' I stared up absently at Benjamin Constant's blue ceiling, meretricious and still adorable, expressive of the delicious decadence of Paris, and my eyes moistened because the world is so beautiful in such various ways.

It was Horace, in an age of deep dramatic decadence, who re-stated the pseudo-Aristotelian formulas of the Alexandrians as though they were unassailable dogmas of art.

Quite genuine decadence this time, with nothing picturesque about it, involving doctors' bills, alimony, and other the fine crops of wild-oat sowing.

The siege of 1565 was its last great struggle with its mortal foe; after that there is but little left for the historian but to trace its gradual decadence and fall.

On every handwith a thrill of intensest joy, I say it!is to be seen, if not yet commencing civilisation, then progress, progresswide as the worldtoward it: only hereat the heartis there decadence, fatty degeneration.

Clerambault spread his new acquisitions before him, starting from the recognised unworthiness of the enemy-nation as from a certain, well-known fact; the whole question being to decide if one should see in this the irremediable decadence of a great people, or the proof, pure and simple, of a barbarism which had always existed, but hidden from sight.

A period of the most lamentable decadence followed, during which Turkish domination prevailed more and more in the country.

I loved Lucy for that reason, because she was consumed and drained by sweating, because she was the girl worker in all her melancholy decadence, born beautiful and made hideous by social injustice.

Could he fall into such miserable decadence?

"What then?" "You willalways remembering that my interest in such things is merely academicyou will then lead me hither and yon, as your whim lists, and show me how Paris amuses itself in these days of its nocturnal decadence.

An air of placid decadence hangs about its old-fashioned streets, and few would guess that here was once the capital of the Somersaetas, the Saxon tribe from which Somerset derives its name.

The slump in her production, which is carried on amidst all the difficulties, the fall in her credit, the absolute lack of foreign exchanges, the difficulty of trading with the hostile populations which surround her, put Austria in an extremely difficult position and in progressive and continuous decadence.

While Michelangelo was obscurely working at the library of San Lorenzo, the great age of art was drawing to its close; Raphael and Leonardo were dead, and their pupils were already hurrying on to a rapid decadence.

And so, from a physical point of view, we find that if a man has any peculiar power, it first gradually increases in strength until it reaches its acme, after which it enters upon a path of slow decadence, until it ends in imbecility.

Oxford, as judged by these men, was remarkable as an illustration of the spiritual and intellectual decadence of a body which at other times has been a centre of great movements of thought.

But, on the whole, the history of the Braganza rule was one of steady decadence, until the second half of the nineteenth century found the country one of the most backward in Europe.

Without war, inferior or decaying races would easily choke the growth of healthy budding elements, and a universal decadence would follow.

"I showed him the decadence of his country, decadence visible through all her institutions, through her political tendencies, through her young men of all classes.