a barbaric court produced by the architects ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... still burning, the women come like so many furies, with more than bacchanalian madness, making the most hideous howlings, and dancing without any order, round the fire. Then all their apparent rage turns of a sudden against the men. They threaten them, that if they do not supply them with scalps, they will hold them very cheap, and look on them as greatly inferior to themselves; ...
— An Account Of The Customs And Manners Of The Micmakis And Maricheets Savage Nations, Now Dependent On The Government Of Cape-Breton • Antoine Simon Maillard
... were as thriftless as locusts, and in the midst of their bacchanalian revels Pierce felt very poor, very obscure. Here was the roisterous spirit of the Northland at full play; it irked the young man intensely to feel that he could afford no part in it. Laure was not long ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... Berry's face as she looked in, in the midst of that Bacchanalian ditty, when she saw no less a person than the ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... accompaniment of broiled oysters." There was some affectation of roystering in all this; but it was a time of social good-fellowship, and easy freedom of manners in both sexes. At the dinners there was much sentimental and bacchanalian singing; it was scarcely good manners not to get a little tipsy; and to be laid under the table by the compulsory bumper was not to the discredit of a guest. Irving used to like to repeat an anecdote of one of his early friends, ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... one even then thought of writing a romance with Nelson or Bonaparte as the hero, or of finishing off in the full blaze of Trafalgar or in the rout of Waterloo; although with Marryat and Lever the English reader revelled in the dashing exploits or bacchanalian revels of sailors and soldiers. Lever did indeed give glimpses of Wellington or Napoleon; but his business was with Connaught Rangers and French guardsmen; while Marryat and Michael Scott gave us daring sea-captains and reckless sailors with ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... aroused by their potations to enter readily into any mischief. Some were smoking with all the industrious perseverance of the Hollander; others shouted forth songs in honor of the bottle, and with all the fervor and ferment of Bacchanalian novitiates; and not a few, congregating about the immediate person of the pedler, assailed his ears with threats sufficiently pregnant with tangible illustration to make him understand and acknowledge, by repeated starts and wincings, the awkward and uncomfortable predicament in which he stood. ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... obeisance, departed without further speech, and in a few moments ushered in from the bacchanalian revels ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... butterfly is from the grim grub. Indeed, members of Parliament seem to take a delight in anticipating the change of dress which the change of season imposes. There are members of the House of Commons who can claim to wear the very first white hat of the season. Sir Wilfrid Lawson has a sombre creed and a Bacchanalian spirit; and, accordingly, the very first time a mere stray gleam of sunshine streaks the wintry gloom Sir Wilfrid ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... excellent exhibit in the Annex building behind the Palace. Thus far Portugal alone represents the Iberian painters. The collection fills three rooms, 109-111, between Sweden and Holland. The Portuguese artists infuse the spirit of revelry into much of their work. Indeed, it sometimes approaches the bacchanalian. The work is of the extreme modern school as to color, although, technically, there is much drawing in and respect for definite form. Most striking, perhaps, is the splendid representation in many of the pictures of the intense sunlight that beats upon that Southern country. No ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... butterflies flit from flower to flower over the dead. I do not know a place more silent or more beautiful. One lingers in the cool shadow of the cloisters before many an old marble,—a vase carved with Bacchanalian women, the head of Achilles, or the bust of Isotta of Rimini. But it is before the fresco of the Triumph of Death that one stays longest, trying to understand the dainty treatment of so horrible a subject. Those fair ladies ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... always bacchanalian. He has a loving, human heart as well, which Landor has shown in a charming translation given to me shortly after our conversation concerning this poet. "I never publish translations," he remarked at the time; but though translations ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... and in consequence, bullock cars and forage; wagons were converted into temporary hotels, and many a jovial party were collected in both. Military music, church bells, drinking choruses, were all commingled in the din and turmoil; processions in honor of "Our Lady of Succor" were jammed up among bacchanalian orgies, and their very chant half drowned in the cries of the wounded as they passed on to the hospitals. With difficulty we pushed our way through the dense mob, as we turned our steps towards the seminary. We both felt naturally curious to see the place where our first detachment landed, and ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... All traces of the downward inclination of the corners of his mouth, caused by the delinquencies of recalcitrant hoppers, quite disappeared as soon as his new duties commenced, and it was a pleasure to see his jovial face beaming over a job which seemed to have no drawbacks. A really Bacchanalian presence is the only one that should be tolerated in a cider-maker; the lean and hungry character is quite out of place amidst the fragrance of the crushed apples, and the generous liquor running ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... presided over by men appointed to deal out the contents to the populace. A boisterous demonstration followed that almost drowned the roar of the twenty-one cannon that thundered forth a royal salute. As a fitting wind-up to the bacchanalian scene, at night twenty-five tar-barrels, fastened on poles, blazed over the "common," while brilliant fireworks were exhibited at Bowling Green. The feasting continued late in the night, and so delighted were the "Sons of Liberty," that they erected a mast, inscribed "to his ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... impossible that a workingman who stands upon a metropolitan street corner and observes this Bacchanalian revel and prodigality of expense, should not be embittered by a sense of the inequality of the conditions of life. But this is not the most mischievous effect of the spectacle. It is the example of what these people care for. With all their wealth ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... ideal, and had nothing to do with ordinary life; it arose from the winter feasts of Bacchus, while comedy was the outcome of the harvest feasts, and the accompanying Bacchanalian processions, which were more in the nature of a frolic than of real acting. The influence of the Middle and New Greek comedy, especially, that of Menander, on the Roman comedy of Terence is well defined. Under Ennius and Plautus the Roman comedy was fairly ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... the kavis and ugijs (poets and priests) of the Veda with the evil spirits of the same names in the Avesta, like daeva deva. Compare, besides, the Indo-Iranian feasts, medha, that accompany this Bacchanalian liquor-worship.] ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... list. The Comparative Exhibition in New York, 1904, revealed to many accustomed to overpraising Diaz and Fromentin the fact that Monticelli was their superior as a colourist, and a decorator of singularly fascinating characteristics, one who was not always a mere contriver of bacchanalian riots of fancy, but who could exhibit when at his best a justesse of vision and a ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... animal at bay, his death, and the shouts of the crowd,—are all pictured with a freshness and genuine out-door feeling which seem almost incredible considering Haydn's age. This remarkable number is separated from its natural companion, the bacchanalian chorus, by a recitative extolling the wealth of the vintage. This chorus ("Joyful the Liquor flows") is in two parts,—first a hymn in praise of wine, sung by the tippling revellers, and second, a dance tempo, full of life and beauty, with imitations ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... would not eat the grapes in my presence. There was to be an orgy, she said, a bacchanalian affair—she was going to place the grapes where she could look at them, and look at them until she could stand the sight no more, when she would fall on them like a wolf on the fold and devour them. She talked morbidly of the grapes—almost neurotically. But, though her fancies ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... again with Hester Sheville, not because he wanted to but because she had insisted. He had been standing gloomily in the doorway watching the bacchanalian scene, listening to the tom-tom of the drums when she came up ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... pious fraternity, we plied them closely, and frequently joined them in flowing bumpers, until their ardour began to sink into brutal stupidity, and the morning's hymns were changed into revelry and bacchanalian roar. ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... ante-room or vestibule, and a scout's pantry and boot-closet. On the right was the sleeping-room, and at the foot of a neat French bed I could perceive the wine bin, surrounded by a regiment of dead men{24} who had, no doubt, departed this life like heroes in some battle of Bacchanalian sculls. The principal chamber, the very penetrale of the Muses, was about six yards square, and low, with a rich carved oaken wainscoting, reaching to the ceiling; the monastic gloom being materially increased by two narrow loopholes, intended for windows, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... rye, schnapps [U.S.], sherry, sling [U.S.], uisquebaugh [Ire.], usquebaugh [Scot.], whisky, xeres^. drunkard, sot, toper, tippler, bibber^, wine-bibber, lush; hard drinker, gin drinker, dram drinker; soaker [Slang], sponge, tun; love pot, toss pot; thirsty soul, reveler, carouser, Bacchanal, Bacchanalian; Bacchal^, Bacchante^; devotee to Bacchus^; bum [U.S.], guzzler, tavern haunter. V. get drunk, be drunk &c adj.; see double; take a drop too much, take a glass too much; drink; tipple, tope, booze, bouse [Fr.], guzzle, swill [Slang], soak [Slang], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... gone home, Well chastened by the Church. This pastoral staff Mine oaken Pax Vobiscum, sent 'em home To think about their sins, with watering eyes. You never saw a bunch of such blue faces, Bumpy and juicy as a bunch of grapes Bruised in a Bacchanalian orgy, dripping The reddest wine a man could ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... drooping lids, the extreme corner of his mouth bulging round his everlasting cigar ... grimy lions in Trafalgar Square of a rainy afternoon ... the octagonal room of L'Abbaye Theleme at three in the morning, a swirl of Bacchanalian shapes ... Wertheimer's soldierly figure beside the telegraphers' table in that noisome cave at the Front ... the deck of a tender in darkness swept by a shaft of yellow light which momentarily revealed a group of folk with upturned faces, a ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... riotous worship of this new divinity, and fearing the demoralizing effects of the unseemly nocturnal orgies held in honour of the wine-god, strictly prohibited his people from taking any part in the wild Bacchanalian revels. Anxious to save him from the consequences of his impiety, Dionysus appeared to him under the form of a youth in the king's train, and earnestly warned him to desist from his denunciations. But the well-meant admonition failed in its purpose, for Pentheus ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... profitable catechising.(987) The keeping of some festival days is set up instead of the thankful commemoration of God's inestimable benefits, howbeit the festivity of Christmas hath hitherto served more to bacchanalian lasciviousness than to the remembrance of the birth of Christ.(988) The kneeling down upon the knees of the body hath now come in place of that humiliation of the soul wherewith worthy communicants addressed themselves unto the holy table of the Lord; and, ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... hypocritical despotism of Cromwell, the arbitrary sequestrations of committee-men, the iniquitous decimations of military prefects, the sale of British citizens for slavery in the West Indies, the blood of some shed on the scaffold without legal trial, . . . the persecution of the Anglican Church, the bacchanalian rant of sectaries, the morose preciseness of puritans . . . It is universally acknowledged that no measure was ever more national, or has ever produced more testimonies of public approbation, than the restoration of Charles II. . . . For the late government, whether under the parliament or ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... another class, which may be found in the same collection; I mean the bacchanalian. Men are invited here to sacrifice frequently at the shrine of Bacchus. Joy, good humour, and fine spirits, are promised to those, who pour out their libations in a liberal manner. An excessive use of wine, which injures the constitution, and stupifies the faculties, instead of being censured in ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... he cried, with a malicious grin; "here's Mr Frank making such capital fun; he'll send us all into fits afore he's done! I never seed anything like it—it's quite bacchanalian!" ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... that surrounded him; everywhere enormous boulders, heaped together, or scattered about in isolated grandeur; some pitched on their sides, others standing erect, still others suspended, as it were, in mid-air. It seemed to him that these boulders had formerly served for the games of bacchanalian Titans, who, after having used them as skittles or jack-stones, had ended by hurling them at one another's heads. It is most probable that He who constructed the Albula Pass, alarmed and confused by the hideous aspect ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... "wandered from place to place, taking with them a veiled image or symbol of their goddess, and clad in women's apparel of many colours, and with their faces and eyes painted in female fashion, armed with swords and scourges, they threw themselves by a wild dance into bacchanalian ecstasy, in which their long hair was draggled through the mud. They bit their own arms, and then hacked themselves with their swords, or scourged themselves in penance for a sin supposed to have been ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... hundred massive finger and earrings;—rich chains—thirty of these, if I remember;—eighty-three very large and heavy crucifixes;—five gold censers of great value;—a prodigious golden punch bowl, ornamented with richly chased vine-leaves and Bacchanalian figures; with two sword-handles exquisitely embossed, and many other smaller articles which I cannot recollect. The weight of these valuables exceeded three hundred and fifty pounds avoirdupois; and in this estimate I have ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... own way. Then, at last, had come the separation, irrevocable and painful; and Jim had flung out into the world, a drunkard, who, sober for a fortnight or a month, or three months, would afterward go off on a spree, in which he quoted Sappho and Horace in taverns, and sang bacchanalian songs with a voice meant for the stage—a heritage from an ancestor who had sung upon the English stage a hundred years before. Even in his cups, even after his darling vice had submerged him, Jim Templeton was a man marked out from his fellows, distinguished and very ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... bacchanalian songs and quarrels recorded above, as the prince stepped out of the house at about eleven o'clock, the general suddenly appeared before him, ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... the mystics of Islam, and their poetry, while often externally anacreontic—bacchanalian and erotic—possesses an esoteric, spiritual signification: the sensual world is employed to symbolise that which is to be apprehended only by the inward sense. Most of the great poets of Persia, Afghanistan, and Turkey are generally ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... barrel of Midianitish oysters sent to Admiral M'Killop (Pasha) had been so carelessly headed up, and so carefully turned topsy-turvy, that the result was, to use my friend's words, they could be nosed from the half-way station. The "Kyrios" had probably passed a Bacchanalian night with his Hellenic friends, and he subsequently made act of presence at Cairo with a very British-looking black eye. His accident at Suez was a bit of "poetical justice," which almost convinced one of ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... accordingly in the nature of the edification they provided. There were religious and sectarian clocks, moral clocks, philosophical clocks, free-thinking and infidel clocks, literary and poetical clocks, educational clocks, frivolous and bacchanalian clocks. In the religious clock department were to be found Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist, Episcopal, and Baptist time-pieces, which, in connection with the announcement of the hour and quarter, repeated some tenet of the sect with a proof text. There were also Talmage clocks, ...
— With The Eyes Shut - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... another man took no effect upon him. Sandy saw him swallow glass after glass, without his countenance betraying any symptom of change, with vexation; for he had never before met with a superior, either at the bacchanalian board, or at aught else. But, as the liquor went round, the old men began to forget their age (and for a time, for the first time, Walter Cunningham forgot his sorrows), and they boasted of what they had done; and ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... stuff. Against this latter hung three pictures from the famous Sansevero collection: a Holy Family by Leonardo da Vinci, a triptych by Perugino, and a Madonna by Correggio. Hardly less celebrated, but sharply at odds with the ecclesiastical subjects of the paintings, was the mantle, carved in a bacchanalian procession of satyrs and nymphs—a model said to have been made by ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... backless gowns, men in dinner-coats, girls in street clothes with yard-long feathers, youths in check suits, old men in staid business frock coats—what a motley throng! All were busily engaged in the orgy of a bacchanalian dance in which couples reeled and writhed, cheek to cheek, feet intertwining, arms about shoulders. Instead of enjoying themselves the men seemed largely engaged in counting their steps, and watching their own feet whenever possible: the girls kept their eyes, ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... into a roaring bacchanalian song, and continued to shout, and yell, and drink the brine until he was hoarse. But he did not seem to get exhausted; on the contrary, his eyes glared more and more brightly, and his face became scarlet as the fires that were raging within ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... brighter, And archly glanced, though meek. A bacchanalian dimple Dipt a wine-cup in ...
— Stories in Verse • Henry Abbey
... did not deepen the sadness of farewell, or cast a shadow upon the joy of return. Many of the marble sarcophagi were ornamented with beautiful bas-reliefs of mythical incidents, utterly inconsistent, we should suppose, with the purpose for which they were designed. Nuptials, bacchanalian fetes, games, and dances, are crowded upon their sculptured sides, in seeming mockery of the pitiable relics of humanity within. They treated death lightly and playfully, these ancient Romans, and tried to hide his terror with a mask of smiles, ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... and, abating nothing of his patronage, gave them every encouragement in his power; favouring them, when the general attention was diverted from his proceedings, with many nods and winks and other tokens of recognition, and occasionally touching his nose with a corkscrew, as if to express the Bacchanalian character of the meeting. In truth, perhaps even the spirits of the two Miss Pecksniffs, and the hungry watchfulness of Mrs Todgers, were less worthy of note than the proceedings of this remarkable boy, whom nothing disconcerted or put out of his way. If any piece of crockery, a dish ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... that the wealthy New Yorkers revel in a luxuriousness that is absolutely startling in its license. Thousands are expended on a single banquet, while the flower bills for a single year of some of these modern Luculli would support a family of five people for three or four years! Bacchanalian orgies that dim even those of the depraved, corrupt, and degenerate Nero are of nightly occurrence.[AI] Drunkenness, lechery, and gambling are the sports and pastimes of these ultra rich men, and it is even whispered ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... sexual ritual has been given an overwhelming and quite unwarranted importance in the trials, for it became an obsession with the Christian judges and recorders to investigate the smallest and most minute details of the rite. Though in late examples the ceremony had possibly degenerated into a Bacchanalian orgy, there is evidence to prove that, like the same rite in other countries, it was originally a ceremonial magic to ensure fertility. There is at present nothing to show how much of the Witches' ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray
... the advancing steps of civilization, are the institutions which we can yet remember as so popular in the days of our childhood, called pleasure fairs. Like that social dodo in a higher section of society, the "three-bottle man," with the stupid Bacchanalian usages of which he was the embodiment, these fairs are slowly but surely disappearing as education spreads among the masses of the people. In the country a fair is a simple and a necessary thing enough. ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... an involuntary imitation of two half-length stretching and yawning figures on the mantel-shelf, who were represented as in one eternal state of weariness from the waist upwards; and hummed a fragment of a song. It was a Bacchanalian song, something about a Sparkling Bowl. He sang it with an assumption of a Devil-may-care voice, that made his face a thousand times more meagre ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... neglect to bear in mind that they shared the spirit of the East; and did they not live on the very boundary-line between the East and the West? As those institutions were propagated farther to the west, they lost their original character. We know what the Bacchanalian rites became at Rome; and had they been introduced north of the Alps, what form would they have there assumed? But to those countries it was possible to {39} transplant the vine, not the service of the god to whom the vine was sacred. The orgies of Bacchus suited the cold soil and inclement ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield
... the subject, which consisted only of such portions of the papyrus as the translators have seen fit to give to the general public. Her American friend had gone further. He was not only interested in the Bacchanalian dances, ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... performed various tricks, such as nipping off the tails of sucking calves, catching chickens in her manger, and making various pieces of them, and kicking in the ribs of strange dogs and horned cattle. But to the eccentric habits and bacchanalian customs of her ex-military master, the old mare's dormant ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... their range far up toward the alpine zone. In the pine belt below the timber-line a pair of solitaires were observed flitting about on the ground and the lower branches of the trees, but vouchsafing no song. In the same woodland the mountain jays held carnival—a bacchanalian revel, judging from the noise they made; the ruby-crowned kinglets piped their galloping roundels; a number of wood-pewees—western species—were screeching, thinking themselves musical; siskins were flitting about, though not as numerous as they had been in the piny regions ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... than to tell them that they will lose their powers some day, the answer will always be, "Well, I will wait until that losing day comes before I worry." If you tell a young man that his life is short, the old bacchanalian answer is the first one, "Live while we live." You must somehow get hold of that, you must persuade him that the true life now is the holy life, that life, this same life that he prizes, ought to breed humility and faith, not arrogance and pride, or else you must expect to talk to the winds. It ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... Hawkwood, who was invested by Gregory XI with the lordship of Bagnacavallo and Cotignola. When with Alberigo da Barbiano Italian armies and leaders appeared upon the scene, the chances of founding a principality, or of increasing one already acquired, became more frequent. The first great bacchanalian outbreak of military ambition took place in the duchy of Milan after the death of Giangaleazzo (1402). The policy of his two sons was chiefly aimed at the destruction of the new despotisms founded by the Condottieri; and from ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... bibacity, drunkenness, carousal, guzzling, intemperance. Antonyms: temperance nephalism, abstinence, teetotalism. Associated Words: bibacious, bibulous, bibitory, dipsomania, alcoholism thirst, nectar, hobnob, bacchanalian, inebriant, potatory, oenomania, symposium, crapulence, supernaculum convivial, conviviality, tankard, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... acquainted at all with his general habits of thought and sentiment. These lyrics of the philosopher appear on the whole to prove too much; looked at from a literary point of view merely, they remind one forcibly of the attempts of Mr. Silence at a Bacchanalian song. 'I have a reasonable good ear in music,' says the unfortunate Pyramus, struggling a little with that cerebral development and uncompromising facial angle which he finds imposed on him. 'I have a reasonable good ear in music: let us have the tongs ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... may be found an abundance of facts culled from various sources in all parts of the world, showing that the bestiality of many savages is not even restrained by the presence of spectators. At the phallic and bacchanalian festivals of ancient and Oriental nations all distinctions of rank and all family ties were forgotten in a carnival of lust. Licentious orgies are indeed carried on to this day in our own large cities; but their participants are the criminal classes, and occasionally some foolish ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... spoken of his claims to the title philosopher, won for him by his book Al-Chazari. But now we must hurry on to Moses ben Ezra, the last and most worldly of the three great poets. He devotes his genius to his patrons, to wine, his faithless mistress, and to "bacchanalian feasts under leafy canopies, with merry minstrelsy of birds." He laments over separation from friends and kin, weeps over the shortness of life and the rapid approach of hoary age—all in polished language, sometimes, however, lacking euphony. Even when he strikes ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... porker from his haversack; the ends of onions or such like vegetables would be protruding, and his broad-brimmed hat or bashed-in helmet would be garlanded with peach blossoms, resembling a joyous Bacchanalian, and the unshaven, dirty face underneath wreathed in smiles. We have destroyed a lot more waggons and houses, and lifted several hundred of cattle, besides getting some prisoners. How the women must hate us! Their faces are invariably concealed by the large sunbonnets which they wear, year in and ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... to the present day that people and animals that have leaped through these flames, or their smoke, are protected for a whole year from fevers and other diseases, as if by a kind of baptism by fire. Bacchanalian dances, which have originated in similar causes among all the rude nations of the earth, and the wild extravagancies of a heated imagination, were the constant accompaniments of this half-heathen, half-Christian festival. At the period of which we are treating, however, the Germans ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... in Madrid, or at the "Bacchus and Ariadne" in the National Gallery. How brimful they are of exuberant joy! you see no sign of a struggle of inner and outer conditions, but life so free, so strong, so glowing, that it almost intoxicates. They are truly Dionysiac, Bacchanalian triumphs—the triumph of life over the ghosts that love the gloom and chill ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... exploded and the mist cleared away, he sang a bacchanalian song, which he wished every free man in the world would commit to memory. "What is the difference," said he, "between this and wine? Neither will hurt a man; it is your rum-drinking, gin-guzzling topers that are harmed;—anything will harm them. Who ever heard of a genteel wine or brandy ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... get your Bacchanalian song? Witty, certainly, but the recollection of the scores a little ghastly for the occasion, perhaps. You have yourself sung into silence, too, all possible songs of Bacchus, as the god ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... to Tragedy—by a Gentleman of Scotland, with a dedication to—James Boswell, Esq.!—'for your particular kindness to me, and chiefly for the profound respect with which you have always treated me.' We hear of his 'old hock' humour, a favourite phrase with him for his Bacchanalian tastes, and we find the author ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... Valentinian, who, years before, in a fit of female spitefulness for having been banished to Constantinople, had sent her ring as a gage d'amour to the repulsive barbarian. He then retired to the Danube by the passes of the Alps, where he spent the winter in bacchanalian orgies and preparations for an invasion of the eastern provinces. But his career was suddenly cut off by the avenging poniard of Ildigo, a Bactrian or Burgundian princess, whom he had taken for one of his numerous wives, and whose relations he ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... little considered. Instruction in music often aims only to train pupils for display in society, and the tendency of the melodies which are played is restricted more and more to orchestral pieces of an exciting or bacchanalian character. The railroad-gallop-style only makes the nerves of youth vibrate with stimulating excitement. Oral speech, the highest form of the personal manifestation of mind, was also treated with great reverence by the ancients. ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... equanimity or his appetite. Hayashi, who always preserved his grave and dignified bearing, ate and drank sparingly, but tasted of every dish, and sipped of every kind of wine. He was the only one, in fact, whose sobriety was proof against the unrestrained conviviality that prevailed among his bacchanalian coadjutors. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... for the returning hero was in the van, high above all the other figures. From the golden throne borne on the shoulders of twelve black slaves he waved his long thyrsus in greeting to the exulting multitude. Before the bacchanalian train which accompanied him, and behind the musicians who followed, moved two elephants bearing between them, as a light burden, some unrecognizable object covered with a purple cloth. Now the column had passed ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... brutalized with excess of every kind; their heads of dishevelled hair bound with coronals of leaves, while, from goblets of an antique grace, they drain the fiery torrent which is destroying them. Around the bacchanalian feast stand, lofty upon pedestals, the statues of old Rome, looking with marble calmness and the severity of a rebuke beyond words upon the revellers. A youth of boyish grace, with a wreath woven in his tangled hair, and with red and drowsy eyes, sits listless upon one pedestal, while upon ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... occasion, and was unexpectedly hilarious and demonstrative. In bidding good-by to his sister he had effusively embraced her, then turned suddenly upon Marion, and before she could dream of what was coming, had caught her in his arms and imprinted upon her fresh young lips a bacchanalian salute that left thereon a mingled essence of Angostura bitters, cloves, and tobacco, and drove her in dismay and confusion from the room to seek her own in a passion of angry tears and disenchantment. Never before in her life had she known such an affront. Never ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... Bachofen relates yet another movement, which for a time restored the early matriarchate. The women, at first opposing, presently became converts to the Dionysusian gospel, and were afterwards its warmest supporters. Motherhood became degraded. Bacchanalian excesses followed, which led to a return to the ancient hetairism. Bachofen believes that this formed a fresh basis for a second gynaecocracy. He compares the Amazonian period of these later days with that in which marriage was first introduced, and finds that "the ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... were streaming toward him to manifest their respect, and to implore his blessing on their knees; the same people who precisely ten years before had closed the churches, driven the priests into exile, and consecrated their bacchanalian worship to the ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... the last-named song, Angellier remarks that the imagination of the poet must have indeed explored every situation of love to have led him to that which he in his own experience could not have known. Even the song Willie brewed a Peck o' Maut, the first of bacchanalian ditties, is the work of a man of sane mind and healthy appetite. It is not of the diseased imagination of drunken genius. But the greatest poem of this period, and one of Burns's biggest achievements, is Tam o' Shanter. This poem was written in answer to a request of Captain Grose that the ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... the company of merry mates, In spite of Temperance's if's and buts, So sure as Eating is set off with plates, His Drinking always was bound up with cuts! Howbeit, such Bacchanalian revels Bring very sad catastrophes about; Palsy, Dyspepsy, Dropsy, and Blue Devils, Not to forget the Gout. Sometimes the liver takes a spleenful whim To grow to Strasburg's regulation size, As if for those hepatical ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... the Bacchic and Corybantic frenzies were, in all respects, identical with the middle age dancing manias, and with the possession of those who still exhibit the influences of Waren in Hindoostan, can hardly be doubted. "As for the Bacchanalian motions and friskings of the Corybantes," says Plutarch in his Essay on Love, "there is a way to allay these extravagant transports, by changing the measure from the Trochaic to the Spondaic, and the tone from the Phrygian to the Doric:" just as with the dancers of St. Vitus, and ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... it was impossible to reject them; but, if true, how account for these grand maxims of lofty morality? What object could their author have in thus uselessly playing the hypocrite, when amatory and bacchanalian choruses would not only have been more consonant with his own feelings, but doubtless more acceptable to the world? She had not yet learned what it often takes the wisest man a lifetime to discover—that every inconsistency of conduct is not hypocrisy, but that it is one of ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... table and chairs, and played a certain game of cards, which was one of their simple amusements. Whether this meeting was intended as an exorcism of any evil influences which might threaten the new must about to be put in, or a mild bacchanalian tribute to the empty space from which they had drawn so much comfort and cheerfulness during the year, or whether the wine left some fine perfume behind it which they wished to inhale, tradition saith not. Maybe the fathers never went ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... blue-clad, golden-haired young lady lolling against the window, trying with a giant chiffon muff to smother a fit of hilarious laughter. One arched and smiling eye showed above the muff and the whole figure was instinct with Bacchanalian mirth. "Why that's," he began to explain, but young Trevor had vanished ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... wicked little golden-haired maiden insists on pouring him out a bumper, and dumb show is his only means of remonstrance? Why, of course, if death were in the cup, he must make her a leg, and drain it to the bottom, as I did. In conclusion, I am bound to add that, notwithstanding the bacchanalian character prevailing in these visits, I derived from them much interesting and useful information, and I have invariably found the gentlemen to whom I have been presented persons of education and refinement, combined with a happy, healthy, jovial temperament, that ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... usually of red wine, but sometimes of white, with the addition of sugar and spices. Sir Walter Scott ("Quarterly Review," vol. xxxiii.) says, after quoting this passage of Pepys, "Assuredly his pieces of bacchanalian casuistry can only be matched by that of Fielding's chaplain of Newgate, who preferred punch to wine, because the former was a liquor ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... crouching-as also the opposite movements of attack with arrows and lances, and also of every kind of thrust. So strong was the attachment to this dance at Sparta that, long after it had in the other Greek states degenerated into a Bacchanalian revel, it was still danced by the Spartans as a warlike exercise, and boys of fifteen were instructed in it." Of the Hunting-dance I have already given instances. (2) It always had the character of Magic about it, by ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... the Governor!" I could distinguish from a multitude of noises, which issued upwards from the forecastle; and then snatches of such Bacchanalian songs as, ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... these distinct divisions of non-laughers and over-laughers would be entertained by reading The Rape of the Lock, or seeing a performance of Le Tartuffe. In relation to the stage, they have taken in our land the form and title of Puritan and Bacchanalian. For though the stage is no longer a public offender, and Shakespeare has been revived on it, to give it nobility, we have not yet entirely raised it above the contention of these two parties. Our speaking on the theme of Comedy ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... with recent illness, half-fainting also from the shock of the terrible and unexpected fate which had overtaken her, Elissa was borne in triumph to the palace that now was hers. Around her gilded litter priestesses danced and sang their wild chants, half-bacchanalian and half-religious; before it marched the priests of El, clashing cymbals and crying, "Make way, make way for the new-born goddess! Make way for her whose throne is upon the horned moon!" while all about the multitude of spectators ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... spot of the city were deserted; but from many a dirty window, and through many a red, dingy curtain, streamed forth into the darkness rages of ruddy light, while the sounds of the violin, and the noise of Bacchanalian orgies, betokened that the squalid and vicious population of that vile ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... one more story of the bacchanalian sort, in which Clarence and York, and the very highest personage of the realm, the great Prince Regent, all play parts. The feast took place at the Pavilion at Brighton, and was described to me by a gentleman who was present at the ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... services at Saint Cow's, and he renders the organ-accompaniments with such unusual freedom from reminiscences of the bacchanalian repertory, that the Gospeler is impelled to compliment him ...
— Punchinello Vol. 1, No. 21, August 20, 1870 • Various
... not wish to strew sugar on bottled spiders, or try to make mystical divinity out of the Song of Solomon, much less out of the erotic and bacchanalian songs of Hafiz. Hafiz himself is determined to defy all such hypocritical interpretation, and tears off his turban and throws it at the head of the meddling dervis, and throws his glass after the turban. But the love or the wine of Hafiz is not to be confounded with vulgar debauch. It is the spirit ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... but drinking songs. At that time the tenor generally sang the melody, and, as in order to show on what foundation their work rested, the Flemings retained the original words in his part, it was not uncommon to hear the tenors singing some bacchanalian verses, while the rest of the choir were intoning the sacred words of a "Gloria" or an "Agnus Dei." These abuses lasted for an incredibly long time, but finally, in 1562, the cardinals were brought together for the purification of all churchly matters, and the ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... considerably astonished, on doing the same, to discover that this dark beverage—which, from Armstrong's manner, I had been prepared to find something at least as wicked as absinthe—was simply and solely Bordeaux of a mild quality. After this Bacchanalian proceeding we went out into the orchard, which was reserved for family use, and sat on a bench under an apple-tree. Armstrong called his little boy who had been at supper with us and gave him a whispered message, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... sequence of wild scenes telescoped themselves along the White Way, but the evening was yet young and would ripen toward fulfilment as the hours progressed. Its Bacchanalian zenith would be reached after the million lights of these gilded places had died—like the snuffing of a single candle—into the five minutes of darkness which ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... margin, where they throw off a rich embroidery of leaves and fruit. A lion's skin, with the head and claws attached, form a sort of drapery, and the introduction of the thyrsus, the lituus, and three bacchanalian masks on each side, complete the embellishments. The capacity of this vase is 103 gallons, its diameter 9 feet, its pedestal of course modern. It was discovered in 1770, in the draining of a mephitic lake within the enclosure of the Villa Adriana, called Laga di Pantanello. Lord ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 366 - Vol. XIII, No. 366., Saturday, April 18, 1829 • Various
... are capitals knitted of nuns and monks, shamelessly coupled, as on the hall of chimney pieces in the Palais de Justice, in Paris. There is Noah's adventure carved to the last detail, as under the great portal of Bourges. There is a bacchanalian monk, with ass's ears and glass in hand, laughing in the face of a whole community, as on the lavatory of the Abbey of Bocherville. There exists at that epoch, for thought written in stone, a privilege exactly comparable to our present ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... mind trembles with recent dread, and my soul, replete with Bacchus, has a tumultuous joy, Evoe! spare me, Bacchus; spare me, thou who art formidable for thy dreadful thyrsus. It is granted me to sing the wanton Bacchanalian priestess, and the fountain of wine, and rivulets flowing with milk, and to tell again of the honeys distilling from the hollow trunks. It is granted me likewise to celebrate the honor added to the constellations by your happy spouse, and the palace ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... the midday of her glory. Anxiety and care ultimately throw her into the arms of the haggard and grim monster death. But, oh, how patient, under every pining influence! Let us view the matter in bolder colors; see her when the dearest object of her affections recklessly seeks every bacchanalian pleasure, contents himself with the last rubbish of creation. With what solicitude she awaits his return! Sleep fails to perform its office—she weeps while the nocturnal shades of the night triumph in the stillness. Bending over some ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to eat cake. And so, by force of circumstance, it came about that Cimarosa, Paesiello, and Rossini fed the mystic, melancholy little boy, who was more than a little intoxicated by his draughts of the Asti spumante poured out for him, instead of milk, by these bacchanalian Satyrs, and the two lively, ingenuously, lasciviously smiling Bacchante of ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... stands by, stolid and immovable; the Magyar blood is not in her, hers is the languorous Oriental blood, the supple, sinuous movements of the Levant. She watches this bacchanalian whirligig with a sneer upon her thin, red lips. Beside her Eros Bela too is still, the scowl has darkened on his face, his one eye leers across the group of twirling dancers to that one couple close to ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... forward step met frowns, the backward smiles. For Pleasure witched him her sweet cup to drain; Repentance offered ecstasy in pain. Delicious licence called it Nature's cry; Ascetic rigours crushed the fleshly sigh; A tread on shingle timed his lame advance Flung as the die of Bacchanalian Chance, He of the troubled marching army leaned On godhead visible, on godhead screened; The radiant roseate, the curtained white; Yet sharp his battle strained through day, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and Adoration of the Magi. And, in all probability, some other Christmas customs are adopted from the festivals of the ancients, as decking with evergreens and mistletoe (relics of Druidism) and the wassail bowl. It is not surprising, therefore, that Bacchanalian illustrations have been found among the decorations in the early Christian Churches. The illustration on the following page is from a mosaic in the Church of St. Constantine, Rome, ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... the psalm-singing line, Sir Thomas," says Mr. Barnes; "quite the contrary." In fact, Sir de Boots in his youth used to sing with the Duke of York, and even against Captain Costigan, but was beaten by that superior bacchanalian artist. ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... through it, to the last, moved his heroic figure—host, master of the revels, and giver of the law. It is true, as the strength oozed from him, that she caught up responsibilities from his failing hands. But in appearance he still ruled, dozing, ofttimes at the board, a bacchanalian ruin, yet in all seeming the ruler of ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... nature appears to undergo a temporary change. Sons and daughters revile their parents in gross language, and parents their children; men and women become almost like animals in the indulgence of their amorous propensities. They enact all that was ever portrayed by prurient artists in a bacchanalian festival or pandean orgy; and as the light of the sun they adore, and the presence of numerous spectators, seems to be no restraint on their indulgence, it cannot be expected that chastity is preserved when the shades of night fall on such a scene of licentiousness ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... from every direction. Their shouts and revels swelled upon the night air. The rain began to fall in torrents. They broke into the houses for shelter; insulted maids and matrons; tore down every thing combustible for their watch fires; massacred a few of the body-guard of the queen, and, with bacchanalian songs, roasted their horses for food. And thus passed the hours of this long and dreary night, in hideous outrages for which one can hardly find a parallel in the annals of New Zealand cannibalism. The immense ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... driven maddened from the house. And they, mingled with the sons of Cadmus, sit on the roofless rocks beneath the green pines. For this city must know, even though it be unwilling, that it is not initiated into my Bacchanalian rites, and that I plead the cause of my mother, Semele, in appearing manifest to mortals as a God whom she bore to Jove. Cadmus then gave his honor and power to Pentheus, born from his daughter, who fights against the Gods as far as I am ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... ailment, come home at night, carrying under their arms a sirloin of beef, a joint of veal, or a leg of mutton, not forgetting to hang a bottle of wine to their belt, and, on entering the court, they throw aside their crutches, resume their healthy and lusty appearance, and, in imitation of the ancient Bacchanalian revelries, dance all kinds of dances with their trophies in their hands, whilst the host is preparing their suppers. Can there be a greater miracle than is to be seen in this court, ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... honest Hungarian by the morning and to encourage him in his task he gave him two guldens and an order on the butler for as much punch as he could drink. By the morning all the punch was drunk, but the translation also was finished, to the tune of bacchanalian songs which Margari kept up with ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... raised. He was, however, too enervated and too emaciated to acquire any knowledge of the military exercise; and, what was rather remarkable, there was another young sprig of the Church to keep him in countenance, who was also a private in the same troop of yeomanry. Although I sometimes made one of the bacchanalian party of our Curate, yet I felt most severely the difference between this society and that ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... and reserved, became wild and animated. He sometimes talked with all the unction of an old debauchee, of former exploits, such as deer-stealing, orchard-robbing, drunken gambols, and desperate affrays in which he had been engaged in the earlier part of his life, sung bacchanalian and amorous ditties, dwelt sometimes upon adventures which drove Phoebe Mayflower from the company, and penetrated even the deaf ears of Dame Jellicot, so as to make the buttery in which he held his carousals no proper place ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... stoop and rise, others whirl, others caper sideways, all keep steadily circling like dervishes; spectators applaud special strokes of skill; my approach only enlivens the scene; the circle enlarges, louder grows the singing, rousing shouts of encouragement come in, half bacchanalian, half devout, "Wake 'em, brudder!" "Stan' up to 'em, brudder!"—and still the ceaseless drumming and clapping, in perfect cadence, goes steadily on. Suddenly there comes a sort of snap, and the spell breaks, amid general sighing and laughter. And this not rarely and occasionally, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... broke out into a loud Bacchanalian hymn, in which Philip could find no mirth, and from which the songster suddenly ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... their trade; and the churches bottége, shops. There is no vitality in the religion of the people, the services are a mere mummery, and the system is held together principally by the attractions of the popular festas, such as those described in a former chapter as scenes of bacchanalian revelry tricked out in the paraphernalia of religion. As for the Jesuits, the most obnoxious of the ecclesiastics, my friend stated, that the populace of Cagliari “burnt them out,” intending, I apprehend, to convey that they ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... whisky, xeres[obs3]. drunkard, sot, toper, tippler, bibber[obs3], wine-bibber, lush; hard drinker, gin drinker, dram drinker; soaker*, sponge, tun; love pot, toss pot; thirsty soul, reveler, carouser, Bacchanal, Bacchanalian; Bacchal[obs3], Bacchante[obs3]; devotee to Bacchus[obs3]; bum* [U.S.], guzzler, tavern haunter. V. get drunk, be drunk &c. adj.; see double; take a drop too much, take a glass too much; drink; tipple, tope, booze, bouse[Fr], guzzle, swill*, soak*, sot, bum* [U.S.], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the Bride—the Bride is coming! Birds are singing, bees are humming; Silent lakes amid the mountains Look but cannot speak their mirth; Streams go bounding in their gladness, With a bacchanalian madness; Trees bow down their heads in wonder, Clouds of purple part asunder, As the Maiden of the Morning Leads the blushing Bride to Earth! Bright as are the planets seven— With her glances She advances, For her azure eyes are Heaven! And her robes are sunbeams ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... in the worship of Dionysus,—so that the inspiration of joy must not be taken for the frenzy of intoxication, though the symbol of the vine has often led to just this misapprehension. Besides, Dionysus must not be too closely identified with the Bacchanalian orgies, which were only a perversion of rites which retained their original purity in the Eleusinia: and this latter institution, it must be remembered, was from the first under the control of the state,—and that state at the time ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... pause in their places, and execute little oscillatory movements, bending the body from one side to the other. The reeds ranged in a line, and fastened together, resemble the Pan's pipes, as we find them represented in the bacchanalian processions on Grecian vases. To unite reeds of different lengths, and make them sound in succession by passing them before the lips, is a simple idea, and has naturally presented itself to every nation. We were surprised to see with what promptitude ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... sit down," resumed the Englishman. "The Bacchanalian gentlemen in the boat which ran you down are still blundering about, and may quite probably cannon into us. And you don't want to take a second chance of being shot ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... as Bons Vivants indite, In which your bibbers of Champagne delight,— The Poetaster, bawling them in clubs, Obtains a miserably noted name; And every noisy Bacchanalian dubs The Singing-Writer ...
— Broad Grins • George Colman, the Younger
... doubt, and there are only a few odd thousands home on leave. But what would happen, with all these public-houses standing open, if hundreds of thousands, intoxicated with the thought of victory, came back? You have told me what took place during the Boer War; that would be nothing to the Bacchanalian orgies we should see if victory were to ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... in vain to find a means of entering the hall. The whole scene had been arranged by Benedetto and Larsagny in a satanic spirit. Larsagny owned the house in Courbevoie, and had often presided at its bacchanalian revels. Carmen had not called him a master of immorality for nothing. While Spero was beating the iron railing in despair, the light suddenly went out and all was still. The vicomte strained his eyes to see what was going on in the hall, and not seeing anything, waited in the agony ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... administration of Intendant De Meulles. In 1712, it was consumed by fire, when occupied by Intendant Begon, but was reconstructed by orders from Versailles. During the last eleven years of French domination, from 1748 to 1759, it became famous through the orgies and bacchanalian scandals of Intendant Bigot, the Sardanapalus of New France, whose exploits of gallantry and conviviality would have formed a fitting theme for romance from the pen of the elder Dumas. After the Conquest, the British had almost entirely neglected it, as they held their ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... every recess seemed to fill with its own merry company, and in each that handsome prima donna presided like a goddess; while the tall figure of a proud, beautiful girl sat near, looking strangely wild and anxious as a loud, bacchanalian spirit broke into the scene, and turned it into a revel. Amid the gurgle of wine and the mellow crush of fruit, some ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... social recollections of Baltimore are by no means exclusively bacchanalian. British stock, lamentably at a discount in other parts of the Union, is, perhaps, a trifle above par here. The popularity of our representatives—masculine and feminine—may have something to do with this; at any rate, the avenues of the best and pleasantest circles are easily opened to any ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... dragged to prison by the hair; children's heads were dashed against stones. Thousands of people rushed, howling, night and day through the streets. Victims were sought in ruins, in chimneys, in cellars. Before the prison bacchanalian feasts and dances were celebrated at fires, around ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... festive tar who induced the unsophisticated Indian maid to join him in worship at the shrine of Venus Porcina carried in the innermost recesses of the folds of his pendulous and sea-beaten prepuce the remnants of former Bacchanalian festivities performed in the questionable temples of Venus and Bacchus in Portsmouth or London. Consumption, as such, was neither imported nor propagated by Europeans into those islands, its original entry being in the shape of syphilis. Had it been the ancient ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... to his feet, ran forward, caught the bacchanalian about the shoulders, and rushed him in the direction of the dimly-looming house, throwing one of his own long legs into the air every now and again. The boys ran after. When they reached the house its master was extended on a settee in the living-room, and Hill was ...
— The Valiant Runaways • Gertrude Atherton
... deal of that sort of thing in Burns, and it is unsatisfactory, not because it is bacchanalian poetry, but because it has not that accent of sincerity which bacchanalian poetry, to do it justice, very often has. There is something in it of bravado, something which makes us feel that we have not ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... social evil, we have no knowledge of them, but there is nevertheless no lack of evidence to prove that it was only too well known among them long before that happy age (Livy i, 4; ii, 18); and the peculiar story of the Bacchanalian cult which was brought to Rome by foreigners about the second century B.C. (Livy xxxix, 9-17), and the comedies of Plautus and Terence, in which the pandar and the harlot are familiar characters. Cicero, Pro Coelio, chap. ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... made a rude kind of harp specially for his poor blind daughter, and on which Dot used to play when she visited the toy-maker's. Caleb's musical contribution would be 'a Bacchanalian song, something about a sparkling bowl,' which much annoyed ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... forbidden fruit,' roared out the bacchanalian chorus, 'Oh, the juice of the forbidden fruit; But you bet all the same, If it had its right name, It's the juice of the ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... my word, you would see where I'd get to." His bold black eyes turned beseechingly to Jeremy—surely it was not only a trick of the waving gas; the boy drew closer and closer, never moving his gaze from the horses who had hitherto been whirling at a bacchanalian pace, but now, as at some sudden secret command, suddenly slackened, hesitated, fell into a gentle jog-trot, then scarcely rose, scarcely fell, were suddenly still. Jeremy saw what it was that you did if ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... is somewhat farther removed from the nursery of improvement, but it is near enough to Windsor, of which place it is not necessary to say much, for their Bacchanalian and Cyprian orgies, and other fashionable festivities, are well known. So that notwithstanding they are not in the immediate vicinity of the metropolis, there can scarcely be a doubt of their being ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... Hellenic religion into Italy; the senate, which subdued Hannibal, had to sanction the transference of the worship of Cybele from Asia Minor to Rome, and to take the most serious steps against other still worse superstitions, particularly the Bacchanalian scandal. But, as during the preceding period the revolution generally was rather preparing its way in men's minds than assuming outward shape, so the religious revolution was in substance, at any rate, the work only of the Gracchan ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... and recognized the rustic bacchanalian for the first time. He had always had a peculiar antipathy to this young gentleman; but at this moment it was intensified into a loathing. How could he ask assistance from such ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... scarcely had time to don his priest's habit, draw the hood well over his head, and conceal his bar and pruning knife in the ample folds of the garment when a belated frequenter of one of the numerous posadas of the city staggered past, humming in maudlin tones the refrain of a bacchanalian song which he cut short when he realised that the two dark figures which he jostled were, as he supposed, connected with the dread institution which lay back there ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... bacchanalian, I am excusable for the inaccuracy," she retorted. "I did not even know where I picked up the foolish bit. Having ascertained the origin to be of doubtful respectability, I shall never use ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... to do battle for the credit of their respective corps—the calm, rigid face, never flushing beyond a clear swarthy brown, and the cold, bright, inevitable eyes, had stricken terror into the hearts of bacchanalian Heavies, and given consolation, if not confidence, to the Hussars, who were failing fast: these knew that though their own brains might be reeling and their legs rebelliously independent, their single champion was invincible. As the last of the Enomotae went down, ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence |
