"Bedlam" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his "religion" to seek, and painfully shape together for himself, out of the abysses of conflicting disbelief and sham-belief and bedlam delusion, now filling the world, as all men of reflection have; and in this respect too,—more especially as his lot in the battle appointed for us all was, if you can understand it, victory and not defeat,—he is an expressive emblem of his time, and an instruction ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... waited on the Duke of York; and after our usual business done, W. Hewer and I to look my wife at the Black Lion, Mercer's, but she is gone home, and so I home and there dined, and W. Batelierand W. Hewer with us. All the afternoon I at the Office, while the young people went to see Bedlam, and at night home to them and to supper, and pretty merry, only troubled with a great cold at this time, and my eyes very bad ever since Monday night last that the light of the candles spoiled me. So to bed. This morning, among other things, talking with Sir W. Coventry, I did propose to him my ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... waterman, be you taking that chap to Bedlam?" cried a shrill female voice close to us. The speech was stopped; we looked up, and perceived a wherry with two females passing close to us. A shout of laughter followed the observation, and my ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... best things and go to Leeche's old stone building for protection. What few men there were could protect us better there than at different homes. This old building was three stories high. Some women were sick, some screaming. It was a scene of trouble and distress. It was the worst bedlam I ever ...
— Old Rail Fence Corners - The A. B. C's. of Minnesota History • Various
... clapping her hands, and now some of the more restless of the audience clapped theirs in concert. The guitar and fiddle began to thump and twang, and the bells to ring, and then again the more refractory lunatics amongst us began to beat accompaniment on our hats. The whole affair was worthy of Bedlam or Hanwell, or, let us add, an ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... scribbling cabalistic signs on little bits of paper, and almost all were howling like maniacs or wild beasts half starved. The only place I was ever in at all to be compared with it in volume and variety of noise is the parrot-room in the London Zoological Gardens. Bedlam and Pandemonium I have not visited—as yet—and consequently cannot speak from personal experience. But the parrots in that awful house in Regent's Park are capable of making more hideous noises in a given moment than any other wild beasts in the world, except brokers. Here the human ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... scarcely believed that a man, With his senses about him could form such a plan, And thought that as Bedlam was so very nigh, You had better been there than ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 50. Saturday, October 12, 1850 • Various
... and all the rest. The other persons present fell at first breathlessly silent, watching the gallant but quite hopeless adventure. Then, in sheer sympathy with a good man in trouble, one after another we rushed in to help, till the constitution of the University must have seemed indeed a thing of Bedlam to our smiling but much- puzzled guest; and all our cheeks were red. But M. Renan cut the knot. Since he could not understand, and we could not explain, what the constitution of Oxford University was, he suavely took ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... entered through the Kaiser Arch of the Brandenburger Tor, and bedlam broke loose during the passing of the captured cannon of Russia, France, and Belgium—these last cast by German workmen at Essen and fired by Belgian artillerists against German ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... St. Antony in the likeness of a lean friar! Between mad monks and mad women, bedlam's broke ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... in the Region of Borgo, apart from the Castle, and Saint Peter's and the Vatican, are those connected with the Holy Office, the hospital and insane asylum of Santo Spirito, and with the Serristori barracks. In Rome, to go to Santo Spirito means to go mad. It is the Roman Bedlam. But there is another association with the name, and a still sadder one. There, by the gate of the long, low hospital, is still to be seen the Rota—the 'wheel'—the revolving wooden drum, with its small aperture, corresponding ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... temperate, I'le have it prov'd if you were never yet in Bedlam, Never in love, for that's a lunacy, No great state left ye that you never lookt for, Nor cannot manage, that's a rank distemper; That you were christen'd, and who answer'd for ye, ...
— Rule a Wife, and Have a Wife - Beaumont & Fletcher's Works (3 of 10) • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... interesting remarks here and there, particularly those of a destructive intent, which the older reader will appreciate; while on the whole he will wonder whether the author has, in these last four chapters, any other than the whimsical aim of producing bedlam in the minds ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... bits of ones, but when the grown people wanted to "shout," I would not let them, and the occasion closed by their "drawing" candy from C. as they passed out. I daresay this sounds pleasant, and I know they all had a good time; but if you could have looked in, you would have thought it Bedlam let loose! ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... loving nephew and his charming wife can't wait to see me buried in the family cemetery; they want to bury me alive in that private Bedlam of yours," ...
— Dearest • Henry Beam Piper
... find out a new trap, or a new gun-barrel, or something; we spend about fifteen millions a year each in our traps, take it altogether; and I don't see how we're to do with less." A highly comic state of life for two private gentlemen! but for two nations, it seems to me, not wholly comic. Bedlam would be comic, perhaps, if there were only one madman in it; and your Christmas pantomime is comic, when there is only one clown in it; but when the whole world turns clown, and paints itself red with its own heart's blood instead of vermilion, it is something ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... that sight for a spirit so shaken,— Down dropt the poor Tory in fits and grimaces, Then off to the Bedlam in Charles Street was taken, And is now one ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... to Lincoln that he was borne along with the rest in an enthusiasm for "developing the country." The mania for speculation was nearly universal, especially in the new Western States. Illinois alone projected 1,350 miles of railroad, without money and without credit to carry out this Bedlam legislation, and in almost every village there were "corner lots" enough to be sold to make a great city. Aside from this participation in a bubble destined to burst, and to be followed by disasters, bankruptcies, and universal distress, Lincoln ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... pleasure as kings. Can we therefore surfeit on this delicate ambrosia? Can we drink too much of that, whereof to taste too little tumbles us into a churchyard; and to use it but indifferently throws us into Bedlam? No, no. Look upon Endymion, the moon's minion, who slept threescore and fifteen years, and was not a hair the worse for it. Can lying abed till noon then, being not the threescore and fifteenth thousand part ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... little as the other. I felt then an exceeding pity for him, and I touched Black on the arm and was about to plead with him; but at the sight of me he raised his fist, and I moved away, seeing by the light of his eyes that he was as much a madman in that moment as any maniac in Bedlam. For he stood foaming and muttering, his hands clenched, his hat upon the snow, great drops of sweat on his bronzed forehead. The haste of the men to get the picks was not half haste enough for him; and when they began ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... I with Cerberus exchange My office (and his is no sinecure) Than see this royal Bedlam-bigot range[gv] The azure fields of Heaven, of that be sure!" "Saint!" replied Satan, "you do well to avenge The wrongs he made your satellites endure; And if to this exchange you should be given, I'll try to coax ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... Clapham. In the latter journey you have nothing to do but to invoke Rowland Hill, and in the former to invoke the sacred nine, and your business is done. You are dubbed one of the elect from that time forth, and nothing but Bedlam or the mint can invalidate your title. For myself, I can attribute my profound knowledge of the real text of my author, to no other than the following cause. On turning accidentally to volume I, page 409, of cunning little ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... trees. To this place I went alone, leaving the crowd behind me with directions not to move till I was in my place, which instruction they most strictly followed. After half an hour's walk I arrived at the place I have named. I had hardly time to regain my breath when I heard a row below me as if Bedlam had been let loose. I loaded my gun with buckshot in one barrel and ball in the other, and remained as quiet as a mouse. As the noise of the beaters and dogs approached me, I heard a crash in the bushes ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... Cox, as if the wind was a settin' from Bedlam, or may be Colney Hatch," said John, who was considered a humourist among his comrades. "I wouldn't take no liberties with a lady, Miss Cox; but if I might be so bold as to arst the joke ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... came to the thinned out strip of timber that surrounded the clearing and the flare of the flames was in his eyes. The bedlam of sound that came to him now was like fire in his brain. He heard the song and the laughter of men, the shrill cries of women and children, the barking and snarling and fighting of a hundred dogs. He wanted ...
— Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... was written before the sky had opened its flood-gates) "are perfectly explicable by the ordinary laws of nature. Your talk of a nebula is so ridiculous that it deserves no reply. If any lunatic accepts your absurd invitation, and goes into your 'ark,' he will find himself in Bedlam, where ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... the right and left, in order to secure the finest specimens of the coveted fruit, scarcely allowing himself time to breathe until he had filled his old straw hat, and all his pockets, with apples. To help laughing was impossible; while this new Tom o' Bedlam darted from the house, and scampered across the field for dear life, as if afraid that we should pursue him, to rob him of ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... the stage, you English fool! Hoo! Three cheers for Ned Forrest!" which were given with a will. Then came another chair, narrowly missing Macready's head, who, now alarmed for his personal safety, fled from the stage, and the curtain fell. But the bedlam that had been let loose did not stop. Hoots, curses, threats of vengeance, and the confused sounds of a mob given wholly over to passion, struck terror into all hearts; and Macready, fearing a rush would be made for him behind the scenes, left the theatre by a private ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... the Virgin Islands now and at dawn we neared St. Kitts, of the Leeward group, anchoring a half-mile away from the landing and putting passengers ashore in the small boats that ranged themselves near the steamer. There was a very bedlam of chatter, argument, and recrimination among the black boatmen, mounting at times to furious invective in a patois we failed wholly to understand, for though the majority of the natives speak English on all the islands, whether Dutch, French, or British, ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... and elevated in his deportment, was shocked at the wayward and reckless conduct of some of the Jacobites on their road to London, told one of the King's officers at Barnet that these prisoners "were only fit for Bedlam." To this it was remarked, that they were only fit for Bridewell. Whilst hopes of life continued, this rebuke still applied. The prisoners were aided in their excesses by the enthusiasm of the fair sex. The following extract from another obscure ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... mother said nothing, but, before she left, she took one long look about the engine room. In some such bedlam of noise and heat he spent his life. She was wrong, of course, to pity him; one need not measure labour by its conditions or by its cost, but by the joy of achievement. The woman saw the engines—sinister, menacing, frightful; the man saw power that answered to his hand—conquest, victory. ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... sees in everything A law that, given we flout it once too often, Brings fire and iron down on our naked heads. To me it looks as if the power that made him, For fear of giving all things to one creature, Left out the first,—faith, innocence, illusion, Whatever 'tis that keeps us out o' Bedlam,— And thereby, for his too consuming vision, Empowered him out of nature; though to see him, You'd never guess what's going on inside him. He'll break out some day like a keg of ale With too much independent frenzy in it; And all for cellaring what he knows won't keep, ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... despondency contain some of the gloomiest bursts of discontent with himself and with the world, which he ever gave vent to either in prose or verse. He describes himself as the "sport, the miserable victim of rebellious pride, hypochondriac imagination, agonizing sensibility, and Bedlam passions. I wish I were dead, but I'm no like to (p. 082) die.... I fear I am something like undone; but I hope for the best. Come, stubborn Pride and unshrinking Resolution; accompany me through this to me miserable world! I have a hundred ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... in a red haze through which he saw dimly. He was aware of the hailstorm of boulders that were thick in the air. He saw vaguely the white faces and copper-clad bodies of strange men leaping about him, and he heard the wild bedlam of their shrieks as they joined in the mad battle ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... think anything," he answered shortly. "I don't think anything, except that the Forward is a ship belonging to the devil, or madmen fit for nothing but Bedlam." ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... at Westminster School and Camb. After leaving the Univ. he went to London, and joined the stage both as actor and author. He was taken up by Rochester and others of the same dissolute set, led a loose life, and drank himself into Bedlam, where he spent four years. After his recovery he lived mainly upon charity, and met his death from a fall under the effects of a carouse. His tragedies, which, with much bombast and frequent untrained flights of imagination, have occasional fire ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... he, "what's two hundred and fifty dollars, after all? We've got the money. One more night of this kid will send me to a bed in Bedlam. Besides being a thorough gentleman, I think Mr. Dorset is a spendthrift for making us such a liberal offer. You ain't going to let the chance go, ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... was finished and Mrs. Grayson rose and read the tent assignments. The tents all had names, it appeared; there was Bedlam and Avernus, Jabberwocky, Hornets, Nevermore, Gibraltar, Tamaracks, Fairview, Woodpeckers, Ravens, All Saints, Aloha, and a number of others which the Winnebagos could not remember at one hearing. Three girls and one councilor were assigned to each tent. ...
— The Campfire Girls at Camp Keewaydin • Hildegard G. Frey
... Some of them fight more 'n they work, but I guess you won't be that kind," she concluded, with an unctuous smile, displaying two rows of false teeth. Then, with a quick, nervous, jerky gait, she hopped up the flight of rough plank stairs, threw open a door, and ushered me into the bedlam noises of the "loft," where, amid the roar of machinery and the hum of innumerable voices, I was to meet ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... stays, bellowed in the shrouds, thrummed the taut ropes against the steel masts, and from the myriad tiny ropes far aloft evoked a devil's chorus of shrill pipings and screechings. And yet, through this bedlam of noise, came Captain West's voice, as of a spirit visitant, distinct, unrelated, mellow as all music and mighty as an archangel's call to judgment. And it carried understanding and command to the man at the wheel, and to Mr. Pike, waist-deep ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... one of the areas of the new buildings at Waterloo-place, opposite Carlton-House, where I was found dead. A few days afterwards, it was declared that they were misinformed as to my death, but that I was taken in a melancholy state of insanity to Bedlam; and the writer gave an account of the incoherent conversation which I had held with Major Cartwright, Mr. Cobbett, and Sir Francis Burdett, who had been to visit me. These accounts were given in such a serious manner, ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... d'oeuvre. How the paper grows less and less! In less than two minutes I shall cease to talk to you, and you may rave to the Great Wall of China. N.B.—Is there such a wall? Is it as big as Old London Wall by Bedlam? Have you met with a friend of mine named Ball at Canton? If you are acquainted, remember me kindly to him. Maybe you'll think I have not said enough of Tuthill and the Holcrofts. Tuthill is a noble fellow, as far as I can judge. The Holcrofts bear their ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... stately, the Spanish captain himself, in a fine laced coat and a plumed hat, and he was holding out his sword by the blade and bowed as we ran towards him, and began some damned foreign nonsense, with his Senor—but the captain would have none o' that, I tell you he was like Tom o' Bedlam now—so as the Senor grinned at him with his monkey face and bowed and wagged, the captain fetched him a slash across the cheek with his sword that cut up into his head; and that don went spinning across the poop like a morris-man and ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... side! On the other side! Oh, you must somehow see the other side! If you'd repair or clean This delicate old machine, You must have a way to see the other side! —The Inventor's Song in, "Bedlam." ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... of Major Robert Beverly's lay before us in the full moonlight, overlapping with the lusty breadth of the new leaves gleaming with silver dew, and upon them we fell. We hacked and cut, we tore up by the roots. In a trice we were bedlam loosened—that is, the ruder part of us. Some of us worked with no less fury, but still with some sense of our own dignity as destroyers over destruction. But the rabble who had swelled our ranks were all on fire with rage, and wasted themselves as well as the tobacco. They filled the air with ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... a trembling hand the paper was delivered. Then came the storm. Juno, as in the Aeneid, delegated the work of vengeance to Alecto. The Queen was calm and gentle; but Madame Schwellenberg raved like a maniac in the incurable ward of Bedlam! Such insolence! Such ingratitude! Such folly! Would Miss Burney bring utter destruction on herself and her family? Would she throw away the inestimable advantage of royal protection? Would she part with privileges which, once relinquished, could never be regained? It was idle ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... my view) for a monument to Fergusson were the churchyard of Haddington. But as that would perhaps not carry many votes, I should say one of the two following sites:—First, either as near the site of the old Bedlam as we could get, or, second, beside the Cross, the heart of his city. Upon this I would have a fluttering butterfly, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Holland in the library for a quarter of an hour. He was very entertaining. He gave us an account of a visit which he paid long ago to the Court of Denmark; and of King Christian, the madman, who was at last deprived of all real share in the government on account of his infirmity. "Such a Tom of Bedlam I never saw," said Lord Holland. "One day the Neapolitan Ambassador came to the levee, and made a profound bow to his Majesty. His Majesty bowed still lower. The Neapolitan bowed down his head almost to the ground; when, behold! the King clapped ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... in peals of loud laughter; and no one, unacquainted with them, would have pronounced them to be anything else than the voices of human beings. They exactly resembled the strong treble produced by the laugh of a maniac negro. It seemed as if some Bedlam of negroes had been let loose, ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... remembered the fate of every boy {p.027} at his school during the fifty years he had superintended it, and always traced their success or misfortunes entirely to their attention or negligence when under his care. His "noisy mansion," which to others would have been a melancholy bedlam, was the pride of his heart; and the only fatigues he felt, amidst din and tumult, and the necessity of reading themes, hearing lessons, and maintaining some degree of order at the same time, were relieved ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... these, we say, were red-coloured infants; of the same pulp and stuff, few years ago; now irretrievably shaped and kneaded as we see! Formulas? There is no mortal extant, out of the depths of Bedlam, but lives all skinned, thatched, covered over with Formulas; and is, as it were, held in from delirium and the Inane by his Formulas! They are withal the most beneficent, indispensable of human equipments: blessed he who has a skin and tissues, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... Through all that bedlam Blake remained resentfully cool, angrily clear-thoughted. He saw that the steamer did not move forward. He concluded the engine-room to be deserted. And he saw both the futility and the danger of remaining where ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... calling out, and what with the crackling of the hungry flames, the neighing of the horses that had drawn the fire-engine to the spot, the whooping of gangs of delighted boys, and a lot of other miscellaneous sounds, Bedlam seemed to have broken loose in Stanhope on this ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Snowbound - A Tour on Skates and Iceboats • George A. Warren
... meaning of the things that we say. Perhaps I should write "the things that we think we say," because so many of those who make themselves heard do not weigh words at all, and they imagine themselves to be uttering cogent truths when they are really giving us the babble of Bedlam. If ladies and gentlemen who rant about freedom would try to emancipate themselves from the dominion of meaningless words, we should all fare better; but we find a large number of public personages using perfectly grammatical series of phrases without ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... it broke forth in a storm of howls and execrations which completely drowned his voice. The whole audience—I could see their faces from where I sat on the platform—were infuriated. Arms were waving in the air, and the scene was like Bedlam. I requested the clergyman to sit down, and, as soon as he did so, the storm began to subside. A man rose in the midst of the audience and mounted a bench. Loud cries and applause greeted him. I could distinguish the name on a hundred ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... &c. Suddenly the reviler started, and exclaimed, Lord, have mercy upon us! He was struck with the utmost terror of mind, said the evil spirit could not abide that Christ should have any mercy upon him, and sunk into madness. He was remitted to Bedlam, and became an awful warning that God will not ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... it was Tom o' Bedlam singing while the house burned; and he did not tarry to enjoy the melody, but went into his own ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... the others worked with him—a dreadful afternoon and evening, fighting off newsmen, blocking phone calls, trying to concentrate in the midst of bedlam. The campaign to elect Tyndall had to start now. They labored to record a work-schedule, listing names, outlining telegrams, drinking coffee, as Dan swore at his dead cigar like old times once again, and ...
— Martyr • Alan Edward Nourse
... with a terrible volcanic fire in him too. He would have been strange anywhere; but among the dapper Royal gentlemen of the Eighteenth Century, what was to be done with such an Orson of a King?—Clap him in Bedlam, and bring out the ballot-boxes instead? The modern generation, too, still takes its impression of him from these rumors,—still more now from Wilhelmina's Book; which paints the outside savagery of the royal man, in a most striking manner; and leaves the inside vacant, undiscovered ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... exceptionally clean-cut young fellow of about his own age. This youth appeared a fine specimen of the sane, wholesome, successful young American business man. Yet he was behaving like a madman, yelling like Bedlam, wildly flaunting his hat—a splendid-looking Panama—now and then savagely brandishing his fists at an unseen foe. Queed heard him saying fiercely, apparently to the world at large: "They couldn't lick us now. By the Lord, ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... helped to clear the atmosphere for the Allies at least, and then our attention was once more directed toward the river, for around us there had sprung up a perfect bedlam of screams and hisses and a seething caldron of hideous reptiles, devoid of fear and filled only with hunger and with rage. They clambered, squirmed and wriggled to the deck, forcing us steadily backward, though we emptied our pistols into them. There were all sorts and ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... light, too, on the daily life of his time. The bellman on his nightly rounds, calling "Paaast twelvvve o'clock"; the dinner at three, or at the latest, four; the meetings at coffee-houses; the book-sales; the visit to the London sights—the lions at the Tower, Bedlam, the tombs in Westminster Abbey, and the puppet-show; the terrible Mohocks, of whom Swift stood in so much fear; the polite "howdees" sent to friends by footmen; these and more are all described in the Journal. We read of curious habits ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... the Rake's Progress is perhaps superior to the last scenes of Timon. If we seek for something of kindred excellence in poetry, it must be in the scenes of Lear's beginning madness, where the King and the Fool and the Tom-o'-Bedlam conspire to produce such a medley of mirth checked by misery, and misery rebuked by mirth; where the society of those "strange bedfellows" which misfortunes have brought Lear acquainted with, so finely sets forth ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... Crick wid a string of fish draggin' from her shoulders down to de ground. Me, I laked milk more'n anything else. You jus' oughta seed dat place at milkin' time. Dere was a heap of cows a fightin', chillun hollerin', and sich a bedlam as you can't think up. Dat old plantation was a grand place for chillun, in summertime 'specially, 'cause dere was so many branches and cricks close by what us chillun could hop in and ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration
... thirty and forty midshipmen, whose vociferations and laughter created such a din as to drown the voice of his conductor, who cried out, "Mr Seymour, gentlemen, to join the mess," and then quitted the noisy abode, which gave our hero the idea of bedlam broke loose. ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Fulkerson," said March, "you'd better call this fortnightly of yours 'The Madness o f the Half-Moon'; or 'Bedlam Broke Loose' wouldn't be bad! Why do you throw away all your hard earnings on such a crazy venture? Don't do it!" The kindness which March had always felt, in spite of his wife's first misgivings and reservations, for the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... this plant of grace intimated precisely to his colleagues, but the general impression was at the time that the captain's message had not been conveyed verbatim. Soon the babble of tongues charged the air and gave an impression of Bedlam. The captain had resolved upon a course of action which was strenuous. He had given certain orders to the chief engineer, and was standing on the lower bridge reviewing the situation, when the second officer came up to him ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... the door, good John! fatigued, I said; Tie up the knocker, say I'm sick, I'm dead. The Dog-star rages! nay, 'tis past a doubt, All Bedlam, or Parnassus, is let out: Fire in each eye, and papers in each hand, They rave, recite, and madden round the land. What walls can guard me, or what shades can hide? They pierce my thickets, through my grot they glide; By land, by water, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... reference to the famous asylum for insane persons, popularly known among the inhabitants of London as "Bedlam," I saw the lawyer start, and exchange a look with the head-clerk. Mr. Hartrey answered with evident reluctance; he said, "Quite right, madam"—and said no more. The lawyer, being the bolder man of the two, added a word of warning, addressed ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... pleasantly among the ladies of the counter myself. But in the second place, I'm told that you actually married the girl! I don't wish to be hard upon you, my good fellow, but there was an unparalleled insanity about that act, worthier of a patient in Bedlam than of my brother. I am not quite sure whether I understand exactly what virtuous behaviour is; but if that was virtuous behaviour—there! there! don't look shocked. Let's have done with the marriage, and get on. Well, you made the girl your wife; and then innocently consented to a very ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... one must seek the Lord, and fight the Lord's battles; if he introduced the Jewish jargon into the parliament of England, to the eternal shame of the human intelligence, he would be nearer to being led to Bedlam than to being ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... reformation, yet finding in religion no pleasures to supply the place of the juvenile amusements which he had relinquished, he began to apprehend that he lay under some special malediction; and he was tormented by a succession of fantasies which seemed likely to drive him to suicide or to Bedlam. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... person, comfortable, modern, twentieth-century, prosperous smugness has no superior in all the smug cities of the earth, and I was prepared to encounter with a smile of recognition anything that the whirling brains of Bedlam had ever conceived. Why should not this little lady tripping along with gold chain-bag and anxious, shopping knit of the brow, throw her arms round my neck and salute me as her long-lost brother? ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... fortune of a vaudeville comedian of the Dutch Daly stripe; and his son, who is his secretary, has the physiognomical symptoms of intellectuality that you might expect in a dude who eats with his knife, or any Brummel of "the bad lands." The lower branch of the municipal legislature is a bedlam. Its sessions are eruptions of obscenity. Talk is indulged in that would cause the ejectment of the talker from a bawdy- house parlor. The august body never rouses into activity save over some measure with "stuff" in it. The combine will ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... heard on every hand, all made more hideous by the variety of evil spirits who added their din to the general bedlam. "What furious world ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... institute, and therefore a possible mistake. A sage and a maniac each thinks the other mad. The decision is a matter of majorities. Should a whole community become insane, it would nevertheless vote itself wise; if the craze of Bedlam were uniform, its inmates could not distinguish it from a Pantheon; and though all human history seemed to the gods only as a continuous series of mediaeval processions des sots et des anes, yet ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... stark mad. It seems he had begun to revolve the change of his circumstances in his mind, and again this put him into an ecstasy of joy. His spirits whirled about faster than the vessels could convey them, the blood grew hot and feverish, and the man was as fit for Bedlam as any creature that ever was in it. The surgeon would not bleed him again in that condition, but gave him something to doze and put him to sleep; which, after some time, operated upon him, and he awoke next morning perfectly ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... letter from Calais tells us that a strange personage lately landed from England (from Bedlam we believe) has been giving himself out to be the son of the unfortunate Louis XVI. This is the twenty-fourth pretender of the species who has asserted that his father was the august victim of the Temple. Beyond his pretensions, the poor creature is said ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... woman's tongue for foolishness. I've heared a saying too in my family, which be—get a female on to your hearth and 'tis Bedlam ...
— Six Plays • Florence Henrietta Darwin
... said. "Man, if you dare to cross the Border you will be whipped at a cart-tail and clapped into Bedlam as a ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... went off prematurely, the shot hit the mark without Alec's trying for it, and a heavy thud informed the scouts that the bullet was fatal! Instantly, however, there was such a commotion in the leaves, and such a Bedlam of screeching! Finally a great flock of crows swept out of the high tree and flew away to find ...
— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... against the stony walls, and fell crippled, gasping, staring, at our feet. And when, at last, our guides and servants, mounting to pinnacles and jutting points, and many a frieze and coigne of vantage, placed blue lights on them all, and at the word illuminated all together, there was redoubled bedlam in that abode of Hecate, and the eternal calm of the Boodh became awful. For what deeds of outer darkness, done long ago in that black hole of superstition, so many damned souls shrieked from their night-fowl transmigrations, 'twere vain to question there were no disclosures ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... desire to persuade her, and the stout old Trojan her father, to consent to return to the Lodge, and live there quietly, and under connivance, like gentlefolk, instead of lodging in a hut hardly fit to harbour a Tom of Bedlam." ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... the sharpest of contrasts in the silvery glare. At the station, men who had died in the ambulances were dumped hurriedly in a plot of grass by the side of the roadway and covered with a blanket. Never was there seen such a bedlam! But on the main road the great convoys moved smoothly on as if held together by an invisible chain. A smouldering in the sky told of fires ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... on the river; all which were either burned down or damaged by the great fire of London, the next year after the plague; and of the second sort, the Monument, Fleet Ditch with its bridges, and the Hospital of Bethlem or Bedlam, &c. But possibly the managers of the city's credit at that time made more conscience of breaking in upon the orphan's money to show charity to the distressed citizens than the managers in the following years did to beautify the city and re-edify ...
— A Journal of the Plague Year • Daniel Defoe
... the afternoon our camp resembled a beehive, and next morning it was more like a bedlam. The horses were fresh, spirited, and they had tender backs; the burros stampeded because of some surreptitious trick of Romer's. But by noon we had all the outfit packed in the wagon. Considering the amount of stuff, and the long, rough climb up to the wagon, this was ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... recompense of his direful deeds; and Young fairly tossed his battered Derby hat up into the air as he shouted: "Go it, El Sabio! Give it to 'em, my boy! Ten t' one against th' fat priest! Three cheers for th' jackass! Hip-hip-hurrah!" In short, it seemed as though Bedlam had broken loose among us, and as though all of us together were ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... disorganization, jumble, chaos, litter, irregularity, disturbance, tumult, riot, turmoil, Bedlam, fracas, pandemonium. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... as the unfortunate man struggled to his feet, and was off again before his opponent had overtaken him. Down the alley of human forms the two came; then as their man drew ahead for an instant or two, such a bedlam broke forth from Gallagher's crew that Lawrence Glass, well started on his overland trip, judged that the ...
— Going Some • Rex Beach
... turn in," he suggested. "When Tavish shows up the dogs will raise bedlam and wake us. Throw out Tavish's blankets and put your own in his bunk. I prefer the floor. Always did. Nothing ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... childhood, I had imbibed a taste and now they came back to me as if in the dotage of grief. Alas, I feel how much even of incipient madness might have been discovered in the gorgeous and fantastic draperies, in the solemn carvings of Egypt, in the wild cornices and furniture, in the Bedlam patterns of the carpets of tufted gold! I had become a bounden slave in the trammels of opium, and my labors and my orders had taken a coloring from my dreams. But these absurdities must not pause to detail. Let me speak only of that one chamber, ever accursed, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the life and "clothes-philosophy" of a certain Diogenes Teufelsdroeckh, Professor der Allerlei Wissenschaft—of things in general—in the University of Weissnichtwo. "Society," said Carlyle, "is founded upon cloth," following the suggestions of Lear's speech to the naked bedlam beggar: "Thou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art;" and borrowing also, perhaps, an ironical hint from a paragraph in Swift's Tale of a Tub: "A sect was established who held the universe to be a large suit of ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... to which all mankind are more or less subject, and from which hardly any individual can entirely free himself. 'There is', he says, 'scarce a man so free from it, but that if he should always, on all occasions, argue or do as in some cases he constantly does, would not be thought fitter for Bedlam than civil conversation. I do not here mean when he is under the power of an unruly passion, but in the steady, calm course of his life. That which thus captivates their reason, and leads men of sincerity blindfold from common sense will, when examined, be found ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... a pandemonium that vessel was I cannot describe, but she was commanded by a lunatic, and might be called a floating Bedlam. Drinking, roaring, singing, quarrelling, dancing, they were never all sober at one time; and there were days together when, if a squall had supervened, it must have sent us to the bottom; or if a King's ship had come along, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... cringed from the pain of the sound. When I opened my eyes, the whole mass of the Jivro medicals was jammed in the doorway, struggling to get over each other, and the squeaking and rasping increased into a bedlam of sound. I laughed, a deep "ha ha," and from the neighboring table ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... absolutely naked and bare, with all the utter nakedness of your inward life this day; were all your secret thoughts, and all your stealthy schemes, and all your mad imaginations, and all your detestable motives, and all your hatreds like hell, and all your follies like Bedlam to be laid naked—I suppose the horror of it would make you cry to the rocks and the mountains to cover you this Sabbath night, or the weeds of the nearest sea to wrap you down into its depths. It would ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... wolfish-looking dog, bolder than the rest, left its snowy bed to hunt for more sheltered quarters. There was a whine, a snarl, then the sound of clashing teeth. In a moment every dog leaped up with bristling hair. Instantly bedlam reigned. Over seventy dogs waged the wildest kind of war and the distant woods reechoed the horrible din. A dozen blanketed mounds rose up, and many long lashes whistled through the air. The seething mass broke away and flew howling and yelping into outer darkness followed ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... up betimes, and stood at the window looking out over the sprawl of the south side of the river to the dome of Bedlam and the tower of Southwark Cathedral, the clustered chimneys, and the gray litter of untidy, ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... went together and visited the mansions of Bedlam[1114]. I had been informed that he had once been there before with Mr. Wedderburne, (now Lord Loughborough,) Mr. Murphy, and Mr. Foote; and I had heard Foote give a very entertaining account of Johnson's happening to have his attention arrested by a man who was very furious, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... A monastery in Mt. Lebanon, a sort of Bedlam, where the exorcising monks beat the devil out of one's ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... came to his own doorway he knew that even his tardiness could not justify the bedlam of sound that came from within. High-pitched voices. Bella's above all the rest, of course, but there was Minnie's too, and Gus's growl, and Pearlie's treble, and the boy ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... and grave deportment, with a perverse temper, with the education of a labouring man, and with an intellect in the most unhappy of all states, that is to say, too much disordered for liberty, and not sufficiently disordered for Bedlam. The circumstances in which he was placed were such as could scarcely fail to bring out in the strongest form the constitutional diseases of his mind. At the time when his faculties were ripening, Episcopalians, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... serious sacrifice. But when the sons had grown up to manhood, they too entered upon the business of iron-founding; and Abraham Darby's son and grandson, both of the same name, largely extended the operations of the firm, until Coalbrookdale, or, as it was popularly called, "Bedlam," became the principal seat of one of the most important branches of the ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... The bedlam that now broke loose exceeded all that had gone before. The uproar drowned the voice of the orator within, and even, for the time, called a halt upon the raging elements without. The speech was never concluded. What might have been the closing words of McKenzie's ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... acquiesce in restraints not imposed on the Channel Islands? Irishmen, Unionists no less than Home Rulers, are mostly Protectionists, and believe that tariffs may give to Ireland, not indeed a 'plethora of wealth,' for of this no man out of Bedlam except Mr. Gladstone dreams, but reasonable prosperity. Vain to argue that Protection is folly. Englishmen think so, and Englishmen are right. But English doctrine is not accepted in Germany, in France, in the United States, ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... and prosperity of all. I repeat, that I do not charge the judges with wilful and ill-intentioned error; but honest error must be arrested, where its toleration leads to public ruin. As, for the safety of society, we commit honest maniacs to Bedlam, so judges should be withdrawn from their bench, whose erroneous biases are leading us to dissolution. It may, indeed, injure them in fame or in fortune; but it saves the Republic, which is ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... either were to be wished) I would rather have a plain downright wisdom, than a foolish and affected eloquence. For what is so furious and Bedlam like as a vain sound of chosen and excellent words, without any subject of ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... voice of a man from across the corridor—"Shut up, you hag!" And after that bedlam broke loose. The woman—Samuel realized at last that the scream had come from a woman—broke forth into a torrent of yells and curses. Such hideous obscenities, such revolting blasphemies he had never heard in his life ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... heart! She clapped her hands, and in rushed the three children like Bedlam let loose, careering round and about the three, shouting, laughing, and begging to be took also. Raisins and oranges from George Anne's reticule alone restored them to ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... take as much pleasure as kings: can we therefore surfeit on this delicate Ambrosia? can we drink too much of that whereof to taste too little tumbles us into a churchyard, and to use it but indifferently throws us into Bedlam? No, no, look upon Endymion, the moon's minion, who slept three score and fifteen years, and was not a hair the worse for it. Can lying abed till noon (being not the three score and fifteenth thousand part of his ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... Shak-speare: his True Chronicle Historie of the life and death of King Lear and his three Daughters. With the vnfortunate life of Edgar, sonne and heire to the Earle of Gloster, and his sullen and assumed humor of Tom of Bedlam: As it was played before the Kings Maiestie at Whitehall vpon S. Stephans night in Christmas Hollidayes. By his Majesties seruants playing vsually at the Gloabe on the Bancke-side. London, Printed for Nathaniel Butter, and are to be sold at his shop in Pauls Church-yard ...
— Catalogue of the Books Presented by Edward Capell to the Library of Trinity College in Cambridge • W. W. Greg
... corridor, at least. There's Vanity Fair and Rag Fair and the Smithsonian Institute on the other side—oh! and the China Shop and the Corner Grocery, too. And on this side is ours, the Owls' Nest, and Bedlam, and the Soap Factory, and the Nursery, and this room ...
— Peggy • Laura E. Richards
... A bedlam of raucous, clamorous shrieks settling into a crude sort of war cry brought all four of them to their feet. Wilson thrust the girl back of him towards the cave-like formation behind them. This effectually protected them in the rear ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... of selling?" said Carew, sharply. "Don't flatter your chances so, Master Alleyn. I wouldn't sell the boy for a world full of Jem Bristows. Why, his mouth is a mint where common words are coined into gold! Sell him? I think I see myself in Bedlam for a fool! Nay, Master Alleyn, what I am coming at is this: I'll place him at the Rose, to do his turn in the play with the rest of us, or out of it alone, as ye choose, for one fourth of the whole receipts over and above my old share ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... side. The surgeons were busy with their glittering instruments. The tramp of men on the decks overhead, and the creaking of the timbers of the water-logged ship, added to the cries of the wounded, made a perfect bedlam of ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... nickname for vagrants who infested England in Tudor times. The phrase is certainly as old as 1561, and was due to these beggars pretending that they were patients discharged from the Abraham ward at Bedlam. The genuine Bedlamite was allowed to roam the country on his discharge, soliciting alms, provided he wore a badge. This humane privilege was grossly abused, and thus gave rise to the slang ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... work you've been, But soon a Bedlam once again, A mess, a wreck. But say, I wonder will it make us mad. No, House, I'll bet we both are glad ...
— Bib Ballads • Ring W. Lardner
... Bedlam reigned. All the recruits below, bushmen and afraid of the sea, dashed panic-stricken on deck and got in everybody's way. At the same time the boat's crew made a rush for the rifles. They knew what going ashore on Malaita meant—one hand ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... charms, as already a moustache was like those coming events that cast a well-defined shadow before. For an instant I half thought that Mr. Dane would try and stop, her tone was so furious, but he drove on as steadily as if he had not a passenger more fit for Bedlam than ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... glass, have used the caution necessary to preserve such brittle bodies. Hence it comes to pass that a man who is very sober, and of a right understanding in all other things, may in one particular be as frantic as any in Bedlam; if either by any sudden very strong impression, or long fixing his fancy upon one sort of thoughts, incoherent ideas have been cemented together so powerfully, as to remain united. But there are degrees of madness, as of folly; the disorderly jumbling ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... Mr Bombasty, "you had lost your intellect, I am a voluntary contributor, and could have got you chains and a keeper in Bedlam. If you had broken a limb, I am a life-governor, and it would have been a pleasure to me to send you to the hospital. But you may as well ask me to put life into a dead man, as to be of service to a creature who has lost his security. You had better die at ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... whimsical and ill-assorted. Thus in spite of his admiration for Gray and his—temporary—interest in Ossian, Chatterton, and Percy's ballads, he ridiculed Mallet's and Gray's Runic experiments, spoke contemptuously of Spenser, Thomson, and Akenside, compared Dante to "a Methodist parson in bedlam," and pronounced "A Midsummer Night's Dream" "forty times more nonsensical than the worst translation of any Italian opera-books."[11] He said that poetry died with Pope, whose measure and manner he employed in his own verses. It has been observed that, in all his ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... every Indian town, of endless mischief and abomination. There were professed dreamers, and professed interpreters of dreams. One of the most noted festivals among the Hurons and Iroquois was the Dream Feast, a scene of frenzy, where the actors counterfeited madness, and the town was like a bedlam turned loose. Each pretended to have dreamed of something necessary to his welfare, and rushed from house to house, demanding of all he met to guess his secret requirement ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... that happened at the bedlam at Paris. 2 gentlemen out of curiosity coming to sie the madmen, the Keeper of the Hospital be reason of some businesse he had could not go alongs wt them, whence he ordains one of the fools that was besyde to go alongs wt them, and show them al the madmen wt the occasions ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... the barber was equally deplorable. The awful words pronounced by Merton may be considered his death-knell. They rang ever after in his ears; and, in a few weeks, his head was turned, his shop shut up, and himself sent to Bedlam. "Gracious heavens, what a nose!" This dreadful sentence—more dreadful than the hand-writing on the wall to Belshazzar,—haunted him by day and by night. Reason was dethroned, and "moody madness, laughing wild," was the result. Such are the frightful consequences of extreme ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 565 - Vol. 20, No. 565., Saturday, September 8, 1832 • Various
... of him, 'tisn't no fits at all, he's nout the worse o't. Jest silly a bit now and again. It's been the same a dozen year and more; and the doctor knows all about it,' answered the old woman sturdily. 'And ye'll find he'll be as mad as bedlam if ye make any stir ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... of those measures are mere assumptions. We have no experience by which to try the question. The doctrines of free trade are of very recent growth; the data on which its laws are founded are few, and also uncertain. And does any one out of Bedlam imagine, that any Minister of this country would consent to run such tremendous risks—to try such experiments upon an article of such immense importance to its well-being? Let us never lose sight of Lord Melbourne's ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... Nelson was in that fight, he was, an' Nelson began to shove out his horns a bit soon after that, I tell you. Well, well," continued the British tar with a resigned look, "to think of meetin' a man out of Bedlam who hasn't heerd of Nelson and the Nile, w'ich, of coorse, ye haven't. It's worth while comin' all ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... thou Bedlam? dost thou thirst, base Trojan, To have me fold up Parca's fatal web?[1] Hence! I am qualmish at the ...
— King Henry the Fifth - Arranged for Representation at the Princess's Theatre • William Shakespeare
... ten thousand Australian associations, being at once recognised and responded to, a reunion of the party took place immediately, doubtless to the great wonderment of the surrounding Londoners, who would probably suppose they were all fit for Bedlam." ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... you," said Doggie; and when the door was shut he went and threw himself, shaken, on the couch, hating Oliver and all his works more than ever. Go about barefoot and swab decks! It was Bedlam madness. Besides being dangerous to health, it would be excruciating discomfort. And to be insulted for not grasping at ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... upon him like a catch-pole, as if he had arrested him, but furious Hamlet woulde presently eyther breake loose like a beare from the stake, or else so set his pawes on this dog that thus bayted him that, with tugging and tearing one another's frockes off, they both looked like mad Tom of Bedlam."—Decker's Dead Terme, 1608. "If any passenger come by and, wondering to see such a conjuring circle kept by hel-houndes, demaund what spirits they raise there, one of the murderers steps to him, poysons him with sweete wordes and shifts him off with this lye, that one of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... means, and those who arrive at the end, are not at all the same persons? On considering the strange and unaccountable fancies and contrivances of artificial reason, I have somewhere called this earth the Bedlam of our system. Looking now upon the effects of some of those fancies, may we not with equal reason call it likewise the Newgate and the Bridewell of the universe? Indeed the blindness of one part of mankind co-operating with the frenzy ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... that strange and unmatchable English artist of the Eighteenth Century, William Hogarth, of the mad house in London know as Bedlam. If he were here, he might draw a companion picture of the Tombs. The one is as much as the other a crazy, incoherent, irrational, futile place, yet embodying very accurately a certain aspect of the civic attitude toward the insanity of vice and crime of the ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... of the abyss underlying the bottom of hell; as if Jehovah's Commandments had been presented on carved stone to the monkeys of the monkey cage at the Zoo; as if the Sermon on the Mount had been preached in a roaring bedlam of lunatics. ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... constitutional government. The French have to be judged by their peers! Of what use is it to pay for judges if we, land-owners, are obliged to do their work. The old parliaments, against which so much has been said, were a thousand times better than all this bedlam let loose in ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... the man who is sound at each particular angle? Ay, meditates the recumbent cynic, more or less mad is not every mother's son? Favourable circumstances—good air, good company, two or three good rules rigidly adhered to—keep the world out of Bedlam. But, let the world fly into a passion, and is not Bedlam the safest abode ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith |
