"Bacchanalian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 will appear almost a libertine proceeding to one, while the other ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... solid gold ornaments;—nearly two 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 ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... end of harvest, for then a supper was given to the tenants and servants. This supper took place in the great hall of the castle—the hall that in ancient days had witnessed many a warlike meeting and Bacchanalian feast. ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... 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 ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... guest-nights, or other tournaments of deep drinking, where Trojan and Tyrian met 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
... 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
... 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 scene. In Gilray's caricatures, and amongst Fox's jolly associates, ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... drinking. For this reason it is their custom, at the conclusion of their meals, to challenge one another to drink, and he who empties the greatest number of goblets, is held in highest esteem. As the Turks drink no wine, their presence was some restraint that day on their usual bacchanalian contests, and as we neither could nor would compete with them, we were held in great contempt. The king was about forty years old, and of large make, with a strong resemblance to the Tartar countenance. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... 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, but scarcely yielding sufficient light ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... 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 and ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... not long enough, for we have not yet 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, ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... others 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, but night after ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... Dionysos-Liber, innocent enough at his first reception in B.C. 493, in the company of Demeter-Ceres and Kore-Libera. To be sure the state had introduced him merely as the god of wine, but the mystery element in Dionysos took firm hold on private worship, and the Bacchanalian clubs or societies began to spread over Italy. In the course of about three centuries they had become a formidable menace to the morals and even the physical security of the inhabitants of Rome. Their meetings instead of occurring three times a year took ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... were up and into the formation. The air crackled with the sound of Lewis-gun fire, machines reeled and staggered like drunken men, Tam's fighting Morane dipped and dived, climbed and swerved in a wild bacchanalian dance. Airplanes, British and German alike, fell flaming to the earth before the second in command of the ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... 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 for the poor ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... most irreverent music issuing from within. Pushing open the door, he entered the sacred edifice, and found it occupied by a party of twenty young men, accompanied by a like number of females, some of whom were playing at dice and cards, some drinking, others singing Bacchanalian melodies, others dancing along the aisles to the notes of a theorbo and spinet. Leonard was so inexpressibly shocked by what he beheld, that unable to contain himself he mounted the steps of the pulpit, and called to them in a ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... electorate of Brandenburg, which has since grown into the kingdom of Prussia. The elector, an ambitious man, who subsequently took the title of king, received them with an extravagant display of splendor. At one of the bacchanalian feasts, given on the occasion, the bad and good qualities of Peter were very conspicuously displayed. Heated with wine, and provoked by a remark made by La Fort, who was one of his embassadors, he drew his sword and called upon La Fort to defend himself. The embassador humbly bowed, folded ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... all from her waist upwards. She held her head and shoulders as though she had carried baskets of fruit or washing upon the crown of her pate since her youth; her glorious bosom was like a bed of lotus buds in the southern wind; she moved like a deer, or a snake, or a bacchanalian dancer, as you will; but in any case in a way which in the present tense caused the Principal to mourn in secret, and in the future brought the condemnation of women and the eyes of men ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... to the oak!" shouted the whole bacchanalian crew; and away they flew across the park, starting the quiescent deer with their shouts, their laughter, and their revelry. Rochester took the naiad under his arm, that she might not be left behind, and dancing, capering, tumbling, and getting up again, ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... limitless license, written down forever under the date, September, 1792, boastfully proclaimed to the world as the New Era, the year 1 of the Age of Reason. Perhaps the number of those who would to-day follow Momoro's pretty wife with loud adulation and Bacchanalian rejoicings to the insulted Church of Notre Dame, thus publicly disowning the God of the Universe and discarding the sweetest of all hopes, the hope of immortality and eternal youth after the weariness of age, would be found to be very small. This was indeed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... 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 ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... in Derbyshire;[161] the invention of an age less refined than the present, when we have heard of globular glasses and bottles, which by their shape cannot stand, but roll about the table; thus compelling the unfortunate Bacchanalian to drain the last drop, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... 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
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... with a smack. I was 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 ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... each other with perfect hatred. But there was this peculiarity in their mutual animosity: it was intermittent. One day they would be glaring at each other like wild beasts; the next, they would be walking in the prison-yard arm in arm, singing bacchanalian songs, as inseparable chums. Their relations had not improved since the riot, for Malin had lost credit with the other prisoners since the failure of it, and laid the blame on Poivre for making fun of him, while there rankled, deep in Poivre's breast, the recollection ...
— The French Prisoners of Norman Cross - A Tale • Arthur Brown
... 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 petticoat ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... heart out in her convent cell, her husband was finding ample compensation for her absence in Bacchanalian orgies and the company of his galaxies of favourites, from tradesmen's daughters to servant-maids of buxom charms, such as the Livonian peasant-girl, in whom he ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... bushels of sixpenny pieces, and whose daughter played the piano to the 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 ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... pictorial representations of Arians writhing in damnation, and martyrs basking in haloes of celestial light, tempted, in every direction, the more pious among the spectators. Cooks perambulated with their shops on their backs; rival slave-merchants shouted petitions for patronage; wine-sellers taught Bacchanalian philosophy from the tops of their casks; poets recited compositions for sale; sophisters held arguments destined to convert the wavering and ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... steps in the first instance to the police-station, quite confident that a bird of Mr. O'Rourke's plumage would be brought to perch in such a cage. But not so much as a feather of him was discoverable. The Wee Drop was not the only bacchanalian resort in Rivermouth; there were five or six other low drinking-shops scattered about town, and through these Mr. Bilkins went conscientiously. He then explored various blind alleys, known haunts of the missing man, and took a careful survey of the wharves along the ...
— A Rivermouth Romance • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... juice of the 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 Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... Mr. Nicol had purchased a small piece of ground called Laggan, on the Nith. There took place the Bacchanalian scene which called forth "Willie brew'd a peck ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... 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 ...
— 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
... Romulus had not been taken in vain,—there could be no singing: none, unless—but I trust that this evil suggestion occurred to nobody—we were so lost to shame as to call upon the college-boys to supply the place of our absent psalmody with some of those Bacchanalian choruses with which they were doubtless too familiar. We felt rather wicked. We knew that we were stigmatized by that terrible compound, "Pro-Rum"; we were held up as the respectable abettors of drunkenness, the dilettanti patrons of pot-houses, the cold-blooded connoisseurs in wife-beating ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... Thessaly, he not only found provisions for his army, but physic too. For there they met with plenty of wine, which they took very freely, and heated with this, sporting and reveling on their march in bacchanalian fashion, they shook off the disease, and their whole constitution was relieved and ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... doors leading to the Master Debtors' side, he heard a loud voice chanting a Bacchanalian melody, and the boisterous laughter that accompanied the song, convinced him that no suspicion was entertained in this quarter. Entering the Red Room, he crept through the hole in the wall, descended the chimney, and arrived once more in his old ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the pope had touched the French soil, and that the people 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
... 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. ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... 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 understood to ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... with the rustic elegance of Aristaeus, a touch of simple feeling in Eurydice's lyrical outcry of farewell, a discrimination between the tender sympathy of Proserpine and Pluto's stern relenting, a spirited presentation of the Bacchanalian furore in the Maenads, an attempt to model the Satyr Mnesillus as apart from human nature and yet sympathetic to its anguish, these points constitute the chief dramatic features of the melodrama. Orpheus himself ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... like the flame of life That flickered and went out with him gold-crowned. A target stood near by, and on it clashed Griffon and stag, adverse as right and wrong. About, lay cups of onyx set in gold. On conic jars were bacchanalian scenes,— Nude chubby Bacchi, grotesque leering fauns, All linked 'neath vines that grew important grapes; And in the jars were rings and flowers of gold. We found twin ear-drops cut from choicest stone, ...
— Stories in Verse • Henry Abbey
... 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
... 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 invests ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... with silent and self-respecting dignity through the crowds, gazing with quiet and observant eyes upon the shifting phantasmagoria that filled the circus grounds and the streets nearby. With these, too, there mingled a few of both old and young who, with bacchanalian enthusiasm, were swaggering their way through the crowds, each followed by a company of friends ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... 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 ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... 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 ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... a cypress still lives. The sun fills the garden with a golden beauty, in which the 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 riding on horseback with so brave a show of cavaliers, ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... 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 ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... pounding along Notre-Dame Street, in Montreal, in his red shirt and tan-colored shupac boots, all dripping wet after mooring an acre or two of raft, and now bent for his ashore-haunts in the Ste.-Marie suburb, to indemnify himself with bacchanalian and other consolations for long-endured hardship. Among other feats of strength attributed to him, I remember the following, which has an old, familiar taste, but was related ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... that bacchanalian melody at the top of his voice, waving an allumette holder over his head to represent ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... 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 with a ...
— Broad Grins • George Colman, the Younger
... poorer warning. If you have nothing better to say to make men use their powers rightly 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 ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... a council of their own relations.[224] Though the evidence in these cases is not by any means satisfactory, yet we can hardly doubt that there was a tendency among women of the highest rank to give way to passion and excitement; the evidence for the Bacchanalian conspiracy of 186 B.C., in which women played a very prominent part, is explicit, and shows that there was a "new woman" even then, who had ceased to be satisfied with the austere life of the family and with the mental comfort supplied ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... drest With such tricksy gaiety, Such unlessoned vanity? With his amber afternoons And his pendant poets' moons— With his twilights dashed with rose From the red-lipped afterglows— With his vocal airs at dawn Breathing hints of Helicon— Bacchanalian bees that sip Where his cider-presses drip— With the winding of the horn Where his huntsmen meet the morn— With his every piping breeze Shaking from familiar trees Apples of Hesperides— With the chuckle, chirp, and trill Of his jolly brooks that spill Mirth in ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... day, the population of Madrid meet on the shores of the Manzanares, where they witness the caricature of a solemn funeral, the body interred being that of a dead sprat. This absurd feast is truly one of bacchanalian character; in it are committed a thousand excesses of many kinds, among which that of drunkenness, especially among the lower classes, greatly prevails. There is not in any modern society a more faithful copy of Pagan festivities than ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... the last of the householders was Chat-oue. But when he grasped the honored hand, he also held it, fixing upon its owner a generous and somewhat bacchanalian smile. ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... source of these manifestations seems to have been the wild revels of St. John's Day. In those revels sundry old heathen ceremonies had been perpetuated, but under a nominally Christian form: wild Bacchanalian dances had thus become a semi-religious ceremonial. The religious and social atmosphere was propitious to the development of the germs of diabolic influence vitalized in these orgies, and they were scattered far and wide through large tracts of the Netherlands and Germany, and especially ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... audiences who crowded to what the bills described as "the smallest theatre in the world," were not a few of the notabilities of London. Mr. Carlyle compared Dickens's wild picturesqueness in the old lighthouse keeper to the famous figure in Nicholas Poussin's bacchanalian dance in the National Gallery; and at one of the joyous suppers that followed on each night of the play, Lord Campbell told the company that he had much rather have written Pickwick than be Chief Justice of England and a peer ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... slaughter and monstrous vice; in one place war and desolation; in another bathing, riot, and debauchery. The whole city seemed to be inflamed with frantic rage, and at the same time intoxicated with bacchanalian pleasures. In the midst of rage and massacre, pleasure knew no intermission. A dreadful carnage seemed to be a spectacle added to the ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... he was ten years old; nor does he seem ever to have lost the habit of deriving gratification from the same art. It were easy to represent him prostituting this love of minstrelsy in the haunts of Eastcheap, and enjoying "through the sweetest morsel of the night" the songs of impurity in reckless Bacchanalian revels, self-condemned indeed, and therefore to be judged by ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... condition of Yussuf, and who was anxious to know how he had got on after the fetva had been promulgated, sent for his vizier Giaffar. "I wish to ascertain," said the caliph to the vizier, "if the unlucky Yussuf has managed to provide for his bacchanalian revels to-night?" ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... Unask'd, they ne'er leave off. Just such a one Tigellius was, Sardinia's famous son. Caesar, who could have forced him to obey, By his sire's friendship and his own might pray, Yet not draw forth a note: then, if the whim Took him, he'd troll a Bacchanalian hymn, From top to bottom of the tetrachord, Till the last course was set upon the board. One mass of inconsistence, oft he'd fly As if the foe were following in full cry, While oft he'd stalk with a majestic gait, Like Juno's priest in ceremonial-state. ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... pretty little creature, coming from the house, entered lightly and merrily the shop. This young girl was Rose-Pompon, the intimate friend of the Bacchanal Queen.—Rose-Pompon, a widow for the moment, whose bacchanalian cicisbeo was Ninny Moulin, the orthodox scapegrace, who, on occasion, after drinking his fill, could transform himself into Jacques Dumoulin, the religious writer, and pass gayly from dishevelled dances to ultramontane polemics, from Storm-blown ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... satyriasis and bacchanalian excesses. They commit rape and indecent acts in public and often appropriate strange objects, hair or wearing apparel, with the idea of obtaining means to satisfy their vices, either because they are unconscious of doing wrong ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... besotted drunkard is the only man who can put his hand upon the symbolical plant. Therein, doubtless, is a mystery anterior to Christianity, a mystery that reminds one of the festival of the Saturnalia or some ancient Bacchanalian revel. Perhaps this paien, who is at the same time the gardener par excellence, is nothing less than Priapus in person, the god of gardens and debauchery,—a divinity probably chaste and serious in his origin, however, ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... distinction; the serious and the ludicrous, drunken fancies and affairs of state were blended one with another in a burlesque medley; and the discussions on the general distress of the country ended in the wild uproar of a bacchanalian revel. But it did not stop here; what they had resolved on in the moment of intoxication they attempted when sober to carry into execution. It was necessary to manifest to the people in some striking shape ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... low obeisance, departed without further speech, and in a few moments ushered in from the bacchanalian revels a maid for ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... 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, ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... its violence, occurred in Sparta. In many places throughout Laconia the rocky soil was rent asunder. From Mount Ta-yg'e-tus, which overhung the city, and on which the women of Lacedaemon were wont to hold their bacchanalian orgies, huge fragments rolled into the suburbs. The greater portion of the city was absolutely overthrown; and it is said, probably with exaggeration, that only five houses wholly escaped disaster from the shock. This terrible calamity ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... silent admonition 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 ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... 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 frowning ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... number of unbelieving and profligate persons who expected nothing new; they had assembled themselves in the catacombs and ruins, where they celebrated Bacchanalian feasts and orgies. In the ruins of Nero's Golden House a banquet on a large scale had been arranged. In the centre on the ground there burned a fire, surrounded by tables and seats. There was abundance ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... music is too 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. Among us, communication ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... 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 ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield
... 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 greatest ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... subsists even 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. ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... lower order of comedy than Ralph Roister Doister, though it is also more spontaneous, less imitative, and, in short, more original. The best thing about it is the magnificent drinking song, "Back and Side go Bare, go Bare," one of the most spirited and genuine of all bacchanalian lyrics; but the credit of this has sometimes been denied to Still. The metre of the play itself is very similar to that of Ralph Roister Doister, though the long swinging couplet has a tendency to lengthen itself still further, to the value of fourteen or even sixteen ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... is best portrayed—the god, Plump, reeling, wreathed with vine, in whom abides Something Olympian still, or the coarse Satyrs, Thoroughly brutish. Here I scarcely miss, So masterly the grouping, so distinct The bacchanalian spirit, your rich brush, So vigorous in color. Do you find The pleasure in this treatment equals ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... immorality seemed to be an essential part of the worship. At Uji, not far from Kyoto, the capital of the Empire, for a thousand years and more, and the center of Buddhism, there was a shrine of great repute and popularity. Thither resorted the multitudes for bacchanalian purposes. Under the auspices of the Goddess Hashihime and the God Sumiyoshi, free rein was given to lust. Since the beginning of the new regime such revels have been forbidden and apparently stopped; the phallic symbols themselves are no longer visible, ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... 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 ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... 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 committed against the goddess. In these scenes, got up to ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... girl all silently busy together. There were bees and wasps humming around the tubs of crushed grapes in the pale afternoon sun; the view of the lake and the mountains was inspiring; but there was nothing bacchanalian in the affair, unless the thick calves of the girl, as she bent over to cut the clusters, suggested a Maenad fury. These poor people were quite songless, though I am bound to say that in another vineyard I did hear some of the children singing. It had momentarily ...
— A Little Swiss Sojourn • W. D. Howells
... and bacchanalian poets, insomuch that songs on these subjects are still called Anacreon'tic ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... composed 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
... fathers of the college above, with a 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... deck a set of dances, which, in one sense of the word at least, were very intelligibly and appropriately entitled reels. The passengers who lay in the cabin below in all the agonies of sea-sickness, must have found our bacchanalian merriment ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... 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 from ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... 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 ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... 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 the ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... every line and lineament;—these still defied disease, or rather borrowed from its very ghastliness a more impressive majesty. Beside the bed was a table spread with books of a motley character. Here an abstruse system of Calculations on Finance; there a volume of wild Bacchanalian Songs; here the lofty aspirations of Plato's Phoedon; and there the last speech of some County Paris on a Malt Tax: old newspapers and dusty pamphlets completed the intellectual litter; and above them rose, mournfully enough, the tall, spectral form of a half-emptied ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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 not included one hundred and ninety-seven superb gold watches; three of the ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... make a 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 ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... Greek Dancing. Bacchanalian Dance, by the Ceramic Painter Hieron. Description of some Greek Dances, the Geranos, the Corybantium, the Hormos, &c. Dancing Bacchante from a Vase and from Terra Cotta. The Hand-in-hand, and Panathenaeac Dance from Ceramic Ware. Military Dance from Sculpture ...
— The Dance (by An Antiquary) - Historic Illustrations of Dancing from 3300 B.C. to 1911 A.D. • Anonymous
... poem is Burns's middle mood, lying between the black melancholy of his poems of despair and remorse and the exhilaration of his more exalted bacchanalian and love songs—the mood, we may infer, of his normal working life. We may again observe the correspondence between the change of dialect and change of tone in stanzas nine and ten, the increase of artificiality coming with his literary English and culminating ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... the sigh of desire to the final ecstasy; it is a very history of love. I could not conceive a woman refusing her partner anything after this dance, for it seemed made to stir up the senses. I was so excited at this Bacchanalian spectacle that I burst out into cries of delight. The masker who had taken me to his box told me that I should see the fandango danced by the Gitanas ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... massacre of the grandchildren of their prophet, and by the images of their tombs, and their sombre music,[8] crosses that of the Holi[9] (in which the Hindoos are excited to tumultuous and licentious joy by their bacchanalian songs and dances) every thirty-six years; and they reign together for some four or five days, during which the scene in every large town is really terrific. The processions are liable to meet in the street, and the lees of the wine ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... May look for male society, Do one thing and another In which mother Shouldn't mix; But revels Bacchanalian Are—or should be—quite alien To you a married person, ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... toper of the first magnitude, and respected accordingly. The merry pin was that which stood pretty far from the mouth of the horn, and he who, at a draught, reduced the liquor to that point, was a man of no ordinary prowess in bacchanalian contest. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... faces, in which the old Roman fire scarcely flickers, 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 ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... improvement of time, the clocks varied 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. ...
— With The Eyes Shut - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... just a drinking den, and all the jolly songs were in praise of drink. Now that all modern halls are unlicensed, and are, more or less, family affairs to which Mr. Jenkinson may bring the wife and the children, and where you can get nothing stronger than non-alcoholic beers, or dry ginger, the Bacchanalian song is out of place. Next to drinking, of course, the Londoner loves eating. Mr. Harry Champion, with the insight of genius, has divined this, and therefore he sings about food, winning much applause, personal popularity, ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... melodies chosen as the basis for masses were nothing 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 ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... 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 favorite book, whilst ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to be, any dispute or observation. But when we come into more free air, one may talk a little more at large. Give me leave then to mention three, whom I do not doubt but we shall see make considerable figures; and these are such as, for their Bacchanalian performances, must be admitted into this order. They are three brothers lately landed from Holland: as yet, indeed, they have not made their public entry, but lodge and converse at Wapping. They have merited already on the ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... unparalleled composition; And "Andrew and his cutty gun" is the work of a master. By the way, are you not quite vexed to think that those men of genius, for such they certainly were, who composed our fine Scottish lyrics, should be unknown? It has given me many a heart-ache. Apropos to bacchanalian songs in Scottish, I composed one yesterday, for an air I like ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... not when labelled 'Heidsick' and 'Rheims.' 'But then the cork proves it, you know,'—for, by a strange superstition, it is assumed that when the cork is correct the wine is not less so; a theory which is exploded by a revelation in the following by no means Bacchanalian lyric:— ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... the dolphin, lynx, tiger, and ass were all sacred to Bacchus. The acceptable sacrifice to Venus was a dove; Jupiter, a bull; an ox of five years old, ram or boar pig to Neptune; and Diana, a stag. At the inception of the Bacchanalian festivals in Greece, the tragic song of the Goat, a sacred hymn was sung, and from which rude beginning sprang the Tragedy and Comedy of Greece. The Greeks place every event as happening in their country, and it ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... vast quantity of solid gold ornaments—nearly two hundred massive finger and ear rings; 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[15] 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; ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... 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 as they ...
— Punchinello Vol. 1, No. 21, August 20, 1870 • Various
... while the birds were 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 ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... insertion of the extreme branches of the vine-stems which compose them, into its 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 ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 366 - Vol. XIII, No. 366., Saturday, April 18, 1829 • Various
... not 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 may not be fit company ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... BOSWELL. 'Waller passed his time in the company that was highest, both in rank and wit, from which even his obstinate sobriety did not exclude him. Though he drank water, he was enabled by his fertility of mind to heighten the mirth of Bacchanalian assemblies; and Mr. Saville said that "no man in England should keep him company without drinking but Ned Waller."' Johnson's ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... grotesque shapes have sometimes been contrived to convey ingenious thoughts. Pannard, a modern French poet, has tortured his agreeable vein of poetry into such forms. He has made some of his Bacchanalian songs to take the figures of bottles, and others of glasses. These objects are perfectly drawn by the various measures of the verses which form the songs. He has also introduced an echo in his verses which he contrives so as not to injure their sense. This was practised ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... rum, 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], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... maintained at Demetrias in Maguesia, Calchis in the island of Euboea, and in Corinth, "the three fetters of the Hellenes." But the strength of the kingdom lay in Macedonia. In Greece proper all moral and political energy had fled, and the degenerate, but still intellectual inhabitants spent their time in bacchanalian pleasures, in fencing, and in study of the midnight lamp. The Greeks, diffused over the East, disseminated their culture, but were only in sufficient numbers to supply officers, statesmen, and schoolmasters. All the real ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... allegorizing and historical versions of the 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 and ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... 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
... filthy evil. Not only does it demoralize, debase, and finally destroy its unhappy victim, but it renders him incapable of performing the ordinary duties of his station; constituting him an object of disgust to others, and of pitiable misery to himself. It is well to talk of the Bacchanalian orgies of talented men, and to call them hilarity and glee. The flashes of wit "that were wont to set the table in a roar;" the brilliancy of genius, that casts a charm even over folly and vice; the rank and fame of the individual, no doubt, increased ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 377, June 27, 1829 • Various
... showed an equal accommodating spirit in all religious observances, and, though much against his inclination, attended morning discourses and lectures with his patron, and even made an attempt at psalm-singing; but on one occasion, missing the tune and coming in with a bacchanalian chorus, he was severely rebuked by the minister, and enjoined to keep silence in future. Such was the friendly relation subsisting between the parties when they met together on the lawn on the ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Charlotte's fingers on the rope, and Charlotte never saw his. The girls' cheeks flushed deeper, their smooth locks became roughened. The laughter waxed louder and longer; the matrons looking on doubled their broad backs with responsive merriment. It became like a little bacchanalian rout in a New England field on a summer afternoon, but they did not know it ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... 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 ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... to the banqueting-room. Here disorder reigned supreme. The table stood as the roisterers had left it; the very wreck and litter of a bacchanalian feast. Bottles, some with the necks struck off, were scattered all about, and the floor was stained and sticky with spilt wine and ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... 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 ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... tells how maid, 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 ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... in 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 great spirit ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... 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 ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... 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. At certain seasons of the year, according to the staple commodities for the sale of which the ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... burst 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 him ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... have devised some scheme of irregular, sensual gratification,—of Bacchanalian revelry;—or, perhaps, two or three dunces, whose intellects and moral feelings are of such a stamp, as to render them rather impracticable subjects for academical discipline, have contrived some plan of impotent resistance to the college authorities, or some plot of petty and vexatious annoyance, ...
— Advice to a Young Man upon First Going to Oxford - In Ten Letters, From an Uncle to His Nephew • Edward Berens
... mournful eyes grew brighter, And archly glanced, though meek. A bacchanalian dimple Dipt ...
— Stories in Verse • Henry Abbey
... ear attended by evidence so circumstantial that 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, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... persons; also four hundred horses in his stables, a civil list of more than 100,000 crowns, a regiment of Uhlans for his guard, and a theater costing over 600,000 livres, while the life he leads, or which is maintained around him, resembles one of Rubens's bacchanalian scenes. As to the special and general provincial governors we have seen that, when they reside on the spot, they fulfill no other duty than to entertain; alongside of them the intendant, who alone attends to business, likewise receives, and magnificently, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the heretic, who had dared to deride their creed and denounce their hypocrisy, was regaling himself on dry bread in one of their dungeons. The bells rang out against each other with a wild glee as I paced my narrow floor. They seemed mad with intoxication of victory; they mocked me with a bacchanalian frenzy of triumph. Yet I smiled grimly, for their clamor was no more than the ancient fool's shout, "Great is Diana of the Ephesians." Great Christ has had his day since, but he in turn is dead; dead in man's ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... 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
... plague 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 region ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn |
