"Sicilian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... help the matter materially, that I can see!" exclaimed the young man. "With a full beard he'd probably look like a Sicilian bandit. If I thought he was really pursuing you in this darkly mysterious way I should certainly give him a piece of my American mind. You might suppose that a girl would be ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... AND BY THE EMPEROR: "The Emperor is Konradin, the last of the Hohenstaufen, beheaded by Charles of Anjou at Naples, 1268. The subsequent cruelties of Charles in Sicily caused the popular uprising known as the Sicilian Vespers, 1282, in which many ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... statements had a way of being truthful. Thus, a work of his had in fact been purchased by the French Government and placed on exhibition in the Luxembourg. And thus he had in fact come to Monte Carlo to paint a portrait—the portrait of a Sicilian Countess, he said, and Henry believed, without actually having seen the alleged Countess—at a high price. There were more complexities in Tom's character than Henry could unravel. Henry had paid the entire bill at the Grand Hotel, had lent Tom ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... the Romans, and Ismael was our high priest, and when so great a famine [27] was come upon us, that one tenth deal [of wheat] was sold for four drachmae, and when no less than seventy cori of flour were brought into the temple, at the feast of unleavened bread, [these cori are thirty-one Sicilian, but forty-one Athenian medimni,] not one of the priests was so hardy as to eat one crumb of it, even while so great a distress was upon the land; and this out of a dread of the law, and of that wrath which God retains against ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... second adventure, the Plangctae (the Claspers, not the Wanderers, as some translations give it), have been located at the Lipari Islands in the Sicilian Sea, where there is strong volcanic action. The well-known Symplegades of the Argonautic expedition which were placed at the entrance of the Euxine, were probably patterned after this Homeric conception, and transferred to the North-east. The two terrors, Scylla and Charybdis, lie in the straits ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... the Earth Mother, was born a daughter more fair than any flower that grew, and ever more dear to her became her child, the lovely Proserpine. By the blue sea, in the Sicilian meadows, Proserpine and the fair nymphs who were her companions spent their happy days. Too short were the days for all their joy, and Demeter made the earth yet fairer than it was that she might bring more ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... of Harold,—armed in mail, with his face concealed by the strange Sicilian nose-piece used then by most of the Northern nations,—had ridden Tostig, who had joined the Earl on his march, with a scanty band of some fifty or sixty of his Danish house-carles. All the men throughout ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the most artificial literary form in modern fiction. It may be said to have begun in the third century B. C. with the perfectly sincere poems of the Greek Theocritus, who gives genuine expression to the life of actual Sicilian shepherds. But with successive Latin, Medieval, and Renaissance writers in verse and prose the country characters and setting had become mere disguises, sometimes allegorical, for the expression of the very far from ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... But Their Sicilian Majesties have been careful, as much as they were able, to exclude from their councils both German Illuminati and Italian philosophers. Their principal Minister, Chevalier Acton, has proved himself worthy of the confidence with which his Sovereigns have honoured him, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... thundering to the ground!— Not B-ck—gh-m himself, with balkier sound, Uprooted from the field of Whiggist glories, Fell souse, of late, among the astonish'd Tories! Instant the ring was broke, and shouts and yells From Trojan Flashmen and Sicilian Swells Fill'd the wide heaven—while, touch'd with grief to see His pall, well-known through many a lark and spree, [8] Thus rumly floor'd, the kind Ascestes ran, [9] And pitying rais'd from earth the game ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... practised writer of theological controversy, a passionately resolved defender of the national unity, and of the French patriotism, which the religious struggle had imperilled, but he was not intolerant. Under him, and under his successor, the Sicilian Cardinal Mazarin, the religion which had been thought so dangerous was allowed to prosper, and the highest offices were crowded with Huguenots. The rapid expansion of French power was largely due to this policy. It was then that the French proved superior ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... makes us women stealthy as cats. It is not our fault. At least, it is not mine. Some women—some girls—may enjoy the excitement, but not I. Perhaps I am different from others, because I have the blood of Europe in my veins. My father's mother was Sicilian. My own mother was Spanish. And he, my father, is an enlightened man, with broader views and more knowledge of the world than most Caids of the south. They all pride themselves on knowing a little French in these days, he tells me, and some have even made ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... not in a cloud or in a quicksand, as there seemed some reason to fear, but in a spacious and elegant station, brilliantly lighted with gas, and reminding one, from its sudden apparition and its strange site, of the fabled palace of the Sicilian Fairy Queen, only not built, like hers, of sunshine and sea-mist. We were marched in file past, first the tribunal of the searchers, and next the tribunal of the passport officials; and then an Austrian gendarme opening to each, as he passed this ordeal, the ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... leading up to the Altar are paved with Purbeck, Sicilian, and black Derbyshire marbles. The spaces between the steps are decorated with a series of scriptural subjects in inlaid work in black and white marble, with distinctive inscriptions. The Altar is of oak, with a single slab of Belgian marble for its top. On the ...
— St. John's College, Cambridge • Robert Forsyth Scott
... any less able," replied Axius, "to have these things at my farm at Reate: is Sicilian honey made at Seius' place and only Corsican honey at Reate,[161] and does the mast which he buys for his wild boars make them fat while that which I get for nothing from ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... Genoese courier, constraining himself to speak a little louder), we were all at Rome for the Carnival. I had been out, all day, with a Sicilian, a friend of mine, and a courier, who was there with an English family. As I returned at night to our hotel, I met the little Carolina, who never stirred from home alone, running distractedly along ...
— To be Read at Dusk • Charles Dickens
... for a while, things were, and none knew who should reign in Egypt. But then Cleopatra took up the dice, and threw them, and this was the throw she made—in truth, it was a bold one. For, leaving the army at Pelusium, she came at dusk to the harbour of Alexandria, and alone with the Sicilian Apollodorus entered and landed. Then Apollodorus bound her in a bale of rich rugs, such as are made in Syria, and sent the rugs as a present to Caesar. And when the rugs were unbound in the palace, behold! within them was the fairest girl on all the earth—ay, and the most witty ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... great roads which led from Greece Proper through the defiles of the mountains into the Peloponnesus. It rapidly monopolized the commerce of the AEgean Sea, and the East through the Saronic Gulf; and through the Corinthian Gulf it commanded the trade of the Ionian and Sicilian seas. ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... ruin, the Ruler had gone out from his dark abode; and, carried in his chariot by black horses, he cautiously surveyed the foundations of the Sicilian land. After it was sufficiently ascertained that no place was insecure, and fear was laid aside, Erycina,[44] sitting down upon her mountain, saw him wandering; and, embracing her winged son, she said, Cupid, my son, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... more or less, made very little difference to him. What he wished to settle was no such barren conundrum. For, had there even been any means of coercing the Earth into an honest answer, on such a delicate point, which the Sicilian canon, Recupero, fancied that there was; [Footnote: Recupero. See Brydone's Travels, some sixty or seventy years ago. The canon, being a beneficed clergyman in the Papal church, was naturally an infidel. He wished exceedingly to refute Moses: and he fancied ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... always been profitable to the arts,—not merely the taking over of raw material, but the more stimulating absorption of methods and processes and even of artistic ideals. The Sicilian Gorgias had for a pupil the Attic Isocrates; and the style of the Athenian was imitated by the Roman Cicero, thus helping to sustain the standard of oratory in every modern language. The 'Matron of Ephesus' of Petronius was the great-grandmother of the 'Yvette' of Maupassant; ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... vessels of commerce and the gilded galleys for the pleasures of the rich citizens. The boats of the fishermen glided rapidly to and fro; and afar off you saw the tall masts of the fleet under the command of Pliny. Upon the shore sat a Sicilian who, with vehement gestures and flexile features, was narrating to a group of fishermen and peasants a strange tale of shipwrecked mariners and friendly dolphins—just as at this day, in the modern neighborhood, you may hear upon the ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... the train arrived. The vast majority of its passengers were Sicilian peasants or business men returning to Palermo from the interior of the island. To Sir Hubert's delight, he at once caught sight of Gros Jean and the Turks, whom, of course, he quickly identified as the loungers on the tower ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... coming toward us, mounted well On a fair Sicilian palfrey, and her face With brow-defending hood of Thessaly Is shadowed from the sun. What must I think? Is it she or no? Can the eye so far deceive? It is. 'Tis not. Unhappy that I am, I know not.—Yes, 'tis she. For drawing near She greets me with bright glances, and declares Beyond ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... in degree, not in kind, from old Italy at the time of the "Sicilian Vespers," when they called upon everybody to pronounce the word "ciceri." The natives who could say "chee-cheree" escaped, but the poor French who could come no nearer than "seeseree" were butchered. Gradually now in Carthage the foreigners from Massachusetts, Georgia, England, ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... repeated invitations, Polixenes came from Bohemia to the Sicilian court, to make his friend ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... agriculture now destined to be performed by small holders? Their masters would have no further use for them and would consequently swell the lists of freedmen in order to avoid the expense of feeding them. This law was passed in the midst of the Sicilian slave war and Tiberius Gracchus would surely not have neglected to make some provision to meet this exigency. The law as it stands in its imperfect condition seems to be the work of an ignorant, unprincipled political charlatan, but we are convinced Tiberius was not that. Moreover, we know ...
— Public Lands and Agrarian Laws of the Roman Republic • Andrew Stephenson
... luckless victim of mad tornadoes, which blow me into chaos. Almighty love still reigns and revels in my bosom; and I am at this moment ready to hang myself for a young Edinburgh widow, who has wit and wisdom more murderously fatal than the assassinating stiletto of the Sicilian banditti, or the poisoned arrow of the savage African. My highland dirk, that used to hang beside my crutches, I have gravely removed into a neighbouring closet, the key of which I cannot command in case of spring-tide paroxysms. You may ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... view; he did a few days' sponging, but found himself incompetent and had to leave. He went back to Athens, took considerable pains with himself, and then had another try, with exactly the same result, however. Plato's Sicilian disaster seems to me to bear ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... and altered from Shakespear, under the title of the Sicilian Usurper; a Tragedy, with a Prefatory Epistle, in Vindication of the Author, occasioned by the Prohibition of this Play on the Stage. The scene is ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... Joloans, the neighbors of Mindanao, who are robbing the country from us and capturing the Indians of these Filipinas. The fleet is there, and I was to embark with it, but in order not to leave this district alone Father Fabricio Sersali, a Sicilian, went. The fleet consisted of thirty ships and more, and in them sailed two hundred Spaniards and innumerable Indian soldiers and rowers. May our Lord give us the ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XXII, 1625-29 • Various
... Sicilian Vespers, Verdi Lucrezia Borgia Solo and choruses from Lucrezia Borgia, Donizetti Solo and choruses from Il Templario, Nicolai Quintette and chorus, Martha, Flotow Miserere, Il Trovatore, Verdi Les Huguenots Bohemian Girl Puritani Charity, Rossini Masaniello Chorus, La Fille Du Regiment, ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... In 1856 he received him with flattering courtesy, the first recognition he had met with from any person in authority in his own state, from which, after 1849, he had been, not exactly banished, but invited to depart. During the same autumn Cavour began to see much of Giuseppe La Farina, a Sicilian exile, who was intimately connected with the new party, which, despairing alike of the existing governments and of the republic, took for its watchword, "Italy under Victor Emmanuel." In the first instance, La Farina was commissioned to ask Cavour to explain his views. His answer was ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... M'Leod, who was a lively witness of this happy combination of song, of labour, and of peril, which he acknowledged was "a very terrific process." Our sailors at Newcastle, in heaving their anchors, have their "Heave and ho! rum-below!" but the Sicilian mariners must be more deeply affected by their beautiful hymn to the Virgin. A society, instituted in Holland for general good, do not consider among their least useful projects that of having printed at a low price a collection of ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... her employment she wore a costume that was fondly presumed to be the correct garbing of a Sicilian peasant maid, including a brilliant bodice that laced in front and buttoned behind, an imposing headdress, and on both her arms, bracelets of the better known ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... playgrounds to London, and, later on, to Bath. London did not make him much more industrious or more careful than he had been at Harrow-on-the-Hill. It was far pleasanter to translate the honeyed Greek of Theocritus, with its babble of Sicilian shepherds, its nymphs and waters and Sicilian seas, than to follow the beaten track of ordinary education. It was vastly more entertaining to translate the impassioned prose of Aristaenetus into impassioned verse, especially ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... of these great successes, and applied to for fresh instructions, commanded Man'lius back to Italy, in order to superintend the Sicilian war, and directed that Reg'ulus should continue in Africa to prosecute his ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... capital, to assist him in discovering the best mode of relief. If the Florentine Adriani could be credited, there were other and sinister designs in the mind of the court, or, at least, in that of Catharine. According to this historian, the plan of the second "Sicilian Vespers," resolved upon at Bayonne, was to have been put into execution at Moulins, which, from its strength, was well suited for the scene of so sanguinary a drama; but, although the Huguenot chiefs assembled in numbers, their actions betrayed so much suspicion of the Roman Catholics, and it ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... in the idyllic dawn when Theocritus sang its pafatoral charms, was that sunny Sicilian land where, one May morning, Leo Gordon wandered with a gay party in quest of historic sites, which the slow silting of the stream of time had not obliterated. Viewed from the heights of Achradina, whence all the vestiges of magnificence ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... Messina. This was a point of danger, for the loud roaring of the sea warned them that they were not far from the terrible Charybdis. Quickly Palinurus turned his ship to the left, and, all the others following, made straight for the Sicilian shore. Here they landed almost at the foot of AEtna, famous then as in our own times as a volcano or burning mountain. Under this mountain, according to an old legend, Jupiter imprisoned En-cel'a-dus, one of the giants who had dared to make war ...
— Story of Aeneas • Michael Clarke
... love still reigns and revels in my bosom, and I am at this moment ready to hang myself for a young Edinburgh widow, who has wit and wisdom more murderously fatal than the assassinating stiletto of the Sicilian bandit, or the poisoned arrow of the savage African." For several months his visits to her house were frequent, his letters unremitting. The sentimental correspondence which they began, in which Burns addresses her as Clarinda, assuming to himself the name of Sylvander, has ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... slightly, cleared his throat and, waving me to the further end of the menagerie, proceeded to answer my question. "The common or Sicilian guinea-pig," he began, "the Porculus Auriferus Excubitor of BUFFON, is still fairly common, though I may say that it is many a day since they could be purchased for a guinea. An allied species, the Chinese or edible ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 4, 1920 • Various
... supplies of every description. Moving closer, we came upon endless lines of motor-trucks moving ammunition and supplies to the front and other lines of motor-trucks and ambulances moving injured machinery and injured men to the repair-depots and hospitals at the rear. We passed Sicilian mule-carts, hundreds upon hundreds of them, two-wheeled, painted bright yellow or bright red and covered with gay little paintings such as one sees on ice cream venders' carts and hurdy-gurdies, the harness of the mules studded with brass and hung with scarlet tassels. Then long strings of ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... treaty between Tancred and Richard had been formed, as related in the last chapter. The letter said that Richard was a treacherous man, in whom no reliance could be placed; that he had no intention of keeping the treaty that he had made, but was laying a scheme for attacking Tancred in his Sicilian dominions; and, finally, it closed with an offer on the part of the writer to assist Tancred in driving Richard and all his ...
— Richard I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... administration. By the beginning of May, 1813, a great improvement was visible in the equipment and moral of the Spanish and Portuguese troops; a vigorous insurrection against the French occupation had broken out in the province of Biscay, endangering the great road into Spain; and an Anglo-Sicilian army of 16,000 men, under Sir John Murray, had repulsed Suchet, hitherto undefeated, at Castalla on the Valencian coast, without, however, completing their victory, or capturing any of the French guns in the narrow defile by which the enemy fled. The ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... devours apace, and nothing said; But that two-handed engine at the door, Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more. Return, Alpheus, the dread voice is past, That shrunk thy streams; return, Sicilian muse, And call the vales, and bid them hither cast Their bells, and flowerets of a thousand hues. Ye valleys low, where the mild whispers use Of shades, and wanton winds, and gushing brooks, On whose fresh lap the swart-star sparely looks, Throw hither all your quaint ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... shown in his memorable invasion of Sicily in 1860. Chased ashore at Marsala by the Neapolitan war-ships, and narrowly escaping capture, he led his followers—one thousand red-shirted volunteers armed with obsolete muskets—into the Sicilian mountains, where he played such a game that within two months he compelled the surrender of a well-equipped army of nearly thirty thousand regulars. The history of warfare can show but few exploits so daring ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... therefore on this disposition of the two nations, who were now daily coalescing more and more, although Etruria was so powerful, that it filled with the fame of its prowess not only the land, but the sea also, through the whole length of Italy, from the Alps to the Sicilian Strait, though he might have repelled the war by means of fortifications, yet he led out his forces to the field. Upon this a battle ensued successful to the Latins, the last also of the mortal acts of ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... Sicilian born, is properly classed with the Venetian school. He obtained a knowledge of Flemish methods probably from Flemish painters or pictures in Italy (he never was a pupil of Jan van Eyck, as Vasari relates, and probably never saw Flanders), ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... terribly and passionately desired. In all probability he would die quickly; he might even now be dead. She saw the thing perpetually as a race between his returning mind—if he still lived, and it was returning—and his ebbing strength. If she had lived in old Sicilian days, she would have made a waxen image like the Theocritean sorceress, and put it by the fire, that as it wasted, so George might waste. As it was, she passed her time during the forty-eight hours after reading Howson's letter in a silent and murderous concentration ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... but of all that jolly company which gathered in Longfellow's days and constituted the imaginary weavers of tales and romances, but one is alive to-day,—the "Young Sicilian." ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... the islands. They are ours. They are farther away, to be sure, than Cuba which Douglas wanted for his ocean-bound republic. But though farther away, civilization, our duty, and the manifest destiny of old compel us to hold them. When Alcibiades embarked on his Sicilian expedition, it was said that Athens itself was sailing out of the Piraeus, never to return. And some think that when Admiral Dewey sailed into the harbor of Manila with his fleet he took the old America with him, never to return to these shores; and what was worse, it disappeared ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... an approximate knowledge even of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the coasts of the White Sea. His work, dedicated to Roger and called after him, Al-Rojary, was rewarded with a peerage, and it was as a Sicilian Count that he finished his Celestial Sphere and Terrestrial Disc of silver, on which "was inscribed all the circuit of the known world and ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... Paul Bucconi, a Sicilian nobleman, treated this notion of the eyes and tongues of serpents as a mere vulgar error; and maintains that they either constitute a particular species of stone produced in the earth, or in the stones of ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... said: 'That one?' with a superior air. It was a mellifluous love-song from a popular Opera somewhat out of date. 'Well, it's in Italian!' she summed up her impressions of the sickly words while scanning them for delivery. She had no great admiration of the sentimental Sicilian composer, she confessed, yet she sang as if possessed by him. Had she, Patrick thought, been bent upon charming Philip, she could not have thrown more fire into the notes. And when she had done, after thrilling ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Welshmen, on either border of the Tweed and of the Esk, on both sides of the Severn and the Dee; an inscription legible, and in strong characters, which the tread of many and great blessings, continued through hundreds of years, has been unable to efface. The Sicilian Vespers are to this day a familiar game among the boys of the villages on the sides of Mount Etna, and through every corner of the Island; and 'Exterminate the French!' is the action in their arms, and the word of ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... loosened, the bridge fell down, and became fastened by means of an iron spike in its under side. The boarders then poured down the bridge into the enemy's ship. Thus prepared, Duilius boldly sailed out to meet the fleet of the enemy. He found them off the Sicilian coast, near Mylae. The Carthaginians hastened to the fight as if to a triumph, but their ships were rapidly seized by the boarding-bridges, and when it came to a close fight their crews were no match for the veteran soldiers of Rome. The ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... crop next in value to raw silk. Sicilian oranges and lemons, from about twenty millions of trees, find a ready market in Europe; the oranges come into competition with the California and Florida oranges of the United States, in spite of the tariff imposed against them by the latter country. Olives are probably the most important ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... it has been said by one whose gracious memory we all revere, and the music of whose pipe once lured Proserpina from her Sicilian fields, and made those white feet stir, and not in vain, the Cumnor cowslips, that the proper aim of Criticism is to see the object as in itself it really is. But this is a very serious error, and takes no cognisance of Criticism's most perfect form, which is in its essence purely subjective, ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... other lads were taken away; our little Lady and her cousin Alianora de Montfort alone were left. The King thought to have made money by Edmund his son; he was a fair boy in very truth, and he clad him in Sicilian dress, which was graceful and comely, and showed him before the Parliament, entreating them to find him money for all these many expenses. But the Parliament did not seem disposed to pay for seeing the young Lord. And, indeed, I heard ...
— Our Little Lady - Six Hundred Years Ago • Emily Sarah Holt
... supposed that, without torture, no crimes could be detected or punished, and this opinion ruled the administration of justice on the continent until the eighteenth century.[593] Lea finds the earliest instances of legal torture in the Veronese Code of 1228, and in the Sicilian Constitutions of 1231;—work of the rationalist emperor, Frederick II, but it was "sparingly and hesitatingly employed." Innocent IV adopted it in 1252, but only secular authorities were to use it. This was to save the sanctity of ecclesiastics. ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... gives a striking description of this horrible place of confinement. Opposite to the city of Trapano in Sicily, at a distance of thirty miles, is the small island or rather the barren rock of the Maritimo, "a Sicilian anagram of Morte-mia, a name quite characteristic of the horror of the place. Upon a point of this island stands a castle where, in former days, watch was kept for the approach of the African pirates who infested the Sicilian coasts. Upon a platform of the castle, situated at the north, a deep ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... for practical purposes in important contests. Gambits and kindred openings containing elements of chance were avoided, and the whole stock which a first-class player requires is a thorough knowledge of the "Ruy Lopez," the "Queen's Pawn Openings," and the "French" and "Sicilian Defences"—openings which contain the least element of chance. The repertoire being restricted it necessarily follows that the scope for grand combinations is also diminished and only strategy or position ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... of savage dogs, which means dogs according the Moors, living in the mountains, and independent of the Dey. A considerable number rushed to the coast, armed, and in great numbers, perceiving the tartane to be an Italian vessel, and expecting a raid by Sicilian robbers on their cattle; but the Moors had informed them that it was no such thing, but a prize taken in the name of the Dey of Algiers, in which an illustrious French Bey's harem was being conveyed to Algiers. From that city the tartane was now about a day's sail, having been driven to the ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... day by Parmenides. Here again the influence of contemporary science on philosophic thought is clearly marked. Empedocles of Agrigentum (c. 460 B. C.), the only citizen of a Dorian state who finds a place in the early history of science and philosophy, was the founder of the Sicilian school of medicine, and it was probably his pre-occupation with that science that led him to revive the old doctrine of Fire, Air, Earth, and Water, which the Milesians had cast aside, but which lent itself readily to the physiological ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... see, by the papers of Galignani, that there is a new tragedy of great expectation, by Barry Cornwall. Of what I have read of his works Hiked the Dramatic Sketches, but thought his Sicilian Story and Marcian Colonna, in rhyme, quite spoilt, by I know not what affectation of Wordsworth, and Moore, and myself, all mixed up into a kind of chaos. I think him very likely to produce a good ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... to Sicily in about a fortnight, as a brigadier-general on the staff there, and I am told that Lord William Bentinck, who is destined to command the forces in that island, will be the bearer of instructions to insist upon the command of the Sicilian army likewise. ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... white, but less white than milk; brown, but less brown than earth; red, but less red than sunset or dawn. It is lucid, but less lucid than the colour of lilies. It has the hint of gold that is in all fine colour; but in our latitudes the hint is almost elusive. Under Sicilian skies, indeed, it is deeper than old ivory; but under the misty blue of the English zenith, and the warm grey of the London horizon, it is as delicately flushed as the paler wild roses, out to their utmost, flat as stars, in the hedges of ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... glowing gold He hates—the generous king, the bold! He who four score towers laid low, Ta'en from the Saracenic foe. Before upon Sicilian plains, Shield joined to shield, the fight he gains, The victory at Hild's war game; And now the heathens dread ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... menace the Peloponnese. On the other hand, in this year the Sicilians were awakening to the fact that Athens was not playing a disinterested part on behalf of the Ionian states, but was dreaming of a Sicilian empire. At a sort of peace congress, Hermocrates of Syracuse successfully urged all Sicilians to compose their quarrels on the basis of uti possidetis, and thus deprive the Athenians of any excuse for remaining. Thus for the time Athenian ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... best judge of your own taste," answered the Sicilian; "for my part, I am content to make an honest livelihood by trading between my native city of Syracuse and yonder good port of Valetta, where, please the holy saints, we shall drop our anchor in the course ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... Odin on earth, it passed to be his favourite food in Valhalla, and a prominent figure in his spectral hunt.' But it is with the moon, not with Odin, that we are at present concerned, and so note two curious items mentioned by Conway. In Sicilian legend, he says, 'Zafarana, by throwing three hog's bristles on embers, renews her husband's youth'; and in Esthonian legend, a prince, by eating pork, acquires the faculty of understanding the language ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... which all Florence turned out in procession to honor when it left the painter's hands; and which even Charles of Anjou, dripping in blood, and stalking through the scenes of that great tragedy whose catastrophe was the Sicilian vespers, paused on his way ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... for that other celestial globe, also constructed by Archimedes, which the same Marcellus placed in the temple of Virtue, is more beautiful as well as more widely known among the people. But when Gallus began to give a very learned explanation of the device, I concluded that the famous Sicilian had been endowed with greater genius than one would imagine possible for human being to possess. For Gallus told us that the other kind of celestial globe, which was solid and contained no hollow ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... precipitates the catastrophe. Rejected and cast out by her betrayer, SANTUZZA in a moment of extreme jealousy, exposes the infamy of LOLA and TURIDDU. ALFIO challenges TURIDDU, according to the rustic Sicilian code, in which each party bites the other's right ear. It is understood between the combatants that the severity of the bite in the challenge indicates the degree of animosity to be expected in contest. TURIDDU regrets his evil course; but nevertheless ...
— Zanetto and Cavalleria Rusticana • Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti, Guido Menasci, and Pietro Mascagni
... ceremony at Naples, but Petrarch preferred to be crowned on the Capitol by the senator of Rome. This honor was long the highest object of ambition, and so it seemed to Jacobus Pizinga, an illustrious Sicilian magistrate. Then came the Italian journey of Charles IV, whom it amused to flatter the vanity of ambitious men, and impress the ignorant multitude by means of gorgeous ceremonies. Starting from the fiction that the coronation of poets was a prerogative of the old Roman emperors, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... antidotes. He had visited the great universities and other schools of the continent, finishing his scientific studies under a famous German chemist named Glaser. But the terrible secret of the agua tofana and of the poudre de succession, Exili learned from Beatrice Spara, a Sicilian, with whom he had a liaison, one of those inscrutable beings of the gentle sex whose lust for pleasure or power is only equalled by the atrocities they are willing to perpetrate upon all who stand in the way of their desires or ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... would follow him through the devil's dance; but neither you nor I would be that man, my dear sir. We assume that Carmen's eyes have been mine—her heart is another matter—and that she has grown weary of my somewhat Sicilian manner of looking into them, and, following her nature and the law of periodicity which Carmens must bow to, she seeks a cooler gaze and calls Mr. Richard Lindley to come and take a turn at looking. Now, Mr. Richard ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... man, and he, well knowing that the jealousy of Leontes had not the slightest foundation in truth, instead of poisoning Polixenes, acquainted him with the king his master's orders, and agreed to escape with him out of the Sicilian dominions; and Polixenes, with the assistance of Camillo, arrived safe in his own kingdom of Bohemia, where Camillo lived from that time in the king's court and became the chief friend and ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... mentioned before grew so very outrageous, that I was obliged to postpone my rest till sugar-plums and nursery eloquence had hushed it to repose. At length peace was restored, and about eleven o'clock I fell into a slumber, during which the most lovely Sicilian prospects filled the eye of my fancy. I anticipated the classic scenes of that famous island, and forgot every sorrow in the meadows ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... Sicilians of to-day are a mixture of all these intrusive stocks and speak a form of Italian corrupted by the infusion of Arabic words.[871] In 1071 when the Normans laid siege to Palermo, five languages were spoken on the island,—Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic and vulgar Sicilian, evidence enough that it was the meeting ground of the nations of Europe, Asia and North Africa.[872] Polyglot Malta to-day tells the same story of successive conquests, the same shuttlecock history.[873] Almost every language ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... little over a year since we planned the North African campaign. It is six months since we planned the Sicilian campaign. I confess that I am of an impatient disposition, but I think that I understand and that most people understand the amount of time necessary to prepare for any major military or naval operation. We cannot just pick up the telephone and order ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... do not know by what spirit of madness Rome can be possessed to desire the good of its enemies rather than of its friends. You are about to quit Dresden, and repair to Rome. You are my enemy. In the first place, you are not a Sicilian for nothing. I do not mean by that that you have spoken abusively of me, but you have desired that I should come to nothing, that my armies should be beaten, and that my enemies should triumph. You are not the only one to wish me evil; at Rome people think no better ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... plant," says John Burroughs in "An October Abroad." But even in England it grows wild, and much more abundantly in southern Europe, while its specific name is said to have been given it because it was so common in the neighborhood of Thapsus; but whether the place of that name in Africa, or the Sicilian town mentioned by Ovid and Virgil, is not certain. Strange that Europeans should labor under the erroneous impression that this mullein is native to America, whereas here it is only an immigrant from their own land. Rapidly taking its course of empire westward from our seaports into ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... They say a Sicilian drum-major, during the French occupation of Palermo, was sentenced to be shot. He was a well-known coward, and it was feared he would disgrace his country at the last moment in the presence of the French soldiers, who had a way of being shot with a good grace and a light heart: ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... Patterns originated in the East, and, through Byzantine influence, in Italy, and Saracenic in Spain, they were adopted and modified by Europeans. In 1295 St. Paul's in London owned a hanging "patterned with wheels and two-headed birds." Sicilian silks, and many others of the contemporary textiles, display variations of the "tree of life" pattern. This consists of a little conventional shrub, sometimes hardly more than a "budding rod," with two birds ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... breast, He got no speech of her: she chose her walks; Let only moon and star look on the face That could well risk the candor of the sun; Ran not to lattice at each sound of hoof; By stream or hedge-row plucked no pansies more, Mistrusting Proserpina's cruel fate, Herself up-gathered in Sicilian fields; At chapel—for one needs to chapel go A-Sunday—glanced not either right or left, But with black eyelash wedded to white cheek Knelt there impassive, like the marble girl That at the foot-end of his father's tomb, Inside the chancel ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... from a warship which was sunk in 1737), and beyond the health office for the port at the Molo Giuseppino, where many others also lie, and the various passenger steamers in definite berths—the big English steamers at the end of the projecting quays. From a Sicilian ship hundreds of chests of oranges and lemons may be seen unloading; from a Venetian trabarcolo great heaps of onions and ropes of garlic; an Istrian boat disgorges a small mountain of green water-melons; from a Dalmatian cutter barrel after barrel of wine is rolled out, much of which ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... was thought on the eve of the Sicilian Vespers; on the eve of St. Bartholomew; at the time when Castracaro, when De ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley
... Merci!...C'est que l'ame, c'est toute la musique!" "And he pressed my hands," says Charles Maurice, "as if I had discovered a new merit in his rare talent." This specimen of Bellini's conversation is sufficient to show that his linguistic accomplishments were very limited. Indeed, as a good Sicilian he spoke Italian badly, and his French was according to Heine worse than bad, it was frightful, apt to make people's ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... Howard Payne wrote the immortal words of "Home, Sweet Home," adapting them to the beautiful Sicilian melody, now so familiar to us all, he gave to the world a precious legacy, which has brought sunshine into millions of hearts. "Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home." And there is no other place in all the world where the little courtesies of life should be so tenderly given; ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... that which through my reed Puffs out before the rain of notes can speed Upon the air, with that calm breath of art That mounts the unwrinkled zenith visibly, Where inspiration seeks its native sky. You fringes of a calm Sicilian lake, The sun's own mirror which I love to take, Silent beneath your starry flowers, tell How here I cut the hollow rushes, well Tamed by my skill, when on the glaucous gold Of distant lawns about ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... With deep refrains and murmurs of the sea, Like to his verse—the art is yours alone. His once—you taught him. Now no voice but yours! Tender and low, O wind among the pines. I would, were mine a lyre of richer strings, In soft Sicilian ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... of these respects, human beings differ widely. They vary in color, for instance, from the marble-like pallor of the Scandinavian to the rich, dark brown of the Zulu, passing by the creamy Slav, the yellow Chinese, the light brown Sicilian and the brown Egyptian. Men vary, too, in the texture of hair from the obstinately straight hair of the Chinese to the obstinately tufted and frizzled hair of the Bushman. In measurement of heads, again, ...
— The Conservation of Races • W.E. Burghardt Du Bois
... bands, that should combine your snow-white wrists, Are these which shall adorn your milk-white necks. The private cells, where you shall end your lives, Is Italy, is Europe—nay, the world. Th' Euxinian Sea, the fierce Sicilian Gulf, The river Ganges and Hydaspes' stream Shall level lie, and smooth as crystal ice, While Fulvia and Cornelia pass thereon. The soldiers, that should guard you to your deaths, Shall be five thousand gallant youths of Rome, In purple robes cross-barr'd ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... second grade from 15 to 20 per cent., and of the third grade 10 to 15 per cent. The usual means adopted for extracting sulphur from the ore is heat, which attains the height of 400 degrees Centigrade, smelting with the kiln, which in Sicilian dialect is called a "calcarone." The "calcarone" is capable of smelting several thousand tons of ore at a time and is operated in the open air. Part of the sulphur is burned in the process of smelting in order to liquefy the remainder. "Calcaroni" are situated ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various
... descent from a long line of noble ancestors—Frenchmen. Poets and romancers, ye whose imaginations delight to dwell upon sudden downfalls and rapid rises, mark well that little lad at play upon the Sicilian shore near the town of Mazzara! Springing from the lowest of the plebeian class, his family have not even a surname. He is the son of one Pierre, a fisherman, whose humble hut stands yonder beneath the cliff. But a day will come when that lowly-born lad, joining his baptismal name to that of the ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... to attack Constantine, Rome was entered, and in the appalling confusion the Lombards elected a certain priest named Philip to be pope. Christopher appeared, Philip was turned out, and Stephen III., a Sicilian, was regularly chosen. That was in 768, and in the same year king Pepin died and was succeeded by his two sons, Charles to whom apparently fell Austrasia and Neustria, and Carloman who ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... suddenly across the darkness at the far end and became motionless, as it might be a white-flowering bush under the trees. Miss Daphne had come out, and was waiting for the moon. Gyp began to play. She pitched on a little Sicilian pastorale that the herdsmen play on their pipes coming down from the hills, softly, from very far, rising, rising, swelling to full cadence, and failing, failing away again to nothing. The moon rose over the trees; its light flooded ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... may learn from each. I am, as thou, a clarion-voice of song; All hail me chief of minstrels. But I am not, Heaven knows, o'ercredulous: no, I scarce can yet (I think) outvie Philetas, nor the bard Of Samos, champion of Sicilian song. They are as cicadas challenged ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... and render it fit for productive purposes. Five miles from Trecastagne is Nicolosi, a small village which has often suffered from the fire-vomiting mountain. Here we supped, and baited the mules for two hours. Nicolosi, according to Signor Gemmellero, a Sicilian physician, long resident at Catania, is two thousand one hundred and twenty-eight feet above the level of the sea, and its mean temperature ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20. No. 568 - 29 Sept 1832 • Various
... the king of Naples having undertaken to convert the Sicilian sulphur trade into a monopoly, England, which consumes an immense quantity of this sulphur, warned the king of Naples that, if the monopoly were maintained, it would be considered a casus belli. While the two governments were exchanging diplomatic notes, fifteen patents were taken out in England ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... generation born in this country we should find, I am convinced, that we are no more homicidal than France and Belgium, and less so than Italy. It is to be expected that with our Chinese, "greaser," and half-breed population in the West, our Black Belt in the South, and our Sicilian and South Italian immigration in the North and East, our murder rate should exceed those of the continental nations, which are ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... Venice in 1720. Bryan says that about 1738 his father sent him to Rome, where he studied under Valeriani, through whom he acquired the style of Valeriani's master, Marco Ricci of Belluno. With Vasi, a Sicilian engraver, he learned that art. Ricci and Pannini were much in vogue, following the example of Claude in his employment of ruins as a picturesque element in a composition. But Piranesi excelled both Ricci and ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... colony are largely from South Italy,—Calabrian and Sicilian peasants, or Neapolitans from the workingmen's quarters of that city. They have come to America with the distinct aim of earning money, and finding more room for the energies of themselves and their children. In almost all cases they mean to go back again, simply because their imaginations ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... interests, apt at times to conflict, the traders and the revenue collectors. To this he owed the glory of his successful impeachment of the infamous Verres, in 70 B.C., which he undertook at the request of the Sicilian provincials. The bad man who had so hideously misgoverned them, felt himself crushed by Cicero's opening speech, and went into voluntary exile. Cicero was now a power in the state, and his rise up the official ladder was sure ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... shared with the king, prevented him from setting up his claims against Conrad. But the deaths both of Conrad and of Frederick II.'s son by Isabella of England weakened the ties between the English royal house and the Hohenstaufen, and Henry was tempted by Innocent's offer of the Sicilian throne for his younger son, Edmund, a boy of nine, along with a proposal to release him from his vow of crusade to Syria, if he would prosecute on his son's behalf a crusading campaign against the enemies of the Church in Naples. ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... policy. Early in 1860 Cavour appointed him governor of Milan, evacuated by the Austrians after the battle of Magenta, a position which he held with great ability. But, disapproving of the government's policy with regard to Garibaldi's Sicilian expedition and the occupation by Piedmont of the kingdom of Naples as ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... Camerota. L'Infresco Point is ahead, not three miles away. It is of no use to row, for the breeze will come up before long and save you the trouble. But the sea is white and motionless. Far in the offing a Sicilian schooner and a couple of clumsy "martinganes"—there is no proper English name for the craft—are lying becalmed, with hanging sails. The men on board the felucca watch them and the sea. There is a shadow on the white, hazy horizon, then a streak, then a broad dark blue band. The schooner ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... celebrate mass at the convent of St Agnese. The time was one when a popular demonstration in favour of the Pope was urgently required. It was in fact the beginning of the end. Victor Emmanuel was about to enter Bologna as king; the news of the Sicilian insurrection had just reached Rome; the Imperial Government had sent one of its periodical intimations, that the French occupation could not be prolonged indefinitely; and General De La Moriciere had assumed the command of the Papal army, ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... gayly-decked wives and daughters of the Gascons, from the metaries along the Ridge, and the chattering Spanish women of the Market, their shining hair un-bonneted to the sun. Next below were their husbands and lovers in Sunday blouses, milkmen, butchers, bakers, black-bearded fishermen, Sicilian fruiterers, swarthy Portuguese sailors, in little woollen caps, and strangers of the graver sort; mariners of England, Germany, and Holland. The lowest seats were full of trappers, smugglers, Canadian voyageurs, drinking and singing; Americains, too—more's the shame—from the upper rivers—who ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... he sailed away wondering how he might relieve the tedium of life, until one day, after long voyaging, sufficiently recovered from his grief and himself, he leaned over the taffrail, this time lost in admiration of the rocks and summits above Syracuse, the Sicilian coasts carrying his thoughts out of the present into the past, to those valleys where Theocritus ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... the objection of prostitutes to be examined during the monthly periods as often greater than that of respectable women. Again, Callari states ("Prostituzione in Sicilia," Archivio di Psichiatria, 1903, p. 205), that Sicilian prostitutes can only with difficulty be persuaded to expose themselves naked in the practice of their profession. Aretino long since remarked (in La Pippa) that no women so detest gratuitous decolletage as prostitutes. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... illustrated these recollections with scenes of mimicry in which she displayed the skill of a fairy, the imagination of an artist, and sometimes the broad humor of a low comedian. In a turn of the hand, with a flower, a bit of silk, a sheet of paper, she composed a Neapolitan, Roman, or Sicilian head-dress. She performed scenes from ballets or operas, pushing back the train of her dress with a tragic sweep of her foot, and accentuating strongly the commonplace exclamations ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... and happily associated with "Sweet the Moments" is "Sicily," or the "Sicilian Hymn"—from an old Latin ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... from the Sicilian straits to Naples is picturesque. The Liparis, with their volcanic summits, on one side—the Calabrian highlands, on the other—a succession of rich mountains, clothed with all kinds of verdure, and of the finest forms; and around, the perpetual ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... the older man. I have lived a life such as your friends on the platform to-night—honorable, clean, sweet people—I've nothing to say against them—have no conception. I am English, of course—London born. My father was an Englishman; but my mother was a Sicilian. She used to go about with a barrel-organ—my father ran away with her. I have that violent South in my blood, and I've lived nearly all my days in London. I've had to pay dearly for my blood. The only compensation it has given ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke |
