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More "Lunacy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... experience out of ideas. Shame, conscience, and reason continually disallow and ignore what consciousness presents; and what are they but habit and latent instinct asserting themselves and forcing us to disregard our midsummer madness? Idiocy and lunacy are merely reversions to a condition in which present consciousness is in the ascendant and has escaped the control of unconscious forces. We speak of people being "out of their senses," when they have in fact fallen back into them; or of those who have "lost their mind," ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... Ashley he seconded Mr. Gordon's Bill, and first came publicly forward in support of measures designed to advance the interests of the insane. A laborious and sometimes fruitless examination of Hansard, from the earliest period of lunacy legislation, has been necessary in order to present a continuous narrative of the successive steps by which so great a success ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... deliberate orders in German for murder, murdering for their lives; and they, too, were like himself, and ate and drank and either laced their boots or had them laced daily. And the staggering apprehension of the miraculous lunacy of war swept through ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... and brought our batteries and battalions to their very doors. But now they were fugitives every one from the city of their pride, which they had surrendered without striking a solitary blow for its defence; while the actual building in which their lunacy took final shape, and launched itself on an astonished Christendom, I beheld full to overflowing with the deadly fruit of their doing. In the very presence of the president's chair of state, here a Boer, there a Briton, it may be of New Zealand birth or Canadian ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... Does not lunacy strike you, Bertie, as being a very eerie thing? It is a disease of the soul. To think that you may have a man of noble mind, full of every lofty aspiration, and that a gross physical cause, such as the fall of a spicule of bone from the inner table of ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... indeed, gave indications of lunacy. He marched up to the road-gate, and stood close to it, so that the barbed wire top was even with his hair; then he backed off, and gazed first at the gate, then at the bewildered Hicks, while he grinned at the dazed squad in a Cheshire ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... 1860 assumed proportions which twenty years previously could not have entered into the wildest dreams. Indeed, had a prophet stood in Hanover square at that epoch, and portrayed the future, he would have been met with the charge of lunacy. $30,000 rent for a store was not more absurd than the idea that trade would ever wing its way to a neighborhood chiefly known through the police reports, and only visited by respectable people in the work of philanthropy. The enterprise of New York houses, in either following ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... for the loan is equal to the entire cost of the whole undertaking; the result is that each family must pay about twice the amount of rent that it would otherwise have to pay if the Council had not incurred interest charges through borrowing other people's credit. Was there ever greater lunacy in public affairs? ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... Knights Grand Cross of Victorian Order. Knights Commanders of the various Orders (in the same order of progression). Knights Bachelors. Commanders of Victorian Order. County Court Judges. Serjeants-at-Law. Masters in Lunacy. Companions of the various Orders. Members of Fourth Class of Victorian Order. Companions of Distinguished Service Order. Eldest Sons of the Younger Sons of Peers. Eldest Sons of Baronets. Eldest Sons of Knights. Members of Fifth Class of Victorian Order. Baronets' Younger Sons. Knights' ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell
... this morning, Katharine," he resumed, with a change of voice, "to ask you to forget my folly, my bad temper, my inconceivable behavior. I came, Katharine, to ask whether we can't return to the position we were in before this—this season of lunacy. Will you take me back, Katharine, ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... he was bringing desolation on my hearth, and destruction on my household gods—did he think that, in less than three years, a natural event—a severe domestic, but an expected and common calamity—would lay his carcass in a cross-road, or stamp his name in a Verdict of Lunacy! Did he (who in his sexagenary * * *) reflect or consider what my feeling must have been, when wife, and child, and sister, and name, and fame, and country, were to be my sacrifice on his legal altar—and this at a moment when my health was declining, my fortune embarrassed, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 471, Saturday, January 15, 1831 • Various
... thinking of itself, because such work, not being of a religious character, partook of the nature of sin. It is no wonder that such a rule of life had not infrequently the most distressing consequences. Newton himself admits that his preaching had the reputation of driving people into lunacy. In a letter asking that steps may be taken to remove one poor victim to an asylum he says: "I hope the poor girl is not without some concern for her soul; and, indeed, I believe a concern of this kind was the beginning of her disorder. I believe," he continues, ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... Horace Father Goriot The Atheist's Mass Cesar Birotteau The Commission in Lunacy Lost Illusions A Distinguished Provincial at Paris A Bachelor's Establishment The Secrets of a Princess The Government Clerks Pierrette A Study of Woman Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Honorine The Magic Skin A Second Home A Prince ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... of Drowne's lunacy, if credit were due to the rumor that he had been seen kneeling at the feet of the oaken lady, and gazing with a lover's passionate ardor into the face that his own hands had created. The bigots of the day hinted that it would be no matter of surprise if an evil spirit were allowed to enter this ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... she named her first-born Samuel? Or was hers the stubborn obstinacy of the ox? the fixity of purpose of the balky horse? the stolidity of the self-willed peasant-mind? Was it whim or fancy?—the one streak of lunacy in what was otherwise an eminently rational mind? Or, reverting, was hers the spirit of a Bruno? Was she convinced of the intellectual rightness of the stand she had taken? Was hers a steady, enlightened opposition to superstition? or—and a subtler thought—was ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... causes of insanity are heredity and stress or strain. Lunacy is not infrequent in children of epileptic, alcoholic, or insane parents, and those born of parents suffering from nervous disease frequently are in such condition that shock, intense emotion, dissipation, or exhausting diseases ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various
... life. That park, or estate, or whatever it is, had taken such an unhealthy hold upon his imagination, that he was half-way to insanity. If Gramarye is permitted again to take the helm.... Well, the ship is half-way across—half-way across those narrow straits which divide reason from lunacy. We've got to take the helm and put it over just as hard as ever we can. You understand? In a word, if, for instance, Major Lyveden were to revisit Gramarye, I think the game would be up. That, of course, can't happen. But ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... confront his end with more philosophy. I made him no reply, therefore, in words; and presently the evening fell so chill that I was glad, for my own sake, to kindle a fire. And yet God knows, in such an open spot, and the country alive with savages, the act was little short of lunacy. Ballantrae seemed never to observe me; but at last, as I was about parching a little ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... perils of disease and death; it is to "purge it of its offenses." We shall not educate the intelligence if we weary it by making it learn things. This is patent in these days of ours, when the victims of nervous disorders and lunacy abound, and when, even among those who are considered healthy, the material consequences of madness may explode, threatening the whole of humanity ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... grumble. It seemed just as if Long Tom Lane was making game of an old man in trouble. 'Twas either that or lunacy. And there was no time for nonsense off the Gingerbread coast in a spring gale ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... in government suits against combinations. That idea has got to be killed! And the regulation of security issues of railroads—preposterous! Why, the President's crazy! If Mall and Gossitch and Wells don't oppose that in the Senate, I'll see that they are up before the lunacy commission—and I have some ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... was all lunacy, sheer clotted madness, as he told himself, but this was a day to riot in illusions, for undreamt-of things had happened, and who could swear that the days of fairies had passed? To meet a dream-Irene on his way to Kieff was unlikely, to rescue her from ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... opera-composers crazy. Several of Richard's pieces had been played; he had occupied one responsible position and been asked to take another; he had the finished score of his opera; and he was young and by nature sanguine to the verge of lunacy. He thought he had only to call on the Intendant of the opera with his masterpiece and its production would be assured. He did call, and soon he received a promise that his work would be done. But Leipzig was now Mendelssohn's ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... quarter fill it with liquid mud, and then invite four or five comrades, all arrayed in much warlike impedimenta, but lacking more extra covering than a waterproof sheet each, to the hole to spend two nights and a day in it—I should be credited with lunacy. Yet I should be offering a fair sample of front-line accommodation ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... the body and animal spirits that circulated in the nerves. One spoke, as did still Prof. Pomme at the end of the eighteenth century, "of the shrivelling up of the nerves."[14] But above all, one preserved the conviction that these queer disorders were very different to the mental disorders of lunacy. These peculiar individuals had, it was said, all their reason; they remained capable of understanding their fellow creatures and of being understood by them; they were not to be expelled from society like ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... long enough to be in want of fresh supplies. Ophelia has obeyed her father's command (given in I. iii.), and has refused to receive Hamlet's visits or letters. What has Hamlet done? He has put on an 'antic disposition' and established a reputation for lunacy, with the result that his mother has become deeply anxious about him, and with the further result that the King, who was formerly so entirely at ease regarding him that he wished him to stay on at Court, is now extremely uneasy and very desirous ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... maleadministration, be forfeited by the sovereign: that to dethrone a king and to elect his successor, was a practice quite unknown to the constitution, and had a tendency to render kingly power entirely dependent and precarious: that where the sovereign, from his tender years, from lunacy, or from other natural infirmity, was incapacitated to hold the reins of government, both the laws and former practice agreed in appointing a regent, who, during the interval, was invested with the whole power ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... and his mates thanked God the direful madness was now gone; even then, Ahab, in his hidden self, raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form. Ahab's full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge. But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab's broad madness ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... to do battle for an egg or die for an idea; singling out his friends and his mate with cordial affection; bringing forth in pain, rearing with long-suffering solicitude, his young. To touch the heart of his mystery, we find in him one thought, strange to the point of lunacy: the thought of duty; the thought of something owing to himself, to his neighbour, to his God: an ideal of decency, to which he would rise if it were possible; a limit of shame, below which, if it be possible, he will ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that only some fifty years before the times of Columbus Christian Europe had no lunatic asylum,—not that there was a lack of lunatics or that the existence of lunacy was entirely ignored, but that the then state of medicine and the general intelligence was not emancipated from the idea of demoniacs,—and we are told that the lunatics were in many instances hung, quartered ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... have suborned witnesses to prove that there was black blood in the veins of Valentine Hawkehurst. If he had not been opposed to so strong an opponent as Dr. Jedd, he might have tried to get a commission of lunacy to declare Charlotte Halliday a madwoman, and thus invalidate her marriage. As it was, he knew that he could do nothing. He had failed. All was said ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... What then? He that says that the doctor's skill is wanted in the case of a slight skin-eruption or whitlow, but is not needed in the case of pleurisy, fever, or lunacy, in what respect does he differ from the man that says that schools and teaching and precepts are only for small and boyish duties, while great and important matters are to be left to mere routine and accident? For, as the man is ridiculous who says we ought to learn to row but not to steer, so ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... any man's affection? Would it not be painful to owe his appearance of regard more to his honour than his love? and is not my person, already faded, likelier to fade sooner, than his? On the other hand, is his life a good one? and would it not be lunacy even to risque the wretchedness of losing all situation in the world for the sake of living with a man one loves, and then to lose both companion and consolation? When I lost Mr. Thrale, every one was officious to comfort and to ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... think have been to some extent averted had his appearance been different. London is a home of madmen and casually permits any lunacy so that public peace is not endangered; had poor Wilbraham looked a fanatic with pale face, long hair, ragged clothes, much would have been forgiven him, but for a stout, middle-aged gentleman, well dressed, well groomed.... What could be supposed but ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... use, pure, duke, tune, tube, blue, duty, flew, new, student, subdue, pursue, absolute, illumine, tumult, suit, during, pursuit, presume, lunacy, Tuesday, numeral. ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... Pleasure. Remove the Vicar's magic-lantern and the try-your-weight machine opposite the post office, and you practically eliminated the temptations to tread the primrose path. The only young men in the place were silent, gaping youths, at whom lunacy commissioners looked sharply and suspiciously when they met. The tango was unknown, and the one-step. The only form of dance extant—and that only at the rarest intervals—was a sort of polka not unlike the movements of a slightly ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... substantial improvements effected in the administration of justice during the late session, and of which the last volume of the statute-book affords abundant evidence, principally under the heads of bankruptcy, insolvency, and lunacy. Great and salutary alterations have been effected in these departments, as well as various others; the leading statutory changes being most ably carried into effect by the Lord Chancellor, who continues to preside over his court, and to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... litigant has reached a stage where things simply are as he wants them to be. Whether this poor derelict will be permitted by his deluded or unscrupulous attorneys to end his days in peace at the Hospital, time alone will tell. Thus far his lunacy case has been carried by them to the ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... had ever so remotely hinted at the possibility of what was taking place in him. Bazarov had a great love for women and for feminine beauty; but love in the ideal, or, as he expressed it, romantic sense, he called lunacy, unpardonable imbecility; he regarded chivalrous sentiments as something of the nature of deformity or disease, and had more than once expressed his wonder that Toggenburg and all the minnesingers and troubadours ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... run on in such a surprising manner with your narrations, imprecations, admirations, and interrogations, that, upon my education, sir, I believe you are approaching to insanity, frenzy, lunacy, madness, ...
— The Politician Out-Witted • Samuel Low
... Brother Bonaday with him. They are off to the river, for Brother Copas carries his rod. What a strange fascination has that dry-fly fishing! And I can remember old anglers discussing it as a craze, a lunacy." ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... if a poor fellow should touch his hat in the street and say, "Pardon, sir, your buttons are awry," he would answer, "Off, villain! Zounds, knave! Know you not that my Divine buttons are the model of things?" and so forth, until he fell into a perfect lunacy. ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... former self, the wreck of what he was, and a picture of fallen and shattered genius. To drive away the hideous phantasmagorias that tortured him, as with the stings of demons, he had recourse to gin, and soon became a confirmed drunkard: the next stage was lunacy; and he was confined for fourteen months in Saint ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 565 - Vol. 20, No. 565., Saturday, September 8, 1832 • Various
... this Morning's Operations Looked Like; Whether an Officers' Ward or a Men's Ward is the nicer; Who Deserves Stripes; C.O.'s Parade and its Terrors; Advantages of Volunteering for Night Duty; The Cushy Job of being in charge of a Sham Lunacy Case; Other Cushy Jobs less cushy than They Sounded; and so forth; until at last protests began to be voiced by the wearier folk ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... Ronain. St. Ronan is said to have been Abbot of Kingarth, Bute, where he died in 737. Holy wells bear his name at Strowan (Perthshire), Chapelton in Strathdon (Aberdeenshire), and the Butt of Lewis; the latter is famed for the cure of lunacy. ...
— A Calendar of Scottish Saints • Michael Barrett
... it; or, if she had, would she have understood its contents? Without that letter, what would the course of events have been? Go back and think of it! Imagine old Mrs. Picture in charge of Widow Thrale, groundedly suspected of lunacy, miserable under the fear that the suspicion might be true—for who can gauge his own sanity? Imagine Granny Marrable, kept away at Denby by her daughter, that her old age should not be afflicted by a lunatic. Imagine the longing of Sapps Court to have Mrs. Picture back, ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... the results of strange experiments and the accomplishment of learning, men were abled to conceive of matters now closed to our conceptions, even as we of this day may haply give a calm ear to talk, that in the days of our fathers would have been surely set to the count of lunacy. And this is ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... Lunacy.—Whether it arises from political heat, religious ecstacies, intemperance, or the cares and worry of the universal hunt for wealth, it is certainly a painful fact to chronicle that in proportion ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... true: The most may err as grossly as the few? And faultless kings run down by common cry, For vice, oppression, and for tyranny. What standard is there in a fickle rout, Which, flowing to the mark, runs faster out? Nor only crowds but Sanhedrims may be Infected with this public lunacy, And share the madness of rebellious times, To murder monarchs for imagined crimes. 790 If they may give and take whene'er they please, Not kings alone, the Godhead's images, But government itself at length must fall To nature's state, where all have right to all. Yet, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... so much as dreamed of by his judges, they would have formed the most lenient of tribunals, and have suffered him to depart in peace. They are not to be charged with a lack of wisdom in not foreseeing what must have appeared to be the ravings of lunacy, had it been deliberately set down by some inspired prophet. Neither the man nor his cause commanded much respect. We, who know that the French Emperor is the first man of the age, as well in intellect as in position, have no right to sneer ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... cobwebs off the sky"—in other words, to set the Church, our cathedrals and bishops' palaces in order—and augured well; but this old woman journeyed not alone, in her hand she carried a broom (Brougham). It may have been a case of ultra-lunacy this journey of ninety-nine times as high as the moon, and "one cannot help thinking," said a writer of that period, "of the song, 'Long life to the Moon'; but this saying became common, 'If that time goes the coach, pray what ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... sit up here, and write, and read Renan's Origines, which is certainly devilish interesting; I read his Nero yesterday, it is very good, O, very good! But he is quite a Michelet; the general views, and such a piece of character painting, excellent; but his method sheer lunacy. You can see him take up the block which he had just rejected, and make of it the corner-stone: a maddening way to deal with authorities; and the result so little like history that one almost blames oneself for wasting time. But ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is used as the ingredient of pills to increase fertility, facilitate parturition, to bring back life to people on the brink of death and it is the main ingredient "in medicines for lunacy, convulsions, epilepsy, etc." (p. 397). "It gives rest to the heart, nourishes the blood, increases the breath, and strengthens the tsing" ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... lunacy rampant, and a whole city is left after such a visitation an asylum of melancholia—Mad Melbourne. Lunacy frequently takes the form of egotism. Peasants imagine themselves princes; Calibans believe themselves to be Adonises; beggars imagine themselves millionaires. ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... be continually putting up English women into outlandish casks; who if they be not shifted anew once in a few months grow too sour for their husbands.... He that makes coats for the moon had need take measure every noon, and he that makes for women, as often to keep them from lunacy." ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... Sidney's constitutional temperament, and the little service through which I and my two comrades contributed materially to his relief, as an illustration of that infirmity which besieges the nervous system of our nation. It is a sensitiveness which sometimes amounts to lunacy, and sometimes even tempts to suicide. It is a mistake, however, to suppose this morbid affection unknown to Frenchmen, or unknown to men of the world. I have myself known it to exist in both, and ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... got the plague or something. And if I'm with you, Kennedy suddenly remembers an appointment, and dashes off at a gallop in the opposite direction. If I had to award the bronze medal for drivelling lunacy in this place, you would get it by a narrow margin, and Kennedy would be proxime, ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... our men.[554] That is next door to freedom. And, after all, if we have to choose our masters, it is less disgrace to put up with Roman emperors than with German priestesses.' Thus the common people: the chieftains used more violent language. 'It was Civilis' lunacy that had driven them to war. He wanted to remedy his private troubles[555] by ruining his country. The Batavians had incurred the wrath of heaven by blockading Roman legions, murdering Roman officers, and plunging into a war which ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... seventy-five thousand people in this town, and there'll be seventy-five thousand bankrupts if this lunacy goes on. And there's seventy-five thousand maggots in your brain, and seventy-five thousand in John Pintard's; and if you two live to see nineteen hundred, you'll have twice five million two hundred and fifty-seven thousand four hundred and ninety-three—whatever that may be!" And he thrust ...
— The Story of a New York House • Henry Cuyler Bunner
... Holden without any expression at all in his voice. "They used to put lunatics in snake-pits. When they were people who'd taken to lunacy for escape from reality, it made them go back to reality to escape from the snakes. Shock-treatments used to be used, later, for the same effect. We're too soft to use either treatment now. But Johnny gave himself the works. The odds are that from now on he will never want ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... or two extracts from the novel "Der Mondschtige,"[18] the title of which is misleading since it in no way treats of one afflicted with lunacy but of a veritable moon lover, presumably our poet himself. There the nephew, Ludwig Licht(!), writes to his uncle: "It is now three months since I had a very serious quarrel with my friend, a quarrel which almost ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... power to the colonial authorities to legislate away any rights enjoyed by the subjects of the British Empire. He dwelt strongly upon the insanity question, and said the jury were convinced of the prisoner's lunacy, ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... to her an object that appeared worthy of any exertion and sacrifice for its attainment. She had witnessed the intense misery beneath which the minister struggled, or, to speak more accurately, had ceased to struggle. She saw that he stood on the verge of lunacy, if he had not already stepped across it. It was impossible to doubt that, whatever painful efficacy there might be in the secret sting of remorse, a deadlier venom had been infused into it by the hand that proffered relief. A secret enemy had been continually by his side, ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... I bought a dog—a queen! Ah Tiny, dear departing pug! She lives, but she is past sixteen And scarce can crawl across the rug. I loved her beautiful and kind; Delighted in her pert Bow-wow: But now she snaps if you don't mind; 'Twere lunacy ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... ghosts with red eyes which flash like lightning. The "amok" devil which comes from the swamp, differs from those which drive people to commit suicide — these again being quite distinct from those which cause merely harmless lunacy. ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... a fearful sect of fakirs devoted to Siva and to Bhairava, the god of lunacy, who associate with evil spirits, ghouls and vampires, and practice hideous rites of blood, lust and gluttony. They tear their flesh with their finger-nails, slash themselves with knives, and occasionally engage in a frantic dance from which ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... With all his torments and infernal terror? What should I say? what yet remains to do? My brain is dry with weeping all too long; My sighs be spent in utt'ring of my woe, And I want words wherewith to tell my wrong. But still distracted in love's lunacy, And bedlam-like thus raving in my grief, Now rail upon her hair, then on her eye, Now call her goddess, then I call her thief; Now I deny her, then I do confess her, Now do I curse her, ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Idea, by Michael Drayton; Fidessa, by Bartholomew Griffin; Chloris, by William Smith • Michael Drayton, Bartholomew Griffin, and William Smith
... guards looked askance at this sudden outbreak of the clergyman, for it verged upon lunacy, and lunacy is to them a fearsome and supernatural thing. One of them rode forward and spoke with the Emir. When he returned he said something to his comrades, one of whom closed in upon each side of the minister's camel, so as to prevent him from falling. The friendly negro ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... cause of hallucination and illusion is sought in the over-excitement of the cerebro-spinal system. As this stimulation may be very various in its intensity and significance, from the momentary rush of blood to complete lunacy, so hallucinations and illusions may be insignificant or signs of very serious mental disturbances. When we seek the form of these phenomena, we find that all those psychical events belong to it which have not been *purposely performed or ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... Mercy, and (let philosophers and theologians explain it as they may) instantaneous peace of mind followed the sight, or fancied sight, of that noon-tide star! The load was removed which threatened to crush my brain into lunacy, the "salt surf waves of bitterness" were stilled, and within me ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... clearly useless to resist a legalised process, I gave in, and thus was I, a perfectly sane man, incarcerated in a lunatic asylum! There I had to remain while Sir Lockesley saw my solicitors, communicated with the Commissioners in Lunacy and others, and after much correspondence and innumerable interviews, at last secured my release; but not until I had endured more than a week's confinement in ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... she was light this long while and not good in the head, and at the last lunacy came on her and she was tied and bound. Sometimes singing and dancing she does ...
— New Irish Comedies • Lady Augusta Gregory
... Reader, good-natured, middle-aged reader, remember that she was only thirty-eight, and that hitherto she had known nothing of the delights of love. By the young, any such hallucination on her part, at her years, will be regarded as lunacy, or at ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... importance to tell you in regard to your daughter-in-law. I shall be waiting to see you at eleven o'clock to-morrow morning. The matter is so utterly vital to the happiness of all your family, that I cannot imagine you will fail to come." Now, what's the meaning of it? Is it sheer impudence, or lunacy, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Venice has heard of the lunacy of the Marchioness de Strozzi," was the reply. "It is for that reason that she never goes out. The marquis perhaps thought she might be trusted to see the regatta; but he was mistaken. You must have remarked how closely he watched her for ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... evidently much excited, "I want you to work your way out upon that limb as far as you can. If you see anything strange, let me know." By this time what little doubt I might have entertained of my poor friend's insanity, was put finally at rest. I had no alternative but to conclude him stricken with lunacy, and I became seriously anxious about getting him home. While I was pondering upon what was best to be done, Jupiter's ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... give each of the officers a drop of whiskey from my flask, and I never saw men drink so thirstily. Their hands and lips trembled as they took it, and their eyes shone like lunacy, as the hot drops sank to the cold vitals, and pricked the frozen blood. Mingling with the privates, I stirred up some native specimens of patriotism, that appeared to be in great doubt as to the causes and ends of the war. They were very much in the political ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... brainless observer you may be quite right. I may be a lunatic. I feel much like one just now. It is lunacy to go climbing back to a level in society from which I have been kicked. But as I knelt there by that little fire, before you came, yearning sprang up in me—and I had thought all that sort of yearning was dead ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... and more time he spent in his torpor, unaware of what was day-dream and what was sleep-dream in the content of his unconsciousness. And here, in the unforgetable crypts of man's unwritten history, unthinkable and unrealizable, like passages of nightmare or impossible adventures of lunacy, he encountered the monsters created of man's first morality that ever since have vexed him into the spinning of fantasies to elude them ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... of modesty, even if they have it not. To rail at 'fact mongers' is, doubtless, far easier than to overturn facts themselves. The 'Shepherd' calls Atheists 'Chaotics' and Materialism 'the philosophy of lunacy,' which is a very free and very easy way of 'Universalising.' But arguments grounded on observation and experience are not to be borne down by hard names. Man, like the magnet, is something—he acts. Dust and ashes he was; dust and ashes he will ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... Dickens shall die during the composition of the said work of the Mystery of Edwin Drood, or shall otherwise become incapable of completing the said work for publication in twelve monthly numbers as agreed, it shall be referred to John Forster, Esq, one of Her Majesty's Commissioners in Lunacy, or in the case of his death, incapacity, or refusal to act, then to such person as shall be named by Her Majesty's Attorney-General for the time being, to determine the amount which shall be repaid by the said Charles Dickens, his executors or administrators, to the said Frederic Chapman ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... philosophy, and as he did so Marty became dazed and aghast, gazing at his boss as if Joe had turned into some unthinkable zoological oddity. Into Marty's prim-set life, with its definite boundaries and unmysterious exactness, was poured a vapor of lunacy. Finally Joe wound ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... me after I left Lord Byron by the persons in constant intercourse with him, added to those doubts which had before transiently occurred to my mind, as to the reality of the alleged disease, and the reports of his medical attendant, were far from establishing the existence of any thing like lunacy. Under this uncertainty, I deemed it right to communicate to my parents, that if I were to consider Lord Byron's past conduct as that of a person of sound mind, nothing could induce me to return to him. It therefore appeared expedient, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... for his nephew's pay.' [Footnote: Mr. Ralph Charlton Palmer was Lord Selborne's second cousin, and secretary to Lord Selborne in the Lord Chancellor's Office. He was afterwards a Commissioner in Lunacy.] ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... mar her value, by renouncing her heart, denying her purpose. For days she would tie her kerchief over her ears and eyes, and crouch in a corner, strangling her impulses. She even malingered, refused food, became dumb. And she might have succeeded in making herself salable through incipient lunacy, if through no other way, had she been able to maintain her role long enough. But some woman or baby always was falling into some emergency ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... here alone and seem sound of mind,—except for—" Harry King smiled, "except for a certain unworldliness that would pass for lunacy in the ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... paradise of her returning smiles? All this, however, came to nothing; and simply because she positively would not quarrel. And the jealousy fell through, because there was no decent subject for such a passion, unless it had settled upon an old music-master whom lunacy itself could not adopt as a rival. The quarrel meantime, which never prospered with the daughter, silently kindled on my part towards the father. His offence was this. At dinner, I naturally placed myself by the side of M., and it gave me great pleasure to touch her hand ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... is very bad for any man not to have a fixed occupation; however great his natural energy may be, it either relaxes with time, or expends itself uselessly. The mere thinker often ends by hovering on the confines of lunacy. ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... improbable circumstance were to occur, I should be heartily sorry for poor Adelais! Only imagine me with such a wife as she would make! Why I wouldn't have so transparent, white- skinned a beauty about my house all day for a mine of gold! I should be seized with lunacy before long, through mere contemplation of her very unearthliness, and be goaded into fancying her a picture, and hanging her up framed and glazed over my drawing-room mantelpiece! No, no, I'll leave Miss Cameron for you, you're just her style, I take it; but as for me, I never ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... wires. "What lunacy are you talking? You might as well ask me whether I'm going to ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... the jungle, a treat he rarely had leisure for now. He invited the Dalehams to accompany him. Noreen accepted eagerly, but her brother was obliged to decline, much to his regret. For Parry was now always in a state bordering on lunacy, and his brutal treatment of the coolies, when his assistant was not there to restrain him, several times nearly drove them into open revolt. So Dermot and ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... needs relaxation. Already it is recognised that in cases of cruelty the child may be divorced from the parent. But there is a hopeless incompatibility of temper and temperament which is not necessarily attended with cruelty. Drunkenness, lunacy, and criminality should also be regarded as valid grounds for divorce, the parent being no longer allowed to bear the name of ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... under a stone porch flung out from the front of the house. A wide porch, almost a verandah; to the delighted eyes of the Australians, who considered verandah-less houses a curious English custom, verging on lunacy. Near the house it was shut in with glass, and furnished with a few lounge chairs and a ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... of great importance. He had, it appeared, been spending some weeks in the south of France, and was full of a project the value of which had, so he said, been amply proved by experiment. To me at first sight it seemed no better than lunacy. I could not for some time even bring myself to consider it seriously. This project was to play a new system at Monte Carlo. It was a system founded on one which, devised by Henry Labouchere, had been—such was Beckett's contention—greatly improved by himself, and he and a companion had been ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... fought for years for your tests and your atmosphere with plain business men not able to understand such lunacy. Quite right ... atmosphere's all that matters. If one and one don't make two by ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker
... hushed in an unconscious darkness she would be upon that river, floating through a long, winding night towards a dim, very distant day. If she were to drink, darkness would sink upon her, and all this visible world, the continual sight of which she felt must end in lunacy, would pass from her. So great was the temptation that she did not dare to get out of bed and put the bottle away—if she did she must drink it, so she lay quite still, her face turned against the wall, trying to find courage in the thought ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... whole Christian dogma, but conceived himself to be the second embodiment [of Christ], and proclaimed himself as such and summoned the missionaries to acknowledge him." It sounds much like blasphemy, or mere lunacy; but in India one learns not to be shocked at what in Europe would be rankest blasphemy; the intention must decide the innocence or the offence. Hakim Singh "professed to work miracles, preached pure morality, but also venerated the cow,"—strange ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... against women exercising their right to vote; no disfranchised person is allowed to be judge or juror—and none but disfranchised persons can be women's peers; nor has the legislature passed laws excluding them on account of idiocy or lunacy; nor yet the courts convicted them of bribery, larceny, or any infamous crime. Clearly, then, there is no constitutional ground for the exclusion of women from the ballot-box in the State of New York. No barriers whatever stand to-day between women and the exercise of their right to vote save those ...
— An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony • Anonymous
... person being human and mortal, and not otherwise privileged than the rest of mankind, is subject to all the defects and failings of it. He may therefore be incapable of directing the government and dispensing the public treasure, &c. either by absence, by infancy, lunacy, deliracy, or apathy, whether by nature or casual infirmity, or lastly, by some invincible prejudices of mind, contracted and fixed by education and habit, with unalterable resolutions superinduced, in matters wholly inconsistent and incompatible with the laws, religion, peace, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to Sigismund. And he is still short of money; and will forever be. Why could not he give up Brandenburg altogether; since, instead of paying, he is still making new loans from Burggraf Friedrich; and the hope of ever paying were mere lunacy! Sigismund revolves these sad thoughts too, amid his world-wide diplomacies, and efforts to heal the Church. "Pledged for one hundred thousand gulden," sadly ruminates Sigismund; "and fifty thousand more borrowed since, by little and little; and more ever needed, especially ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... it is to "purge it of its offenses." We shall not educate the intelligence if we weary it by making it learn things. This is patent in these days of ours, when the victims of nervous disorders and lunacy abound, and when, even among those who are considered healthy, the material consequences of madness may explode, threatening the ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... observer you may be quite right. I may be a lunatic. I feel much like one just now. It is lunacy to go climbing back to a level in society from which I have been kicked. But as I knelt there by that little fire, before you came, yearning sprang up in me—and I had thought all that sort of yearning ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... of speech. This friend in need spent a bad hour, a hard hour with Waring. Calmness was ineffective, clear reasoning impossible. The accusation of drug-using was vehemently denied, and it was only the doctor's courageous threat to have him arrested and tried on a lunacy charge that broke down the ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... intended to excuse himself thereby. How, indeed, should he excuse himself? Louie's character was a fixed quantity to be reckoned on by all who had dealings with her. One might as well excuse oneself for letting a lunatic escape by the pretext of his lunacy. Dora perfectly understood his tone. Yet in her heart of hearts she forgave him—for she knew not what!—became his champion. There was a dry sharpness of self-judgment, a settled conviction of coming ill ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... hour, we were never more than twenty or thirty yards from the nearest lion, and often much closer. Three or four times I saw slowly gliding yellow bodies just ahead of me, but in the circumstances it would have been sheer stark lunacy to have fired. Probably six or eight times-I did not count-we were commanded to stop, ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... question, I simply reply that there is as much ill taste in the one case as in the other. All that this 'taste' can mean is that no devout delusion should be ridiculed, which is itself one of the greatest pieces of absurdity ever perpetrated. It would shield every form of 'spiritual' lunacy in the world. ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... cross of suffering to the throne of Mercy, and (let philosophers and theologians explain it as they may) instantaneous peace of mind followed the sight, or fancied sight, of that noon-tide star! The load was removed which threatened to crush my brain into lunacy, the "salt surf waves of bitterness" were stilled, and ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... developed itself into mental malady; and the irritability of weakness, to which cultivated minds are often most subjected, might have ended, even for a time, if not wisely treated, in the violence of lunacy. It was natural that the doctor's daughter should assist in the doctor's work; and, perhaps, not less natural that the patient should be fascinated by her. In a short time the cure was perfected, and ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... every one who has mastered the peculiarities of the Otto speaks of it would be considered as evidence in its favor, if we were not all considered by other cyclists to be in various stages of lunacy. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 447, July 26, 1884 • Various
... was a scientific pugilist, and once took a journey to have a sparring encounter with the Game-Chicken. Certainly, no one would have looked for a pugilist in this subdued old gentleman. He is now Commissioner of Lunacy, and makes periodical circuits through the country, attending to the business of his office. He is slightly deaf, and this may be the cause of his unaccented utterance,—owing to his not being able to regulate his voice exactly by his own ear. He is a good ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... instead of fancying that any of his fair acquaintances were angels, he had deliberately and, as some may think, in a very cold-blooded fashion, endeavored to discover what they actually were. He had observed that a good deal of prose followed the poetry of wooing and the lunacy of the honeymoon; and he thought it might be well to criticise a little before marriage as well as ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... themselves. Never been to a school before, except that wretched little dame's school, and he goes practically straight to the top of the third form—at nine years of age!" They discussed his future. There could be no sign of lunacy in discussing his future up to a certain point, but each felt that to discuss the ultimate career of a child nine years old would not be the act of a sensible parent; only foolish parents would be so fond. Yet each was dying ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... before established. In 1877, when Miss Dix was seventy-five, Dr. Charles F. Folsom, of Boston, in a book entitled "Diseases of the Mind," said of her: "Her frequent visits to our institutions of the insane now, and her searching criticisms, constitute of themselves a better lunacy commission than would be likely to be appointed ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... With all his torments and infernall terror? Myne eyes want teares thus to bewayle my woe, My brayne is dry with weeping all too long; My sighes be spent with griefe and sighing so, And I want words for to expresse my wrong. But still, distracted in loues lunacy, And Bedlam like thus rauing in my griefe, Now rayle vpon her hayre, now on her eye, Now call her Goddesse, then I call her thiefe; Now I deny her, then I doe confesse her, Now I doe curse her, then againe ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... The Atheist's Mass Cesar Birotteau The Commission in Lunacy Lost Illusions A Distinguished Provincial at Paris A Bachelor's Establishment The Secrets of a Princess The Government Clerks Pierrette A Study of Woman Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Honorine The Seamy Side of History The Magic Skin A Prince ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... English lyrist, known by his pseudonym as Barry Cornwall, born in London; was bred to the bar, and was for 30 years a Commissioner of Lunacy, and is chiefly memorable as the friend of all the eminent literary men of two generations, such as Wordsworth, Lamb, and Scott on the one hand and Carlyle, Thackeray, and Tennyson on the other; he was ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... fellow-passengers regarded him with some apprehension. They detected signs of lunacy in the young man; kept a nervous eye cocked upon the alarm cord; at the first stopping place with one accord arose and fled. One, signing herself "Lady Shareholder," had her alarming experience in her daily-paper upon ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... without any expression at all in his voice. "They used to put lunatics in snake-pits. When they were people who'd taken to lunacy for escape from reality, it made them go back to reality to escape from the snakes. Shock-treatments used to be used, later, for the same effect. We're too soft to use either treatment now. But Johnny gave himself the works. The odds are that from now on he will never want to be alone even ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... if they be not shifted anew once in a few months grow too sour for their husbands.... He that makes coats for the moon had need take measure every noon, and he that makes for women, as often to keep them from lunacy." ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... and withdrew. The lieutenant of the Britomart and the Superintendent of Enlistments were in a state of incipient lunacy. Oh, the fool! They would break him if they could. They would write to the Secretary. They would—but as they growled and cursed behind him, Eben McClure suddenly remembered that Julian Wemyss and my Lord Erskine were first cousins, ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... with a wild hilarity I flew. Gradually, a dizziness, a lunacy, had seized upon me, till finally, up-buoyed on air, and dancing mad, I sped, I spun, with grinning teeth that chattered and gibbered, and eyeballs of distraction: for a Fear, too—most cold and dreadful—had its hand of ice ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... say," broke in Frank Leven, who could really bear it no longer. "Now look here, Miss Boyce,—what do you think Mr. Hallin wants? It is just sheer lunacy—it really is—though I know I'm impertinent, and he's a great man. But I do declare he wants Aldous to give up a big common there is—oh! over beyond Girtstone, down in the plain—on Lord Maxwell's estate, and make a labourers' shoot of it! Now, I ask you! And he vows he ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... deck of the Veielland, just before landing on the sand-spit in the Sea of Timor. I often found this deafness a very serious drawback, especially when hunting. I was sometimes at a loss to hear the "coo-ee" or call of my natives. Fortunate men! they did not even understand what deafness meant. Lunacy also was unknown among them, and such a thing as suicide no native can possibly grasp or understand. In all my wanderings I only met one idiot or demented person. He had been struck by a falling tree, and was worshipped ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... heartless lunacy that runs through the sickly plagiarism of the Book of Mormon, pervades all this, and instead of the odor of sanctity you notice the flavor of bilge water, and the emigrant's own hailing sign, the all-pervading fragrance ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... tweaked Susan Hetth's heart, the social one, the maternal one having long since atrophied through want of use; for the shadow of lunacy is about the blackest of all the shadows that can fall across a ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... shufflin' the envelopes when the auld man had gone ashore: 'We're to creep round a' the south coast, standin' in for orders his weather, too. There's no question o' his lunacy now.' ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... professional acquirements. Behind him was the entire medical profession and all its literature: behind me were only Nature, many-voiced—and the patient. With us there was no lack of mutual respect, except in matters of faith and practice; but he no more tolerated my "crankiness," lunacy—perhaps imbecility—in withholding food from the sick than I his paganism in enforcing it. For the sake of the agony of friends my noble patient accepted one severe dose of medicine and one ration of predigested ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... confusion of identity, the domestic discord or the bewitchment and supposed lunacy the most powerful factor in the plot of error. Which is the most comical and which the most tragic moment in ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... Tina is a cynic," remarked Dr. Theophilus, smiling, "and I don't doubt that she has her excellent reasons, as usual; most cynics have. A woman, however, has got to believe in love to the point of lunacy or become a scoffer. What I contend, now, is that love isn't moonshine, but that however solid a thing it may be, it isn't, after all, as solid as one's duty ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... attitude with William was not a form of romantic idealism bordering on lunacy; it was instead a token of his blundering stupidity; also in a sense his four-square frankness in owning that Prussia was playing second fiddle to Austria, at this interesting moment. And, in truth, ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... effected in the administration of justice during the late session, and of which the last volume of the statute-book affords abundant evidence, principally under the heads of bankruptcy, insolvency, and lunacy. Great and salutary alterations have been effected in these departments, as well as various others; the leading statutory changes being most ably carried into effect by the Lord Chancellor, who continues to preside over ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... remarkable; but that the person so doing should be totally unprovided with a box-coat, or other similar protection, argued something so strange, that I doubt not, if he were to decide upon the applicability of the statute of lunacy to a traveller in the mail, the palm would certainly have been awarded to me, and not to my late companion. Well, on we rolled, and heavily as the rain poured down, so relieved did I feel at my change ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... hypocrite, as one who makes himself out worse than he is. I should rather call him an inverted idealist, for, with high hopes and generous expectations, he entered into the world, and lacerated by rage at the cruelty, foulness, and lunacy he there discovered, he poured out his denunciations upon the crawling forms of life whose filthy minds were well housed in their apelike and corrupting flesh—a bag of loathsome carrion, ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... Religieuse chez les Grecs: 6 tomes: Groningue—1840), alleges a case (which, however, we do not remember to have met) where the client ventured to object:—"Mon roi Apollon, je crois que tu es fou." But cases are obvious which look this way, though not going so far as to charge lunacy upon the lord of prophetic vision. Battus, who was destined to be the eldest father of Cyrene, so memorable as the first ground of Greek intercourse with the African shore of the Mediterranean, never consulted the Delphic Oracle in reference to his eyes, which happened to be diseased, but ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... burgomaster, was forced to make police regulations concerning the domestic animals, as, seized with lunacy, they rendered the streets of ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... Earl of Bradford was brought before the Lord Chancellor, to be examined upon application for a statute of lunacy against him, the chancellor asked him, "How many legs has a sheep?"—"Does your lordship mean," answered Lord Bradford, "a live sheep or a dead sheep?"—"Is it not the same thing?" said the chancellor. "No, my ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... believe, too, that it is very bad for any man not to have a fixed occupation; however great his natural energy may be, it either relaxes with time, or expends itself uselessly. The mere thinker often ends by hovering on the confines of lunacy. ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... he is still short of money; and will forever be. Why could not he give up Brandenburg altogether; since, instead of paying, he is still making new loans from Burggraf Friedrich; and the hope of ever paying were mere lunacy! Sigismund revolves these sad thoughts too, amid his world-wide diplomacies, and efforts to heal the Church. "Pledged for one hundred thousand gulden," sadly ruminates Sigismund; "and fifty thousand more borrowed since, by little and little; and more ever needed, especially for this ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... truth in this instance, by a celebrated remark which he made on the characteristic distinction of Csar, in comparison with other revolutionary disturbers; for, whereas others had attempted the overthrow of the state in a continued paroxysm of fury, and in a state of mind resembling the lunacy of intoxication, that Csar, on the contrary, among that whole class of civil disturbers, was the only one who had come to the task in a temper of sobriety and moderation, (unum ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... Fennimore leaves the house before us. Then I will take the girls to Brighton, and you and the Actons might keep watch over him, and if he should persist in his infatuation—why, in the state of his head, it would almost come to a commission of lunacy. Juliana said so!' ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and then the wrath of Andrew, previously in a crescent state, actually dilated to a plenilunar orb. The Westmoreland people (for at the lakes it was we knew him) expounded his condition to us by saying that he was "maffled;" which word means "perplexed in the extreme." His wrath did not pass into lunacy; it produced simple distraction; an uneasy fumbling with the idea; like that of an old superannuated dog who longs to worry, but cannot for want of teeth. In this condition you will judge that he was rather tedious. And in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... laugh over these romances. When unable to refute their theories, it could sneer at the authors, and answer them to the satisfaction of the generation in which they lived, at least by a general charge of lunacy. Some of their notions were no doubt as absurd as those of the astronomer in "Rasselas", who tells Imlac that he has for five years possessed the regulation of the weather, and has got the secret of making to the different nations an equal ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... faces of his dead friend and the pale woman were strangely blended, nor of the fancy that he was followed. Once, as he passed the hospital where Feval died, a faint hint seemed to flash and vanish from the clouds of his lunacy, and almost identify the dogging goblin with the figure of his dream; but the conception instantly mixed with a disconnected remembrance that this was Christmas eve, and then slipped from him, and was lost. He did not pause there, but strode on. But just there, ...
— The Ghost • William. D. O'Connor
... at last bowed to me. They were a little pale, but quite collected. "Excellency," they said, "forgive him; it is not his fault. He has been frightened into semi-insanity." "Hsia hu-tu-lo," they said. Yes, that is the phrase, frightened into semi-lunacy. They are employing this for everyone. The tragedy has been so immense, the strain has been endured for so many months, there has been so much of it, that all minds excepting those of the common people ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... "the parlour" (though he guessed that the Madison family called it "the reception room," now) this was the place where his aunt received callers who, she justifiably hoped, would not linger. Altogether, it struck him that it might be a good test-room for an alienist: no incipient lunacy would remain ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... in sic favour as the laird of Redgauntlet? He was knighted at Lonon Court, wi' the king's ain sword; and being a red-hot prelatist, he came down here, rampauging like a lion, with commission of lieutenancy (and of lunacy, for what I ken), to put down a' the Whigs and Covenanters in the country. Wild wark they made of it; for the Whigs were as dour as the Cavaliers were fierce, and it was which should first tire the other. ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... gave indications of lunacy. He marched up to the road-gate, and stood close to it, so that the barbed wire top was even with his hair; then he backed off, and gazed first at the gate, then at the bewildered Hicks, while he grinned at the dazed squad in ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... have made him anything! Anything in the wide world. He could have gone to the world's end. I would have helped him. I made him, didn't I, Polly? Didn't I create that man? Doesn't he owe everything to me? And to reward me, just when everything was nicely arranged, by this lunacy that spoiled everything!" ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... into a pit of lunacy. "They call it war," cried the speaker; "but I call it murder." And he went on to picture to them what was happening in Europe at that hour—he brought the awful nightmare before their eyes, he showed them homes blown to pieces, cities given to the flames, the ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... indignities past expression, they (the barbarians) would consider at their leisure whether it would please them to spare our necks; a villany that gallant men could not have sanctioned, an which too certainly was not hurled back in their teeth as it ought to have been. We pass the lunacy of tempting barbarians to a perfidy almost systematic in their policy, by consenting to a conference outside the British cantonments, not even within range of the British guns, not even within the overlooking of British eyes. We pass the lunacy of taking out sixteen ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... a ludicrous description of Menou see the Memoirs of Marmont:— "Clever and gay, he was an agreeable talker, but a great liar. He was not destitute of some education. His character, one of the oddest in the world, came very near to lunacy: Constantly writing, always in motion in his room, riding for exercise every day, he was never able to start on any necessary of useful journey. . . . When, later, Bonaparte, then First Consul, gave ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... [It was an Appeal in Lunacy. No other appeals save in Lunacy lie from the Court of Chancery to the King in Council, and these are very rare. Drax v. Grosvenor is reported in ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... of the paragraphs that deserves to be quoted, discusses madness, or, as we would call it, lunacy, and sums up the causes, the symptoms, and the treatment quite as well as that has ever been done in the same ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... the pieces of sheer lunacy," he observed, "that ever came under my observation, this is the worst. Here it ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... their eyes out. But consider how easy it is to make people stare by being absurd. I may do it by going into a drawing-room without my shoes. You remember the gentleman in The Spectator, who had a commission of lunacy taken out against him for his extreme singularity, such as never wearing a wig, but a night-cap. Now, Sir, abstractedly, the night-cap was best; but, relatively, the advantage was overbalanced by his making the boys run ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... A Bachelor's Establishment Colonel Chabert A Woman of Thirty The Commission in Lunacy The Government Clerks A Distinguished Provincial at Paris Scenes from a Courtesan's Life The Firm of Nucingen A Man ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac
... two extracts from the novel "Der Mondschtige,"[18] the title of which is misleading since it in no way treats of one afflicted with lunacy but of a veritable moon lover, presumably our poet himself. There the nephew, Ludwig Licht(!), writes to his uncle: "It is now three months since I had a very serious quarrel with my friend, a quarrel which almost separated us, for he mocked at an entire world which is to me so immeasurably ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... goods trade had by 1860 assumed proportions which twenty years previously could not have entered into the wildest dreams. Indeed, had a prophet stood in Hanover square at that epoch, and portrayed the future, he would have been met with the charge of lunacy. $30,000 rent for a store was not more absurd than the idea that trade would ever wing its way to a neighborhood chiefly known through the police reports, and only visited by respectable people in the work of philanthropy. The enterprise of New York houses, in either following ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... of these couples, and when the father endeavoured to carry it away an action was brought which resulted in the affirmation of the mother's right to its custody. The circumstance in which a fourth sister who joined the community was abducted by her brothers led to an inquiry in lunacy and to her final settlement at Spaxton. A few years after the establishment of the "Abode of Love,'' a peculiarly gross scandal, in which Prince and one of his female followers were involved, led to the secession of some of his most faithful friends, who were unable ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of the sublime surprises of all war. The commander, whose men sit that way in the saddle and toss those jokes shoulder over shoulder down the line, dare tackle forlorn hopes that would seem sheer leap-year lunacy to the martinet with twenty ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... see me, and talk, so he said, about something of great importance. He had, it appeared, been spending some weeks in the south of France, and was full of a project the value of which had, so he said, been amply proved by experiment. To me at first sight it seemed no better than lunacy. I could not for some time even bring myself to consider it seriously. This project was to play a new system at Monte Carlo. It was a system founded on one which, devised by Henry Labouchere, had been—such was Beckett's contention—greatly improved by himself, ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... old thing. But it's pretty obvious, isn't it, that she wants us to believe she knows what we're after. She's vindictive. She imagines she owes me a grudge on my brother's account. It might soothe her to think she had made me nervous. And by gad—it sounds like lunacy, and mind you I'm not propounding it for fact!—there's just one chance that she really does know where ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... her, that it has nothing to fear—that the person is essentially gentle and benignant. On the contrary, cruel people attract malevolent phantoms, distinguishable also to the cat by their smell, a smell typical of cruelty—often of homicidal lunacy (I have particularly noticed how cats have shrunk from people who have afterwards become dangerously insane). Is this sense of smell, then, the keynote to the halo of mystery that has for all times surrounded the cat—that has led to its bitter ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... if you saw it. In truth, Merimee was the unconscious parent of much we may think of dubious significance in later French literature. It is as if there were nothing to tell of in this world but various forms of hatred, and a love that is like lunacy; and the only other world, a world of maliciously ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... on horseback a few paces off, had a mind to ride forward and protest. To his mind the order spelt sheer lunacy. The barrier, to begin with, stood close on twenty feet high, built of rough timbers staked in the ground and densely packed with furze. Nothing could be seen behind it but the top of the second barrier, which at fifty yards distance guarded the approach from Helleston. This ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas. Shame, conscience, and reason continually disallow and ignore what consciousness presents; and what are they but habit and latent instinct asserting themselves and forcing us to disregard our midsummer madness? Idiocy and lunacy are merely reversions to a condition in which present consciousness is in the ascendant and has escaped the control of unconscious forces. We speak of people being "out of their senses," when they have in fact fallen ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... combinations. That idea has got to be killed! And the regulation of security issues of railroads—preposterous! Why, the President's crazy! If Mall and Gossitch and Wells don't oppose that in the Senate, I'll see that they are up before the lunacy commission—and I have some influence with ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... as the moon, to sweep the cobwebs off the sky"—in other words, to set the Church, our cathedrals and bishops' palaces in order—and augured well; but this old woman journeyed not alone, in her hand she carried a broom (Brougham). It may have been a case of ultra-lunacy this journey of ninety-nine times as high as the moon, and "one cannot help thinking," said a writer of that period, "of the song, 'Long life to the Moon'; but this saying became common, 'If that time goes the coach, pray what time goes ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... more or less uncomfortable in consequence of my consciousness that all the sensible people of my acquaintance are laughing at her also, I am inclined to watch her progress with a sympathy which includes the hope that she will work out of her present state of lunacy into a more practical field, rather than that she will relapse into the stereotyped woman whom we all know. When, however, Josephine asked me the other day to specify the field, I was obliged to admit that my ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... to natural physical health. It is no use saying they are so few. Two millenniums ago, how many were the Anglo-Saxons? Three millenniums ago, how many were the Latins? Supposing the white race in America failed. The statistics of lunacy—of that alone—are a fearful Mene, Tekel Upharsin written on our walls, for any Daniel with vision to read. I think Naure must also take into account these possibilities. Does she keep in reserve hereditary ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... bless my soul!' Lord John's transparent skin flushed up to his white hair. 'Don't tell me any responsible person is going even to consider the lunacy of tampering with the ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... freedom. And, after all, if we have to choose our masters, it is less disgrace to put up with Roman emperors than with German priestesses.' Thus the common people: the chieftains used more violent language. 'It was Civilis' lunacy that had driven them to war. He wanted to remedy his private troubles[555] by ruining his country. The Batavians had incurred the wrath of heaven by blockading Roman legions, murdering Roman officers, and plunging ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... calamities; battles yet more so; earthquakes, the famine, the pestilence, though rarer, are visitations yet wider in their desolation. Sickness and commercial ill-luck, if narrower, are more frequent scourges. And most of all, or with most darkness in its train, comes the sickness of the brain—lunacy—which, visiting nearly one thousand in every million, must, in every populous nation, make many ruins in each particular day. 'Babylon in ruins,' says a great author, 'is not so sad a sight as a human soul overthrown by lunacy.' But there is a sadder even than that,—the ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... State or private asylums were huddled together in the poorhouses of the various counties. Their condition was heartrending. They were constantly exposed to neglect, frequently to extremes of cold and hunger, and sometimes to brutality: thus mild lunacy often became raving madness. For some years before my election to the Senate the need of a reform had been urged upon the legislative committees by a physician —Dr. Willard of Albany. He had taken this evil condition of things much to heart, and year after year had come before ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... being made by the Guardian to establish its preeminence in Lancashire as a ridiculous waste of money, and plainly intimated that they would never attempt to enter into a competition which, in their opinion, savoured of stark lunacy. ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... mind from thinking of itself, because such work, not being of a religious character, partook of the nature of sin. It is no wonder that such a rule of life had not infrequently the most distressing consequences. Newton himself admits that his preaching had the reputation of driving people into lunacy. In a letter asking that steps may be taken to remove one poor victim to an asylum he says: "I hope the poor girl is not without some concern for her soul; and, indeed, I believe a concern of this kind was the beginning of her disorder. ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... abstract thought and to all learning which desired to be something for itself, even though you demeaned yourselves as if you merely haughtily despised all this. As far as you possibly could, you held from you the men who did such things as well as their propositions; the reproach of lunacy, or the advice that they be sent to the mad-house, was the thanks from you on which they might usually count. They, in their turn, did not venture to express themselves regarding you with the same frankness, since they were dependent upon you; but ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... something wrong about his mind. And something wrong about St. John's mind there ultimately proves to be. It flashes across Isola that this is the case, and before long her worst suspicions are confirmed. At last St. John breaks out into open lunacy, and dies deranged—a fate which is partly the cause, and partly the consequence, of his continual indulgence in such wild theories about the relations of man and wife. It is not every day that we have the valuable lesson of the rights of wives so plainly or so practically put before us, ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... fond of getting up early in the morning and going out, and in such a village this was an eccentricity bordering almost on lunacy. At five o'clock she was often wandering about her garden. She was a great lover of order in the house, and kept it well under control, but I do not think I ever surprised her when she was so busy that she would not easily, and without ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... followed the child's death! Cyriax raved as if he had really been seized with the lunacy whose pretence helped him to beg his bread. Besides, he gave himself up to unbridled indulgence in brandy, and, when drunk, he was capable of the most brutal acts. The dead Juli's mother, who, spite of an evil youth ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... was light this long while and not good in the head, and at the last lunacy came on her and she was tied and bound. Sometimes singing and dancing she does ...
— New Irish Comedies • Lady Augusta Gregory
... and instantly shot the bolt. Thereupon he wiped his brow, though the day was cold. He had done his duty to the community by shutting up a wandering and probably dangerous maniac. Smith isn't a hard man at all, but he had room in his brain only for that one idea of lunacy. He was not imaginative enough to ask himself whether the man might not be perishing with cold and hunger. Meantime, at first, the maniac made a great deal of noise in the lodge. Mrs. Smith was screaming upstairs, where she had locked herself in her bedroom; but Amy Foster sobbed piteously ...
— Amy Foster • Joseph Conrad
... conjunction, semi-sextile, sextile, or trine, to Jupiter, is exceeding fortunate; and she is said by the old Astrologers to govern the brain, stomach, bowels, left eye of the male, and right eye of the female. Her usual diseases are rheumatism, consumption, palsy, cholic, apoplexy, vertigo, lunacy, scrophula, smallpox, dropsy, etc.; also most diseases peculiar to young children." [363] Such teaching is not a whit in advance of Plutarch's odd dictum that the moon has a "special hand ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... who enjoyed a certain mild fame in his day. The last song, "set in his sicknesse," was a song supposed to be sung by a mad woman, "From rosy bowers." The recitative is magnificent; two of the sections in tempo are fine, especially the second; the last portion is meant to depict raving lunacy, and does so. It is by no means one of Purcell's greatest efforts, and he apparently had no notion of making a dramatic exit from this world. If the doctors knew what disease killed him, they never told. The professional libeller of the ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... be just. You can afford to. Your wife may be a fiend in human form; and if you insist upon it, I've nothing to say. But this last notion of yours is nothing but the most wretched absurdity. It's worse. It's lunacy." ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... Englishmen are, adventurers to the backbone; and all our magnificent muster-roll of colonies, each of which will in time become a great nation, testify to the extraordinary value of the spirit of adventure which at first sight looks like a mild form of lunacy. 'Adventurer' — he that goes out to meet whatever may come. Well, that is what we all do in the world one way or another, and, speaking for myself, I am proud of the title, because it implies a brave heart and a trust in Providence. ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... with much tact, of the lunacy of her husband and the imprisonment of Louise. At first she wept much, uttering sorrowful cries. Then, the first spasms of grief over, the poor creature, weak and unsettled, consoled herself by degrees in seeing herself and children surrounded by comforts which ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... monasteries were held to be capable of curing disease. The Latin Church had either a saint or a relic of a saint to cure nearly every ill that flesh is heir to. St. Apollonia was invoked against toothache; St. Avertin against lunacy; St. Benedict against stone; St. Clara against sore eyes; St. Herbert in hydrophobia; St. John in epilepsy; St. Maur in gout; St. Pernel in ague; St. Genevieve in fever; St. Sebastian in plague; St. ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... now," the good old soul went on to say, "if Simon's wentured out without his hat to cool a head-ache: his grand-father—peace be with him! died, poor man, in a Lunacy 'Sylum: alack, Si, I wish you mayn't be going the same road. No, no, I hope not—he's always so prudent-like, and wise, and good; so kind, too, to a poor old fool like me:" and the poor old fool ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... his person being human and mortal, and not otherwise privileged than the rest of mankind, is subject to all the defects and failings of it. He may therefore be incapable of directing the government and dispensing the public treasure, &c. either by absence, by infancy, lunacy, deliracy, or apathy, whether by nature or casual infirmity, or lastly, by some invincible prejudices of mind, contracted and fixed by education and habit, with unalterable resolutions superinduced, in matters wholly inconsistent and incompatible with ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... what little doubt I might have entertained of my poor friend's insanity was put finally at rest. I had no alternative but to conclude him stricken with lunacy, and I became seriously anxious about getting him home. While I was pondering upon what was best to be done, Jupiter's voice ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... putting on record an implacability that was confessedly impotent. This was the very lunacy of malice. Mortifying it might certainly seem for the members of a supreme court, like the General Assembly, to be baffled by those of a subordinate court: but still, since each party must be regarded as representing far larger interests than any personal to themselves, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... in serious disapproval. "I did. I get seizures of confidential lunacy once in a while. Are you ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... son apart, surrounded by intriguers, who did all they could to set him against his father, George seems to have behaved with great discretion. In the years that follow, I can conceive no position more difficult than that in which he found himself every time his father relapsed into lunacy. That he should have by every means opposed those who through jealousy stood between him and the regency was only natural. It cannot be said that at any time did he show anxiety to rule, so long as there was any immediate chance of the ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... had she done to bring it about? Nothing, simply nothing, except to command it! She had not even signed cheques. Mr. Foulger had signed the cheques! Mr. Foulger, who set down the whole enterprise as incomprehensible lunacy! Mr. Foulger, who had never been to aught but a smoking-concert in his life, and who could not pronounce the name of Beethoven without hesitations! The great deed had cost money, and it would cost more money; it would probably cost four hundred pounds ere ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... impracticable, which is extended beyond common effects, or comprises many intermediate operations. Many that presume to laugh at projectors, would consider a flight through the air in a winged chariot, and the movement of a mighty engine by the steam of water as equally the dreams of mechanick lunacy; and would hear, with equal negligence, of the union of the Thames and Severn by a canal, and the scheme of Albuquerque, the viceroy of the Indies, who in the rage of hostility had contrived to make Egypt a barren desert, by turning the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... suborned witnesses to prove that there was black blood in the veins of Valentine Hawkehurst. If he had not been opposed to so strong an opponent as Dr. Jedd, he might have tried to get a commission of lunacy to declare Charlotte Halliday a madwoman, and thus invalidate her marriage. As it was, he knew that he could do nothing. He had failed. All was said in ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... my brain," Thomson continued, "a secret weakness, perhaps even a dash of lunacy, and I might be quite reasonably the master-spy of the world. I was in Berlin six weeks ago, Ambrose. There wasn't a soul who ever knew it. I made no report, ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... mounted in it to a height of three hundred feet. But the first glider of whom we have any full knowledge is Otto Lilienthal of Berlin. He devoted his whole life to the study of aviation at a time when in Germany people looked upon such a pursuit as little better than lunacy. The principal professor of mathematics at the Berlin Gewerbe Academie, on hearing that Lilienthal was experimenting with aeronautics, advised him to spend no money on such things—a piece of advice which, Lilienthal ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... have formed the most lenient of tribunals, and have suffered him to depart in peace. They are not to be charged with a lack of wisdom in not foreseeing what must have appeared to be the ravings of lunacy, had it been deliberately set down by some inspired prophet. Neither the man nor his cause commanded much respect. We, who know that the French Emperor is the first man of the age, as well in intellect as in position, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... disgust as Hamlet is made to show, is no counterfeit, but the real face of absolute aversion,—of irreconcilable alienation. It may be said he puts on the madman; but then he should only so far put on this counterfeit lunacy as his own real distraction will give him leave; that is, incompletely, imperfectly; not in that confirmed, practised way, like a master of his art, or as Dame Quickly would say, "like one ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... these as the accepted data by which RABIES may measure his chances for life in case he executes his avowed purpose, but I would impress upon him the fact that these are necessary outside of New-York only. Here proof of the lunacy of the maiden aunt would ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 8, May 21, 1870 • Various
... nourishment, and purged from the spleen"; Gk. melancholia, black bile. See Sams. Agon. 600, "humours black That mingle with thy fancy"; and Nash's Terrors of the Night (1594): "(Melancholy) sinketh down to the bottom like the lees of the wine, corrupteth the blood, and is the cause of lunacy." ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... if it was an invariable sign of lunacy in America to take your breakfast in bed. Lucy couldn't say. All she knew was that nobody ever took it so in Greyridge, Vermont, unless they were ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... firing now became incessant. The veteran in Yates was aroused. He was like an old war horse who again feels the intoxicating smell of battle smoke. The lunacy of gunpower shone in his ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... from the sublime to things that are common, we are compelled to say that not a few consider the effects of the moon so great, that they would not kill their pigs but when it was on the increase. Then every one has heard of the effects the moon has on the human mind; whence the term "lunacy." There are many tribes and nations that reckon time by moons, and not by years, as we now do. This reminds us of a story which shows the credulity of the savages of North America, and how they calculated ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... he said insinuatingly, "this is pretty bad, I admit. I think, myself, that Brass is off his head. He 'phoned me once about this, but he's such a josher, and it was such wild-eyed lunacy that I thought he was kidding. You'd have thought so, too, in my place. But we can pull through yet. We can convince the sports that this high-moral business is only for the church people, and the civic purity push. Why, Brassfield himself couldn't ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... known as "Barry Cornwall," was a barrister and commissioner in lunacy. Most probably he assumed the pseudonym for the same reason that Dr. Paris published his 'Philosophy in Sport made Science in Earnest' anonymously—because he apprehended that, if known, it might compromise ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... I shall be waiting to see you at eleven o'clock to-morrow morning. The matter is so utterly vital to the happiness of all your family, that I cannot imagine you will fail to come." Now, what's the meaning of it? Is it sheer impudence, or lunacy, or what? ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... that all books admitted should be models of style; even a purist must admit that one of the greatest charms of literature is its infinite variety. But when book after book is filled with such specimens of literary lunacy as this, one is tempted to believe that Homer and Shakespeare, to say nothing of Thackeray and Hawthorne, have ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... has been well illustrated during the past forty years in the flourishing county of Glamorgan in Wales, as is shown by Dr. R.S. Stewart ("The Relationship of Wages, Lunacy, and Crime in South Wales," Journal of Mental Science, January, 1904). The staple industry here is coal, 17 per cent of the population being directly employed in coal-mining, and wages are determined by the sliding scale as it is called, ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... destructive doctrines, arose to speak, but the intolerant cried out: "Away with him! We want no more bigotry and one-hundred-years-behind-the time speeches!" At the suggestion of the chairman he was hurried from the room to appear before a commission on lunacy. ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... every other passion subservient to itself, till it becomes the sole tyrant of our desires and our aversions." Of all the poets, perhaps, he alone has portrayed the mental diseases, melancholy, delirium, lunacy, with such inexpressible and, in every respect, definite truth, that the physician may enrich his observations from them in the same manner ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... systems, and perhaps approximated more to that black magic which desires power for the sake of power alone than to any transcendental type. Thus it included the power to render the magician invisible, to change his bodily shape, to produce an enchanted sleep, to induce lunacy, and to inflict death ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... to be made laughing stocks for the whole business world to jeer at?" he asked as he paced the office furiously, "or to be bankrupted through methods that border strongly on insanity? For it is nothing else, Mr. Denton, but raving lunacy! No man in his sober senses would entertain such a plan for the space of a second! Why, your orders about those sweat-shops were simply ridiculous! Are we to pay more for our goods than they are really worth, and then make a charity organization of ourselves and give them ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon
... God, to punish guilty men. When resorted to, as a means of relieving fools of their earnings, it is sacrilegious; and those who support such impious humbugs can be excused from deadly sin only on the grounds of lunacy. ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... almonds and divers ingredients, tending to make a sort of "compote" of it. Taken as it is taken here, it must have a tremendous effect on the nerves. Mr. Olphert thinks it has had much to do with the increase of lunacy in Ireland of late years. From his official connection with the asylum at Letterkenny, he knows that while it used to accommodate the lunatics of three counties, it is now hardly adequate to the needs of ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... marriage as a vicious institution, that was but another phase of the partial lunacy which affected him: for to no man were purity and fidelity more essential elements in the idea of real love. Again, De Quincey speaks of Shelley's "fearlessness, his gracious nature, his truth, his purity from all ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... his usual self once more. He had assumed that air which a practical man like Britt found an aggravating, teasing pose or a kind of lunacy with which common sense could not cope. Elias slowly spread his umbrella. He stood ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... that men who can command attention need no testimonial from a commission in lunacy. People who have lived and are living are the only ones who have a message for living ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... million a day! And so does every doctor. And so does everybody—including you —for that matter. And THAT was the important thing that authorized you to venture to disobey my orders and imperil that woman's life! Look here, Hester Gray, this is pure lunacy; that girl COULDN'T tell a lie that was intended to injure a person. The thing is impossible —absolutely impossible. You know it yourselves—both of you; you ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... boys among these men who, in spite of their lunacy, had an eye to business, and begged pathetically for coppers, though of what use they could be to them in that place I cannot imagine. I saw no girls under twelve years of age. There were several boys who appeared ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... and all proposals of marriage were submitted to the Local Elders' Conference; and in each case the Conference arrived at its decision by consulting the Lot. To some critics this practice appeared a symptom of lunacy. It was not so regarded by the Brethren. It was their way of seeking the guidance of God; and when they were challenged to justify their conduct, they appealed to the example of the eleven Apostles as recorded in Acts i. 26, and also to the promise ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... he has retired to an eligible island where he may repent his cruelty to his daughter. Julio tells his tale, and goes mad again. The apostrophe to Lunacy which follows is marked "Beautiful" by Aytoun, and is in the spirit of Charles Lamb's remark that madness has pleasures ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... a single hair of a saint had been dipped was used as a purgative; water in which St. Remy's ring had been dipped cured fevers; wine in which the bones of a saint had been dipped cured lunacy; oil from a lamp burning before the tomb of St. Gall cured tumours; St. Valentine cured epilepsy; St. Christopher, throat diseases; St. Eutropius, dropsy; St. Ovid, deafness; St. Gervase, rheumatism; St. Apollonia, toothache; St. Vitus, St. Anthony, and a multitude of other saints, the maladies ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... difficult to adjust his feelings and perceptions to its peculiarities. Coming out of the sweet sanity of the Bolton household, this was by contrast the maddest Vanity Fair one could conceive. It seemed to him a feverish, unhealthy atmosphere in which lunacy would be easily developed. He fancied that everybody attached to himself an exaggerated importance, from the fact of being at the national capital, the center of political influence, the fountain of patronage, ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 5. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... her an object that appeared worthy of any exertion and sacrifice for its attainment. She had witnessed the intense misery beneath which the minister struggled, or, to speak more accurately, had ceased to struggle. She saw that he stood on the verge of lunacy, if he had not already stepped across it. It was impossible to doubt, that, whatever painful efficacy there might be in the secret sting of remorse, a deadlier venom had been infused into it by the hand that proffered ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... lazy conference of leaves made eloquent) because of many unfinished sentences. "Oh, YOU know what I mean, dear!" one would say as a last resort. And she-why, bless her heart! of course, she always did. . . . Heigho, youth's was a pleasant lunacy. . ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... madness; and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is, that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... it was a toy, an absurd and pitiful toy. Real genius and lunacy had many an over-lapping line, Jerry reflected as he approached to look inside. But he found Winslow in a room surrounded by a network of curving, latticed struts. The machine was no makeshift of a demented builder: it was a beautiful bit of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... N. disordered reason, disordered intellect; diseased mind, unsound mind, abnormal mind; derangement, unsoundness; psychosis; neurosis; cognitive disorder; affective disorder[obs3]. insanity, lunacy; madness &c. adj.; mania, rabies, furor, mental alienation, aberration; paranoia, schizophrenia; dementation[obs3], dementia, demency[obs3]; phrenitis[obs3], phrensy[obs3], frenzy, raving, incoherence, wandering, delirium, calenture of the brain[obs3]; delusion, hallucination; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... here this morning, Katharine," he resumed, with a change of voice, "to ask you to forget my folly, my bad temper, my inconceivable behavior. I came, Katharine, to ask whether we can't return to the position we were in before this—this season of lunacy. Will you take me back, Katharine, once more ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... our own contemporaries, men of character and intellect whom all must respect. The situation may, as it seems to me, be summed up in a simple alternative. The one supposition is that there has been an outbreak of lunacy extending over two generations of mankind, and two great continents—a lunacy which assails men or women who are otherwise eminently sane. The alternative supposition is that in recent years there has come to us from divine sources a new revelation ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... nobody could understand it. The doctor treated him for water on the brain, hypnotic irresponsibility and hereditary lunacy. Meanwhile his business suffered, and his health grew worse. He seemed to be living upside down. His days seemed to have neither beginning nor end, but to be all middle. There was no time for exercise or recreation. ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... for them to take cognizance of any matter of property, belonging to the subjects of this kingdom. But, in plantation or admiralty causes, which arise out of the jurisdiction of this kingdom, and in matters of lunacy and ideocy (being a special flower of the prerogative) with regard to these, although they may eventually involve questions of extensive property, the privy council continues to have cognizance, being the court of appeal in such causes: or, rather, the appeal lies to ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... tendencies, we apply, in the general way, the term "Insane Diathesis." This diathesis may be inherited or acquired. Those who are born to become insane do not necessarily spring from insane parents or from an ancestry having any apparent taint of lunacy in the blood. But they do receive from their progenitors oftentimes certain impressions upon their mental and moral, as well as upon their physical being, which impressions, like iron molds, fix and shape ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... difficult to understand. For Air and many other things are Bodies, though not Flesh and Bone, or any other grosse body, to bee discerned by the eye. But when our Saviour speaketh to the Devill, and commandeth him to go out of a man, if by the Devill, be meant a Disease, as Phrenesy, or Lunacy, or a corporeal Spirit, is not the speech improper? can Diseases heare? or can there be a corporeall Spirit in a Body of Flesh and Bone, full already of vitall and animall Spirits? Are there not therefore Spirits, that neither have Bodies, nor are meer Imaginations? ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... Delphine de Father Goriot Eugenie Grandet Cesar Birotteau Melmoth Reconciled Lost Illusions A Distinguished Provincial at Paris The Commission in Lunacy Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Modeste Mignon The Firm of Nucingen Another Study of Woman A Daughter of ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... enlistment, voluntary or (better still from the Junker point of view) compulsory. It seems to me that a nation which tolerates such insensate methods and outrageous risks must shortly perish from sheer lunacy. And it is all pure superstition: the retaining of the methods of Edward the First in the reign of George the Fifth. I therefore suggest that the first lesson of the war is that the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs be reduced to the level of a simple Prime Minister, ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... a liven soul, gentle or simple, can stand on level ground. As to getten up hill to the church, 'tis perfect lunacy. And I speak of foot-passengers. As to horses and carriage, 'tis murder to think of 'em. I am going to send straight as a line into the breakfast-room, and say 'tis a closer.... Hullo—here's Clerk Crickett and John Day a-comen! Now just look at 'em and picture ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... more villainously than the landlord had done, he returned to his place, which perhaps was well, as I was rapidly approaching the verge of lunacy. However, I followed the innkeeper up a crazy staircase, along various rambling corridors, and finally into a sparsely-furnished but comfortable apartment. Uttering a sigh of relief at the sight ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... was day-dream and what was sleep-dream in the content of his unconsciousness. And here, in the unforgetable crypts of man's unwritten history, unthinkable and unrealizable, like passages of nightmare or impossible adventures of lunacy, he encountered the monsters created of man's first morality that ever since have vexed him into the spinning of fantasies to elude them or do battle ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... with the spurs, he went on, pursued by the maledictions of Sir Asinus. He had cause. Jacques had charged him with lunacy; said he designed assassinating the King; kept from him the very names of the combatants; and was going to ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... will not particularly care to know or remember what factory-brand was borne by the teapots and saucers of our grandmothers, and what Staffordshire modeller or woodcutter was responsible for the usually atrocious decorations of those utensils. They will smile but once over the pleasant lunacy of a hunt, printed and illustrated, among New England cottages for forgotten and more or less damaged crockery. The Youngest Member herself—by that time promoted probably to the ranks of the matrons whose treasures she delights to ransack—will be slow to recall and understand her enthusiasm ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... The man and his cow have taught me a great lesson, which I shall recall when I keep a cow. I can recommend this cow, if anybody wants one, as a steady boarder, whose keeping will cost the owner little; but, if her milk is at all like her voice, those who drink it are on the straight road to lunacy. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Marsh's Library, not then rebuilt, where he turned over with infinite interest Swift's well-noted folios. Then on to Trinity College, where there was much that was curious; to Swift's Hospital, where, from his office in the Lunacy Commission, he was quite at home. He at once characteristically assumed the air of command, introducing himself with grave dignity to the authorities, by-and-bye pointing out matters which might be amended, among ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald
... of the word. She refuses the count's millions from a silly fear of telling people that she belongs to the Chalusse family. She threatened her brother, but she would never have carried her threats into execution. And she prefers her present position to such a fortune. What lunacy!" But, although he was disappointed and angry, he did not by any means despair. "Fortunately for me," he thought, "this proud and haughty lady has a son somewhere in the world. And she'll do for him what she ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... patients. Patients may present themselves in a week's time. Patients may communicate with Mr. Armadale, or Mr. Armadale may communicate with patients. A note may be smuggled out of the house, and may reach the Commissioners in Lunacy. Even in the case of an unlicensed establishment like mine, those gentlemen—no! those chartered despots in a land of liberty—have only to apply to the Lord Chancellor for an order, and to enter (by heavens, to enter ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... passing, repassing, encountering, evading, vanishing into shop-doors and emerging from them, dispersing down the side streets, and swarming out of them. It was a scene that possessed the beholder with singular fascination, and in its effect of universal lunacy, it might well have seemed the last phase of a world presently to be destroyed. They who were in it but not of it, as they fancied, though there was no reason for this,—looked on it amazed, and at last their own errands being accomplished, and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... finished! Do you think I would not have shot myself last year, had I not luckily recollected that Mrs. C * * and Lady N * *, and all the old women in England would have been delighted;—besides the agreeable 'Lunacy,' of the 'Crowner's Quest,' and the regrets of two or three or half a dozen? Be assured that I would live for two reasons, or more;—there are one or two people whom I have to put out of the world, and as many into it, before I ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... was in the second stage of panic, which is next door to collapse. I tried to cry, but could only raise a squeak like a bat. A wheel started to run round in my head, and, when I looked at the moon, I saw that it was rotating in time. Things were very bad with me. It was 'Mwanga who saved me from lunacy. He had been appointed my keeper, and the first I knew of it was a violent kick in the ribs. I rolled over on the grass down a short slope. The brute squatted beside me, and prodded ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... mind, trying to excuse defection, he told himself, as he trudged to and fro, that he was not a fit man for Flagg. Nevertheless he cursed himself for being so weak. He had read stories of woman's subjugation of the famous and the strong and had wondered what sort of lunacy had overtaken such men. Here he was making an invalid's tantrums an excuse to give up his work and dangle at the skirts of an unknown girl; and he knew it was because of the mystery of her real identity and because his jealousy was afire on account ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... annual cost of $16,000. In it nothing European, either in the way of drugs or treatment, is tried. There is a dispensary connected with it, where advice is daily given to about a hundred and twenty people; and, though lunacy is rare in China, they are building a lunatic asylum at the ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... fortunate that I have kept this journal of our voyage, as it will serve to justify us in case we have to put him under any sort of restraint, a step which I should only consent to as a last resource. Curiously enough it was he himself who suggested lunacy and not mere eccentricity as the secret of his strange conduct. He was standing upon the bridge about an hour ago, peering as usual through his glass, while I was walking up and down the quarterdeck. The majority of the men were below at their tea, for the watches ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... muddle of hope and madness, It's the tangle of good and badness, It's the lunacy linked with sanity, ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
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