"Black-letter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... black-letter folio copy of Chaucer in my possession (with curious wood-cuts, but without title-page, or any indications of its date, printer, &c.), ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 26. Saturday, April 27, 1850 • Various
... his head. He had always known that it would come. The widow Navarro threw up her eyes, and in a whisper called the attention of her own special black-letter saint to this business. Rosa was glancing surreptitiously at Felipe, who, to do him justice, was smiling on the old ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... gentlemen of descent, not two in twenty can show a pedigree like Talboys. And with that name a princely mansion—antiquity stamped on it—stands in its own park, in the middle of its vast estates, with title-deeds in black-letter, girl." ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... who is called by Dibdin 'the father of black-letter collectors in this country,' was a great and generous patron of learning, and formed a magnificent library, which at the time of his death contained nearly twenty-nine thousand printed books and seventeen hundred and ninety manuscripts. John Bagford ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... would be enduring, unless the small game of the forest could be lured into her snares and parcelled among the apathetic hens. Many were the recipes and the consultations on the subject, till at last Ray wrote out for her, in black-letter, a notice to be pinned up in the sight of every delinquent: "Twelve eggs, or death!" Whether it were the frozen rabbit-meat flung among them the day before, or whether it were the timely warning, there is no one to tell; but the next morning ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... ago override the wisdom, or overshadow the light of the present, is a paradox peculiar to our system of jurisprudence. There are lawyers and judges, who enjoy a high reputation, whose fame rests upon their profound research among the worm-eaten tomes of black-letter law, and whose glory consists in their familiarity with the opinions and axioms of men who lived and died so long ago that their very tombs are forgotten. This class of lawyers and jurists hold in contempt all the learning, the philosophy, the practical wisdom of the present —rejecting everything ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... still to be found in old gardens: they stand here side by side. Monkshood, horehound, henbane, vervain (good against the spells of witches), feverfew, dog's mercury, bistort, woad, and so on, all seem like relics of the days of black-letter books. All the while greenfinches are singing happily in the trees without ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... pristine condition;[36] the Polish Protestant Bible of 1563, with its first rough-edged margins and in wooden binding; St. Jerom's Epistles, printed at Parma, by A. de Portilia—most captivating to the eye; with a curious black-letter broadside, in Latin sapphics, pasted in the interior of the cover; the History of Bohemia, by Pope Pius II, of 1475, as fresh and crackling as if it had just come from the printer: Schuzler's edition of the Hexameron of Ambrosius, 1472: the Hungarian Chronicle ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... but on sentimental occasions that the exhibition of cannibalism becomes general. But the monsters who interrupt men in the middle of a sentence are to be found everywhere; and they are always practising. Red-letter days or black-letter days, festival or fast, makes no difference to them. This enormous nuisance I feel the more, because it is one which I never retaliate. Interrupted in every sentence, I still practise the American Indian's ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... many grains of allowance had he known that there was a professional warfare of long continuance between him and Dr. Rappaccini, in which the latter was generally thought to have gained the advantage. If the reader be inclined to judge for himself, we refer him to certain black-letter tracts on both sides, preserved in the medical department of the University ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... is one of the results of the unlucky fancy of scholars for re-editing already accessible texts instead of devoting themselves to anecdota, that work of the first interest, like Perceforest, for instance, is left to black-letter, which, not to mention its costliness, is impossible to weak eyes; even where it is not left to manuscript, which is more ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... of the poore for the death of the right Honourable Earle of Huntington (printed 1596), Joseph Lilly, A Collection of Seventy-Nine Black-Letter Ballads and ...
— The Elizabethan Parish in its Ecclesiastical and Financial Aspects • Sedley Lynch Ware
... rhetorician of Potsdam. Real emperors reconcile and consolidate peoples, for an empire is not a nation; but the Hohenzollerns have never dared to be anything but sedulously national, "echt Deutsch" and advocates of black-letter. They know the people ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... True Discovery of Terra Florida,' This is Captain Jean Ribaut's account of his voyage to Florida in 1562. It was "prynted at London," "newly set forthe in Englishe," in 1563, and reprinted by Hakluyt in 1582 in his black-letter tract entitled 'Divers Voyages.' It is not known to exist in ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... in Frith's Works.—Your correspondent T.J. rightly conjectured that the peruse of a modern reprint of Frith was an error. I have been able since to consult two black-letter editions, and have found, as I suspected, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 20, March 16, 1850 • Various
... between marks were printed in black-letter ("gothic") type; lines represent italics. Letters printed as superscripts ...
— Roister Doister - Written, probably also represented, before 1553. Carefully - edited from the unique copy, now at Eton College • Nicholas Udall
... (beginning) 66; diluvian[obs3], antediluvian; protohistoric[obs3]; prehistoric; antebellum, colonial, precolumbian; patriarchal, preadamite[obs3]; paleocrystic[obs3]; fossil, paleozoolical, paleozoic, preglacial[obs3], antemundane[obs3]; archaic, classic, medieval, Pre-Raphaelite, ancestral, black-letter. immemorial, traditional, prescriptive, customary, whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary; inveterate, rooted. antiquated, of other times, rococo, of the old school, after-age, obsolete; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... pleasure from this medley of balderdash and drivel to the more sober tome of Mr Collier, because we know that whatever he gives us will at least have the merit of being genuine. Out of the thousand black-letter broadsides which constitute the Roxburghe collection, the editor has selected upwards of fifty, and thus states the object of their publication:—"The main purpose of the ensuing collection is to show, in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... and Monuments is of the date 1641, 3 vols, folio, the last of those in the black-letter, and probably the latest when it came into Bunyan's hands. In each volume he has written his name beneath the title-page, in a large and stout print-hand. Under some of the woodcuts he has inserted a few rhymes, which are undoubtedly his own composition; and which, though ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... the plays of Shakspeare, each according to its priority in time, by proofs derived from external documents. How unsuccessful these attempts have been might easily be shown, not only from the widely different results arrived at by men, all deeply versed in the black-letter books, old plays, pamphlets, manuscript records and catalogues of that age, but also from the fallacious and unsatisfactory nature of the facts and assumptions on which the evidence rests. In that age, when the press was chiefly occupied with controversial or practical divinity,—when ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... examples of precocity in the history of literature. His father had been sexton of the ancient Church of St. Mary Redcliff, in Bristol, and the boy's sensitive imagination took the stamp of his surroundings. He taught himself to read from a black-letter Bible. He drew charcoal sketches of churches, castles, knightly tombs, and heraldic blazonry. When only eleven years old, he began the fabrication of documents in prose and verse, which he ascribed to a fictitious Thomas Rowley, a secular priest at Bristol in the 15th century. Chatterton ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... away delightfully in a quaint-looking apartment, half study, half drawing-room. Scott read several passages from the old Romance of Arthur, with a fine deep sonorous voice, and a gravity of tone that seemed to suit the antiquated black-letter volume. It was a rich treat to hear such a work read by such a person, and in such a place; and his appearance, as he sat reading, in a large armchair, with his favorite hound Maida at his feet, and surrounded by ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... the distant provincial towns, though not without their own separate literature and their own literary professors, were always two or three generations in the rear of the metropolis; and thus it happened, that, about the time of Augustus, there were some grammatici in Rome, answering to our black-letter critics, who sought the material of their researches in Boulogne, (Gessoriacum,) in Arles, (Arelata,) or in Marseilles, (Massilia.) Now, the old Irish nobility—that part, I mean, which might be called the rural nobility—stood in the same relation to English manners and customs. Here might ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... ghost-stories connected with the house; and there is an attic chamber, with a skylight, which is called the Martyr's chamber, from the fact of its having, in old times, been tenanted by a lady, who was imprisoned there, and persecuted to death for her religion. There is an old black-letter library, but the room containing it is shut, barred, and padlocked,—the owner of the house refusing to let it be opened, lest some of the books should be stolen. Meanwhile the rats are devouring them, and the damps ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... texts and editions of Anacreon. His library was rich in curious editions of the classics, and was in some respects not excelled by any private collection in Great Britain, and the reputation of the Auchinleck library was greatly increased by the black-letter tastes and publications of his grandson. A strong Whig and active Presbyterian, he was much esteemed in public and in private life. The son had on his northern tour the pleasure to note, both at Aberdeen and at Inverness, the high regard in which the old judge was held, and to find his name ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... thoughts in motion to fill up the scanty tale, and those of the young at least are almost always worth while. At Siena, for instance, in the great Dominican church, even with the impassioned work of Sodoma at hand, you may linger in a certain dimly lit chapel to spell out the black-letter memorials of the German students who died here—aetatis flore!—at the University, famous early in the last century; young nobles chiefly, far from the Rhine, from Nuremberg, or Leipsic. Note one in particular! Loving parents and elder ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... and breezy. The song of "Robin Hood and the Bishop", which the black-letter copy describes as "Shewing how Robin Hood went to an old woman's house, and changed cloathes with her to escape from the bishop, and how he robbed the bishop of all his gold and made him sing a mass", contains about the best ...
— The Dukeries • R. Murray Gilchrist
... (4 miles N.E. from Braughing Station, G.E.R.) has an interesting E.E. and Perp. church. One of the six bells in the embattled W. tower dates from before the Reformation; it bears, in black-letter, the words "Sancta Katarina ora pro nobis"; upon the clock in the tower are the words: "Time flies. Mind your business." Note (1) piscina and sedilia in chancel; (2) piscina in each aisle; (3) Newport Chapel adjoining ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... the Troubadours, Or of Minnesingers in old black-letter, Sound in his ears more sweet than yours, And if yours are not sweeter ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... Charter of the Forest was extorted from the unwilling hands of King John when he succeeded to his heroic brother. As for the rest of Robin Hood's career, as well as the tale of his treacherous death, they are to be found in those black-letter garlands, once sold at the low and easy ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... master. "Were he thoughtless or light-headed, or rei suae prodigus," said his instructor, "I would know what to make of him. But he never pays away a shilling without looking anxiously after the change, makes his sixpence go farther than another lad's half-crown, and wilt ponder over an old black-letter copy of the acts of parliament for days, rather than go to the golf or the change-house; and yet he will not bestow one of these days on a little business of routine, that would put twenty shillings in his pocketa strange mixture of frugality and industry, and negligent indolenceI ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... out of proportion to the size of the apartment. On the front had once been an armorial scutcheon; for the hammer, or chisel, which had been employed to deface the shield or crest, had left uninjured the scroll beneath, which bore the pious motto, 'TRUST IN GOD.' Black-letter, you know, was my early passion, and the tombstones in the Greyfriars' churchyard early yielded up to my knowledge as a decipherer what little they could ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... acquainted with the history and literature of the German tales {358} which go under the name of Till Eulenspiegel? I am searching to find out which are the English translations, but have only succeeded to trace two. The oldest is a very curious black-letter volume in small 4to. in the British Museum, C. 21. c/5, formerly in the possession of Mr. Garrick, as appears from Bishop Percy ("Dissertation on the Origin of the British Stage," Reliques, vol. i. p. 134., ed. 1812). It is entitled, "Here begynneth ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 180, April 9, 1853 • Various
... into details respecting her life from this time, but briefly state that it is a popular error to suppose that she was starved in a ditch, and that the circumstance gave rise to the name of a part of London known as Shoreditch. The black-letter ballad in the Pepys collection, which makes Jane Shore die of hunger after doing penance, and a man suffer death on the gallows for giving her bread, is without foundation. She died about 1533 or 1534, when she was upwards of eighty years of age. It ...
— Bygone Punishments • William Andrews
... reveal their arcana, and FATE itself whispered its dark mysteries into his ear. The SPIRITS being subjects of the Great Magician, their aid would be called in when desired. Where this mode was preferred to the ordinary methods of consulting the stars, the Cabala, and black-letter volumes, these intelligences answered all questions by significant RAPS, or in writing, guiding the hand of the Wanderer, who acted as ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... with considerable awe, a portion of our task to which we beg to call the undivided attention of our erudite readers. Upon referring to the original black-letter quarto, we find, after each particular sentence, the author introduces, with consummate tact, a line, meant, as we presume, as a kind of literary resting-place, upon which the delighted mind might, in the sweet indulgence of repose, reflect with greater pleasure on the thrilling parts, made ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... Woodlands a bit of enchanted forest cut from an old black-letter legend, in which one half expected to meet mediaeval knights on foaming steeds—every-day folk ride jogging horses—threading their way through the mysterious forest aisles in search of those romantic adventures which were necessary to give knights of that period an excuse for existence. It ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... informed by Frank Bracebridge that the parson had been a chum of his father's at Oxford, and had received this living shortly after the latter had come to his estate. He was a complete black-letter hunter, and would scarcely read a work printed in the Roman character. The editions of Caxton and Wynkin de Worde were his delight; and he was indefatigable in his researches after such old English writers as have fallen into oblivion ...
— Old Christmas From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving • Washington Irving
... boy of black-letter," said the Nabob; "with me you shall go, and we'll bring them to submission to mother-church, I warrant you—Why, the idea of being cheated in such a way, would scare a Santon out of his trance.—What ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... still more their wives, rich in that legendary lore so invaluable to true history. Whenever, therefore, he happened upon a genuine Dutch family, snugly shut up in its low-roofed farmhouse under a spreading sycamore, he looked upon it as a little clasped volume of black-letter, and studied it with the zeal of ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... Chimneys, it still remains in the great and tall family of the Van Hornes. Here are to be seen ancient Dutch corner cupboards, chests of drawers, and massive clothes-presses, quaintly carved, and carefully waxed and polished; together with divers thick, black-letter volumes, with brass clasps, printed of yore in Leydon and Amsterdam, and handed down from generation to generation, in the family, but never read. They are preserved in the archives, among sundry old parchment deeds, ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... remembraunce of all them that ben departed (generally) out of this worlde sholde be holden in al monasteryes, the daye after the fest Halowen (All Hallows even); the wyche thynge was approved after all holye Chyrche.” {157} This is the old Christian black-letter festival of “All Souls,” generally, as distinguished from the red-letter, “All Saints day.” Such are some of the old traditions which hang, like evergreen garlands, round our sacred places. Children may once have “passed through fire ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... the rare moments when his father was off duty, and then beg for the food which his keen mental appetite craved for. Mason could both read and write, and he began to teach his little son. This state of things continued until Giles was seven years old. Then there came a dreadful black-letter day for the child; for the father, ...
— Sue, A Little Heroine • L. T. Meade
... by praising, however insincerely, my books, I always say, "But you have not read the best one." Nine times out of ten it is so. The tenth takes a place in the family calendar; St. Michael or St. Agatha, as the case may be, a red-letter or black-letter saint, according to whether the book was bought or borrowed. But there are few such saints, and both my publisher and I have the feeling (so common to publishers and authors) that there ought to be more. So ...
— Once on a Time • A. A. Milne |
