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Surfeit   Listen
noun
Surfeit  n.  
1.
Excess in eating and drinking. "Let not Sir Surfeit sit at thy board." "Now comes the sick hour that his surfeit made."
2.
Fullness and oppression of the system, occasioned often by excessive eating and drinking. "To prevent surfeit and other diseases that are incident to those that heat their blood by travels."
3.
Disgust caused by excess; satiety. "Matter and argument have been supplied abundantly, and even to surfeit."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Surfeit" Quotes from Famous Books



... of a hen's egg?" I recognised at once the idea at the back of the question and appreciated the fact that it had been asked by one who, as some one has said, "called himself an advanced free-thinker, but was really a very ignorant and vulgar person who was suffering from a surfeit of the ideas of certain people cleverer than himself." But, as a full discussion of the matter would have taken at least as long as the lecture which I had just concluded, my reply was that before I attempted ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle

... laying down rules for reading, and furnishing lists of the books which should be read in order, I will undertake the much humbler task of giving a little quasi-medical advice to persons, young or old, suffering from book-hunger, book-surfeit, book-nervousness, book-indigestion, book-nausea, and all other maladies which, directly or indirectly, may be traced to books, and to which I could give Greek or Latin names if I thought it ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... world—so small—so small! your people like dull beasts pacing in a cage, believing that in the meat thrust in between their bars and the number of steps to be taken from side to side lies all the meaning of life; people who survey with their heavy eyes of surfeit the free souls of the world! Hypocrites! Pharisees! And to this cage you have consigned my child! and you would make of her, too, a creature of counted paces and of unearned meat! You would shut her in from the ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

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

... happened, they are in such close company that escape is impossible; dilly-bags are filled in a single dip, and it may take half an hour to pick out those "meshed" in the cable. It is all the work of a few minutes, and the haul often amounts in quantity to a surfeit ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

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

... invited to dine with the lion and saw that all the footmarks of his predecessors led into the lion's cave, and none away from it. He described in humorous detail his interviews with the Indiana lion, and the particulars of the surfeit of lobster as given in the President's dialect; he even repeated to her the story told him by Mr. Tom Lord, without omitting oaths or gestures; he told her how matters stood at the moment, and how the President had ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams

... time passed, and when night had fallen and they had had a surfeit of Rikevir, of rabbit and of Dame Christine's "koechten" sprinkled with cinnamon. Mr. Seiler, happy and contented, full of joyous hope, ascended to his room, putting off until to-morrow his declaration, not doubting for a moment but that it would ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various

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

... type of person, he did a great deal of embroidery in the evenings, because, as he said, it was such a change. The embroidery stood for a symbol, a type of the pleasures of the senses, and when he fell to it with fervour beyond the ordinary, one understood that he had been having a surfeit of the displeasures of the senses, and felt need ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay

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

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

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

... were glowing with enthusiasm, her lips were parted and her eyes were of a vivid, translucent blue, with the pupils like brilliant sardonyx, full of dark and mysterious lights. She was ready to meet love with a surfeit of the rich gifts which she had at ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... way to throw out the eruption, as it is called, is to keep the body comfortably warm, and to give the beverages ordered by the medical man, with the chill off. "Surfeit water," saffron tea, and remedies of that class, are hot and stimulating. The only effect they can have, will be to increase the fever and the inflammation—to add ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse

... are the certain attendants of intemperance; and it has been generally observed in great eaters, that though from custom, a state of youth, and a strong constitution, they suffer no present inconvenience, but have digested their food, and sustained the surfeit; yet if they have not been unexpectedly cut off, they have found the symptoms of old age come on early in life, attended with pains and innumerable disorders. If health is to be regarded, we must ever make it a rule not to eat to satiety ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton

... is as food, and needs no less Her temp'rance over appetite, to know In measure what the mind may well contain; Oppresses else with surfeit, and soon turns Wisdom to folly. 1037 MILTON: Par. Lost, Bk. vii., ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various

... enormous quantities of refined sugar, but in tropical countries figs and dates are staple in many places and the inhabitants relish them day in and day out as we relish some of out staples. It is a matter of habit. Those who do not surfeit themselves do not weary quickly of any ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker

... oat straw, as much as they will eat. They should be kept gaining by grain regularly fed to them, and so distributed that each gets its share. Corn, either whole or ground, or oil-cake meal, or both, are used for fattening sheep. They will easily surfeit themselves on any grain except oil-meal, which is very safe feed for them, and usually economical. Strong sheep will often drive the weaker ones away, and so get more than their share of food and make themselves sick. This must be guarded against, and the flock sorted, keeping ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe

... a chaplain, who gave me a surfeit of the whole tribe. The meanest sycophant, yet the most impertinent busy-body—always cringing, yet always intriguing—wanting to govern the whole family, and at the same time every creature's humble servant—fawning to my lord the bishop, insolent to the ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth

... renown of the Society were due to other things besides the talent of its conductor, who combined with a lively artistic intelligence both common-sense and energy and a remarkable gift for organisation—it was due partly to the help of favourable circumstances, partly to the surfeit of Wagnerism, of which I have just spoken, and partly to the birth of a new religious art, which had sprung up since the death of Cesar Franck round the ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland

... but consider the contemptible thoughts which the very women they are concerned with, in such cases as these, have of them, it would be a surfeit to them. As I said above, they value not the pleasure, they are raised by no inclination to the man, the passive jade thinks of no pleasure but the money; and when he is, as it were, drunk in the ecstasies of his wicked pleasure, her hands are in his pockets searching for what ...
— The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders &c. • Daniel Defoe

... idle young man's leisure! You are he that in that fool's hole of a Bosekop, is known as the 'rich Englishman,'—an idle trifler with time,—an aimless wanderer from those dull shores where they eat gold till they die of surfeit! I have heard of you,—a mushroom knight, a fungus of nobility,—an ephemeral growth on a grand decaying old tree, whose roots lie buried in the annals ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli

... on it, so the place was a little drier than the road outside. The floor was strewn with broken glass, chairs, and bottles. I got hold of a three-legged chair, and by balancing myself against one of the walls, tried to do a bit of a doze. I was precious near tired out now, from want of sleep and a surfeit of marching. I told my sergeant to wake me when the order came along, and then and there slept on that chair for twenty minutes, lulled off by the shrapnel bursting along the road outside. My sergeant woke me. "We are going on again, sir!" "Right oh!" I said, and left ...
— Bullets & Billets • Bruce Bairnsfather

... stew. I ordered the dinner, sir, and got more credit for inventing it than they ever gave to Ude or Soyer. The Marquess was in ecstasies, the Earl devoured half a bushel of sprats, and if the Viscount is not laid up with a surfeit of bullock's heart, my name's not Howard Walker. Billy, as I call him, was in the chair, and gave my health; and what do ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray

... said, and there was a touch of melancholy in his rich voice—"We are midges in a sunbeam,—emmets on a sand- hill...no more! Is there a next world, thinkest thou, for the bees who die of surfeit in the nilica-cups?—for the whirling drift of brilliant butterflies that sleepily float with the wind unknowing whither, till met by the icy blast of the north, they fall like broken and colorless leaves in the ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... mother bidden: He saw, at once, where the game was hidden, And viewed it with a favor stealthy. He spake: "That is the proper view,— Who overcometh, winneth too. The Holy Church has a stomach healthy: Hath eaten many a land as forfeit, And never yet complained of surfeit: The Church alone, beyond all question, Has for ill-gotten ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

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

... cost. Thought you greatness was to ripen for you like a pear? If you would have greatness, know that you must conquer it through ages, centuries—must pay for it with a proportionate price. For you too, as for all lands, the struggle, the traitor, the wily person in office, scrofulous wealth, the surfeit of prosperity, the demonism of greed, the hell of passion, the decay of faith, the long postponement, the fossil-like lethargy, the ceaseless need of revolutions, prophets, thunder-storms, deaths, births, new projections and invigorations of ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... shepherd sometimes produces, by first muzzling and fettering his delinquent dog, and then leaving him as a stepping stone for the whole flock to use in its transit over a wall, or through the opening of a sheep-fold; a process which is said to produce in the culprit a species of surfeit, on the subject of mutton, for ever after. By the time Paul and the trapper saw fit to terminate the fresh bursts of merriment, which the continued abstraction of their learned companion did not fail to excite, he commenced breathing again, as if the ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper

... stirred with sweet anxieties of reminiscence. And surely within the enchanted boundaries of the counties where I ramble, there is variety which not the hundred eyes of Argus could exhaust. These fields and woodlands in high summer feast all the senses with a surfeit of delights. How good it is to exercise in all its range the fine mechanism of the body, suffering each part of it to indulge its own hunger after beauty; to feel the texture of petals, and draw the long grasses through the fingers; to breathe an air laden with ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith

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

... aught I see, they are as sick that surfeit of too much, as they that starve with nothing; it is no mean happiness, therefore, to be seated in ...
— Tales • George Crabbe

... the violent hands alone that bring The curse, the ravage, and the downward doom, Although to these full oft the yawning tomb Owes deadly surfeit; but a keener sting, A more immortal agony will cling To the half fashioned sin which would assume Fair Virtue's garb; the eye that sows the gloom With quiet seeds of Death henceforth to spring What time ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald

... the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeit of our own behaviour—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and the stars; as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, ... and all that we are evil in by a ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley

... sweet to hear you say that, mother dear; sweet to know that you love me so," Evelyn said in moved tones, bending down to press a kiss on the wan cheek, "and I mean to fairly surfeit you with my company in the days and weeks that lie ...
— Elsie at Home • Martha Finley

... Angels food, and rubied nectar flows In pearl, in diamond, and massy gold, Fruit of delicious vines, the growth of Heaven. On flowers reposed, and with fresh flowerets crowned, They eat, they drink, and in communion sweet Quaff immortality and joy, secure Of surfeit, where full measure only bounds Excess, before the all-bounteous King, who showered With copious hand, rejoicing in their joy. Now when ambrosial night with clouds exhaled From that high mount of God, whence light and shade Spring both, the face of brightest Heaven ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton

... and smiled, manifesting his pleased acquiescence. The dinner was substantial, and in all the dishes there was noticeable the excessive abundance of country banquets, realized at the expense of variety. There was enough to surfeit twice as many persons as sat down to table. The ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos

... blood, who could "put the stone" with Finlayson, or climb with the hardiest of the Ben-Nevis guides, or cast a fly with the daintiest of the Low-Country fishers,—redundant of imagination, redundant of speech, and with such exuberance in him that we feel surfeit from the overflow, as at the reading of Spenser's "Faerie Queene," and lay him down with a wearisome sense ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various

... O Nomades, Although Maecenas' marble frieze Stand not between you and the sky Nor Persian luxury supply Its rosy surfeit, find ye ease. ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various

... various, is not fine in any part of the Mediterranean; and as to thunny, one surfeit would put it out of the bill of fare for life. On the whole, though at Palermo and Naples the pauper starves not in the streets, the gourmand would be sadly at a loss in his requisition of delicacies and variety. Inferior ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various

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

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

... the effect of this wholesale disfranchisement of colored men, upon their citizenship. The value of food to the human organism is not measured by the pains of an occasional surfeit, but by the effect of its entire deprivation. Whether a class of citizens should vote, even if not always wisely—what class does?—may best be determined by considering their condition when they are without ...
— The Negro Problem • Booker T. Washington, et al.

... redress: Of divine Leisure such foul lies are spoke, Wounding her fair gifts with calumnious stroke. But might I, fed with silent meditation, Assoiled live from that fiend Occupation— Improbus Labor, which my spirits hath broke— I'd drink of time's rich cup, and never surfeit: Fling in more days than went to make the gem That crown'd the white top of Methusalem: Yea on my weak neck take, and never forfeit, Like Atlas bearing up the dainty sky, The ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb

... dogmatic democracy respect the unintelligible insight of the few? Will a perhaps starving democracy support materially its Soviet of seers? But let us suppose that no utilitarian fanaticism supervenes, and no intellectual surfeit or discouragement. May not the very profundity of the new science and its metaphysical affinities lead it to bolder developments, inscrutable to the public and incompatible with one another, like the gnostic sects of declining ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana

... with food and wine than could the beggar. It might be pleasant to take an added hour or two in bed in the morning, but to lie in bed all day would be an infliction. So it ran indefinitely—this thin selvedge of advantage which money could buy—with deprivation on the one side, and surfeit on the other. Candidly, was it not true that more happiness lay in winning the way out of deprivation, than in inventing safeguards against satiety? The poor man succeeding in making himself rich—at ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic

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

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

... have it ready for Monday, and certainly for Tuesday. Acknowledge its receipt, and that it will appear on Monday or Tuesday. I have not yet come to the real gems of my budget. Reed shall have a surfeit. ...
— Nuts for Future Historians to Crack • Various

... That alters the case. And, pray, what occasioned this indisposition? Not a previous mental surfeit, ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur

... be coming on, make much of fifteen, and so till five and twenty: use your time with reverence, that your profits may arise: it will not tarry with you, Ecce signum: here was a face, but time that like a surfeit eats our youth, plague of his iron teeth, and draw 'em for't, has been a little bolder here than welcome: and now to say the truth, I am fit for no man. Old men i'th' house of fifty, call me Granum; and when they are drunk, e'ne then, when Jone and my Lady are all ...
— The Scornful Lady • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher

... the aristocrat, are both too content to think of looking beyond their own horizon. And yet we are good in essentials, and no tale of pity is unheeded—if only it be called forth loudly enough. Let us wake our languid rich folk. They suffer from a surfeit—an apoplexy—of money. An eager, wakeful, nervous American plutocrat, thinks nothing of giving a large fortune to endow a hospital or an institute for some petty Western town. Are we meaner or more griping than the Americans? Never. ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman

... was highly applauded by them all, and was accounted the very masterpiece of hell, namely, to choke Mansoul with a fulness of this world, and to surfeit her heart with the good things thereof. But see how things meet together! Just as this Diabolonian council was broken up, Captain Credence received a letter from Emmanuel, the contents of which were these: That upon the third day he would meet him in the ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan

... for ever bickering and snarling through the slats of their cages. In fact, Michael's sourness of temper had become too profound even for quarrelling. All he desired was to be let alone, and of this he had a surfeit for the first ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London

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

... experimental processes upon the bodies of unfortunate fellow-creatures, in whom the vital spark, to mere vulgar thinking, would seem extinct, and lost for ever. He omitteth no occasion of obtruding his services, from a case of common surfeit-suffocation to the ignobler obstructions, sometimes induced by a too wilful application of the plant Cannabis outwardly. But though he declineth not altogether these drier extinctions, his occupation tendeth for the most part to water-practice; for the convenience of which, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... bringing the hour of roast near the hour of roost; but this was probably in families where there were three repasts, with lunch all the way between, and an incessant buying of cookies from the baker, lest the children should go hungry. After this surfeit one pardons a recoil. Or, in an enervating day of July, one may have longed to dine upon humming-bird, with rose-leaves for dessert. But these are exceptional times; the abiding hope is, that we shall continue ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various

... after almost a surfeit of music, if one dare, un-self-accused, employ such a word concerning a holy thing, they went out to wander a little about the house in ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald

... have it from veracious witnesses," Bame snuffled, "that the death of Robert Greene Was caused by a surfeit, sir, of Rhenish wine And pickled herrings. Also, sir, that his shirt Was very foul, and while it was at wash He lay i' the cobbler's old blue smock, sir!" "Gods," The voice of Raleigh muttered nigh mine ear, "I had a dirty cloak once on my arm; But a Queen's feet ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... and morally, Candahar ought not to be retained. It would oblige us to keep up an interference with the internal affairs of Afghanistan, would increase the expenditure of impoverished India, and expose us chronically to the reception of those painfully sensational telegrams of which we have had a surfeit of late." ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger

... all despairs and shames, What the mean, forgotten names Of the thousand more or less, For one surfeit of success? ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various

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

... said; "I dread ophthalmia. Surfeit of blue compels the use of green spectacles. I adore the skies of Hobbema and Backhuysen; one can look at them with the naked eye for twenty years, and yet never need an oculist in ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin

... the narrow trench, the one in which the left side keeps fraying the cloth of your sleeve, and the right side strives to open furrows in your hand. You get a surfeit of damp, earthy smell in your nostrils, a choking sensation in your throat, for the place is suffocating. The narrow trench is the safest, and most of the English communication trenches are narrow—so narrow, indeed, that ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill

... Americans have, and I could not have believed, if I had not known how hardened people become to such things here, that they were almost in the actual presence of hunger and cold. It was within five minutes' walk of their warmth and surfeit; and if they had lifted the window and called, "Who goes there?" the houselessness that prowls the night could have answered them ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells

... atheism should have been affixed to a system whose very starting-point is Deity and whose great characteristic is the ignoration of everything but Deity, insomuch that the pure and devout Novalis pronounced the author a God-drunken man, and Spinozism a surfeit of Deity. [17] ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... Sforza-Riario had earlier been granted by her children full administration of their patrimony during their minority. To the defence of this she now addressed herself with all the resolution of her stern nature. Her life had been unfortunate, and of horrors she had touched a surfeit. Her father, Galeazzo Sforza, was murdered in Milan Cathedral by a little band of patriots; her brother Giangaleazzo had died, of want or poison, in the Castle of Pavia, the victim of her ambitious uncle, Lodovico; her husband, Girolamo Riario, she had seen butchered and flung ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini

... in the grief natural on such an occasion; but really, the death of the cat in such times as these is a great relief to me, as he was maintained at the cost of not less than $200 per annum. His death was probably occasioned by a surfeit of meat which his mistress obtained unexpectedly, seeing it fall in the street, and sending a ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones

... before there had been in every line a thought of her, so in her essay, which was peculiarly German in its method and handling, thoughts of Harold had been closely interwoven. She knew she should receive a surfeit of applause—she always did; but if Harold's were wanting the whole thing would be a failure. So she wrote him twice a week, urging him to come, and he always replied that nothing but necessity would keep ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes

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

... a crack-brained king He raises in the place of Prester John, Smites Priam, and mid-course in conquering Bids Caesar pause; the wit of Salomon, The wealth of Nero and the pride thereof, And battle-prowess—or of Tamburlaine Darius, Jeshua, or Charlemaigne,— Wheedle and bribe and surfeit Death in vain, And get no grace of ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell

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

... Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose; But musical as is Apollo's lute, And a perpetual feast of nectared sweets, Where no crude surfeit reigns. ...
— Familiar Quotations • Various

... As he lay, all dressed on the hard ground, he fell to thinking of what he should write to Desiree to-morrow from Moscow. The mere date and address of such a letter would make her love him the more, he thought; for, like his leaders, he was dazed by a surfeit of glory. ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman

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

... worst sinners are in all respects fashioned as much after the outward semblance of the ideal saint as can well be managed. The original notion was a very good one, and the revolution did not come before it was wanted; but it has been a little overdone of late, and we are threatened with as great a surfeit of small-limbed, yellow-headed criminals as we have had of the man-like black. One gets weary of the most perfect model in time, if too constantly repeated; as now, when we have all begun to feel that the resources of the angel's face and demon's soul have been more ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous

... Mexicans pulled up with loud exclamations of joy and wonder. One of them took out of his haversack a quantity of provisions and a flask of aguardiente; and Coronado handed them to Thurstane with a smile, hoping that he would surfeit himself and die. ...
— Overland • John William De Forest

... attenuated prerogative, and nearly lost his throne in consequence. On the second occasion, under the guidance of his eldest son, the crown prince Gustavus, afterwards Gustavus III., he succeeded in overthrowing the tyrannous "Cap'' senate, but was unable to make any use of his victory. He died of surfeit at Stockholm on the 12th of February 1771. See R. Nisbet Bain, Gustavus III. and his Contemporaries, vol. i. (London, 1895). (R. N. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... most common use are AEthiops mineral, antimony, rosin, sulphur, etc., which form the principal ingredients in all condition-powders, and are chiefly useful in diseases of the skin, such as hide-bound, mange, surfeit, etc. ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings

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

... what is it that you wish? Would ye, for food, sweet friends, become all slaves; And for a meal, that ye might surfeit on it, Give up your wives, your homes, and all that's dear, To the brute arms of men, who hold it virtue To heap their shame upon a fallen foe? Would ye, that ye might eat, yet not be satisfied, Pick up the scanty crumbs around their camp, After their cattle and their dogs have ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton

... The artillery, discharged with uniform promptness several seconds in advance of time, renders them wild with delight. PAREPA'S voice, rising at intervals above even the combined din of instruments, voices, and cannon, is hardly heeded by them. Noise is what they want, and they have a surfeit of it. It is only after the performance is ended that the vision of GILMORE'S ecstatic coat-tails, as they danced to the wild whirling of his maniacal baton, comes back to their memory. Then they smile and say, "Curious fellow that GILMORE. Knows ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 14, July 2, 1870 • Various

... in one place and anxious to get on to the next thing. This may be due to a gipsy strain in my ancestry—one of my uncles travelled with a circus—or it may be the Artistic Temperament, acquired from a grandfather who, before dying of a surfeit of paste in the property-room of the Bristol Coliseum, which he was visiting in the course of a professional tour, had an established reputation on the music-hall stage as one of ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse

... was weary of fine scenery, and it seemed to me that I had eaten a score of mountains and quaffed as many lakes, all in the space of two or three days, and the natural consequence was a surfeit. ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop

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

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

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

... much, too many; superabundance, superfluity, superfluence|, saturation; nimiety[obs3], transcendency, exuberance, profuseness; profusion &c. (plenty) 639; repletion, enough in all conscience, satis superque[Lat], lion's share; more than enough &c. 639; plethora, engorgement, congestion, load, surfeit, sickener[obs3]; turgescence &c. (expansion) 194[obs3]; overdose, overmeasure[obs3], oversupply, overflow; inundation &c. (water) 348; avalanche. accumulation &c. (store) 636; heap &c. 72; drug, drug in the market; glut; crowd; burden. excess; surplus, overplus[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

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

... printed discourses, I think all herbalists, all stories of beasts, fowls, and fishes are rifled up, that they may come in multitudes to wait upon any of our conceits, which certainly is as absurd a surfeit to the ears as is possible. For the force of a similitude not being to prove anything to a contrary disputer, but only to explain to a willing hearer: when that is done, the rest is a most tedious prattling, ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney

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

... springs from levity or weakness of mind, and makes us accept everyone's opinion, and another more excusable comes from a surfeit of matter. ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld

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

... you shall see it very soon; though there will scarce be a new page: nobody else shall see it till spring. In the first place, the prints will not be finished: in the next, I intend that two or three other things shall appear before it from my press, of other authors; for I will not surfeit people with my writings, nor have them think that I propose to find employment alone for a whole press—so far from it, I intend to employ it ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole

... a very fascinating one. East, west, north, and south, there is, at all times and in all seasons, plenty of good hunting-ground for the sportsman, although the inveterate hunter will encounter a surfeit of Barmecides' feasts. Nearly every book-hunter has been more or less of a bookstaller, and the custom is more than tinctured with the odour of respectability by the fact that Roxburghe's famous Duke, Lord Macaulay the historian, and Mr. Gladstone ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts

... if you would view them at all justly or wisely. Ease, and health, and worldly wealth, and success may be good, just as the plentiful feast is good, provided a man has temperance and soundness of constitution properly to partake of it; but, if he is likely to indulge to a surfeit, or if every morsel is food to some mortal disorder, and every cup adds strength to a fever that is raging in his veins, no one in reason would call such an entertainment good to such a man. And just so with the good things of this present life: the Christian does ...
— The Church of England Magazine - Volume 10, No. 263, January 9, 1841 • Various

... hankering, and sense of waste. Did women have it too? Who could tell? And yet, men who gave vent to their appetites for novelty, their riotous longings for new adventures, new risks, new pleasures, these suffered, no doubt, from the reverse side of starvation, from surfeit. No getting out of it—a maladjusted animal, civilised man! There could be no garden of his choosing, of "the Apple-tree, the singing, and the gold," in the words of that lovely Greek chorus, no achievable elysium in life, or lasting haven of happiness for any man with a sense ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

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

... and by the hardness of the flanks and the smaller volume of the swelling. It arises from gorging with almost any kind of food, even with grain or with chaff, at a sudden change of diet; but it is particularly liable to arise from a surfeit of turnips, fresh grass, or any other succulent food at the commencement of the season. The instrument called a probang ought to be introduced, either to decide whether the case be one of hoove or one ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 4, January 26, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various

... arraigns him, among other offences, for having "expressed himself to be an enemy to frequent preaching, inveighing in his sermons against long Sermons, saying that Peters sword cut off but one eare, but long Sermons like long swords cut off both at once, and that the Surfeit of the Word is of all most dangerous, and that the silliest creatures have longest eares, and that preaching was the worst part of God's worship, and that if he left out anything he would leave out that." And that, for Mr. Andrewes, was the end; a man who lost his living because ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker

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

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

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

... FOLLIOTT. No such thing, sir. In the family there is a paterfamilias, who regulates the distribution, and takes care that there shall be no such thing in the household as one dying of hunger, while another dies of surfeit. In the state it is all hunger at one end, and all surfeit at the other. Matchless ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock

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

... of any former kind of human unhappiness presses upon us, so much the more urgently is an answer demanded to the question: What will there be in the character of man's future destiny, what new ideals will arise, to prevent him from being swamped by a surfeit of happiness? ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka

... romantically miserable; and then come on your tantalising scenes of delicate distress, and so the end of your third volume, and then finish without any end at all. Verb. sap. sat. Or, if you like it better, kill the old dowager of a surfeit, and make the old brute who marries the heroine commit suicide; and, after all these unheard-of trials, marry them as fresh and beautiful ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat

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

... cramped for want of money. The negroes ate everything that was produced on the farm in Anne Arundel, a gastronomic feat which they could easily accomplish, without ever having cause to complain of a surfeit. His aunt, herself in limited circumstances, by a careful husbandry of her means, managed to keep him at college. Kenyon was then a manual-labor institution, and the boys were required to sweep their own rooms, make their ...
— Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis • John A. J. Creswell

... said: "I am glad you are provided with a surfeit of funds. Perhaps you will be willing to float our ...
— Up the Forked River - Or, Adventures in South America • Edward Sylvester Ellis

... was so charmed with everything about the flat that he said he wanted to move into one right away, and make biscuits himself on a glass-topped table, and do stunts with the fireless cooker like Joyce. He has had a surfeit of ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston

... you, that though the Eel, thus drest, be not only excellent good, but more harmless than any other way, yet it is certain that physicians account the Eel dangerous meat; I will advise you therefore, as Solomon says of honey, " Hast thou found it, eat no more than is sufficient, lest thou surfeit, for it is not good to eat much honey ". And let me add this, that the uncharitable Italian bids us " give Eels and no wine to our ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton

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

... in what she calls Society. Now and then Mr. Lancaster will have a shilling left to spend on a nice book for his library, poor dear; and, with no business worries, he will probably begin to admire his wife once more as well as love her, which he has always done; and when he gets a surfeit of her friends, as I fear he will now and then, he will just take a little holiday and pay ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell

... birth! I 2 Insolent Pride, if idly nursed On timeless surfeit, plenty accursed, Spurning the lowlier tract of Earth Mounts to her pinnacle,—then falls, Dashed headlong down sheer mountain walls To dark Necessity's deep ground, Where never foothold can be found. Let wrestlers for my country's ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles

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

... dozen sons, each in my love alike and none less dear than thine and my good Marcius, I had rather eleven die nobly for their country than one voluptuously surfeit out ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett

... affectionate he was to all other creatures; he hardly gave thought to them; he spoke abruptly to them, and found no interest in seeing them. Both in Jean-Christophe and Minna their kindness was only a surfeit of tenderness which overflowed at intervals to the benefit of the first comer. Except for these overflowings they were more egoistic than ever, for their minds were filled only with the one thought, and everything was brought ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland

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

... had urged Washington for office because he had been a surveyor's lad; nobody had voted for Adams because stately old ladies designated him as "that cobbler's son." But when Jackson came into office the people had just had almost a surfeit of regular training in their chief magistrates. There was a certain zest in the thought of a change, and the nation ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various

... The leaves of the tall domes and kissing branches of the elms, that peeped on either side into open windows of people asleep and told across the street to each other the secrets there, were now themselves heavy as if with surfeit of gossip and they drooped and hardly rustled. Not a tipsy waiter lurked in the shadows, not a skylarking couple of darkey lovers whispered on doorsteps. No birds, nor even crickets, serenaded the ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend

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

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

... daybreak, and a few minutes later rolled up before the Persian custom-house in the valley below. There was no evidence of the proximity of a Russian frontier, except the extraordinary size of the tea-glasses, from which we slaked our intolerable thirst. During the day we had had a surfeit of cavernous gorges and commanding pinnacles, but very little water. The only copious spring we were able to find was filled at the time with the unwashed linen of a Persian traveler, who sat by, smiling in derision, as we upbraided ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben

... little yellow claw; but I never cared to let it remain long upon my shoulder—a perch it ardently affected. Well! it is dead, poor dear, and whether from shock (the pony which carried its basket having fallen down with it en route from "Walnut Camp"), or from a surfeit of caterpillars which were washed in myriads off the trees there, we cannot tell. Sabz Ali brought the little corpse along, holding it by one pathetic leg to show the horrified Jane, before giving it to the kites and crows. He has many "murghis" left; ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne

... did their fell work of producing the sense of surfeit, and presently Elizabeth's guests dropped off gorged from the tea-table. Diva fortunately remembered their consistency in time, and nearly cleared a plate of jumbles instead, which the hostess had hoped would form a pleasant accompaniment to her dessert at ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson

... pass for nothing. I pity you for over-work, but I assure you no-work is worse. The mind preys on itself, the most unwholesome food. I brag'd formerly that I could not have too much time. I have a surfeit. With few years to come, the days are wearisome. But weariness is not eternal. Something will shine out to take the load off, that flags me, which is at present intolerable. I have killed an hour or two in this poor scrawl. I am a sanguinary murderer of time, and would ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb

... till it had run its course inside the walls of the ship, and no more victims were to be claimed, was too much for his nerve. He fled like some frightened animal to his room, and deliberately set about guzzling a surfeit of neat spirit. ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne

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

... little, were his judgment true; Nature is frugal, and her wants are few; Those few wants answer'd, bring sincere delights; But fools create themselves new appetites: Fancy, and pride, seek things at vast expense, Which relish not to reason, nor to sense. When surfeit, or unthankfulness, destroys, In nature's narrow sphere, our solid joys, In fancy's airy land of noise and show, Where nought but dreams, no real pleasures, grow; Like cats in air-pumps, to subsist we strive On joys too thin to keep the soul alive. Lemira's sick; make haste; the doctor call: He ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young

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

... went to a meeting of my constituents. My appetite for politics was at one time just about as sharp set as a saw-mill, but late events have given me something of a surfeit, more than I could well digest; still, habit, they say, is second natur, and so I went, and gave them a piece of my mind touching 'the Government' and the succession, by way of a codicil to what ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott

... pre-Raphaelite picture, and the mountains to which Aunt Kathryn had applied so insulting a simile were even grander in size and nobler in shape than before. We had seen many old chateaux (though never a surfeit), but the best of all had been reserved for to-day. Far away on our left, as we drove towards Padua, it rose above the little town that crawled to the foot of the castle's hill to beg protection; and it was exactly like a city painted by Mantegna or Carpaccio, ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

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

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

... hut, situated at the top of a mountain near Herat, where we made the good people believe he was living upon no other food than that which the Gins and Peris brought to him; but unfortunately he actually died of a surfeit, having ate more of a roast lamb and sweetmeats than his nature could support. For my own credit, I was obliged to say, that the Gins, jealous of us mortals for possessing the society of so wonderful a person, had so inflated him with celestial ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier

... brain of George Borrow a series of impressions which, to the end of his life, remained as vivid as at the moment they were absorbed. What appeared to those around him as dull-witted stupidity was, in reality, mental surfeit. His mind was occupied with other things than books, things that it eagerly took cognisance of, strove to understand and was never to forget. {10b} Hitherto he had taken "no pleasure in books . . . and bade fair ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins

... shilling has about the value of a pre-war sixpence and a bit of paper that is called a Bradbury fetches half as much as the pound of five years ago. Compared with what other peoples are suffering from the same disease arising from the same surfeit of money in one form or another, this nuisance that we are enduring is not too terribly severe. It has entailed great hardship on a class that is small in number, namely, those who have to live on fixed incomes. The salary-earner ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers

... work. It has been reissued, with additional illustrations, by Messrs. Dent. Those who welcome it as one of the most inspiring criticisms from an always inspired critic, will regret that eight of the illustrations belong to the worst period of Beardsley's art. Kelmscott dyspepsia following on a surfeit of Burne-Jones, belongs to the pathology of style; it is a phase that should be produced by the prosecution, not by the eloquent advocate for the defence. Moreover, I do not believe Mr. Arthur Symons admires ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross

... Ditto another way. Rennet-Bags, which are good. Rennet-Bags, how to make them good. Rennet with Spice. Red Surfeit-Water. Rosa Solis, to distil. Raspberry-Wine. Red Goosberry-Wine. Rabbit, roasted ...
— The Country Housewife and Lady's Director - In the Management of a House, and the Delights and Profits of a Farm • Richard Bradley

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

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

... should enjoy it by whose blood and labour it had been won. The patricians rejected the proposal with scorn: some even complained that the once vigorous spirit of Caeso was running riot, and decaying through a surfeit of glory. There were afterward no party struggles in the city. The Latins, however, were harassed by the incursions of the Aequans. Caeso being sent thither with an army, crossed into the territory of the Aequans ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius

... magnetism in a superlative degree in spite of her deliberate aloofness, Clavering had, of course, been conscious from the first. Had not every male first-nighter been conscious of it? There was a surfeit of beauty in New York. A stranger, even if invested with mystery, must possess the one irresistible magnet, combined with some unusual quality of looks, to capture and hold the interest of weary New Yorkers as she had done. Even the dramatic ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... society, who make their strong holds in the great city. They are the shining lights of the competitive system. They believe in a constant warfare of competition, which brings suffering to the many and success to the few. We have seen that a surfeit of wealth and power, has made these leaders so despicably selfish and unpatriotic, that they are unwilling to pay a just proportion of tax for ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson

... by now, and the pig merchant, the noble lord and the rich shopkeeper all gone to seek a sweetheart elsewhere, there were still plenty of suitors dangling round the beauty of the country-side: in fact her well-known pride and aloofness had brought a surfeit of competitors in the lists. Foremost among these was Eros Bela, who was not only young and in a high position as my lord the Count's chief bailiff, but was also reputed to be the ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... believed he would get in with Zene and try the wagon awhile. Springs and cushions had become tiresome. He half-stood on the tongue, to bring his legs down on a level with Zene's, and enjoyed the jolting in every piece of his backbone. He had had a surfeit of woman-society. Even the horsey smell of Zene's clothes was found agreeable. And above all, he wanted to talk about J. D. Matthews, and tell the terrors of a bottomless ford and a house with ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood

... world desired, He wept to find the course he ran— Despite of altars—was of man. So avaricious hopes are checked, And so proud man may lack respect; And so ambition may be foiled Of the reward for which it moiled. The wealthy surfeit of their wealth, Grudging the ploughman's strength and health. The man, who weds the loveliest wife, Weds, with her loveliness, much strife. One wants an heir: another rails Upon his heirs and the entails. Another—but ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay

... Chiltern, once embarked upon that life of usefulness, once firmly established on ground of her own tilling, and she was immune. And this led her to a consideration of those she knew who had been flayed. They were not few, and a surfeit of publicity is a sufficient reason for not enumerating them here. And during this process of exorcism Notoriety became a bogey, too: he had been powerless to hurt them. It must be true what Chiltern had said that the world was changing. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... heavy, I labored with double zeal to get up an excitement, which should carry me through the remainder of the day. My head began to feel sensations of giddiness—for I had hardly eaten since my husband left. Of the pleasures of house-cleaning, I had at length a surfeit; when a ring, which I knew among all others, surprised me. I looked at the clock. It was past four, and the kitchen still in confusion, and ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur

... happen that the war-talk begins—none knowing how—and spreads through the villages: first the young men take to dancing and painting their faces, and the elder men catch fire, and a day sees us taking leave of our womankind to follow the war-path. But in time we surfeit even of fighting, and ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... life to which he was condemned. But the price he was paying for survival was the usual price. He was in danger of becoming no better than an animal, of sinking to the level of the negroes who sometimes toiled beside him. The man, however, was still there, not yet dormant, but merely torpid from a surfeit of despair; and the man in him promptly shook off that torpidity and awoke at the first words Blood spoke to him ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini

... only met together at dinner-time, and then they would sit round the table with sour, ill-tempered faces, the younger ones grumbling and whining at the meagre food, the elder girls with their appetites spoilt by a surfeit of sweetmeats, every one moody and bored, as if they found each other's company intolerable, and all of them eagerly awaiting the moment when they might return to their ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai



Words linked to "Surfeit" :   excess, supply, overmuchness, overabundance, feeding, cloy, glut, indulge, overmuch, luxuriate, superabundance



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