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Conflagration to be quenched; and your buckets all in hideous leakage, like buckets of the Danaides: your one course is, ply them, pour with them, such as they are. Mauduit points out farther the enormous fortunes realized by a swindling set of Army-Furnishers, Hebrews mainly, and unbeautiful to look on.

Like substance and shade, indeed they possess a similitude in outward appearance, but in reality they are perfect contraries; for the one fills the mind with solid and durable good, but the other with empty delusions; which like the ever-running waters of the Danaides, glide away as fast as they enter, and leave nothing behind but the ruinous passages through which they flowed.

If a person has nothing better to do than count the sea sands or fill the old bottomless tub of the Danaides, they may be excused for devoting their time and wits to such riddles, perhaps.

"The Queen, too, still clings to this fine word. When I saw her at work yesterday, it seemed as if I beheld her drawing water with the bottomless vessel of the Danaides. True, today, when I left her, her arms had fallen and in this attitude she now stands before me with her tearful eyes. And besides, I can't get my nephew Dion out of my mind. Cares nothing but cares concerning him!

I also saw several times, at this period of his celebrity, the inimitable comic actor, Poitier, in a farce called "Les Danaïdes" that was making a furor a burlesque upon a magnificent mythological ballet, produced with extraordinary splendor of decoration, at the Académie Royale de Musique, and of which this travesty drew all Paris in crowds; and certainly any thing more ludicrous than Poitier, as the wicked old King Danaus, with his fifty daughters, it is impossible to imagine.

The shameful torments of maidens violated before death by gladiators dressed as wild beasts, delighted the hearts of the rabble. They saw priestesses of Cybele and Ceres, they saw the Danaides, they saw Dirce and Pasiphaë; finally they saw young girls, not mature yet, torn asunder by wild horses.

Indeed, farcical to the broadest point as was that mythological travesty of "The Danaïdes," it was the essence of decency and propriety compared with "La grande Duchesse," "La belle Hélène," "Orphée aux Enfers," "La Biche au Bois," "Le petit Faust," and all the vile succession of indecencies and immoralities that the female good society of England in these latter years has delighted in witnessing, without the help of the mask which enabled their great-grandmothers to sit out the plays of Wycherley, Congreve, and Farquhar, chaste and decorous in their crude coarseness compared with the French operatic burlesques of the present day.

Let us leave States and senates to fill the sieve of the Danaides, and roll up the stone of Sisyphus." "My dear friend," said De Montaigne, "you have certainly made the most of an argument, which, if granted, would consign government to fools and knaves, and plunge the communities of mankind into the Slough of Despond. But a very commonplace view of the question might suffice to shake your system.

We had scarcely passed these small subterranean houses when I perceived a number of large wheels, on which on week days these human moles, the inhabitants of the cavern, make ropes. I fancied I here saw the wheel of Ixion, and the incessant labour of the Danaides.

The possession that music held over his nature shows itself clearly in the sudden outbreak of his genius. His family opposed the idea of his becoming a musician; and until he was twenty-two or twenty-three years old his weak will sulkily gave way to their wishes. In obedience to his father he began his studies in medicine at Paris. One evening he heard Les Danaïdes of Salieri.