"Mediaeval" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... development of the middle class, and with the growth of a commercial and industrial civilization. Horror at human slavery is not a century old as a common sentiment in a civilized state. The idea of the "free man," as we understand it, is the product of a revolt against mediaeval and feudal ideas; and our notion of equality, when it is true and practical, can be explained only by that revolt. It was in England that the modern idea found birth. It has been strengthened by the industrial and commercial development of that country. It has been inherited ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... it," I said after supper. "What do you want with your mediaeval Venetians and your Chinese pots now? You will have the finest antique in the world in your garden—a temple as old as time, and in a land which they say has no history. You had the right ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... indigestion, always wet through, always violently ill and always dirty, with your hair in ropes and your face bloused by the wind—to say nothing of icebergs and fogs and the cargo of cotton goods catching fire, and the wheezing mediaeval boilers bursting and ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... An old mediaeval mystic once said, 'There is nothing weaker than the devil stripped naked.' Would it were true! For there is one thing that is weaker than a discovered devil, and that is my own heart. For we all know that sometimes, with our eyes open, and the most unmistakable consciousness ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... by the haughty Scrymgeour: he might be a pain in the neck to "the family"; but he did know how to stop a dog fight. From the first moment of his intervention calm began to steal over the scene. He had the same effect on the almost inextricably entwined belligerents as, in mediaeval legend, the Holy Grail, sliding down the sunbeam, used to have on battling knights. He did not look like a dove of peace, but the most captious could not have denied that he brought home the goods. There was a magic ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... advanced in civilization than those occupied by the North American Indians, as in mediaeval Ireland, the formation of bogs may be commenced by the neglect of man to remove, from the natural channels of superficial drainage, the tops and branches of trees felled for the various purposes to which wood is applicable in his rude industry; and, when the flow of the water ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... and unintelligent orthodoxy, and Froude had entered with earnest purpose into Church ways of practical self-discipline and self-correction. Bishop Lloyd's lectures had taught him and others, to the surprise of many, that the familiar and venerated Prayer Book was but the reflexion of mediaeval and primitive devotion, still embodied in its Latin forms in the Roman Service books; and so indirectly had planted in their minds the idea of the historical connexion, and in a very profound way the spiritual sympathy, of the modern ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... foregather, brothers and sisters in one home! Religious tolerance—practical separation of Church and State—that was a broad idea for his age, a generous idea for a Roman Catholic of a time not so far removed from the mediaeval. True, wherever he went and whatever might be his own thought and feeling, he would still have for overlord a Protestant sovereign, and the words of his charter forbade him to make laws repugnant to the laws of England. But Maryland was distant, and wise management might do much. ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... the sixteenth century; some wonderful old paintings, especially the portraits of the early Bishops of Hexham, Alcmund, Wilfrid, Acca, Eata, Frithbert, Cuthbert, and John, which date from the fifteenth century; the mediaeval carved and painted pulpit, and the tomb of good King Alfwald of Northumbria. Many of the stones used by Wilfrid's builders were of Roman workmanship, and seem to have come from the Roman city of Corstopitum, at Corbridge. An ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... nine or ten English ones, dress baskets, large packing cases, and one mysterious long box which when opened contained several panels of old Florentine carved wood-work which interested all New York immensely. Pictures and tapestries, armor and screens, and a gate of mediaeval wrought iron were all among her art treasures. The foreign butler was her charge d'affaires, and managed everything most wisely and even economically. He engaged a few servants in New York, her maid, housekeeper and the two housemaids she had brought out with her. Her house was the perfect abode ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... am not quite sure of this, not having studied with any care the forms of mediaeval shipping; but in all the MSS. I have examined the sails of the shipping ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... that Don Francisco de Mogente had purposely avoided crossing the bridge, where to this day the night watchman, with lantern and spear, peeps cautiously to and fro—a startlingly mediaeval figure. It seemed also that the traveler was expected, though he had performed the last stage of his journey ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... fruitless; and the judgment will, for once at least, be in a condition to exercise itself on these works with justice. Nay, this will be done most thoroughly if our active young friend, besides the monograph devoted to the cathedral of Cologne, follows out in detail the history of our mediaeval architecture. When whatever is to be known about the practical exercise of this art is further brought to light, when the art is represented in all its fundamental features by a comparison with the Graeco-Roman and the Oriental ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... had a place in Quedlinburg. I still remember with pleasure Steuerwald's beautiful winter landscapes, into which he so cleverly introduced the mediaeval ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... adventurous enterprises which rendered the age of feudalism and chain-armour memorable in history, none were more remarkable or important than the 'armed pilgrimages' popularly known as the Crusades; and, among the expeditions which the warriors of mediaeval Europe undertook with the view of rescuing the Holy Sepulchre from the Saracens, hardly one is so interesting as that which had Louis IX. for its chief and Joinville for ...
— The Boy Crusaders - A Story of the Days of Louis IX. • John G. Edgar
... these diseases were tardy because men were taught that some unseen power was punishing men and governments for their sins. The difference between the old and the new way is shown powerfully by a painting in the Liverpool Gallery entitled "The Plague." A mediaeval village is strewn with the dead and dying. Bloated, spotted faces look into the eyes of ghouls as laces and jewelry are torn from bodies not yet cold. In the foreground a muscular giant, paragon of conscious virtue, clad like John the Baptist and Bible ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... large is it as to be practically an upland plateau, and yet its area lies wholly within the walls of what may be designated as one building. It is a long-violated retreat; all its corner-stones, plinths, and architraves were carried away to build neighbouring villages even before mediaeval or modern history began. Many a block which once may have helped to form a bastion here rests now in broken and diminished shape as part of the chimney-corner of some shepherd's cottage within the distant horizon, and the corner-stones of this heathen altar may form the base-course ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... the star of the May Island on the other, and farther off yet a third and a greater on the craggy foreland of St. Abb's. And but a little way round the corner of the land, imminent itself above the sea, stands the gem of the province and the light of mediaeval Scotland, St. Andrews, where the great Cardinal Beaton held garrison against the world, and the second of the name and title perished (as you may read in Knox's jeering narrative) under the knives of true-blue Protestants, and to this day (after so many centuries) the current voice of the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his large house and proceeded to spend. Porportuk was known as the richest Indian in Alaska. Klakee-Nah was known as the whitest. Porportuk was a money-lender and a usurer. Klakee-Nah was an anachronism—a mediaeval ruin, a fighter and a feaster, ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... new fashion, wore a coif of slashed black velvet, a head-dress that recalls memories of mediaeval legend to a young imagination, to amplify, as it were, the dignity of womanhood. Her red-gold hair, escaping from under her cap, hung loose; bright golden color in the light, red in the rounded shadow of the curls that only partially hid her neck. Beneath a massive white brow, clean ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... writers of romance, and withal had hitherto maintained the semblance of strict originality. He had now, however, worked his way considerably up the tide of time. We had emerged from the period of fire-arms, and Mandeville was at this stage mediaeval. ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... find many specimens here that can only by equaled in De Quincey's best work. Read the peroration of the "Lamp of Sacrifice" and you will not need to be told that this is the finest tribute to the work of the builders of the mediaeval cathedral. Here is a part ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... cronies, M. le Cure de St. Eustace and M. le Cure de Ste. Agatha, though the priestly calling seemed all they had in common. The first was small of stature, thin of face, looking like a mediaeval, though he was a modern, saint; the other tall, well filled out like an epicure, yet not even Bonhomme Careau, the nearest approach to a scoffer in the two parishes, ever went so far as to call the Cure of Ste. Agatha ...
— The City and the World and Other Stories • Francis Clement Kelley
... prison be not altogether a garden of delights, it is still preferable to a gallows. In the third, I am almost ashamed to say it, but I found a certain pleasure in our place of residence: being an obsolete and really mediaeval fortress, high placed and commanding extraordinary prospects, not only over sea, mountain, and champaign, but actually over the thoroughfares of a capital city, which we could see blackened by day with the moving crowd of the inhabitants, and at night shining with lamps. And lastly, although ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... would he look at the photos of the Siamese, and he said: 'Don't show them to me!' So, in despair, as he sat silent, I told him I had been at a pleasant dinner-party the night before, and had met Mr. L—-, who told me of certain curious books of mediaeval history. 'Did he know them?' 'No, and he dared say Mr. L—- did not, either! Who was Mr. L—-?' I described that obscure individual (one of the foremost writers of the day), and added that he was immensely ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... to God—the heat of his quick love, the sweetness of his spiritual intercourse, the joyous melody with which it filled his austere, self-giving life[43]—as the probable result of the reaction of a neurotic temperament to mediaeval traditions. But if, for instance the Oxford undergraduate of to-day realizes Rolle, not as a picturesque fourteenth-century hermit, but as a fellow-student—another Oxford undergraduate, separated from him only by an interval of time—who gave up that university and the ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... Scott was not only romantic but reactionary. That was his weakness. But if he was the first to make the past alive, he was also the first to make the present historical. His masterpieces are not his descriptions of mediaeval knights so much as the stories in which he illuminates the present by his vivid presentation of the present order as the outgrowth from the old, and makes the Scottish peasant or lawyer or laird interesting as a ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... desperate battle to face Till the leer of the trader is seen nevermore in the land, Till we bring every maid of the age to one sheltering hand. Ah, they are priceless, the pale and the ivory and red! Breathless we gaze on the curls of each glorious head! Arm them with strength mediaeval, thy marvellous dower, Blast now their tempters, shelter their steps with thy power. Leave not life's fairest to perish—strangers to thee, Let not the weakest be shipwrecked, ...
— The Congo and Other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... vitalizing power of the rod may be found embalmed in many a curious mediaeval legend. The budding rod, borrowed from the tradition of Aaron's, is, for instance, very frequent. Thus in the story of St. Christophoros, as preserved in Von Buelow's Christian Legends of Germany, we read of the godly man carrying ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... insipid, something which gave her appetite for the rest. "This is all Tolstoyan nonsense and sentimentality," she told herself mockingly, "there is nothing sacred about scrubbing the floor." Or on another day, "I wonder if it's a twist of the absurd mediaeval ascetic perversity left over?" Or again, "All it does for me is to take off the curse of belonging to the bourgeoisie." But no matter what skeptical name she called it, nor how much she minimized the reality ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... a short time secrecy was thrown to the winds. Japan's officers reorganized the Chinese army; her drill sergeants made the mediaeval warriors over into twentieth century soldiers, accustomed to all the modern machinery of war and with a higher average of marksmanship than the soldiers of any Western nation. The engineers of Japan deepened and widened the intricate system of canals, built factories and foundries, ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... to scenarios this looks a large order. Eighteen years seems difficult to put on the screen. In reality this is exactly where the trained movie man sees his chance. Here he can put in anything and everything that he likes, bringing in, in a slightly mediaeval form, ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... getting and enjoying wholly—and in this case, moreover, you are you, and know something about me, if not much, and have read Bos on the art of supplying Ellipses, and (after, particularly, I have confessed all this, why and how it has been) you will subaudire when I pull out my Mediaeval-Gothic-Architectural-Manuscript (so it was, I remember now,) and instruct you about corbeils and ogives ... though, after all, it was none of Vivian's doing, that,—all the uncle kind or man's, which I never professed to be. Now you see how ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... Kenneth, passed over to Bute, to St. Cathan, his mother's brother. He is said to have made later a pilgrimage to Rome. The monastery he founded became the site of the well-known Cathedral of Dunblane a place which derives its name from the saint where the mediaeval building begun by David I. is still to be seen. Among the many miracles attributed to the saint is the restoration to life of a dead boy. He is also said to have rekindled the extinguished lamps in his church during the night office, on one occasion, ...
— A Calendar of Scottish Saints • Michael Barrett
... law ("Doctors commons" courts lasted until a generation ago in England); some of it still remains. But in these early days all matters concerning marriage, divorce, guardianship of children, ownership of property after death, belonged to church law. It is hard to see why, except that the mediaeval church arrogated to itself anything that concerned sin in any way—anything that concerned the relation of the sexes, that concerned the Holy Sacraments, and marriage is a sacrament. Consequently the mediaeval church claimed that it had jurisdiction over ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... successful, and having, through Golenishtchev, made acquaintance with a few interesting people, for a time he was satisfied. He painted studies from nature under the guidance of an Italian professor of painting, and studied mediaeval Italian life. Mediaeval Italian life so fascinated Vronsky that he even wore a hat and flung a cloak over his shoulder in the mediaeval style, which, indeed, ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... Mr. Chesterton and he may be at one in the way in which they regard the scientific criminologists, eugenists, collectivists, pragmatists, post-impressionists, and most of the other "ists" of recent times, as an army of barbarians invading the territories of mediaeval Christendom. But while Mr. Chesterton is in the gap of danger, waving against his enemies the sword of the spirit, Mr. Belloc stands on a little height apart, aiming at them the more cruel shafts of the intellect. It is not that he is less courageous than Mr. Chesterton, ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... account of the virtues see the Republic, Book IV, and the Laws, Book I.] It is interesting to lay beside it the longer list drawn up by Aristotle, and to compare both with that which commended itself to the mind of the mediaeval churchman. ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... a monument, and so, I think, has some other modern worthy. At one end of the hall, under one of the great painted windows, stand three or four old statues of mediaeval kings, whose identities I forget; and in the two corners of the opposite end are two gigantic absurdities of painted wood, with grotesque visages, whom I quickly recognized as Gog and Magog. They stand each on ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and receive, in change for his money, base or demonetised coin from waiters dressed as undertakers. And, again, our traveller, after getting a headache at the Louvre and vainly trying to find the Mediaeval improprieties at the Maison Cluny, will refresh himself by a visit to the Morgue, to say nothing ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... the garden where the oleanders and cherokee money and the crescent leaves of the blue gum trees were moving in the wind. Colonel Seth, despite the war, had plenty of roses and Grangersons was kept up in the old style. Just as in Nuremberg and Vittoria we see mediaeval cities preserved, so to speak, under glass, so at Grangersons one found the old Plantation, house and all, miraculously intact, living, ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... bewildered tourist alights at the station of Monteriano, he finds himself in the middle of the country. There are a few houses round the railway, and many more dotted over the plain and the slopes of the hills, but of a town, mediaeval or otherwise, not the slightest sign. He must take what is suitably termed a "legno"—a piece of wood—and drive up eight miles of excellent road into the middle ages. For it is impossible, as well as sacrilegious, to be as ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... Providence, fitting always the men to their age and their work, had sent upon the earth whereof it takes right good care, not in England only, but in Spain and Italy, in Germany and the Netherlands, and wherever, in short, great men and great deeds were needed to lift the mediaeval world into the modern. ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... beyond that limited range of thought. I propose now, in illustration of this View, to show what this secret was. It has the making of a fascinating Romance; it is the most wonderful example of what I will call "the Evolution of Thought as depicted by Human strivings after the Transcendental in Mediaeval Mysticism." I shall give it in a brief form, touching only on those essential points which require a very slight knowledge of Geometry, but those interested in the subject may refer to Ars Quatuor Coronatorum (vol. xxiii., 1910), where I have given the whole subject, ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... perfect, they would have been utterly inadequate to reveal those minute displacements, from which we have learned the actual distance of the nearest of the celestial orbs. From the early times, therefore, until the mediaeval period of our own era, astronomy grew up upon a faulty basis, for the earth ever seemed so much the largest body in the universe, that it continued from century to century to be regarded as the ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... said, "There's one who'll go overboard before we get across," but he happily proved a mistaken prophet. Irving not only survived the voyage, but spent two years traveling in Italy, France, Sicily, and the Netherlands. The romantic spirit strong within him eagerly absorbed mediaeval history and tradition. "My native country was full of youthful promise; Europe was rich in ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... flesh, nor fowl, nor good red herring," the professor declared. "If Mr. Hodder were cornered he couldn't maintain that he, as a priest, has full power to forgive sins, and yet he won't assert that he hasn't. The mediaeval conception of the Church, before Luther's day, was consistent, at any rate, if you once grant the premises on which ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... mortal life, philosophical Pantheists, whether Egyptian or Greek, or even Indian,[1] satisfied their religious instincts by hearty communion with the popular worship of traditional gods. Or, if it is thought that the mediaeval mystics were religious Pantheists, a closer examination of their devout utterances will show that, though they approximated to Pantheism, and even used language such as, if interpreted logically, must have implied it, yet they carefully reserved ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... knew better. What did he think of the Brownings? 'Oh, he had heard the name; he did not know anything of them. Since Scott, he read no modern writer; Scott WAS GREATER THAN HOMER! What he liked were curious, old, erudite books about mediaeval and northern things.' I said I knew little of such literature, and preferred the writers of our own age, but indeed I was no great student at all. Thereupon he evidently wanted to astonish me; and, talking of Ireland, said, 'Ah, yes; a most curious, mixed race. First there ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... governor of Orange. The city became the starting-point for a continuous series of incursions. It was not war, but open rapine. The very traders were plundered of their wares when they fell into his hands. One might have fancied that a mediaeval robber-baron had reappeared on the banks of the Rhone. It was true that Glandage, making a virtue of bluntness, was wont to say that "there was nothing Huguenot about him but the point of his sword." None ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... sometimes found occasions for satisfying both, he could not have lived in Paris and London at all, but would have gone back to Constantinople, which is the last refuge of romance in Europe, the last hiding-place of mediaeval adventure, the last city of which a new Decameron of tales could still be told, and might still ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... Orange colours and thronged from deck to topmast by enthusiastic multitudes, was waiting to receive their beloved stadholder. A deafening cannonade saluted him on his approach. The Prince was escorted to the Square or Dam, where on a high scaffolding covered with blue velvet in front of the stately mediaeval town-hall the burgomasters and board of magistrates in their robes of office were waiting to receive him. The strains of that most inspiriting and suggestive of national melodies, the 'Wilhelmus van Nassouwen,' rang through the air, and when they were ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... now as he walked up the silent road he still bewailed, the fate that had called him to such an uneventful life as a pedagogue's. What a prosaic existence he led, so stagnant, so colourless! Secure, methodical, year in year out, what call was there for bravery? He thought enviously of those roving, mediaeval days, so near and so remote, of quests and spies and condottieri and many a risky blade-drawing business. And suddenly came a doubt, a strange doubt, springing out of some chance thought of tortures, and destructive altogether of the position ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... "But it's the best I can do, anyway. Do you remember what the mediaeval mummer said, when he ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... and religious reaction; and reaction often assumes the aspect of progress, nay, in some cases is identical with progress. Most of the poets, dramatists, and other writers of the Romantic School were, either by affinity or predilection, legitimists and neo-Catholics. Gothic art, mediaeval sentiment, the ancient monarchy and the ancient creed, were blended in their programme with the abrogation of the "unities," and a greater license ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... a convent. But there was one person who had absolutely no voice in the matter, and that was the unfortunate girl in question. The very idea of consulting her on any point of it, would have struck a mediaeval mother ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... the serfs were entirely at their mercy, with much more consideration than those who were free, and, although dependent on them, had certain rights guaranteed by contract. The absolute monarchy found in nearly all nations, at the opening of modern times, was forced by its struggle with the mediaeval aristocracy to favor the emancipation of the serfs and of the lower classes. Even in Russia, Iwan III. (1462-1505) seems to have restored to the peasantry the right of migration, of which they ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... wife and made her mine. My summer holiday was coming on, and I decided that, instead of spending the week in Scarborough, I would make a tour through the towns and villages of the West Riding in search of Throp's wife. I took the matter as much to heart as if I had been a mediaeval knight setting forth to rescue some distressed damsel from the clutches of a wicked magician or monstrous hippogriff, and I called my expedition "the quest of Throppes wife"; as my emblem I chose ...
— Tales of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... Transvaal, whom they were called upon to face the burghers of Watersberg and Zoutpansberg, were tough frontiersmen living in a land where a dinner was shot, not bought. Shaggy, hairy, half-savage men, handling a rifle as a mediaeval Englishman handled a bow, and skilled in every wile of veld craft, they were as formidable opponents as the ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... hard to conceive of a greater responsibility than that of a mediaeval Inquisitor. The life or death of the heretic was practically at his disposal. The Church, therefore, required him to possess in a pre-eminent degree the qualities of an impartial judge. Bernard Gui, the most experienced Inquisitor of his time (1308-1323), thus ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard
... complete story would require a series of biographies presented in parallel columns. My own preliminary chapter to this book—a mere explanation of the presence of the dukes of Burgundy in the Netherlands—grew into an account of a sovereign whom they deposed and was published under the title of A Mediaeval Princess. ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... whom they adored, and who had brought them up with his heart. It was Dr. Schulze's furious unbelief, investing him with a certain suggestion of Satan-got intelligence, that attracted Saint X to him in serious illnesses—somewhat as the Christian princes of mediaeval Europe tolerated and believed in the Jew physicians. Saint X was only just reaching the stage at which it could listen to "higher criticism" without dread lest the talk should be interrupted by a bolt ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... his rounds along the gallery, shuffled his silk-clad shanks smartly between two young negroes balancing lanthorns suspended on the shafts of their halberds. That little group had a mediaeval and outlandish aspect. Cesar carried a bunch of keys in one hand, his staff of office in the other. He stood aside, in his maroon velvet and gold lace, holding the three-cornered hat under his arm, bowing his gray, woolly ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... garden-paradise, which occupies the whole higher portion of the entire extent of the valley, rise here and there white villas, with ornaments upon their roofs and balconies, with small towers, which show a mediaeval Venetian origin. Around the valley ascend mountains in a wide circuit, their slopes covered with shadowy olive woods, and cultivated almost to their summits, which are rounded and not very high. These larger villages, with their churches, and half a dozen lesser homesteads, are situated on the terraces ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... strange girl found in the heart of London's darkness, alone, without friends or parents, was a witch, a devilish, potion-dealing witch, who might, at any time, fly through the night-sky on a broom-stick as surely as any mediaeval old hag. These visions might be exaggerated for many human beings, not so for Grace. Having no imagination she was soaked in superstition. She clung to a few simple pictures, and was exposed to every terror that ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... churches. No amount of plausible evidence would have made me believe in his sincerity. Let me beg you to appreciate the simple fact, that no young man of brains and education is nowadays an honest defender of mediaeval Christianity—the Christianity of your churches. Such fellows may transact with their conscience, and make a more or less decent business of the clerical career; or, in rare cases, they may believe that society ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... the effect of such teaching on humanity? It is impossible to doubt that it has led to results deplorably, indescribably wicked. Whence, for instance, arose the horrors of the mediaeval inquisition, the insensate tortures inflicted upon men like Huss and Bruno solely for theological errors, if not from belief in this demon-deity whom the Church worshipped? If their practices were but a shadow of the horrors he was supposed to be everlastingly inflicting on mankind, who could ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... right and power to make his own will prevail. This tendency was strongest in the slaveholding States, and especially, in those States, in the slaveholding class, the American imitation of the feudal nobility of mediaeval Europe; and on this side the war just ended was, in its most general expression, a war in defence of personal democracy or the sovereignty of the people individually, against the humanitarian democracy, represented by the abolitionists, and the territorial democracy, represented ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... this priceless literary heritage has been waiting, precariously subjected to the vicissitudes of earthly circumstance. Like a lone great manuscript within the cloister of a mediaeval monk, Brann's work might have perished utterly soon after its creation, like a song of magic music held but fleetingly within the ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... things come to pass. They are very old rooms, and I can fancy what strange people must have lived in them, and died in them perhaps, in the days that are gone. But if you come to them, they shall be made bright and pretty, and we will chase the shadows of the mediaeval age away. There are old pictures, old musical instruments, quaint spindle-legged chairs and tables, tapestries that crumble as you touch them—the ashes and relics of many generations. Gustave says we will sweep these poor vestiges away, and begin a new life, ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... to her, a jeopardy previously undiscerned, but which then shaken at him, instantly took shape, twisted his mouth into the appalling grimace that mediaeval art gave to ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... phantoms of the street. It seemed a fit setting for his fears. "I am lost," he thought; lost among goblins, marooned in the age of barbarism, shut in a labyrinth with a Black Death at once actual and mediaeval: he dared not think of Home, but flung his arms on the littered ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... had been in travelling, how many they were, what was their rank, whither they went,—all these questions are left unsolved. They glide into the story, present their silent adoration, and as silently steal away.' The tasteless mediaeval tradition knows all about them: they were three; they were kings. It knows their names; and, if we choose to pay the fee, we can see their bones to-day in the shrine behind the high altar in Cologne ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... Poland. There existed only two classes—nobles and serfs. The business and trade of the state were in the hands of Germans and Jews, and there existed no national or middle class in which must reside the life of a modern state. In other words, Poland was patriarchal and mediaeval. She had become unsuited to her environment. Surrounded by powerful absolutisms which had grown out of the ruins of mediaeval forces, she in the eighteenth century was clinging to the traditions of feudalism ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... Empire, and of circumventing the dark and crooked wiles of Russian diplomacy. Altogether Augustus Charles Hobart was a remarkable man—bluff, bold, dashing, and somewhat dogged. There was in his composition something of the mediaeval "condottiere," and a good deal more of that Dugald Dalgetty whom Scott drew. Gustavus Adolphus would have made much of Hobart; the great Czarina, Catherine II., would have appointed him Commander-in-Chief ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... material nor arrogant. I am humbler than you, and your positive assertion seems much the more arrogant. This is the twentieth century, and your mediaeval attitude would win no possible sympathy or ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... luncheon with us on the day of our departure, and with an adroit privacy, which in a layman would have been sly, presented her, in right of his holy calling, with a little book, the binding of which was mediaeval and costly, and whose letter-press dealt in a way which he commended, with some points on which she was not satisfactory; and she found on the fly-leaf this little inscription:—'Presented to Miss Millicent ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... the Frankish chieftain, saved Europe from a Mohammedan con-quest. He drove the Moslems out of France, but they maintained themselves in Spain where Abd-ar-Rahman founded the Caliphate of Cordova, which became the greatest centre of science and art of mediaeval Europe. ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... painfully emerging and preening its wings for flight. The "higher criticism" was nascent, and ancient traditions were already beginning to totter on the foundations which the Fathers had set. But Spain, close wrapped in mediaeval dreams, had suffered no taint of "modernism." The portals of her mind were well guarded against the entrance of radical thought, and her dreamers were yet lulled into lethargic adherence to outworn beliefs and musty creeds by the mesmerism of priestly tradition. The peculiar ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... most certainly was not an Anarchist. Christ, like Satan, claimed the throne. He set up a new authority against an old authority; but He set it up with positive commandments and a comprehensible scheme. In this light all mediaeval people—indeed, all people until a little while ago—would have judged questions involving revolt. John Ball would have offered to pull down the government because it was a bad government, not because it was a government. Richard II. would ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... word used in preceding quotation from Plutarch. The Old Fr. forme, mediaeval Lat. forma, was sometimes applied to choir-stalls, with back, and book-rest. "For the origin of this use of the word, cf. Old French s'asseoir en forme, to sit in a row or in fixed order."—Murray. Nowhere in literature is there a more realistic study and interpretation of the temper ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... mediaeval Europe, so in early Rome, the same conditions produced the same results: we find the craftsmen of the town forming themselves into gilds, not only for the protection of their trade, but from a natural instinct of association, and providing these gilds, on the model of the older groups ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... and we may infer that while at this seat of learning he laid the foundations for his wide scholarship in the diligent study of the Greek and Latin classics, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, the pastoral poetry of Theocritus and Vergil, and the great mediaeval epics of Italian literature. On account of some misunderstanding with the master and tutors of his college, Spenser failed to receive the appointment to a fellowship, and left the University in 1576, at the age of twenty-four. His failure to attain the highest scholastic recognition was ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... consoled the weeping infant with a new doll and the assurance that Hedwige was the spitefullest cat as yet evolved from a feline sex. I had no notion at the time of the reason for Hedwige's viciousness. But now I fancy she must have acted according to mediaeval superstition and used the doll as Joanna's hated effigy. I remember that the next time I saw her I criticised her straight Teutonic fringe and fanfaronaded on the captivating frizziness of Joanna's hair. The wonder is that Hedwige did not run hatpins into me. The murderer's widow ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... elaborate carving. Imagine Staples Inn in Holborn double its present height, and with every structural detail chiselled with patient care into intricate patterns of fruit and foliage, and you will get some idea of a Brunswick street. The town contained four or five splendid old churches, and their mediaeval builders had taken advantage of the dead-flat, featureless plain in which Brunswick stands, to erect such lofty towers as only the architects in the Low Countries ever devised; towers which served as landmarks for miles around, their soaring height silhouetted against the pale northern ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... the castle, dearest, he wants to see, not papa! You don't know what manner of creature this is! He is one of your refined and supremely cultivated English—mad about archaeology and mediaeval trumpery. He'll know all your ancestors intended by every insane piece of architecture, and every puzzling detail of this old house; and he'll light up every corner of it with some gleam of ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... angles and corners, his pointed elbows dig beds for themselves in the oak table, his skinny fingers bury themselves in his cheeks, his piggish grey eyes get redder over manuscripts, Latin, Greek, or mediaeval. He falls into raptures, he smacks his lips, he licks his chops like a cat over a dainty dish, and then he throws himself upon that dirty litter, with his knees up to his chin, and he thinks he has had a delightful day! Oh, Providence of God, is a man's duty best done, are his responsibilities ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... the Egyptian, the Grecian, and the Romanesque,—including in the latter term both Roman Art itself and all subsequent Art, whether derived directly or indirectly from Rome, as the Byzantine, the Moresque, the Mediaeval, and the Renaissance. Selecting the most characteristic works to which these great eras respectively gave birth, it is not difficult, by comparison, to ascertain the master-spirit, or type, to which each of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... massiveness of the Norman nave, the unusual effect of the coloured paintings above the arches, and the carved stone effigies of knights whose names are almost forgotten, carry one away from the familiar impressions of a present-day Yorkshire town, and almost suggest that one is living in mediaeval times. One can wander, too, on the moors a few miles to the north and see heather stretching away to the most distant horizon and feel that there, also, are scenes which have been identically the same for many centuries. The men of the Neolithic ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... Reformers took—the step which put them most strikingly out of line with the main course of the Reformation—was their break with Protestant Theology. They were not satisfied with a programme which limited itself to a correction of abuses, an abolition of mediaeval superstitions, and a shift of external authority. They were determined to go the whole way to a Religion of inward life and power, to a Christianity whose only authority should be its dynamic and spiritual authority. They placed as low an estimate on the saving value ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... we should have become gradually and painfully conscious of an improvement in our hats. If he had been a tailor, we should have suddenly found our frock-coats trailing on the ground with the grandeur of mediaeval raiment. If he had been a shoemaker, we should have found, with no little consternation, our shoes gradually approximating to the antique sandal. As a hairdresser, he would have invented some massing of the hair worthy to be the crown of Venus; ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... that point in our narrative where the history of modern Sweden takes its start. With the close of the war of independence those features which mark the face of mediaeval Sweden disappear, and a wholly new countenance gradually settles upon the land. Nor is this transformation peculiar in any way to Sweden. Early in the sixteenth century all Europe was passing from mediaeval into modern history. In the Middle Ages there was but one ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... contemplating it for a while as Eve might have contemplated the apple, unmindful of a certain petition in the Lord's Prayer, he took up the volume marked I, and began to read the well-remembered hand-writing with its quaint mediaeval-looking contractions. Even at the age when its author had opened her diary, he noted that this writing was so tiny and neat that many of the pages might have been taken from a monkish missal. Also there were few corrections; what she set down was already ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... 'benefit of clergy,'" exploded the younger man; "that mediaeval bonanza isn't to be mentioned in the same week with the ministerial half-rates, donations, and hold-ups we moderns put up with. This pulpit pounder's shrew pays me no more than she pays the doctor, the grocer, the butcher, and the ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... correspondence between the modern and the ancient notion of a distinction between primary and derivative matter is, to a certain extent, real. For this ethereal 'Urstoff' of the modern corresponds very closely with the prhote hyle of Aristotle, the materia prima of his mediaeval followers; while matter, differentiated into our elements, is the equivalent of the first stage of progress towards the heschhate hyle, or finished matter, of ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
... silvestris, was used of wild animals as contrasted with domesticated beasts, as wild sheep and wild fowl, in Columella, vii. 2; viii. 12, or wolves, in Propertius, iii. 7, or mice, in Pliny, xxx. 22. (Occasionally it is used of men, as in Pliny, viii. 79.) The meaning was the same in mediaeval Latin (Du Cange, Glossarium, Niort, 1886, tom. vii. p. 686) and in Old French, as "La douce voiz du loussignol sauvage" (Michel, Chansons de chatelain de Coucy, xix.). In the romance of Robert le ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... generally popular—stiff, hard, unsympathetic, people called him. From one point of view, and one only, he perhaps deserved the epithets. If a woman lost his respect she seemed to lose his pity too. Like a mediaeval monk, he looked upon such rather as the cause than the result of male depravity, and his contempt for them mingled with anger, almost, as I sometimes thought, with hatred. And this attitude was, I have no doubt, resented by the men of his own class and set, who shared neither his faults ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... Ascher to be much interested in Irish affairs. Ireland is the one country in the world over which financiers have not cast their net, possibly because they would catch next to nothing there. So we, who escaped the civilisation of Roman law, almost escaped the philosophy of the mediaeval church, were entirely untouched by the culture of the Renaissance, remained a kind of Gideon's fleece when the dew of the industrial system of the 19th century was moistening Europe, are now left untouched by the new civilisation of international finance. ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... indefinitely—show, above all, one thing: the striking difference in the conception of what is termed "honor" obtaining between the officers in the army and the bulk of the population, the citizen element. The so-called "army code" embodies views which it is euphemism to call mediaeval—remnants of the dark ages. And yet these views are not excused; no, they are upheld and endorsed by the Kaiser, his government, and by ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... arise the two vast mediaeval schools; one of flat and infinitely varied colour, with exquisite character and sentiment added, in the forms represented; but little perception of shadow. The other, of light and shade, with exquisite drawing of solid ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... a moment to the greatest knower of men in mediaeval days, to Dante. How deeply his poetic eye looked into the hearts of men, how living are the characters in his "Divine Comedy"; and yet he left us hardly any psychological observations. Some psychology may be acknowledged in words like these: "The man in whose bosom thought on thought awakes ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... mythological as Dunbar's God who laughs his heart sore at an ale-house jest. Dunbar, and the author of the Hymn, and the savage with his tale of Tundun or Daramulun, have all quite contradictory sets of ideas alternately present to their minds; the mediaeval poet, of course, being conscious of the contradiction, which makes the essence of his humour, such as it is. To Greece, in its loftier moods, Apollo was, despite his myth, a noble source of inspiration, of art, and of conduct. But the contradiction in the low myth and high doctrine ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... There were the old, old residents and their offspring, people who squabbled violently among themselves as to whose ancestor came aboard the Mayflower first, and which in what capacity. There were the mediaeval spinsters who always reach their best development in the semi-small New England town, spinsters who have clubs and theories, and yet play golf, and frivol delightfully above their luncheon tables. And there ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... and languor of the cloister; nor will the institution be regarded with other than respect, as well as gratitude, when it is remembered that, as to the convent library we owe the preservation of ancient literature, to the convent laboratory we owe the duration of mediaeval art. ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... youth have their minds occupied more seriously by the sculpture and painting of the bowls of their tobacco-pipes, than by all the divinest workmanship and passionate imagination of Greece, Rome, and Mediaeval Christendom. ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... end, and murder is punished with the utmost sternness. In such a state as Dahomey, in the old days of independence, there may have been a good deal of barbarity displayed in the administration of justice, but at any rate human life was no less effectively protected by the law than it was, say, in mediaeval Europe. ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... Brancacci Chapel; but we do not doubt that he too felt the beneficent influx of the new style, of which Masaccio was the greatest champion, and that he followed it, leaving behind, up to a certain point, the primitive giottesque forms. There is in his art, the great mediaeval ideal rejuvenated and reinvigorated by the spirit of newer times. Being in the beginning of his career, as is generally believed, only an illuminator, he continued, with subtle delicacy and accurate, almost timid design, to illuminate in larger proportions on his panels, those figures which are often ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... in the Tintoretto, that of the suspended nude model, it would be safe to say that no modern painter would have employed such a figure. This touch of realism, even among the transcendental painters, denotes the clean-cut separations between the modern and mediaeval art sense. ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... his hastiness and the sudden outburst of friendliness which had followed it. He wanted to apologise to Laevsky in a joking tone, to give him a good talking to, to soothe him and to tell him that the duel was a survival of mediaeval barbarism, but that Providence itself had brought them to the duel as a means of reconciliation; that the next day, both being splendid and highly intelligent people, they would, after exchanging shots, appreciate ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... common speech is so great a means of union, that the Romans imposed the Latin tongue on all public business and official records, even where Greek was the more familiar language; and the Mediaeval Church displayed her unity by the use of Latin in every bishopric on all occasions of public worship. A language not only makes the literature embodied in it the heritage of all who speak it, but it diffuses among ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... written none of these more elaborate works, she would deserve a permanent place in our literature for a considerable library of short stories, among which I should name "A Berkshire Tradition," a pathetic tale of the Revolution; "The White Scarf," a romantic story of Mediaeval France; "Fanny McDermot," a study of conventional morality; "Home," of which the Westminster Review said, "We wish this book was in the hands of every mechanic in England"; "The Poor Rich Man and the Rich Poor Man" ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... square of the hotel de ville, a structure which a flattering wood-cut in the Guide-Joanne had given me a desire to behold. The reality was not impressive, the old color of the front having been completely restored away. Such interest as it superficially possesses it derives from a fine mediaeval tower which rises beside it, with turrets at the angles, - always a picturesque thing. The rest of the market was held in another place, still shabbier than the first, which lies beyond the canal. The Canal du Midi flows through the town, and, spanned at this ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... The mediaeval Irish scholars catalogued their native literature under several heads, probably as an aid to the memory of the professional poets or story-tellers whose stock-in-trade it was, and to one of these divisions ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... this period onwards frequent mention is made of "felt hattes," "beever hattes," and other like names. Throughout mediaeval times the wearing of a hat was regarded as a mark of rank and distinction. During the reign of Elizabeth the caprices of fashion in hats ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... material concerning Greeks and things Grecian. And here I must confess that I am no Hebraist. I am not intimately acquainted with the heterogeneous compilation called the Talmud, nor with Alexandrine and mediaeval Jewish literature. Nevertheless no one brought up strictly in a Christian Church can help becoming in some measure versed in things Hebraic. To be perpetually exercised from early childhood in reading, marking, ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... found himself involved. Here he was, committed to a strange and desperate enterprise. Nor was this all, for about him were other complications, totally different from those which might be expected in connection with such a mediaeval adventure, complications which, though they are frequent enough in the civilised life of men, were scarcely to be looked for in the wilds of Africa, and amidst savages. Among his companions were his ward, who chanced also to be the lady whom he loved and desired to make his wife, ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... Gothic art and his interest in the middle ages; the mediaeval revival at the close of the eighteenth century; The Castle of Otranto; Walpole's bequest to later romance-writers; Smollett's incidental anticipation of the methods of Gothic Romance; Clara Reeve's Old English Baron and her ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... yard without that announcing cry. It was mediaeval, the Blight said, positively—two lorn damsels, a benighted knight partially stripped of his armor by bush and sharp-edged rock, a gray palfrey (she didn't mention the impatient asses that had turned homeward) and she wished I ...
— A Knight of the Cumberland • John Fox Jr.
... many hours in conversation with Senor Custodio, noted very soon that the rag-dealer, though fully aware of his very humble condition, was a man of extraordinary pride and that as regarded honour and virtue he had the ideas of a mediaeval nobleman. ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... various times during a sojourn in Normandy; notes—not intended to be exhaustive, or even as complete and comprehensive in description, as ordinary books of travel, but which—written in the full enjoyment of summer time in this country, in sketching in the open air, and in the exploration of its mediaeval towns—may perchance impart something of the author's enthusiasm to his unknown readers, when scattered upon the winds of ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... manner was determined in part at least by the nature of the typical negroes themselves. Impulsive and inconstant, sociable and amorous, voluble, dilatory, and negligent, but robust, amiable, obedient and contented, they have been the world's premium slaves. Prehistoric Pharaohs, mediaeval Pashas and the grandees of Elizabethan England esteemed them as such; and so great a connoisseur in household service as the Czar Alexander added to his palace corps in 1810 two free negroes, one a steward on an American merchant ship and the other a body-servant whom John Quincy Adams, ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... which elevates and ennobles, which purifies the mind and inspires the soul. Progress is rapid in this direction as in many others. A breach of good taste in public works will ere long be adjudged a crime. For already mediaeval mud has ceased to be fashionable, and the picturesque in urban ugliness is picturesque no longer. All the capitals of Europe have had to be made over, Haussmannized, once or several times. Our own national capital ...
— Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam • Hubert Howe Bancroft
... been secretary to the last of the Counts of Spada, one of the most powerful families of mediaeval Italy, and he, dying in poverty, had left Faria an old breviary, which had been in the family since the days of the Borgias. In this, by chance, Faria found a piece of yellowed paper, on which, when put in the fire, writing began to ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds. |
