The corruptions of the age, the seductions of power, and the evil influence of Cleopatra paralyzed a nature capable of better things.

Yet a little while and one must bid adieu to that Youth which one has so heedlessly squandered, a last adieu to Youth with its days of high adventure, its carefree heart, its susceptibility to the infinite seductions of Romance.

No seductions of billiards or pleasant company ever kept him from the society of his mother.

He had resisted the seductions which always beset solitary men with restless brains overwrought by depressing agencies.

It is a pure "cloak and sword" novel, definitely located in Italy, with all the machinery of secret assignations, escapes from convents, adventures on the road and at inns, sudden assaults, duels, seductions, and revenge characteristic of Spanish fiction.

There may be folly in calling each truant inclination that deep sentiment and secret sympathy which firmly knits heart to heart, and doubtless a common fortune may bind the worldly-minded together; but this is not the holy union which keeps noble qualities in a family, and which fortifies against the seductions of a world that is already too strong for honesty.

"I will go seek this brave mariner," he said, trembling lest his self-command should be again lost by the seductions of such a communion:"it is time he had more substantial proofs of our gratitude.

We all have moments of weakness; moments when the seductions of life, the worthless ties which bind together the thoughtless and selfish in what are called the interests of the world, appear of more value than aught else.

They are appointed to guard the approaches to the public Treasury, and they occupy positions that expose them to all the temptations and seductions which the cupidity of peculators and fraudulent claimants can prompt them to employ.

"It is in vain that in his successive halts from parish to parish, he has resisted the thousand seductions which surround the priest, from the timid gaze of the simple school-girl, smitten with a holy love for the young curate, to the veiled smile of the languishing woman.

Good Heavens, all seductions begin in the same way.

Their oppressions, and seductions, and debaucheries, are the theme of many an angry verse; and the indignation and abhorrence of the reader is relentlessly conjured up against those perturbators of society, and scourges of mankind.

He may be seen in every page running round the paltry circle of his seductions with incredible zeal and anxiety, and stimulating his jaded fancy for new images of impurity, with as much melancholy industry as ever outcast of the muses hunted for epithets or metre.

War has slain its thousands, but alcohol its tens of thousands; and the fortitude which could bear without shrinking the most cruel inflictions of torture, has proved powerless to resist the seductions of strong drink.

Every-where his seductions are successful, and Byron uses him as a means of exposing the weakness of the human heart and the rottenness of society in all countries.

The hardship upon the moth is that though he has already scorched himself terribly in the flame, and burned up all the tender fibre of his wings, yet he can't help returning to the seductions of the tallow-candle till his whole body has become a wretched cinder.

War had captured the souls and bodies of men, and under her discipline of blood and agony men's wayward fancies, the seductions of the flesh, the truancies of the heart were tamed and leashed.

At the beginning of the second century B.C. the Judean state was closely encircled by a ring of Hellenic cities and subjected on every side to the seductions of that debased Greek culture which had taken firm root in the soil of Palestine.

"Greatly flattered and delighted by this preference, and blinded by a mad love for her, which I had not ventured to express, I most readily gave myself up to her seductions, and in a very short time she obtained such an influence over me that everything I possessed was at her disposal.

I would as soon expose myself, after a vow of celibacy, to the seductions of a lovely nymph, as encounter the fury of a jealous woman.

Indra was therefore the enemy of excessive self-mortification, and had in his service numerous nymphs who were called his 'weapons,' and whose business it was to impede by their seductions the devotion of holy men.

The judges of the Areopagus well knew the power of gesture, and to avoid its seductions, they adopted the resource of hearing pleas only in the darkness.

"You can make all right," urged Nobili, maddened by her seductions.

It is the seductions of that branch of the system which consists in internal improvements, holding out, as it does, inducements to the people of particular sections and localities to embark the Government in them without stopping to calculate the inevitable consequences.

He had lived with her for more than ten years; he was attached to her by all the ties of friendship and gratitude; he had constantly declared that he would never leave herno, not for all the seductions of princes.