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Surfeit   Listen
verb
Surfeit  v. t.  (past & past part. surfeited; pres. part. surfeiting)  
1.
To feed so as to oppress the stomach and derange the function of the system; to overfeed, and produce satiety, sickness, or uneasiness; often reflexive; as, to surfeit one's self with sweets.
2.
To fill to satiety and disgust; to cloy; as, he surfeits us with compliments.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Surfeit" Quotes from Famous Books



... mine!'—should the modern generation depart from the track of him who proved himself the giant in mainly supporting her glory—was, no doubt, a high pitch of the note of Conservatism. But considering, that Dr. Bouthoin 'committed suicide under a depression of mind produced by a surfeit of unaccustomed dishes, upon a physical system inspired by the traditions of exercise, and no longer relieved by the practice'—to translate from Dr. Gannius: we are again at war with the writer's reverential tone, and we know not what to think: except, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... Blencathra, and that noble brotherhood of mountains out of the midst of which we came. But, to say the truth, I was weary of fine scenery, and it seemed to me that I had eaten a score of mountains, and quaffed as many lakes, all in the space of two or three days,—and the natural consequence was a surfeit. There was scarcely a single place in all our tour where I should not have been glad to spend a month; but, by flitting so quickly from one point to another, I lost all the more recondite beauties, and had come ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... said Paoli. "I never heard music like that before. It is new. I do not say whether I like it. I cannot understand it all as yet, I who can comprehend all that even Wagner wrote. But it is wonderful. Continue.—No, nothing fresh, or my ears will be dazed with surfeit. Play again that—that piece, that study, I know not what you call it, which ran somehow thus"—the Italian hummed some broken snatches.—"It seemed to show me a procession of damned spirits scrambling down the mountains to hell, with troops of little devils blackmailing ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne

... a moral sense in the proud beauty of this last image, a rich surfeit of the fancy,—as that well-known passage beginning, "Me of my lawful pleasure she restrained, and prayed me oft forbearance," sets a keener edge upon it by the inimitable picture of modesty ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... that she allows; and, like a kind and liberal mother, abundantly allows all that nature requires, even to satiety, if not to lassitude: unless we mean to say that the regimen which stops the toper before he has drunk himself drunk, the glutton before he has eaten to a surfeit, and the lecher before he has got the pox, is an enemy to pleasure. If the ordinary fortune fail, she does without it, and forms another, wholly her own, not so fickle and unsteady as the other. She can be rich, be potent and wise, and knows how to lie upon soft ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne

... work. I can not get up a particle of enthusiasm or faith in the success, either financial or spiritual, of another series of conventions. For the past five years I have gone through this routine and something within me keeps praying to be spared from more of it. There has been such a surfeit of lecturing, the people are tired of it. Then I never was so poor in purse and I fear to end another campaign with a heavy debt to still further encroach upon my small savings. I can not bear to make myself ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper

... that bashfulness is one of the least of my virtues; and, I do not think that I am constitutionally timid—so why this feeling? Was it not a foreboding of evil? I believe it was, for everything went wrong with me that night, instead of my having a surfeit of pleasure, ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson

... credit to both, particularly when it is considered that Leonardo da Vinci is his next greatest favourite, and that his love of the actual does not proceed from a want of taste for the ideal. His worst fault is an over-eagerness of enthusiasm, which occasionally makes him take a surfeit of his highest favourites.—Mr. Lamb excels in familiar conversation almost as much as in writing, when his modesty does not overpower his self-possession. He is as little of a proser as possible; but he blurts out the finest wit and sense in the world. He keeps a good deal in the back-ground ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt

... private room the privileged passenger by the Ceres, or Juno, or Pallas, stunned and as it were annihilated mentally by a sudden surfeit of sights, sounds, names, facts, and complicated information imperfectly apprehended, would listen like a tired child to a fairy tale; would hear a voice, familiar and surprising in its pompousness, tell him, as if from another world, how there was "in this very harbour" an ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad

... hoping that nothing is changed, and am stirred with sweet anxieties of reminiscence. And surely within the enchanted boundaries of the counties where I ramble, there is variety which not the hundred eyes of Argus could exhaust. These fields and woodlands in high summer feast all the senses with a surfeit of delights. How good it is to exercise in all its range the fine mechanism of the body, suffering each part of it to indulge its own hunger after beauty; to feel the texture of petals, and draw ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith

... surfeit of killing, and a waning Revolution. We are far from saying that such a thing happened. But ambitious royalists might have thought their money well expended in removing the son of the murdered king from the scene. The claim of the ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele

... writes Khalid in the K. L. MS., "there is always something pathetic in a second-hand book offered again for sale. Why did its first owner part with it? Was it out of disgust or surfeit or penury? Did he throw it away, or give it away, or sell it? Alas, and is this how to treat a friend? Were it not better burned, than sold or thrown away? After coming out of the press, how many have handled this tattered volume? How many has it entertained, enlightened, or perverted? Look at its ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... surfeit. Our delight in reason degenerates into idolatry of the herald. Especially when a mind of powerful method has instructed men, we find the examples of oppression. The dominion of Aristotle, the Ptolemaic astronomy, the ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... Strange, that the stigma of atheism should have been affixed to a system whose very starting-point is Deity and whose great characteristic is the ignoration of everything but Deity, insomuch that the pure and devout Novalis pronounced the author a God-drunken man, and Spinozism a surfeit of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... Consider well the cause, that calls upon thee: And, if thou'rt base enough, die then. Remember, Thy Belvidera suffers; Belvidera! Die—damn first—What! be decently interr'd In a church-yard, and mingle thy brave dust With stinking rogues, that rot in winding-sheets, Surfeit-slain fools, the common dung ...
— Venice Preserved - A Tragedy • Thomas Otway

... now induces me to lay down my Pen. My Thoughts and Desires, I must own, are turn'd to Solitude and rural Pleasures. The Man, who desires to have his Body in Health, should rise from Table with some Remains of Appetite, and not be covetous of gorging to Satiety: So a Writer, who would not wish to surfeit the Town, should submit to give over Writing, before they begin to think he has ...
— The Theater (1720) • Sir John Falstaffe

... excellent foppery of the world! that when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeit of our own behaviour), we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and traitors by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson

... eye—a lock of hair, or a pansy here or there pressed between the pages—birthday verses addressed to Sacharissa, receipts for 'puptons,' 'farces,' &c.; and several for toilet luxuries, 'Angelica water,' 'The Queen of Hungary's' ditto, 'surfeit waters,' and finally, that he was in search of, to wit, 'My great Aunt Bell's recipe for purging the head' (good against melancholy or the headache). You are not to suppose that the volume was slovenly or in anywise ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... been a surfeit of these internecine brawls for some time to come, and, indeed, stories of dissensions among the servants of the company in the East are plentifully sprinkled throughout its history, both in this century and the next. Of hints for trade ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various

... to the school of Mr. John Brinsley, who 'was very severe in his life and conversation, and did breed up many scholars for the universities; in religion he was a strict Puritan.' 'In the fourteenth year of my age, about Michaelmas, I got a surfeit, and thereupon a fever, by eating beechnuts.' 'In the sixteenth year of my age I was exceedingly troubled in my dreams concerning my salvation and damnation, and also concerning the safety and destruction of my father and mother: ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... began to suffer from the ravages of a malady which is almost worse than failure—namely, a surfeit of success. The success was that of his Universal Thrift Club. This device, by which members after subscribing one pound in weekly instalments could at once get two pounds' worth of goods at nearly any large shop in the district, ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett

... men of wit and talents was never more melancholy than about this period. Their lives were so irregular, and their means of living so precarious, that they were alternately rioting in debauchery, or encountering and struggling with the meanest necessities. Two or three lost their lives by a surfeit brought on by that fatal banquet of Rhenish wine and pickled herrings, which is familiar to those who study the lighter literature of that age. The whole history is a most melancholy picture of genius, degraded ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott

... domestic broiled bones—though evidently caused by a momentary surfeit—is dwelt upon by the enraptured Lebrun as a triumphant disproof of the accusations of cruelty and violence, brought against him by the Grimods and his charming wife. "She regrets their quiet suppers! And yet we are told by the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various

... of some other disease located in another portion of the body, as derangement of the stomach, mange, surfeit, &c. The presence of one of these affections will indicate ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt

... surfeit of sensuous distraction she retired to her room, the old room, as far away from Diavolo's as possible, which she had always occupied at the castle. She dismissed her maid, and sat down to think; but she was suffering ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand

... implacable Enemies in a moment as it were, and those who had been before inhumanely thirsty after your blood, now ready to sacrifice their own for your safety; Digna res memoratu! ibat sub ducibus vexillisque Regiis, hostis aliquando Regius, & signa contra quae steterat sequebatur. But I suffer [HW: surfeit] with too much Plenty, and what eloquence is able to expresse the triumph of that your never to be forgotten Entry, unlesse it be the renewing of it this day? For then were we as those who dream, and can yet hardly be perswaded, that we are truly awake: Dies ille aeternis ...
— An Apologie for the Royal Party (1659); and A Panegyric to Charles the Second (1661) • John Evelyn

... thoughtful of you to emphasise the fact that the season of green figs, to a surfeit of which I sincerely hope you will succumb, will be over before I reach Pau. I am inclined to think that the five hundred cigars George sent you will be over even earlier. Besides, I shall at once console and distend myself with ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates

... occasionally follow. Sometimes they are due to an internal spiritual cause, such as previous thoughts. At other times they arise from some internal corporeal cause, as from abundance or weakness of nature, or even from surfeit of meat or drink. Now every one of these three causes can be without sin at all, or else with venial sin, or with mortal sin. If it be without sin, or with venial sin, it does not necessarily prevent ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas

... young ladies, turned the house out of windows, and played the devil with everything, when he was called upon to put his Sire the Baron of Roche-Corbon some few feet under the turf. Then he was his own master, free to lead a life of wild dissipation, and indeed he worked very hard to get a surfeit of enjoyment. Now by making his crowns sweat and his goods scarce, draining his land, and a bleeding his hogsheads, and regaling frail beauties, he found himself excommunicated from decent society, and had for his friends only the plunderers of towns and the Lombardians. ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac

... company we passed two or three months very agreeably, till the major and I both betook ourselves to our several nurseries; my wife being brought to bed of a girl, and Miss Bath confined to her chamber by a surfeit, which had like to have occasioned ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding

... Finanzrathin and Mozart had put me quite in a blaze. I smiled with downcast eyes, very stupidly. I could but acknowledge it. And now all talents, which hitherto had bloomed unseen, were in motion, wildly flitting to and fro. They were bent upon a surfeit of music; tuttis, finales, choruses must be performed. The Canonicus Kratzer sings, you know, a heavenly bass, as was observed by the gentleman yonder, with the head of Titus Andronicus, who modestly remarked also, that he himself was properly ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... are covered with a juicy and perfectly white pulp, which is the part eaten, or, more properly, sucked, for it dissolves in the mouth. Its qualities are as innocent as they are grateful, and the fruit may be eaten in any moderate quantity without danger of surfeit, or other injurious effects. The returns of its season appeared to be irregular, ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden

... a surfeit devoid of appetites; but, on the contrary, such an immense flood of appetites that the insurgent wave of them struck the region of the impossible with fury, because it could not rush over that barrier. This was also an inflammation of the fancy, which had risen from an active mind, and which ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)

... followers, Indignation, Sturdiness, Malice, Hastiness, Wreck, and Discord. Next, Understanding summons his adherents, Wrong, Slight, Doubleness, Falseness, Ravin, and Deceit. Then come the servants of Will, named Recklessness, Idleness, Surfeit, Greediness, Spouse-breach, and Fornication. The minstrels striking up a hornpipe, they all dance together till a quarrel breaks out among them, when the eighteen servants are driven off, their masters remaining alone on the stage. Just as these are ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson

... is divine philosophy! Not harsh, and crabbed, as dull fools suppose, But musical as is Apollo's lute, And a perpetual feast of nectared sweets, Where no crude surfeit reigns. Comus. MILTON. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various

... said Madeline indulgently. "You know I am delighted to have you here." She turned abruptly to the new-comers as though she had already had a surfeit of this subject. It is a pleasant thing to have had a good education, but one does not care to spend one's time thinking about it, any more than about how much money there is in ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter

... number were pardoned on account of their youth, and a few individuals who effected their escape when led to the gallows, were not pursued. The fact that the townspeople almost connived at the escape of these desperadoes showed that there had been a surfeit of hangings in Rotterdam. It is moreover not easy to distinguish with exactness the lines which in those days separated regular sea belligerents, privateers, and pirates from each other. It had been laid down by the archdukes that there ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... be allowed to surfeit themselves? Shall they be suffered to take their fill of dainties and make themselves ill, as they certainly will do?" As thus put, the question admits of but one reply. But as thus put, it assumes the point at issue. We contend that, as appetite is ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer

... gentlemen who have written so much romantic nonsense about "good red wine" and "good brown ale" are responsible for this. I admit that a glass of Burgundy is a more beautiful thing than a blancmange, but I do not think that it follows that a surfeit of one is more heroic than a surfeit of the other. There may be a divinity in the grape which excuses excess, but if so, one would expect it to be there even before the grape had been trodden on by somebody else. Yet no poet ever hymned the man who tucked into ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne

... birth of this happy, this incomparable child." And so it would, as Shakspeare says, "if my mother's cat had kittened. This," says our sagacious bard, "is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune, (after the surfeit of our own behaviour) we make guilt of our disasters, the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains by necessity; fools, by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, (traitors) by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian

... near it touched the public morals, And that our age is grown corrupt and rotten By such excesses, we have sent to Rome, Beseeching that his Holiness would aid In curing the gross surfeit of the time, By seasonable stop put here in Spain To bull-fights and lewd dances on the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... will not get a surfeit," remarked Harry. "I suspect in a few days they'll wish the carcases at Jericho, or at all events, at a distance from their village. Our horses and the quagga would have fared ill, had the elephants come ...
— Adventures in Africa - By an African Trader • W.H.G. Kingston

... lady, Even a husband may be false, you know; Ay, even to so sweet a wife as you. Men have odd tastes. They'll surfeit on the charms Of Cleopatra, and then turn aside To woo her blackamoor. 'Tis so, in faith; Or Dora's uncle's gold had ne'er outbid The boundless measure of a love like mine. Think of it, lady, to weigh love with gold! What ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker

... God has created in the week. I am the mainstay of the music shops. At Paris there are drawing-rooms which exactly resemble the musical snuff-boxes of Germany. They are a sort of continuous orchestra to which I regularly go in search of that surfeit of harmony which my wife calls a concert. But most part of the time my wife keeps herself buried ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac

... many ill consequences of the treaty of Utrecht, it was within a point of giving my uncle Toby a surfeit of sieges; and though he recovered his appetite afterwards, yet Calais itself left not a deeper scar in Mary's heart, than Utrecht upon my uncle Toby's. To the end of his life he never could hear Utrecht ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne

... (WARD, LOCK) was to amuse themselves, and as their sprightly conversations were often punctuated by laughter I take it that they succeeded. To give Mr. DORNFORD YATES his due he is expert in light banter; but some three hundred pages of such entertainment tend to create a sense of surfeit. The first part of the book is called, "How some passed out of the Courts for ever," and then comes an interlude, in which we are given at least one stirring war-incident. I imagine that Mr. YATES desires ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 22, 1920 • Various

... derive it from a story about an old Canadian having smoked himself to death with it, and spell it "Kill a Kannuck." Others spell it "Kill a Cynic," and believe that DIOGENES, the founder of the Cynical School of philosophy, died of a surfeit of ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 33, November 12, 1870 • Various

... Here is the pride that breaks the desolate heart. 155 These are the lilies glorious as Solomon, Who toil not, neither do they spin,—unless It be the webs they catch poor rogues withal. Here is the surfeit which to them who earn The niggard wages of the earth, scarce leaves 160 The tithe that will support them till they crawl Back to her cold hard bosom. Here is health Followed by grim disease, glory by shame, Waste by lame famine, wealth by ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... that the dainty, squeamish, and fastidious taste acquired by a surfeit of idle reading had not only rendered our hero unfit for serious and sober study, but had even disgusted him in some degree with that in which he ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... everyday life, Kipling was illuminating, in a totally different manner, the wealth of poetic material in things hitherto regarded as too commonplace for poetry. Before literary England had quite recovered from its surfeit of Victorian priggishness and pre-Raphaelite delicacy, Kipling came along with high spirits and a great tide of life, sweeping all before him. An obscure Anglo-Indian journalist, the publication of his Barrack-room Ballads in 1892 brought him sudden notice. By 1895 ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various

... browses free On herbage of the lea, Or marsh grass, daintily, Until her haunch is greased. Her drink is of the well, Where the water-cresses swell, Nor with the flowing shell Is the toper better pleased. The bent makes nobler cheer, Or the rashes of the mere, Than all the creagh that e'er Gave surfeit to a guest. Come, see her table spread; The sorach[117] sweet display'd The ealvi,[118] and the head Of the daisy stem; The dorach[119] crested, sleek, And ringed with many a streak, Presents her pastures meek, Profusely by the stream. Such the luxuries That plump their noble ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... basket and send it to the Hummels. Germans like messes. I'm sick of the sight of this, and there's no reason you should all die of a surfeit because I've been a fool," cried Amy, wiping ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott

... temperate belly. Such a man riseth up in the morning, and is well at ease with himself. Be not too hasty of meats; for excess of meats bringeth sickness, and choleric disease cometh of gluttony. By surfeit have many perished, and he that dieteth himself prolongeth his life. Show not thy valiantness in wine; for wine hath ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott

... Whether the two-year-old baby who dashes his bread-and-butter on the floor, in wrath at the lack of marmalade, does it because of a prevailing effectual tendency in his nature, or in consequence of his federal alliance with Adam, or from a previous surfeit of plum-cake, is a question which seems to bear a general family likeness to the inquiry, whether there is such a thing as generic bread-and-butter, or only such specific slices as arouse infant ire and nourish infant tissue. But around ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various

... salts are incontestably curative. The parents had first undergone a gradual impairment of health because of calcareous matters to excess in their general conditions of sustenance; and the lime proves potent to cure in the offspring what, through the parental surfeit, was entailed as [xvii] a heritage of disease. Just in the same way the mineral waters of Missisquoi, and Bethesda, in America, through containing siliceous qualities so sublimated as almost to defy ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie

... the first cast. The trout rose readily, and almost too soon we had more than enough for dinner, though no "rod-smashers" had been seen or felt. Our experience the next morning, and during the day and the next morning, in the lake, in the rapids, in the pools, was about the same: there was a surfeit of trout eight or ten inches long, though we rarely kept any under ten, but the big fish were lazy and would not rise; they were in the deepest water and did not like ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs

... story in Boswell's Biography which is transferred to "Pickwick," that of the unlucky gentleman who died from a surfeit of crumpets; Sam, it will be recollected, describes it as a case of the man "as killed ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald

... solemnities did not agree with Swift. He was half-killed with a surfeit of Shene pippins; and in a garden-seat which he devised for himself at Moor Park, and where he devoured greedily the stock of books within his reach, he caught a vertigo and deafness which punished and ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... degree; and we can well understand that having given us these channels, by which His vineyard is to be watered, by which the living waters are to flow forth, it is not His will that every man should be his own evangelist or pastor, feeding himself at will, drinking, perhaps to surfeit, of the precious waters which should be conveyed to him through the appointed channel, but that he should be under dutiful obedience and submission, and that thus and thus only may unity and peace be preserved, and the body grow together ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green

... Marah Rocke in a home of safety, plenty and kindness, in the old doctor's house, we must run down to Hurricane Hall to see what mischief Cap has been getting into since we left her! In truth, none! Cap had had such a surfeit of adventures that she was fain to lie by and rest upon her laurels. Besides, there seemed just now nothing to do—no tyrants to take down, no robbers to capture, no distressed damsels to deliver, ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth

... mother sent, Who, when he understood the jest, With what he saw was well content. "This shows a pious mind!" Quoth he: "Self-conquest is true victory. The Church hath a good stomach, she, with zest, Whole countries hath swallow'd down, And never yet a surfeit known. The Church alone, be it confessed, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... mouthfuls of the aliment are rejected at a time for some hours after meals. When the aliment has had time to ferment, and become acid, it produces cardialgia, or heart-burn. This disease is perhaps generally left after a slight inflammation of the stomach, called a surfeit, occasioned by drinking cold liquors, or eating cold vegetables, when heated with exercise. This inflammation of the stomach is frequently, I believe, at its commencement removed by a critical eruption on the face, which differs in its appearance as well as in its cause from the gutta rosea ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... 'Justice is a slippery dame, and hath a two-edged sword in her hand. We may have enough of justice in our character as rebels to give us a surfeit of it. I would fain overtake these robbers that we may relieve them of their spolia opima, together with any other wealth which they may have unlawfully amassed. My learned friend the Fleming layeth it down that ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle

... afternoon, he walked through the rooms before going out and commented on the different flowers, entirely simple in arrangement, and lingered over them, touching and taking pleasure in them in a way wholly different from last week, when each room was a jungle and I was fairly suffering from flower surfeit. ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright

... her Beauty and Wit, Like Manna to each she's a relishing Bit; She alone by Enjoyment, the more does prevail, And still with fresh Pleasures does hoist up your Sail: Nay, had you a Surfeit, but took of all others, One Look from ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various

... upon range of hills, reaching north and south as far as the eye could see from the masthead, was rising above our horizon behind a very surfeit of islands, bewildering the minds of men accustomed to our English ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell

... drunkenness. Let us give them all that, then, to their heart's desire.' This advice of Lucifer, our history tells us, was highly applauded in hell, and ever since it has proved their masterpiece to choke Mansoul with the fulness of this world, and to surfeit the heart with the good things thereof. But, my brethren, you will outwit hell herself and all her counsellors and all her machinations, if, out of all the riches, pleasures, cares, and possessions, that both heaven and earth ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte

... of Oxford, lived with Sir William Temple as his friend and domestic companion. When he had been about two years with Sir William, he contracted a very long and dangerous illness by eating an immoderate quantity of fruit. To this surfeit he was often heard to ascribe that giddiness in his head which, with intermissions sometimes of longer and sometimes of shorter continuance, pursued him to ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne

... whereas you desire to have my opinion, you may imagine that my stomach is rather cloyed than queasy, and therefore mine appetite of less force than my affection, fearing rather a surfeit of sweetness than desiring a satisfying. The repeating of love wrought in me a semblance of liking; but searching the very veins of my heart I could find nothing but a broad scar where I left a deep wound: and loose strings where I tied hard knots: and ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury

... this to a laudable end:— The general has his star; Shylock his four per cent; The contractor's wife a costly gem To enhance her vulgar charms; The mother a harvest of tears; The wife a broken heart; The unborn babe a prenatal curse; While I have my surfeit ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various

... them wheat, And they will acorns eat; 'Twere simple fury, still, thyself to waste On such as have no taste! To offer them a surfeit of pure bread, Whose appetites are dead! No, give them graines their fill, Husks, draff, to drink and swill. If they love lees, and leave the lusty wine, Envy them not their palate with ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... opposite direction; and the observer could almost have supposed that the burden itself might have been parted in twain by the treatment to which it was subjected—the incident affording a new application of the remark that a surfeit of zeal is destructive of the best intentions. The nature of the bodies which the ants seemed so excessively anxious to preserve from injury was readily determined. The oval bodies, resembling grains of corn, were the pupae or chrysalides of the ants—the sleeping babies and young ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various

... never felt better in my life,—I explain it in this way: The world has robbed me of my love, time has dried up hatred, and as the living individual must feel something, I live upon what remains to me. I must also say that he who feels and lives thus does not get a surfeit of happiness. ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... sure, eventually, to wear love to the warp. So the wise old Gascon suggests that it is the part of wisdom to give your affection to one who is both plain and elderly—one who is not suffering from a surfeit of love, and one whose head has not been turned by flattery. "Young women," says the philosopher, "demand attention as their right and often flout the giver; whereas old women ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard

... her husband, that is not to be tried till she has one: for faith in her confessor, she has as much as the law prescribes: for embroidery an Arachne: for music a Siren: and for pickling and preserving, did not one of her jars of sugared apricots give you your last surfeit at Arlingford Castle?" ...
— Maid Marian • Thomas Love Peacock

... is a language which tells through a reaction upon our emotional natures something which cannot be put into words. Unless we set ourselves seriously to the task of understanding that language is only a means and never an end, poetic art will be dead in fifty years, from a surfeit of ...
— Japanese Prints • John Gould Fletcher

... as per Crown and Anchor. Mr. Vincent. Mr. Roebuck, with ancestral sauce—very fine, if not pitched too strong. N.B.—In case of surfeit from the above, the editor of the Times may be resorted to as an antidote. Daniel O'Connell—whose successful practice of the exciting and fasting, or rather, starving system, among the rent contributors in Ireland, not only proves the truth ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... surfeit of human society and gossip, and worn out all my village friends, I rambled still farther westward than I habitually dwell, into yet more unfrequented parts of the town, "to fresh woods and pastures new," or, while the ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau

... of the hours—'labuntur anni', 'pereunt et imputantur' ever in his thoughts: and though the world of old moved slower, the man of business has rarely belied his name. A more plausible explanation is that the custom has died of surfeit. As increased facilities of travel made the world smaller, the circle of those that might be visited and saluted by the active grew boundless; so that on both sides limits were desired. Another consideration is that with new facilities came increased opportunities and hopes. To-day ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen

... high winds. Hanging head-downwards from its cage, it stuffed the fruit into its cheeks, monkey-fashion, and then seemed to chew it at leisure. When I left the steamer at Suez it remained in the captain's possession, and seemed to be tame and reconciled to its imprisonment, tempered by a surfeit of plantains. In flying over water they frequently dip down to touch the surface. Jerdon was in doubt whether they did this to drink or not, but McMaster feels sure that they do this in order to drink, and that the habit is not peculiar to the Pteropodidae, ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale

... cooler and more impersonal than he was wont to encounter, but it crossed his burdened mind that a blooming face even if unfashionably sunburnt, and a supple vigorous body were somewhat attractive after a surfeit of dolls with their languid fine-lady airs and affectation of physical delicacy; which he, being no fool, suspected of covering fine appetites and stubborn selfishness. But while he was young enough to admire the fresh beauty of his companion, it was ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton

... of authorship, and the mysteries of bookselling. ROBERT GREENE, the master-wit, wrote "The Art of Coney-catching," or Cheatery, in which he was an adept; he died of a surfeit of Rhenish and pickled herrings, at a fatal banquet of authors;—and left as his legacy among the "Authors by Profession" "A Groatsworth of Wit, bought with a Million of Repentance." One died of another kind of surfeit. Another was assassinated in a brothel. But the list of the ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli

... we realize what is for our good. Knowledge, development, culture, may reach their zenith and pass beyond. We may become debauched with the surfeit of these things. The end and ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... see the revolution. Most of them are too ignorant, and many are too afraid to see it. It is the same old story of every perishing ruling class in the world's history. Fat with power and possession, drunken with success, and made soft by surfeit and by cessation of struggle, they are like the drones clustered about the honey vats when the worker-bees spring upon them to end ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London

... rushed, toward the stream, fell prostrate on their faces by its edge, and drank to a surfeit. It gave them new life; and, indeed, it had given them their lives already, though they knew it not. It was the outflow of its current into the ocean that caused the break in the coral reef through which their boat had been enabled to pass. Otherwise they might have found ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid

... upon the chief which he jeered and laughed at, but there was a shaking of heads when he pointed to the zig-zag way. His followers were not inclined to try that road to victory again. They had had their surfeit of it. Vasilici was quick-witted enough to see that he must listen to counsel, and with lowering visage he turned first to one and then to another as they spoke. Presently one speaker seemed to please him, for his features relaxed into a grim smile. A movement ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner

... the most ancient rule, and profession, and practice of truth in scripture, to Christ and his apostles, but halt in their grandfathers' tombs. But sometimes things are commended, because new. The nature of man being inclined to change and variety, and ready to surfeit and loath accustomed things, even as the stomach finds appetite for new and unusual diets, so the mind of man hath a secret longing after new doctrines and things. Now we have both these combined together in this subject, which makes it the more excellent and wonderful,—antiquity, ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning

... why are bells mightily and stopped because food is not refused because not any food is refused, because when the moment and the rejoicing and the elevation and the relief do not make a surface sober, when all that is exchanged and any intermediary is a sacrificed surfeit, when elaboration has no towel and the season to sow consists in the dark and no titular remembrance, does being weather beaten mean more weather and does it not show a sudden result of not enduring, does it not bestow a resolution to abstain in silence and move South and almost ...
— Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein - With Two Shorter Stories • Gertrude Stein

... three or four weeks which followed, the General gathered a surfeit of adulation, notwithstanding which he was constantly and with pain imagining a confused chatter of ladies, and when he shut his eyes with annoyance, there was Madame Delicieuse standing, and saying, "I knew not a reason why you should ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable

... vex him: is not a lion as much a quadruped as a poodle?), there is certainly something winged in Litolff's execution, which has, moreover, all the superiority over Dreyschock's which a biped with ideas, imagination, and sensibility has over another biped who fancies that he possesses a surfeit ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated

... on any occasion, a surfeit of society, or a dislike of business, came upon him, when he was desirous to take some recreation; ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence

... the effect of this wholesale disfranchisement of colored men, upon their citizenship. The value of food to the human organism is not measured by the pains of an occasional surfeit, but by the effect of its entire deprivation. Whether a class of citizens should vote, even if not always wisely—what class does?—may best be determined by considering their condition when they are ...
— The Negro Problem • Booker T. Washington, et al.

... you it is easy to deny the world; because when the bread is bitter it is easy not to linger at the meal; because when the oil is low it is easy to rise with dawn; because when the body is without surfeit or temptation it is easy to rise above earth on the wings of the spirit. Poverty is very terrible to you, and kills your soul in you sometimes; but it is like the northern blast that lashes men into Vikings; ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... this, which he could not have adorned. Julian Grenfell, who was a poet almost by accident, resembled the most enlightened of the young Italian noblemen of the Renaissance, who gave themselves with violence to a surfeit of knowledge and a riot of action. He was a humanist of the type of the fifteenth century, soldier, scholar, and man of pleasure, such as we read of in Vespasiano's famous book. Everything he did was done in the service ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... Their kingdom's loss, my woeful banishment, Should all but answer for that peevish brat? Can curses pierce the clouds and enter heaven?— Why, then, give way, dull clouds, to my quick curses!— Though not by war, by surfeit die your king, As ours by murder, to make him a king! Edward thy son, that now is Prince of Wales, For Edward our son, that was Prince of Wales, Die in his youth by like untimely violence! Thyself a queen, for me that was a queen, Outlive thy glory, like my wretched self! Long ...
— The Life and Death of King Richard III • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]

... brewed their beer.[259] It would appear that the Celts were not in the habit of excessive drinking until a comparatively recent period. In the year 1405 we read of the death of a chieftain who died of "a surfeit in drinking;" but previous to this entry we may safely assert that the Irish were comparatively a sober race. The origin of the drink called whisky in modern parlance, is involved in considerable obscurity. Some authorities consider ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack

... and a yawn—"Why be very much in earnest? Why take so much trouble? Somebody must always be rich, why should not I? Somebody must enjoy the money, why should not I? At all events, things will last my time." And that such a surfeit has fallen upon the rich of this land, is a fact; for that this is the tone of to-day, and that the tone increases, none can deny who knows that which calls itself the WORLD, and calls itself so only too truly; the world of which it is written, that all that ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley

... way in, he found the stage empty and the proceedings not yet begun; and he stood for a minute at the inner door, glancing over the house. It was crowded. Oratory is a real inducement in societies seldom blessed with that attraction. Even lemonade is a magnet if you get it seldom and never to surfeit. Already men were sitting in the long low windows which ran down either side of the building; and a score of ushers, singularly alert-looking men, were hurriedly distributing camp-chairs to accommodate the overflow. Certainly, Peter could have desired ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... such a surfeit of the precious metals was instantly felt on prices. The most ordinary articles were only to be had for exorbitant sums. A quire of paper sold for ten pesos de oro; a bottle of wine, for sixty; a sword, for forty or fifty; a cloak, for a hundred,—sometimes more; a pair of shoes cost thirty ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott

... as the melons grew apace, throwing out secondary leaves in defiance of Cheon's prophecies, Billy Muck grew more and more enthusiastic, and, usurping the position of Chairman of the Directors, he inspired the shareholders with so much zeal that the prophecies were almost fulfilled through a surfeit of watering. But Cheon's attitude towards the water-melons did not change, although he had begun to look with favour upon mail-matter and station books, finding in them a power that could keep the ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn

... better in health than I was at the beginning of the winter. My journey is quite laid aside, at least for this year; though as Lord Hertford goes ambassador to Paris, I propose to make him a visit there next spring. As I shall be a good deal here this summer, I hope you did not take a surfeit of Strawberry Hill, but will bestow a visit on it while its beauty lasts; the gallery advances fast now, and I think in a few weeks will make a figure ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole

... quickly, she hindereth it. If the meat roast ill the witch hath turned the spit; and if the lumber pie taste ill she hath had a finger in it. If your sheep have the foot-rot—your horses the staggers or string-halt—your swine the measles—your hounds a surfeit—or your cow slippeth her calf—the witch is at the bottom of it all. If your maid hath a fit of the sullens, or doeth her work amiss, or your man breaketh a dish, the witch is in fault, and her shoulders ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth

... of old, and 'tis said to-day, That wealth to prosperous stature grown Begets a birth of its own: That a surfeit of evil by good is prepared, And sons must bear what allotment of woe Their sires were spared. But this I refuse to believe: I know That impious deeds conspire To beget an offspring of impious deeds Too like their ugly sire. But whoso is just, though his wealth like a river Flow down, shall be ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... we speak of to them, such as of good people going to heaven, and wicked people to the devil, they would ask us where we intend to go ourselves, that believe all this, and are such wicked fellows as we indeed are? Why, sir; 'tis enough to give them a surfeit of religion at first hearing; folks must have some religion themselves before they begin to teach other people."—"Will Atkins," said I to him, "though I am afraid that what you say has too much truth in it, yet can you not tell your wife she is in the wrong; that there is a God ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe

... ever in the womb nor see the light? For what live ever here? With labouring step To tread our former footsteps? pace the round Eternal? to climb life's worn, heavy wheel, Which draws up nothing new? to beat, and beat The beaten track? to bid each wretched day The former mock? to surfeit on the same, And yawn our joys? or thank a misery For change, though sad? to see what we have seen; Hear, till unheard, the same old slabbered tale? To taste the tasted, and at each return Less tasteful? o'er our palates to decant Another vintage? strain ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum

... save when a shower of spray fell upon the roof and walls like heavy hail.... The men, however, were not perturbed. Sleeping, even under such conditions, was far preferable to doubtful rest in a bunk upon an attendant vessel, rolling and pitching with the motion of the sea. They had had a surfeit of such experience ... while ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton

... have baked rhubarb pies and have had a surfeit of dandelion salad or 'Salat,' as our neighbors designate it. Your Uncle calls 'dandelion greens' the farmers' spring tonic; that and 'celadine,' that plant you see growing by the side of the house. Later in the season it bears small, yellow flowers not unlike ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas

... call to mind the comeliness of his person, the honor of his parents, and the virtues that, excelling both, made him so gracious in the eyes of every one. Sucking in thus the honey of love by imprinting in her thoughts his rare qualities, she began to surfeit with the contemplation of his virtuous conditions; but when she called to remembrance her present estate, and the hardness of her fortunes, desire began to shrink, and fancy to vail bonnet, that between a Chaos of confused thoughts ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge

... the old man, lifting his face, gazed vaguely from one to the other. Their intense but controlled excitement seemed subtly imparted to his nerves. The details of the tragedy had become hackneyed in his own consciousness, but their significance, their surfeit of horror, revived on witnessing their ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock

... of us supped full with horrors this last year or so, and I have no thought of adding to the surfeit. But sometimes common accidents appear exceptional, if they befall ourselves, or those with whom we are intimate. If the sufferer has any special identity, we speculate on his peculiar way of bearing his misfortune; and are thus led on to place ourselves ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke

... scarce able to bury the dead. Our want of sufficient good food, and continual watching, four or five each night, at three bulwarks, being the chief cause; only of sturgeon we had great store, whereon we would so greedily surfeit, as it cost many their lives; the sack, Aquavite, and other preservations of our health being kept in the President's hands, for his own diet and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... see my pleasure: Sometime all full with feasting on your sight, And by and by clean starved for a look; Possessing or pursuing no delight, Save what is had, or must from you be took. Thus do I pine and surfeit day by day, Or gluttoning on all, ...
— Shakespeare's Sonnets • William Shakespeare

... sweet madam, if your miseries were in the same abundance as your good fortunes are. And yet, for aught I see, they are as sick that surfeit with too much, as they that starve with nothing. It is no small happiness, therefore, to be seated in the mean; superfluity comes sooner by white ...
— The Merchant of Venice [liberally edited by Charles Kean] • William Shakespeare

... missed them and the stimulus of their presence. They brought me into closer touch with things. Marigold, too, pined for more occupation for his one critical eye than was afforded by the local volunteers. He grew morose, sick of a surfeit of newspapers. If he could have gone to France and got through to the firing-line, I am sure he would have dug a little trench all to himself and defied the Germans ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke

... lawyers, ward-committee chairmen and the less pretentious, common-ordinary soap-box orator—whom no community is without. The long-suffering and patient public had evidently been hypnotised into putting up with the usual surfeit of lingual fare by the nerve-soothing influences of a preceding supper with a ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson

... What a nuisance! I fancied I had left them all behind me in the city, where one has such a surfeit of them. A hand organ in the country! where the little birds never make a discord, or charge us a fee, either! I'll get up and shut the window, or run off into the back woods, where such a thing as a hand organ was ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern

... speeds down the broad breast of this wondrous river, gay with summer and flushed with the laughter of early vineyards, so close is the network of legend that the swiftly read or spoken tale of one locality is scarce over ere the traveller is confronted by another. It is a surfeit of romance, an inexhaustible hoard ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence

... have got a nerve! I'll say that." Similar things happened whenever he showed that he was pleased. If he said of a dish, in the local tongue: "I could do a bit of that!" or if he simply smacked his lips over it, she would surfeit him ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett

... universities, Marlowe, Greene, Peele, Kyd, Lyly, Lodge, and others, who came up to town and led a Bohemian life as actors and playwrights. Most of them were wild and dissipated, and ended in wretchedness. Peele died of a disease brought on by his evil courses; Greene, in extreme destitution, from a surfeit of Rhenish wine and pickled herring; and Marlowe was stabbed in a ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... coaxingly, "haven't I done charity enough for one day? You will surfeit me at the start, and then I'll be just as little fond of it as I was before. When I must let dirty children climb all over me, I ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair

... with a better stomach for a fight than Martin de Garnache, nor did he stop to consider that here his appetite in that direction was likely to be indulged to a surfeit. The sight of those three men opposing him, swords drawn and Fortunio armed in addition with a dagger, drove from his mind every other thought, every other consideration but that ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini

... of a beautiful festival [At the "Century," New York, Nov. 5, 1864, in honor of Mr. Bryant's seventieth birthday.] to a beautiful—but enough of this. You must have [278] had a surfeit. 'T was all right and due, but it must have been a hard thing to bear,—to be so praised to your very face. . . . Your reply was admirable,—simple, modest, quiet, graceful,—in short, I don't see how it could be ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey

... of a surfeit: but it is not for readers to complain; the remedy is easy; nothing forces them to read. It is not any the more for authors to complain. Those who make the crowd must not cry that they are being crushed. ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire

... not, in the pursuit of my calling, studied human nature and collected documents for nothing. With how many brides had I not talked! How many loves did I not know to have been paralyzed and killed by a surfeit in the frail early stages of their existence! Inexperienced as I was, my learning in humanity was wiser than the experience of my impulsive, generous, magnanimous lover, to whom the very thought of calculation ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett

... rash-embraced despair, And shudd'ring fear, and green-eyed jealousy? O love! be moderate, allay thy ecstasy; In measure rain thy joy scant this excess; I feel too much thy blessing: make it less, For fear I surfeit! ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson

... we have manned with invisible guards. We have thronged with fiery faces and arms the fences of our gardens and parks. The plate-glass of our windows we have made more impenetrable than adamant. To our very infants we have given the strength of giants. Babies surfeit, while strong men starve; and the foetus in the womb stretches out unformed hands to annex a principality. Is this liberty? Is this Nature? No! It is a Merlin's prison! Yet, monstrous, it subsists! Has our friend, then, no power to dissolve the ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson

... were posted in the towers day and night. Nor'-West spies shadowed every movement of the enemy; and it was seriously considered whether we should not open communication with D'Orsonnens to ascertain what he wanted; but, truth to say, we knew very well what he wanted, and had had such a surfeit of blood, we were not ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut

... surfeit, which is the worst of monotonies, eagerly would the prince have joined the revolting troops, detachments of which he could perceive from the walls of the Kutub hastening along the sun-scorched highway ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder

... are among the handful of fellow potentates who say what law shall be and how it shall be enforced. No stern, masterful men and women are they as some future moonstruck novelist or historian bent upon creating legendary lore may portray them. Voluptuaries are most of them, sunk in a surfeit of gorgeous living and riotous pleasure. Weak, without distinction of mind or heart, they have the money to hire brains to plan, plot, scheme, advocate, supervise and work for them. Suddenly deprived of their stocks and bonds ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers

... palm-tree in Batavia, on that momentous morning of the 27th, was a sailor who had been left behind sick by Captain Roy when he went on his rather Quixotic trip to the Keeling Islands. He was a somewhat delicate son of the sea. Want of self-restraint was his complaint—leading to a surfeit of fruit and other things, which terminated in a severe fit of indigestion and indisposition to life in general. He was smoking—that being a sovereign and infallible cure for indigestion and all other ills that flesh is heir to, as ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne

... philosophy! Not harsh and rugged as dull fools suppose, But musical as is Apollo's lute, And a perpetual feast of nectared sweets, Where no crude surfeit reigns." ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar

... inventions could be easily gauged; Mr. Mardale claimed to have invented a wheel of perpetual rotation. Sir Charles, however, had his impulses of kindness. He knew Mr. Mardale to be an old and gentle person, a little touched in the head perhaps, who with money enough to surfeit every instinct of pleasure, had preferred to live a shy secluded life, busily engaged either in the collection of curiosities or the invention of toy-like futile machines. There was a girl too whom Sir Charles remembered, a weird ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason

... frantically on in front of the disturbers. The smells were sickening, overpowering. Only excitement, curiosity, youth—whatever you may care to term it-kept him up and going. The everlasting glory of youth never ends until old age has provided the surfeit of knowledge; the strife to see ahead, to find out what is to be, to know,—that is youth. Youth dies when curiosity ends. The emotion is even stronger than the dread of what may lie beyond in the pallid sea ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... and devoured it, and grown gaunt to the bone. Rome has robbed men of their bodies and of their lives, and has torn them limb from limb wantonly, as a spoiled hawk tears a pheasant and scatters the bright feathers on the ground. Rome has robbed men of their souls and has fed hell with them to its surfeit. And now, in her turn, her grasping hands have withered at the wrists, her insatiable lips are cracking upon her loosening teeth, and the mistress of the world is the sport of Jews ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford

... them, therefore, in their food. This excessively enraged the pampered menials, and their old butler, who was the most indignant, ate so much meat and puddings of various sorts, and drank so much beer, that he actually brought on a surfeit, and died from it. How angry most of the fellows at school would have been if told that they could not have butter, or sugar in their tea. Never mind if the butter was not to be procured, and the sugar had by chance not come ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston

... halts undecided, being yet unwilling to go on and fulfill its new ideals. For those who have eyes to see, Jesus Christ stands again in the market and the street. He has given society a new vision of the earth as a possible paradise, filled with the fruits of peace and plenty where none know surfeit, and none know want. He has given a vision of the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God, and that vision has destroyed the old contentment. Our fathers were happy because what they did kept pace with what they saw. And we are unhappy because we are unwilling ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis

... You know all about them, and what it feels like in rainy weather, when the fat gentleman has got to-day's "Times," and means to read all through the advertisement-column before he gives up the leaders, and you have to spend your time turning over thick and shiny snap-shot journals with a surfeit of pictures in them; or the Real Lady, or the Ladylike Lady, or the Titled Lady, the portraits of whom—one or other of them—sweep in curves about their folio pages; and, while they fascinate you, make you feel that you would falter on the threshold of matrimony if only because ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan

... have at your side. It was Freddie who suggested that Derek should recline in the arm-chair which he had vacated; Freddie who nipped round the corner to the all-night chemist's and returned with a magic bottle guaranteed to relieve an ostrich after a surfeit of soda-water bottles; Freddie who mixed ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse

... be easy to surfeit criticism with similar examples; where Webster is writing in sarcastic, meditative, or deliberately terror-stirring moods. The same dark dye of his imagination shows itself even more significantly in circumstances where, in the work of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... to the family during the ensuing year. Fortunately Nanoun's preventive measures averted this calamity; yet were they like to have overshot their mark. Only the cat's natural abstemiousness saved her that night from dying of a surfeit—and in agony surely provocative of the very cries ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier



Words linked to "Surfeit" :   indulge, eating, oversupply, superabundance, render, luxuriate, fullness, glut, supply, overmuch, repletion, excess, feeding, cloy, provide, overabundance, overmuchness



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