hereditary taint

In broad terms, I may say that you have a constitutional and hereditary taint."

Their hereditary taint of insanity is a menace to all mankind; and you?"

In mind and body, both, the poor girl was in the condition which offered its opportunity to the lurking hereditary taint.

His father was a convicted murderer, and Nigel he has the hereditary taint .

To all of which questions no answer came, although one suggested itself to him--namely, that he was the victim of some hereditary taint, and therefore not in fact to blame.

Roberts admits to having injected O'Callaghan with hyoscine, but claims that he was justified: O'Callaghan's family had a "hereditary taint" (as shown by his sister), and it was his duty to remove such "tainted" persons from society.

For example, you can show courage in a play perhaps as well as in a story; but suppose you want to show how some hereditary taint destroys your hero's courage in the dark, it would be difficult for you to represent it in a drama.

In truth, there were so many anomalies in his character, and though shrinking with diseased sensibility from public notice, it had been his fatality so often to become the topic of the day, by some wild eccentricity of conduct, that people searched his lineage for an hereditary taint of insanity.

When I think of the growth of that poisonous hereditary taint, which may come with time--when I think of passions let loose and temptations lying in ambush--I see the smooth surface of the Minister's domestic life with dangers lurking under it which make me shake in my shoes.

Angus of Wardshaven had been bad enough, with the hereditary taint of the Mad Baron of Blackchffe, and Queen Evita and her rapacious family, but even he was preferable to a murderous villain-some even called him a fiend in human shape-like Omfray of Glaspyth.

The hereditary taint expressed itself, in his case, not by mystic leanings as in his two brothers, Alexander and Nicholas (in their various ways, for one was mystically liberal and the other mystically autocratic), but by the fury of an uncontrollable temper which generally broke out in disgusting abuse on the parade ground.