She died in 1796, and her son Paul succeeded her,a prince whom his imperial mother had excluded from all active participation in the government of the empire because of his mental imbecility, or partial insanity.

Life is odiously short at the best, and it is mere imbecility to fritter away any of our scanty portion upon the dead, who can never be any the better for our tears.

I am in that stage of the novitiate that seems sheer imbecility.

" Huckstep came swearing on: when within a few yards of Harry he stopped, looked at him with a stare of mingled rage and drunken imbecility; and bid him throw down his hoe and come forward.

But the connection of the absurd Frenchman with the case, which at first seemed a characteristic imbecility of his landlord, bewildered him the more he thought of it.

Built a few missions, which are rotting, terrorized or cajoled few thousand worthless Indians into civilized imbecility, and raised a respectable number of horses and cattle.

Similar corruptions and decay have succeeded to the intellectual eminence of other nations; and we might be almost led to conclude, that mental as well as physical power, after attaining a certain perfection, became weakened by expansion, and sunk into a state of comparative imbecility, until time and circumstance gave it a new progressive impetus.

And as it was the noblest triumph which the human mind, under Pagan influences, ever achieved, so it was followed by the most degrading imbecility into which man, in civilized countries, was ever allowed to fall.

A most ingenious, and satisfactory, and simple theory, which will explain the ten-of-diamond naevus, for" "Dreadful imbecility!"

The man's proximity caused his neighbour a ceaseless irritation; of all objectionable types of humanity, this loafing and boozing degenerate was, to Miss Rodney, perhaps the least endurable; his mere countenance excited her animosity, for feebleness and conceit, things abhorrent to her, were legible in every line of the trivial features; and a full moustache, evidently subjected to training, served only as emphasis of foppish imbecility.

He is for some time a raving maniac, and then falls into a state of gay and compassionable imbecility, which is described with inimitable beauty in the close of this story.

Neither smiled, they regarded each other intently, with an air of grave imbecility.

Every art which has its absolute technique is, to a certain extent, guarded from the intrusions of mere left-handed imbecility.

This state of mind, together with other causes, finally broke his health, destroyed his mind and left him but the sad wreck of a brilliant manhood, and an old age of helpless imbecility.

The Persian monarchy lay in hopeless imbecility, inviting Greek invasion; nor did the known world contain the power that seemed capable of checking the growing might of Athens, if Syracuse once should be hers.

O joyous imbecility!

Endowed with a little barren taste, they must be inanimate enough to tread with laborious imbecility in the footsteps of another.

Claudius, more than any of his class, from the peculiar imbecility of his character, was under the powerful influence of this class of men; and so dangerous was their power that Messalina herself was forced to win her ascendency over her husband's mind by making these men her supporters, and cultivating their favour.

Religion must be regarded as a necessary evil, its necessity resting on the pitiful imbecility of the great majority of mankind, incapable of grasping the truth, and therefore requiring, in its pressing need, something to take its place.

When a sentimental young man seeks a private interview with a marriageable young woman, and recklessly refuses at the outset to retain at least his cane for the solution of the intricate conversational problem of what to do with his hands, it is an infallible sign that some madly rash intention has temporarily overpowered his usual sheepish imbecility, and that he may be expected to speak and act with almost human intelligence.

Since little Charles, his son, terrified him so greatly with his deathlike beauty, his royal air of sickly imbecility, why should he not take his sister Clotilde to live with him?

But though defeated in many respects by the selfish ambition and short-sighted imbecility of foreign powers, whose rulers were too venal or too weak to follow the flight of that mind which would have taught them to outwing the storm, the policy involved in it was still a secret operation on the conduct of surrounding states.

Of all the solemn imbecilities one hears, surely the most foolish is this, that we are in "an age of specialisation."

The whole company rose at my entrance; but when I saw so many eyes fixed at once upon me, I was blasted with a sudden imbecility, I was quelled by some nameless power which I found impossible to be resisted.

This was plain in the unusual prevalence of infant mortality, convulsions, epilepsy, hysteria, fatal brain diseases, and actual imbecility.