"Errantry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in the district, that the reverend fathers gave money sometimes to the wayfarer, but accepted none in return for food and shelter. That part of me in which the conventional is concentrated said: 'Stop at the inn;' but the other part, which has the curiosity and the errantry of the man who has never been perfectly civilized, said: 'Go on, and whatever happens pass the ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... which amused his parents, and teased the young lady. Nor was he wholly actuated by the jealousy of proprietorship, for he knew the devotion with which Antony regarded Queen Mary, and did not wholly trust him. His sense of honour and duty to his father's trust was one thing, Antony's knight-errantry to the beautiful captive was another; each boy thought himself strictly honourable, while they moved in parallel lines and could not understand one another; yet, with the reserve of childhood, all that passed ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... evidences of an infamous plot to drain Canadian traffic southward to United States ports and roads: to others they seemed to be philanthropic endeavours to rescue Western Canada from the clutches of monopoly. They were not, however, due to either political intrigue or knight-errantry, but to the same desire for profit which had led the Canadian Pacific to build up its great system in the western states. Other things being at all equal, it was of course desirable that Canadian traffic should follow ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... cavalier who came to seek his fortunes in the New World. It was the reality of romance. The life of the Spanish adventurer was one chapter more—and not the least remarkable —in the chronicles of knight-errantry. ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... understanding, as I saw it. And, after all, why not? Understanding of my poor bubbling mind, anyhow, and—Nature's furnishing of young women's minds is a mighty subtle business, not very much more clearly understood to-day than in the era of knight-errantry. ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... larger than the fishing-craft of Gloucester and Marblehead,—one was of twelve, the other of fifteen tons,—held their way across the Atlantic, passed the tempestuous headlands of Newfoundland and the St. Lawrence, and, with adventurous knight-errantry, glided deep into the heart of the Canadian wilderness. On board of one of them was the Breton merchant, Pontgrave, and with him a man of spirit widely different, a Catholic of good family,—Samuel de Champlain, born in 1567 at the small seaport of Bronage on the Bay of Biscay. ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... when our gentleman had nothing to do (which was almost all the year round), he passed his time in reading books of knight-errantry, which he did with that application and delight, that at last he in a manner wholly left off his country sports, and even the care of his estate; nay, he grew so strangely besotted with these amusements that he sold many acres of arable land to purchase books ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... should arise to avail themselves of the unique opportunities of the time—men who, loving liberty and hating oppression, took the law into their own hands and executed a rough and ready justice between the rich and the poor which embodied the best traditions of knight-errantry, whilst they themselves lived a free and merry life on the tolls they exacted from their wealthy victims. Such a man may well have been the original Robin Hood, a man who, when once he had captured the popular imagination, soon acquired ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... have been intended as a burlesque upon the romances of chivalry once so popular in Europe. The hero, Don Quixote, attended by his shrewd and faithful squire, Sancho Panza, rides forth to perform deeds of knight-errantry, but meets, instead, the most absurd adventures. The work is a vivid picture of Spanish life. Nobles, priests, monks, traders, farmers, innkeepers, muleteers, barbers, beggars—all these pass before our eyes as in a panorama. ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... Florentine invented neither his stories nor his " plot," if we may so call it. He wrote in the middle of the fourteenth century (1344-8) when the West had borrowed many things from the East, rhymes[FN8] and romance, lutes and drums, alchemy and knight-errantry. Many of the "Novelle" are, as Orientalists well know, to this day sung and recited almost textually by the wandering tale-tellers, bards, and rhapsodists of ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... Castile and Aragon, than Ferdinand and Isabella, enthroned beneath the golden vaults of the conquered Alhambra. And Robinson, with the simple training of a rural pastor in England, when he knelt on the shores of Delft Haven, and sent his little flock upon their Gospel errantry beyond the world of waters, exercised an influence over the destinies of the civilized world, which will last to the end ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... which my incautious knight-errantry has exposed me; I begin, indeed, to take you for a very mischievous sort of person, and I fear the poor devil from whom I rescued you will be amply revenged for his disgrace, by finding that the first use you make of your freedom is to doom ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... on the other side of the channel. In this connection the proud, revengeful and chivalrous natives were had at a sad disadvantage; for then, as to-day, they were characterized by a spirit of knight-errantry, which disdained to ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... madame, the age of knight-errantry is over—nothing for nothing is the ruling principle of our own prosaic day. To be plain with you, I can't afford to quarrel with Le Prun for nothing; and, if you persist in refusing my services, I must only make ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... sons and the Simeuse twins to return to France. The superb disdain with which she met the project frightened these poor people, who were not mistaken in their fears that she was meditating what they called knight-errantry. This jarring of opinion came to the surface after the explosion of the infernal machine in the rue Saint-Nicaise, the first royalist attempt against the conqueror of Marengo after his refusal ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... Since his adventure in knight-errantry Christopher Parish had suffered terrible alternations of hope and despair. For fear of offending Miss Sparkes he did not press for an explanation of the errand on which she had sent him enough that he was again permitted to see ...
— The Town Traveller • George Gissing
... since he was eighteen, without once getting out of the saddle. The secret of this endurance lay perhaps in his unconsciousness that he was in the saddle at all. It was as much his natural seat as office stools to other mortals. He made no capital out of errantry, his temperament being far too like his red-gold hair, which people compared to flames, consuming all before them. His vices were patent; too incurable an optimism; an admiration for beauty such ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... efficiency and importance of this branch of the service, and our authorities began to change their views. The sentiment of the people at large seemed to turn in the same channel, and a peculiar enthusiasm in this direction was perceptible everywhere. It was as though the spirit of the old knight-errantry had ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... it was particular, that he had diligently perused, and accurately remembered, the old romances of knight-errantry. ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... some magical light. Its canons, arroyos, and mesquite, its bronchos, cowboys, Indians, and scouts filled the boy's mind with thoughts of daring, not much unlike the fancies of a boy in the days of knight errantry. ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... of civilization. Sometimes—to-day we have many cases in point as regards the social crusade of brave women against taxation without representation—they are martyrs as well as pioneers. But the splendid spirit of knight-errantry, which shone so vividly with the fire of enthusiasm in medieval days, is still abroad in our midst to-day. A few militant personalities fight for a great cause, a great principle— the raising of a better moral tone amongst us, the betterment ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... likewise, improved it into their respective tongues. From its great affinity to the Latin, it was called Romance, a name which the Spaniards still give to their own language. As the first legends of knight-errantry were written in Provencal, all subsequent performances of the same kind, have derived from it the name of romance; and as those annals of chivalry contained extravagant adventures of knights, giants, and necromancers, every improbable story or fiction is to this ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... a warm regard. The very honesty of his character, his habit of saying just what he meant (so foreign to the Count's own practice), his ingenuous delight in all that he saw, his modern knight-errantry based upon an absurdly old-fashioned notion of right and wrong and justice and all such stuff as that, these were the very qualities to win the admiration of a man of the world who possessed none of them. Count Sergius said that the lad must suffer nothing. His ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... all the enterprises undertaken in this spirit of daring adventure, none has surpassed, for hardihood and variety of incident, that of the renowned Hernando de Soto, and his band of cavaliers. It was poetry put in action. It was the knight-errantry of the old world carried into the depths of the American wilderness. Indeed the personal adventures, the feats of individual prowess, the picturesque description of steel-clad cavaliers, with lance and helm and prancing steed, glittering through the wildernesses ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... Florence in the year 1432, and who was deeply versed in the Bible, composed a poem, called the 'Morgante Maggiore,' which he recited at the table of Lorenzo de Medici, the great patron of Italian genius. It is a mock-heroic and religious poem, in which the legends of knight-errantry, and of the Popish Church, are turned to unbounded ridicule. The pretended hero of it is a converted giant, called Morgante; though his adventures do not occupy the twentieth part of the poem, the principal personages being Charlemagne, Orlando, and his cousin Rinaldo of Montalban. Morgante has ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... proverb from the Persian (which I made up myself for the occasion) is cited in mitigation of the Tyro's regrettable fickleness, he—to his shame be it chronicled—having practically forgotten the woe-begone damsel's very existence within eighteen short hours after his adventure in knight-errantry. Her tear-ravaged and untidy plainness had, in that brief time, been exorcised from memory by a more potent interest, that of Beauty on her imperial throne. Setting forth the facts in their due order, it befell ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... of the Portuguese had been continued for nearly fourscore years before any of their neighbours seem to have entertained the most distant idea of engaging in foreign discoveries, even viewing their endeavours as downright knight-errantry, proceeding from a distempered imagination, as well in the first promoter as in those who continued to prosecute his scheme. In a word, the relation of these discoveries forms one of the most curious portions of modern history, as comprizing a great number of the most extraordinary transactions ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... Dignity;—But here, after the Knight, by diverting you in this manner, has brought himself down to the lowest Mark, he rises again and forces your Esteem, by his excellent Sense, Learning and Judgment, upon any Subjects which are not ally'd to his Errantry; These continually act for the Advancement of his Character; And with such Supports and Abilities he always obtains your ready Attention, and never becomes heavy ...
— An Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Railery, Satire, and Ridicule (1744) • Corbyn Morris
... employed. There is no room, however, for the allegation made; and the full amount of her slumber is justly imputable to the gross darkness which so long enveloped the horizon of Russia. Whose business was it to rouse her? What nation could be supposed to possess so much of the spirit of knight-errantry, as to be induced to instruct her savages as to the advantages of cultivating commerce, without a cautious regard to its own particular interests in the first place? But the bold, though somewhat impolitic seaman, has perhaps stumbled ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... have prevailed. A remote, an expensive, a murderous, and, in the end, an unproductive adventure, carried on upon ideas of mercantile knight-errantry, without any of the generous wildness of Quixotism, is considered as sound, solid sense; and a war in a wholesome climate, a war at our door, a war directly on the enemy, a war in the heart of his country, a war in concert with ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... should also exercise the same spirit toward men. The duty is reciprocal. The days of knight-errantry, when men were chivalrous and women were merely beautiful, should not last forever; women, too, should learn to be chivalrous. Do not imagine I would have you less considerate or thoughtful of anyone, or less demonstrative in your feelings, if you will only remember that men ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... Church to the heathen, and the heathen into the Church; and the impressiveness of their activity was due to the daring and faith which pitted units against thousands, and refused to accept defeat. They were the knight-errantry of religion. The fame of their deeds inspired enthusiasm in France, so that noble women gave up their luxurious lives, for the sake of planting faith in the inhospitable immensities of the Canadian forests; but the mass of the common people were not stimulated or attracted; the profits ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... resist temptation is not a man. He is wanting in the highest attributes of humanity. The honor and nobleness of the old "knight-errantry" consisted in defending the innocence of men and protecting the chastity of women against the assaults of others. But the truer and nobler knighthood protects the property and the character, the innocence ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... pale face and graceful gestures, in the funny instinctive British way tried to place her socially. Was she a lady? It made such a difference. This was the girl for whom Doggie had performed his deed of knight-errantry; the girl whom she proposed to take back to Doggie. For the moment, discounting the uniform which might have hidden a midinette or a duchess, she had nothing but the face and the gestures and the beautifully ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... joyous, Triumphant and Glorious Knight, The ever gentle and Courteous Flower of Chivalry, Cream of Knight Errantry and Pole Star of Manly virtues, Sir Slosson Thompson, who doth for the nonce sojourn at ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... the highest peak we round, Then lightly graze along the ground, And cover the heath, where eye can see, With the flower of witch-errantry. [They alight.] ...
— Faust • Goethe
... protracted his walk, and, whether it was his unfamiliarity with the district, his recent accession of audacious errantry, or the sophistical whisper of a certain green-eyed fairy, he came at last to tread a shuttered, blank, and echoing thoroughfare, dark and unpeopled. And, suddenly, this way came to an end (as many streets do ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... matter, I have particular notions. One is, that it should always be a subject. For example, a history of Piracy; in connexion with which there is a vast deal of extraordinary, romantic, and almost unknown matter. A history of Knight-errantry, and the wild old notion of the Sangreal. A history of Savages, showing the singular respects in which all savages are like each other; and those in which civilised men, under circumstances of difficulty, soonest become ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... determined to give up political knight-errantry and to stick to sober business. Very carefully and in the most conservative spirit I took stock of the situation. I was still a couple of years on the right side of fifty, young looking for my age (an advantage), a desirable ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... world-famous book written by Miguel Cervantes, in satire of the romances of chivalry with which his countrymen were so fascinated; the chief character of which gives title to it, a worthy gentleman of La Mancha, whose head is so turned by reading tales of knight-errantry, that he fancies he is a knight-errant himself, sallies forth in quest of adventures, and encounters them in the most commonplace incidents, one of his most ridiculous extravagancies being his tilting with the windmills, and the overweening ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Here was righteousness incarnate. Here in the form of an armored man on horseback was the quintessence of the Age of Chivalry—not the Age of Chivalry as exemplified by the vain and boasting nobles who had constituted nine-tenths of the knight-errantry profession and who had used the quest of the Holy Grail as an excuse to seek after mead and maidens, but the Age of Chivalry as it might have been if the ideal behind it had been shared by the many instead ...
— A Knyght Ther Was • Robert F. Young
... heaven; a landscape of Frederick Walker's, the romance of harvest in an autumn land; Burne-Jones's "The Mill," and a copy in oils of a knight of Gustave Moreau's, riding in armor over the summit of a hill into an unseen country of errantry, some fairy-land forlorn. There was, too, an old Venetian mirror in a ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... not the frost of the world's unconcern fall upon young manhood's unfolding powers. Let us beware how we extinguish the feeblest of youth's idealisms. Let us check not the onset of his knight-errantry. And the world does these things—not purposely, not even knowingly, but thoughtlessly. Many a young man has had his life's work kept back and the ardor of it chilled by ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... singer as well as a fervid preacher, and in his sermons appealed to the feelings of his hearers. "The early New-Light preachers," says Dr. Smith, "resembled their leader. Such men, passing from settlement to settlement, as if impelled by a species of religious knight-errantry, could not fail to make an impression. Viewed in themselves, the results of their visits were in certain cases painful. Families were divided; neighbors became opposed to each other; pastors preached and published in vain endeavor to stem the tide, and failing submitted to ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... to the view of a genius and to the ends of poetry? And may not the philosophic moderns have gone too far in their perpetual ridicule and contempt of it?" After a preliminary discussion of the origin of chivalry and knight-errantry and of the ideal knightly characteristics, "Prowess, Generosity, Gallantry, and Religion," which he derives from the military necessities of the feudal system, he proceeds to establish a "remarkable correspondency between the manners of the old heroic times, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Saxon monosyllable for what the Japanese was to him he never learned. For only one other word did he have more use and I believe it was the only one he knew, "hyaku—hurry!" Over there I was in constant fear for him because of his knight-errantry and his candor. Once he came near being involved in a duel because of his quixotic championship of a woman whom he barely knew, and disliked, and whose absent husband he did not know at all. And more than once ...
— Appreciations of Richard Harding Davis • Various
... pp. 240) "Scharkan, Conte Arabe," etc. Traduit par M. Asselan Riche, etc. Paris: Dondey-Dupre. 1829. It has its longueurs and at times is longsome enough; but it is interesting as a comparison between the chivalry of Al-Islam and European knight-errantry. Although all the characters are fictitious the period is evidently in the early crusading days. Caesarea, the second capital of Palestine, taken during the Caliphate of Omar (A.H. 19) and afterwards ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... not knowing that he himself was admired, could be no duty, but only a happy dream. There has been in my family, here and there, a vein of fancy, or of mysticism turning sometimes to religious fervour, again sometimes to soldierly enthusiasm and a knight-errantry in arms, the ruin and despair of cool statesmanship. On this element Owen's teaching laid hold and bent it to a more modern shape. I would not be a monk or a Bayard, but would serve humanity, holding my throne a naked ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... he did not stir. The impression can be apprehended of the solemn scene upon the white page of the boy's mind. A spirit of religion has breathed through it all, so exalted, so warm, so personal; the passionate mediaeval Christianity which expressed itself in crusades and religious orders and knight-errantry. The cry of the Saviour (Erloesung's Held, Hero of Redemption, the poet characteristically calls him) has rung so piercingly, there seems but one answer from a humanly constituted simple heart: "Did you indeed suffer so much and die for love of me and my brothers? ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... doubting how much of her thought it would be justifiable to confide to her companion. A certain vein of knight-errantry in her character inclined her to set lance in rest and ride forth, rather recklessly, to redress human wrongs. But in redressing one wrong it too often happens that another wrong—or something perilously approaching one—must be inflicted. To save ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... and Sancho Panza went along, they were overtaken by a gentleman in a fine green coat, who rode a very good mare. This gentleman stared very hard at Don Quixote, and the two began to speak together about knight-errantry, and were so interested in what they were saying, that Sancho took the opportunity of riding over to ask for a little milk from some shepherds, who were milking their ewes ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... which all the elements of love, chivalry, and religion were blended together, resembled that of some paladin of romance; as the chimerical enterprises, in which he was perpetually engaged, seem rather to belong to the age of knight-errantry, than to the fifteenth ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... assured the ladies, was neither a wolf, nor a bear, nor yet a wild man of the woods, but a veritable fiery dragon, a species of monster peculiarly hostile to beautiful females in the days of chivalry, and which all the efforts of knight-errantry had not been able ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... I knew how knight-errantry in some of its branches was likely to affect Mr. Dane's pocket, I resolved that nothing should tempt me to encourage him in the pursuit. No matter how many flirtatious smiles were shed upon me by enterprising waiters, no matter how many conversations were begun by couriers ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... and immovable at the city end. So he straddled it and, averting his eyes from the scenery beneath him, hitched ingloriously across, collecting splinters and a very distinct impression that, as a vocation, knight-errantry was ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... the latter had first begun once again to talk of times of knight errantry, and of the feats which the preux chevaliers had performed for their ladies. The headlong Clifton, utterly despising the pretended admiration of what he was persuaded the Count durst in no manner imitate, after some sarcastic expressions of his ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... "Knight-errantry, by the Host!" quoth he, and his brows shot up on his steep brow. Then they came down again to scowl. "No doubt, my preux-chevalier, you will have definite knowledge of the groundlessness of these same slanders," he said, moving backwards, away from me, towards the door; and as he moved now his ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... in 1770. He describes it as belonging to "the Prince of Palermo, a man of immense fortune, who has devoted his whole life to the study of monsters and chimeras, greater and more ridiculous than ever entered into the imagination of the wildest writers of romance and knight-errantry." He tells us this palace was surrounded by an army of statues, "not one made to represent any object in nature. He has put the heads of men to the bodies of every sort of animal, and the heads of ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... Thus she continu'd her Errantry for above a Fortnight, having no more Money than just thirty Shillings, half of which brought her to Sir Christian Kindly's House in Lancashire. 'Twas near five a Clock in the Afternoon when she reach'd that happy ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... happiness and elevation of the race, and make it a mere commercial enterprise; an exchange of houses and lands and equipage; a business partnership of two, stuffed up with the stories of romance and knight-errantry, and unfaithfulness and feminine angelhood. The two after a while have roused up to find that, instead of the paradise they dreamed of, they have got nothing but a Van Amburgh's menagerie, filled with tigers and wild-cats. Twenty thousand divorces in Paris in one year preceded the worst revolution ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... which they extorted from the people. A tone of romantic and chivalrous gallantry (which, however, was often disgraced by unbounded license) characterized the intercourse between the sexes; and the language of knight errantry was yet used, and its observances followed, though the pure spirit of honourable love and benevolent enterprise which it inculcates had ceased to qualify and atone for its extravagances. The jousts and tournaments, the entertainments and revels, ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... faith, if this prospect fails, it must e'en come to that I am for venturing one of the hundreds, if you will, upon this knight-errantry; but, in case it should fail, we 'll reserve t' other to carry us to some counterscarp, where we may die, as ...
— The Beaux-Stratagem • George Farquhar
... his younger brother Sir Edward—the most daring soldiers of their time, posters of sea and land—wherever the buffeting was closest, or adventure the wildest on ship-board or shore, for they were men who combined much of the knight-errantry of a vanishing age with the more practical and expansive spirit of adventure that characterized the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the age at which a fair dame loses the benefit of chivalry, and is no longer entitled to crave boon of brave knight, that I leave to the statutes of the Order of Errantry; but for the blood of Rizzio I take up the gauntlet, and maintain against all and sundry that I hold the stains to be of no modern date, but to have been actually the consequence and the record of that ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... do remember," he drawled. "Why, of course—of course! It was a matter of knight-errantry and ladies fair! But who was it whose choice conflicted ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... to see the species of knight-errantry that still existed in the regions which he had come to visit, but he had no opportunity to put further questions, for the man who was the object of them now joined them, saying with an expression ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... that once noble thing had grown to be. Institutions become effete. Age is apt to sap the strength of movements as of men. Feudalism and the Crusades had commissioned the knight-errant; and now, when law began to hold sword for itself, the self-constituted legal force—knight-errantry—was no longer needed. But to know when an institution has served its purpose is little less than genius. Some things can be laughed down which can not be argued down. A jest is not infrequently more potent than any syllogism. Some things must be laughed away, other things ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... politically, are we not inclined, at times, to think those men died in vain? We gained the shadow; have we the substance? We gained an unparalleled prestige for courage, but are the people to-day better morally, socially, and politically? Let the world answer. The days of knight-errantry had their decadence; may not the days of the South's ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... plantations, build and sow, and make the desert valleys laugh with corn? Shall I not have my Spenser with me, to fill me with all noble thoughts, and raise my soul to his heroic pitch? Is not this true knight-errantry, to redeem to peace and use, and to the glory of that glorious queen whom God has given to me, a generous soil and a more generous race? Trustful and tenderhearted they are—none more; and if they be fickle and passionate, will not that very softness of temper, which makes ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... was soon explaining matters to Duke Sigismund, who presently advanced to the heir of Angus, wrung his hand, and gave him to understand that he accepted him as a comrade in their doughty enterprise, and honoured his proceeding as a piece of knight-errantry. He was free from any question whether George was to be esteemed a rival by hearing it was the Lady Joanna for whose sake he thus adventured himself, whereas it was not her beauty, but her sister's intellect that had won the heart of Sigismund. Perhaps Sir Robert somewhat magnified the grandeur ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to death that day in stopping a stampede. Pain they knew not, fear they had not, and duty was their only god. They told her, simply as children, of deeds which now caused a shudder, now set tingling the full blood of enthusiasm, and opened up unconsciously to her view a rude field of knight-errantry, whose principles sat strangely close with the best traditions of her own earlier land and time. They were knights-errant, and for all on the Ellisville trail there was but one lady. So hopeless was the case of each that they ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... England; Godwine, Leofric, and Siward divide among them the administration of the realm. The next generation, the warriors of Stamfordbridge and Senlac, of York and Ely, are fast growing into maturity. Harold Hadrada is already pursuing his wild career of night-errantry in distant lands, and is astonishing the world by his exploits in Russia and Sicily, at Constantinople ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... us very little of Ellie directly, yet she leaves us with a charming picture of an innocent, imaginative, romantic child. Ellie has been reading or listening to tales of knight-errantry, and her mind is full of them, so that the "sweetest pleasure ... for her future" is a lover riding straight out of one of the romances. That she is only a child, with a child's ideas, we may see from the fact that she can think, in her ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... the National Magazine, starting with a splendid flourish of knight-errantry, degenerated into the mere, "let-well-enough-alone" thrift-crier it is.... "'How I Became an Expert Tombstone Salesman' ... 'How I collected Tin Foil After Work-Hours and Added Three Hundred a Year Extra ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... prose, as was his custom, on a sort of knight- errantry after thoughts and images:—"The lawn thou hast chosen for thy bridal shift—thy shroud may be of the same piece. That flower thou hast bought to feed thy vanity—from the same tree thy corpse may be decked. Reynolds shall, like his ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... period of the conflict and her early youth having been spent almost before the echo of the guns had died, Miss Guiney's work was much influenced by this background of association. The symbolism of her poetry is frequently drawn from battle or from knight-errantry, as in "The Wild Ride", "The Kings", "The Vigil-at-Arms", "The Knight Errant", "Memorial Day", etc. Valor, transmuted to a spiritual quality, may, indeed, be said to be the keynote of Miss Guiney's work. Add to this a mystical element, best illustrated in her poem, "Beati Mortui", a Celtic ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... a way, found in every baron's hall and cotter's hut a ready welcome. And while the boar's head sputtered on the spit, or the ale sparkled in the shining tankards, he told such tales of joust and journey, and feats of brave knight errantry, that even the scullions left their kitchen tasks, and, creeping near, stood round the door ...
— The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation • Annie Fellows Johnston
... in the chronicles of Italy by the designation of Fra Moreale, had passed into Italy—a bold adventurer, worthy to become a successor of those roving Normans (from one of the most eminent of whom, by the mother's side, he claimed descent) who had formerly played so strange a part in the chivalric errantry of Europe,—realizing the fables of Amadis and Palmerin—(each knight, in himself a host), winning territories and oversetting thrones; acknowledging no laws save those of knighthood; never confounding ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... steamer. His excuse was valid; he could paint the interview from which he had just come so that Josephine would be moved by it, would welcome his interference, and come again to nurse her uncle's wife. Thus thinking, he had hurried along, but when he met Day his knight-errantry received a check. ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... Blue Beard is a type of the castle-lords in the days of knight-errantry. Some say Henry VIII. (the noted wife-killer) was the "academy figure." Others think it was Giles de Retz, marquis de Laval, marshal of France in 1429, who (according to Mezeray) murdered six of his seven wives, and was ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... now, in very low esteem! With the solidification of society, of property, the bond of family has been tremendously exalted, the mere fact of parenthood declared the last sanctity. Together with this, naturally, the persistent errantry of men, so vulgarly misunderstood, has become only a reprehensible paradox. The entire shelf of James Branch Cabell's books, dedicated to an unquenchable masculine idealism, has, as well, a paradoxical ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... neither wholly merits. Didst thou ever tell the girl, Melchior, of our mad excursion into the forests of the Apennines, in search of a Spanish lady that had fallen into the hands of banditti; and how we passed weeks on a foolish enterprise of errantry, that had become useless, by the timely application of a few sequins on the part of the husband, even before we started on the chivalrous, not to say ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... capable of loving a woman whom he might be compelled to acknowledge as his superior. This elderly New-Englander had in him none of the spirit of knight-errantry. He had been a good, faithful husband to his wife, but he had never set her on a pedestal, but a trifle below him, and he had loved her there and been patient ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... lives of Western pioneers and immigrants has suggested nearly as many stories as the chivalric deeds of knight-errantry. These tales of frontier life are, however, as a rule, characterized by such wildness of fancy and such extravagancy of language that we have often wondered why another Cervantes did not ridicule our border ...
— In School and Out - or, The Conquest of Richard Grant. • Oliver Optic
... Bulmer, "I lament that your sylvan diversions should be thus interrupted by the fact that an elderly person like myself, quite old enough to know better, has seen fit to adopt the pursuit of knight-errantry. You need not trouble yourselves about your companion, for I have blown out most of the substance nature intended him to think with. One of you, I regret to observe, is rendered immune by the garb of an order which I consider misguided, indeed, but with which I have no quarrel. With the ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... of Spain, what could make the pupils understand better the spirit of knight-errantry, its faults and its qualities, than a recital from "Don Quixote" or from the ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... "the good old times were come back in Pomerania, when every one trusted to his own good sword, and were not led like sheep at the beck of another; for the treasury and all the courts of justice were closed. So the glorious times of knight-errantry must come again, such as their forefathers had seen." His companions had promised to elect him captain; but then he must give them handsel for that, and the gold chain would just sell for the sum he wanted. What use was it to ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... believe it. Thou, Bred in the north, in the dark ages, how, In whirl of priesthood and knight-errantry, Have for such sights thy vision free! In darkness only thou'rt ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... regard nothing more sacred than their word of honour, to believe earnestly, rigidly, and firmly in the inane code of knight-errantry, and if necessary to seal their belief by death, and to look upon a king as a being of a higher order. Politeness and compliments, and particularly our courteous attitude towards ladies, are the result of training; and so is our esteem for birth, position, and title. And so is our displeasure ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... gunpowder, a means so powerful of annoying an enemy, without the aid of human force, which places a giant and a dwarf in some sort upon an equality, was wonderfully adapted for doing away the illusions of knight errantry, that had such a powerful effect in making war be preferred to commerce: while printing facilitated the communication of ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... man for the present emergency. He had courage and a sense of honour, had been accustomed to eccentric adventures, and, with the keen observation and ironical pleasantry of a finished man of the world, had a strong propensity to knight errantry. All his national feelings and all his personal interests impelled him to undertake the adventure from which the most devoted subjects of the English crown seemed to shrink. As the guardian, at a perilous crisis, of the Queen of Great Britain ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... sudden there came an adventure which gave opening for knight-errantry. As Thurstane, Coronado, and Texas Smith were riding a few hundred yards ahead of the caravan, and just emerging from what seemed an enormous court or public square, surrounded by ruined edifices of gigantic magnitude, they discovered a man running ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... discovery. Who, I again thought, could this intending visitor be, who was to come, armed with the prerogative to make my stay-at-home father forthwith leave his household goods—his books and his child—to whom he clung, and set forth on an unknown knight-errantry? Who but Uncle Silas, I thought—that mysterious relative whom I had never seen—who was, it had in old times been very darkly hinted to me, unspeakably unfortunate or unspeakably vicious—whom I had seldom heard my ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... vicissitudes of his own life, and the evils that had overtaken him even in his tender youth. Suddenly he hears the bell ringing to matins, but its sound, chiming in with his melancholy fancies, seems to him like a voice exhorting him to write his story. In the spirit of poetic errantry he determines to comply with this intimation; he therefore takes pen in hand, makes with it a sign of the cross to implore a benediction, and sallies forth into the fairy-land of poetry. There is something extremely fanciful in all ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... President was remarkable among the men of his time for his lifelong fidelity to one woman, for since the days of knight-errantry such devotion has been as rare as it is beautiful. The young lawyer came of Scotch-Irish parentage, and to this blending of blood were probably in part due his deep love and steadfastness. There was rather more of the Irish than of the Scotch in his ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... door-way ready to enter whenever he leaves it unguarded. Then, too, there is no small danger of failing to discriminate between a rational philanthropy, with its adaptation of means to ends, and that spiritual knight-errantry which undertakes the championship of every novel project of reform, scouring the world in search of distressed schemes held in durance by common sense and vagaries happily spellbound by ridicule. He must learn that, although the most needful truth may be unpopular, it does not follow ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... thou sped So ill in amors?" Answered This Gobertz, "By my head, She scorneth me." "Hauberc and arms then, instead Of lute and begarlanded Poll, take you," he said, "For errantry." ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... much as any of those who may be misled by its perversion; and, like the curate and the barber in Don Quixote, lament the day when a gentleman of such endowments was corrupted by the wicked tales of knight-errantry ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... Theresa lost her mother, and took to reading romances, which, it seems, were books of knight-errantry, at the close of the chivalric period. These romances were innumerable, and very extravagant and absurd, and were ridiculed by Cervantes, half-a-century afterwards, in his immortal "Don Quixote." Although ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... so rapturously of your enchanted castle, Thaddeus," returned his friend, "I believe I shall consider my knight-errantry, in being fool enough to trust myself amidst a fray in which I had no business, as one of the wisest acts ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... books that ever were thought on," writes another, who curiously enough had about the same opinion of the favourite novels of his time as Sidney had had of the drama a century earlier, "those of knight errantry and shepherdry have been so excellently trivial and naughty, that it would amuse a good judgment to consider into what strange and vast absurdities some imaginations have straggled ... the Knight constantly killing the gyant, or it may be whole squadrons; the Damosel certainly to be relieved ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... "Oho! So that's it. Knight-errantry, eh? Now, let me put this thing to you straight, Mr. Harrington Surtaine. If your father wants to make a fair and decent statement, without abuse or calling names, over his own signature, the 'Clarion' will run it, at ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Sancho remained on foot to serve him with the cup which was made of horn. Seeing him standing, his master said: "That thou mayest see, Sancho, the good which is in knight-errantry, and how fair a chance they have who exercise it to arrive at honour and position in the world, I desire that here by my side, and in company of these good people, thou dost seat thyself, and be one and the same with me that am thy master and natural lord. That thou dost eat in my dish and drink ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... very distressing headache; I, therefore, who (from a peculiar nervousness connected with the act of writing) so rarely attempt to discharge my own debts in the letter-writing department of life, find myself unaccountably, I might say mysteriously, engaged in the knight-errantry of undertaking for other people's. Wretched bankrupt that I am, with an absolute refusal on the part of the Commissioner to grant me a certificate of the lowest class, suddenly, and by a necessity not to be evaded, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... vocabulary, plainly enjoying the amazement he provoked by his style of language. "The spirit of a stray cat at midnight, the tastes of the prowling hyena! The fat thief I saw running away into the woods! When such as these began to take to the road, knight-errantry vanished from the face of the earth. The varlets borrowed the grand idea of care-free itinerancy and debased it, as waiters borrow a gentleman's evening dress for their menial uniform, and drunken coachmen wear the same ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... my jovial ally; "why, the hot little epicurean Wagtail, and Gelid, cold and frozen as he is, have both taken a fancy to me—and no wonder, knowing my pleasant qualities as they do ahem; so, for their sakes, I volunteer on this piece of knight—errantry ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... her, who should she be but an early flame of mine, who had been fool enough to marry an Austrian baron with a long mustache and short affection? But it was an affair of my own that called me there—nothing to do with knight-errantry, any more than you coming to Genoa had to do with ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... that has never been equalled. Don Quixote's life is entirely in the imagination; this enables him to see castles in windmills, beauty and refinement in coarseness and vulgarity, and poetry, wisdom, and genius in bombastic and absurd works on chivalry, love, and knight-errantry. To emphasize the romantic and preposterous exaltation of the mad gentleman of La Mancha, we have his coarse, vulgar, practical, almost grovelling squire, Sancho Panza. The master lives in the clouds; Sancho is most at home in the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... dilemma is very just, and is very formidable; and upon the one or other of its horns, has been transfixed every adventurer that has hitherto gone forth on the knight-errantry of speculation. Every man who lays claim to a direct knowledge of something different from himself, perishes impaled on the contradiction involved in the assumption, that consciousness can transcend itself: and every man who disclaims such knowledge, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... fragrant sheets and was happy, and convinced of the presence of the God to whom she had prayed. All night Sydney Lord sat down-stairs in his book-walled sanctum and studied over the situation. It was a crucial one. The great psychological moment of Sydney Lord's life for knight-errantry had arrived. He studied the thing from every point of view. There was no romance about it. These were hard, sordid, tragic, ludicrous facts with which he had to deal. He knew to a nicety the agonies which Margaret suffered. He knew, because of his own capacity for sufferings of like stress. ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... same foible, the same conceit, the same spirit of caste among those who, from the sixteenth century to the present day, have occupied the most prominent rank in the society of Germany. Professorial knight-errantry still waits for its Cervantes. Nowhere have the objects of learning been so completely sacrificed to the means of learning, nowhere has that Dulcinea,—knowledge for its own sake,—with her dark veil and ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... you, but for my father having contrived to clog my heels with fetters of a professional nature. I will tell you the matter at length, for it is comical enough; and why should not you list to my juridical adventures, as well as I to those of your fiddling knight-errantry? ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... was dimpling and smiling, a spice of mischief in her soft blue eyes. She and Mrs. Adams had not omitted to chaff Errington about his involuntary knight-errantry, and the former had even laughingly declared it her firm belief that his journey to town the next day partook more of the nature of flight than anything else. To all of which Errington had submitted composedly, declining to add anything further ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... reverence. I do not need to study the bent, broad shoulders and thin sinewy limbs to measure the hardness and steepness of his path; he climbed it like a bridegroom, humming quaint snatches of hymns to lull his human waywardnesses, and all the fever and errantry of our own vain career shrink abashed ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... In their errantry they did great good. It was they that rescued Andromeda, though she lied, as a woman will, and gave the praise to her lover. It was they, also, who slew the Tarasque on his second appearance, when he came in a thunderstorm across the broad bridge of Beaucaire, all scaled in crimson and gold, ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... which made Cervantes famous, and which has kept his name before the world ever since. This was the inimitable Don Quixote, which gives the burlesque adventures of the self-styled "Knight of the Rueful Countenance." This book was not intended to satirize knight-errantry itself, for that had long before died out in Spain. What it did aim to do was to make ridiculous the romances of chivalry over which all Spain at the time of Cervantes seemed to have gone mad. How well Cervantes succeeded in his aim may be known from the fact that after the appearance ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... for him, many of his follies evaporated in words. I saw but little either of him or his follies at this time. All I know about him is, that after he had lost his bet of a hundred guineas, as a pig-driver, by his knight-errantry in rescuing the female duellists from a mob, he wrote a very charming copy of verses upon the occasion; and that he was so much provoked by the stupidity of some of his brother officers who could not understand the verses, that he took a disgust to the army, and sold his commission. He ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... softens the severe; The cloud on Nature's beauteous face dispels, Restores bright order, easts the brute beneath, And re-enthrones us in supremacy Of joy, e'en here. Admit immortal life, And virtue is knight-errantry no more: Each virtue brings in hand a golden dower Far richer in reversion: Hope exults, And, though much bitter in our cup is thrown, Predominates and gives the ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... transgression, wished to scold him. But what superb white roses they were, as big as cabbages, as he himself had said! And he was entitled to triumph over them, for they were the only white roses there, and had been secured by himself, like the wandering urchin he was with a spice of knight-errantry in his composition, quite ready to jump over walls and cajole damsels in order to deck a bride ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... indeed there should be Fourth-Dimension ibises; and even then he begged that she would select instead a magic field-glass, with which one might see what is happening at an infinite distance; although of what use would that be to him, he wanted to know, since it would be his too late to follow her errantry through Yaque? They felt, as they talked, quite like the puppets of the days of Haroun-al-Raschid; only the puppets, poor children of mere magic, had not the traditions of the golden age of science for a setting, and were obliged to content themselves with mere tricks of jars ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... no guide, General," another of the senior officers said. "It is simply amazing that a lad of seventeen—I suppose he is not much over that—should have conceived and carried out such a plan. It sounds like a piece of old knight-errantry. Clive did as much, but Clive was some years older when he first became a thorn in the side of the French. What is your ...
— With Moore At Corunna • G. A. Henty
... hypocrite? Did the French populace discriminate between such, and the sincere professor of christianity? The facts of the revolution give an awful answer to the question. Cervantes ridiculed the fooleries and affectation ingrafted upon knight errantry. Did he intend to banish honour, humanity and virtue, loyalty, courtesy and gentlemanly feeling from Spain? The people understood not irony, and Don Quixote combined with other causes, to degrade to its present abasement, a land, so long renowned for her high and honourable ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... only go into a bookshop when they happen to need some particular book. Do they never drop in for a little innocent carouse and refreshment? There are some knightly souls who even go so far as to make their visits to bookshops a kind of chivalrous errantry at large. They go in not because they need any certain volume, but because they feel that there may be some book that needs them. Some wistful, little forgotten sheaf of loveliness, long pining away on an upper shelf—why not ride up, fling her across your charger (or your charge ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... the genius of Cervantes hurried Don Quixote and Sancho served to moderate the extravagances of knight-errantry. The adventures of Hudibras and Ralpho, undertaken to extinguish the sports and pastimes of the people, aided greatly in staying the hand of fanaticism, which had suppressed all stage plays and interludes as "condemned by ancient heathens, and by no means to be tolerated ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... loose, generous, informal design he had better place it in the mouth of the adventurer. True that in so far as it is romantic, and a story of youth, and a story in which an air from an age of knight-errantry blows into modern times, so that something like a clash of armour and a splintering of spears seems to mingle with the noises of modern life—true that in so far as it is all this, Harry Richmond is not alone among Meredith's books. The author of Richard Feverel and Evan Harrington and ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... that he failed to choke back the curse quick risen to his lips when the throb of the Mercury's engine came over the crest of the hill. Never was mailed dragon more terrible to the beholder, even in the days of knight-errantry. In an instant his well-conceived project had gone by the board. He saw himself discredited, suspected, a skulking plotter driven into the open, a self-confessed trickster utterly at the mercy of some haphazard question that would lay bare his pretenses and cover ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... when, one evening, I sat with the author of "Vanity Fair," in the concert rooms at Covent Garden, as Colonel Newcome and Clive had done before me, and took my beer and mutton with those kindly eyes measuring me through their spectacles, I felt that such grand companionship lifted me from the errantry of my career into the dignity of ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... had a long and confidential talk," the young artist continued, "and came to the conclusion that Doctor Oleander was at the bottom of the matter, and that, wherever you were, you were an unwilling prisoner. Of course, to a gentleman of my knight-errantry, that was sufficient to fire my blood. I put lance in rest, buckled on my armor, mounted my prancing charger, and set off to the ogre's castle to rescue the captive maiden! And for the rest, you know it. I came, ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... sufficient to fire the hidden mine and send to the countenance the flash of haughty indignation. Whilst yet in her maidenhood she longed for distinction. Fame leaped before her ardent imagination as a gilded bubble she loved to grasp. Tales of knight-errantry and chivalry were always in her hands, and bore their noxious fruit in the wild dreams of ambition they fired in the girl's mind. Often, when alone with her sister, with book closed in her hand and eye fixed on some article of furniture, her thoughts would be away winning ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... clapped on his hat, grasped his stout oak stick, and telling his housekeeper to let them know, in case his guests should miss him, that he was obliged to go out for ten minutes or so on parish business, forth sallied the stout priest, with no great appetite for knight-errantry, but still anxious to rescue, if so it might be, the distressed princess, begirt with giants and enchanters, at ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... Counter-Reformers, of Loyola, and above all, in the order of abstract but deeply felt thought, that of our mystics, was, in its essence, none other than this? What was the mysticism of St. John of the Cross but a knight-errantry of the heart in ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... ankles, and a learning and a wit unimaginable. Her own fortune was made, she believed, in serving her. Both the magister and her brother had sworn it, and, living in an age of marvels—dragons, portents from the heavens, and the romances of knight errantry—she was ready to believe it. It was true that the lady's room had proved a cell more bare and darker than her own at home, but Katharine's bright and careless laughter, her fair and radiant height, and her ready kisses and pleasant words, ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... hole-and-corner business, and God only knows why," he answered. "All I know is that her brother, Peter, tried to make conditions about the marriage, and that, although at first Papa would not hear of them, he afterwards took some fancy or knight-errantry or another into his head. But, as I say, it is a hole-and-corner business. I am only just beginning to understand my father "—the fact that Woloda called Papa "my father" instead of "Papa" somehow hurt ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... volunteers, many of them of the best families of France. But the boiling valour of these fiery youths was equally difficult to restrain or direct; and, after losing two-thirds of their number in desperate, but irregular, sallies against the Turkish lines, the survivors of this piece of knight-errantry re-embarked for Christendom in January, leaving the heads of their fallen comrades ranged on pikes before the tent of Kiuprili. A stancher reinforcement was received in the spring of 1669, by the arrival of 3000 Lunenburghers, whose commander, Count Waldeck, fell ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... the coming years, Flutter awhile, then quiet lie, Like timid birds that fain would fly, But do not dare to leave their nests;— And youths, who in their strength elate Challenge the van and front of fate, Eager as champions to be In the divine knight-errantry Of youth, that travels sea and land Seeking adventures, or pursues, Through cities, and through solitudes Frequented by the lyric Muse, The phantom with the beckoning hand, That still allures and still eludes. O sweet illusions of the brain! ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... consonant to all the principles of reason and religion, natural and revealed, to replenish the earth with inhabitants than to depopulate it by killing those already in existence. Besides, it is time for the age of knight-errantry and mad heroism to be at an end. Your young military men, who want to reap the harvest of laurels, do not care, I suppose, how many seeds of war are sown; but for the sake of humanity it is devoutly to be wished, that the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... Lady Hildegarde; "I understand now what has always puzzled everyone who has had the care of you. You were born two hundred years too late; the ancient days of knight errantry and chivalry would have suited ...
— The Coquette's Victim • Charlotte M. Braeme
... along. Never did Sancha Pancha, on his Embassage to Dulcinea, make such a despicable, out of the way Figure, as our Clerico did at this Time. And what increas'd our Mirth was, their telling me, that our Clerico, like that Squire (tho' upon his own Priest-Errantry) was actually on his March to Toboso, a Place five Leagues off, famous for the Nativity of Dulcinea, The Object of the Passion of that celebrated Hero Don Quixot. So I will leave our Clerico on his Journey to Murcia, to relate ...
— Military Memoirs of Capt. George Carleton • Daniel Defoe
... within thirty years Japan slumbered still in the Knight-time of the Middle Ages, and so long as a man carried about with him continually two beautiful swords he felt it incumbent upon him to use them. The happy days of knight-errantry have passed. These same cavaliers of Samurai are now thankful to police the streets in spectacles necessitated by the too diligent study of German text, and arrest chance disturbers of the public peace for a miserably small ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... Since the knight-errantry of wolf and bear and catamount and fox has scant need of milestones, or signposts, or ferries, or the tender iteration of road-taxes, the casual glance might hardly perceive the necessity of opening a thoroughfare ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... a stout gate of iron bars to keep him out,' said Mr. Grewgious, smiling; 'and Furnival's is fire-proof, and specially watched and lighted, and I live over the way!' In the stoutness of his knight-errantry, he seemed to think the last-named protection all sufficient. In the same spirit he said to the gate- porter as he went out, 'If some one staying in the hotel should wish to send across the road to me in the night, a crown will be ready for the messenger.' ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... giants, as being a dull and sullen kind of persons. This tremendous warder was appropriately armed with a heavy club spiked with steel. In fine, he represented excellently one of those giants of popular romance, who figure in every fairy tale or legend of knight-errantry. ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... fact that morality is the most dark and daring of conspiracies. It reminds us that the whole noiseless and unnoticeable police management by which we are ruled and protected is only a successful knight-errantry. ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... Grindhusen, the painter who can ditch and delve at a pinch, or Falkenberg, farm-labourer in harvest-time, and piano-tuner where pianos are. Here is brave comradeship, the sharing of adventures, the ready wit of jovial vagrants. The book is a harmless picaresque, a geste of innocent rogue-errantry; its place is with Lavengro and The Cloister and the Hearth, in that ancient, endless order of tales which link up age with age and land with land in the unaltering, unfrontiered fellowship of the road that kept the spirit of poetry ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... and somewhat mystical ballad is from Nyerup and Rahbek's Danske Viser of the Middle Ages. It seems to refer to the first preaching of Christianity in the North, and to the institution of Knight-Errantry. The three maidens I suppose to be Faith, Hope, and Charity. The irregularities of the original have been ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... should make a habit of knight-errantry, if I were you," said Roger. "Not in slums ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... when he succeeded in making himself master of Cabul. He was forty-four, when with a force of twelve thousand men he shattered the huge armies of Ibrahim at Panipat and made himself master of Delhi. His conquests were conducted on what might almost be called principles of knight errantry. His greatest victories were won against overwhelming odds, at the head of followers who were resolved to conquer or die. And in three years he had conquered all Hindustan. His figure stands out with ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... the partners; and I have ever since regretted that I was prevented by circumstances from carrying my intention into effect. From those early impressions, the grand enterprise of the great fur companies, and the hazardous errantry of their associates in the wild parts of our vast continent, have always been themes of charmed interest to me; and I have felt anxious to get at the details of their adventurous expeditions among the savage tribes that peopled the depths of ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... riddle is, what had become of the Brazilian general's heart? President Olivier might be called a visionary or a nuisance; but even his enemies admitted that he was magnanimous to the point of knight errantry. Almost every other prisoner he had ever captured had been set free or even loaded with benefits. Men who had really wronged him came away touched by his simplicity and sweetness. Why the deuce should he diabolically revenge himself only once in his life; and that ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... library in Edinburgh, he began to devour its works of fiction, characteristically rejecting love stories and domestic tales, but laying hold upon "all that was adventurous and romantic," and in particular upon "everything which touched on knight-errantry." For two or three years he used to spend his holidays with his schoolmate, John Irving, on Arthur's Seat or Salisbury Crags, where they read together books like "The Castle of Otranto" and the poems of Spenser and Ariosto; or composed and narrated to ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... effectiveness—in short, that mysterious "virtu" by which the Renaissance set such great store. It had the negative value of providing artificial trials for young gentlemen with patrimony and no occupation who might otherwise be living idly on their country estates, or dissolutely in London. Knight-errantry, in chivalric society, had provided the hardships and discipline agreeable to youth; travel "for vertues sake, to apply the study of good artes,"[55] was in the Renaissance an excellent way to keep a young man profitably busy. For besides the academic advantages of ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... tarried a little while, and then to have availed himself of the confidence and affection he had inspired, so as to gather the remnants of his mission again, we cannot say. At any rate, he consoled himself for the disastrous failure at Natal by setting forth on a fresh scheme of Christian knight-errantry on behalf of the Indians of ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... century. Among the authors are kings, princes, noblemen of high rank and low, burgher-poets, and the Jew Suesskind von Trimberg. Each poet's productions are accompanied by illustrations, not authentic portraits, but a series of vivid representations of scenes of knight-errantry. There are scenes of war and peace, of combats, the chase, and tourneys with games, songs, and dance. We see the storming of a castle of Love (Minneburg)—lovers fleeing, lovers separated, love triumphant. Heinrich von Veldeke reclines upon ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... way out of them. And if the man's nature be noble and sweet and true; if he has hitherto drifted adown the stream of circumstance because his fellows have also drifted; then, with the deepening tides of his passion, the old spirit of knight-errantry descends upon him with its mystic mantle of white samite. And slowly out of this deepening torrent of bewildered impulse and devotion is born a new man—a man with a soul—a man who can dare all things, do all things, endure all things, for the sake of the woman he loves. ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... was pale, but there was firmness in the glance of his bright eye, and a smile unclouded in its joyance on his lip. The frivolous lightness of the courtier, the mad bravado of knight-errantry, which was not uncommon to the times, indeed, were not there. It was the quiet courage of the resolved warrior, the calm of a spirit at peace with itself, shedding its own high feeling and poetic glory ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar |
