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Updated: May 5, 2025
In these various instances of what may be called dry-rot or local blight on the civilised world's culture the decline appears to be due not to a positive infection of a malignant sort, so much as to a failure of the active cultural ferment, which has fallen below the critical point of efficacy; perhaps through an unintended refusal of a livelihood to persons given over to cultivating the elements of civilisation; perhaps through the conventional disallowance of the pursuit of any other ends than competitive gain and competitive spending.
The tendency to vegetation which produces the dry-rot is thus prevented effectually, and the ships built of this wood last for twenty years. Terry read Bobadil in the evening, which he has, I think, improved. September 8. I have rubbed up, by collation with Mr. Impey, Sir Frederick Adam's idea of the Greeks.
But there are moral swamps, sending up their foul steam to pollute the common light; there are kennels of uncleanness, running with the waste of human lives, sweeping along with the death-gurgle of human souls; there is a dry-rot of impurity infecting the town-air, withering the dearest sanctities of society and of home and over this kind of evil we cannot be facetious.
"These were all securely boxed once, but the boxes have gone to pieces long since. Dry-rot, you know. Well, let's see what condition the parchments are in!" She held the torch while he tried to raise one, but it broke at the slightest touch. Again he assayed, and a third time. Same result. "Great Scott!" he ejaculated, nonplused. "See what we're up against, will you?
Well, let that go; before another day I was face to face with his other flaming characteristic. "Out of Ilo-Ilo we had contrary winds at first; all night the lorcha an old grandmother of a craft, full of dry-rot spots as big as woodpeckers' nests flapped heavily about on impotent tacks, and when the sun rose we found ourselves on the same spot from which we had watched its setting.
Ay, still my fragments wander, music-fraught, Sighs of the soul, mine once, mine now, and mine For ever! with what immediately follows, would have satisfied the ardent spirit of Mrs Browning. And the characterisation of the genius of the French nation, whose lust for war and the glory of war Browning censures as "the dry-rot of the race," rises brilliantly out of its somewhat gray surroundings:
It is not only the negation of the sanctity of the family and the destroyer of the purity of the home, as I have already pointed out, but it is also the derider of the sacredness of the individual, the slow but sure disintegrator of the body politic, the dry-rot of nations, before which the mightiest empires have crumbled into dust.
Frederick the Great, it is related, being in one of his grim humours after the dearly bought victory of Czaslaw, invited the neighbouring peasantry to come and share the spoil of the carcases on the field of battle. In like manner the discipline used in the British fleet, while not less drastic, failed conspicuously to counteract the dry-rot introduced and fostered by the press-gang.
The bark held firm, though he heard the ring of the dry-rot at the heart that had brought the old giant crashing down to become food for the scrubs and pigmies of the forest. Wayland picked out two spindly birches. Quick strokes brought them down.
Irma had only looked into the cellar when she first came, and had found it rifled, the barrels dry and gaping, full of dust, dry-rot and the smell of decay. But she too had heard her father tell of the passage to the ice-house, and how he and his brothers had used it for their escapades when the house was locked up and the keys taken to their father's room.
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