"Milesian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of Avenel, a spirit mysteriously connected with the Avenel family, as the Irish banshee is with true Milesian families. She announces good or ill fortune, and manifests a general interest in the family to which she is attached, but to others she acts with considerable caprice; thus she shows unmitigated malignity to the sacristan and the robber. Any truly virtuous mortal has commanding ...
— 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.
... shore of the Sea of Marmora, at the entrance of the Hellespont, is perceived the peninsula of Kapoutaghi—the ancient, almost insular Cyzicus, a Milesian colony. At the neck of the isthmus, where it joins the mainland, there where are seen to-day the ruins of Aidindjik, formerly arose Cyzicus, a city celebrated in the history of Persia and of Rome, of ancient Greece and of the Byzantine empire. This port, one of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... is remembered that the ancestors of the Highlanders, i.e., the Picts and Scots, originally came from Ireland and are of Formosian and Milesian descent, it will be readily understood that their proud old clans—and rightly proud, for who but a grovelling money grubber would not sooner be descended from a warrior, elected chief, on account of his all-round prowess, ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... everybody by his conformity to Spartan habits. People who saw him wearing his hair close cut, bathing in cold water, eating coarse meal, and dining on black broth, doubted, or rather could not believe, that he ever had a cook in his house, or had ever seen a perfumer, or had worn a mantle of Milesian purple. For he had, as it was observed, this peculiar talent for gaining men's affections, that he could at once comply with and really enter into their habits and ways of life, and change faster than the chameleon. One color, indeed, ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... certain families in whose records periodic visits from the spirit are chronicled. A like ghostly informer figures in Brittany folklore. The Irish banshee is held to be the distinction only of families of pure Milesian descent. The Welsh have the banshee under the name gwrach y Rhibyn (witch of Rhibyn). Sir Walter Scott mentions a belief in the banshee as existing in the highlands of Scotland (Demonology and Witchcraft, p. 351). A Welsh death-portent ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... the Mediterranean then swarmed. In this island he was detained by them till he could obtain fifty talents from the neighboring cities for his ransom. Immediately on obtaining his liberty, he manned some Milesian vessels, overpowered the pirates, and conducted them as prisoners to Pergamus, where he shortly afterward crucified them—a punishment he had frequently threatened them with in sport when he was their prisoner. He then repaired to ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... confer with the author on the subject of these very illustrations. Lever was so anxious to restrain him from caricaturing his countrymen, that he even begged Browne to accompany him to Dublin for the purpose of seeing the natives, instead of the wretched specimens of Milesian humanity to be ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... such hard circumstances, or what deity imposed these plagues, as a penance on rebellious mortals, I am not now at leisure to enquire: but whoever seriously takes them into consideration must needs commend the valour of the Milesian virgins, who voluntarily killed themselves to get rid of a troublesome world: and how many wise men have taken the same course of becoming their own executioners; among whom, not to mention Diogenes, Xenocrates, Cato, Cassius, Brutus, ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... required it, since the right heir had ascended the throne. The people seemed willing to espouse the cause of the new King as that of the native head of their race, and a genealogy was concocted in which his descent was traced to the old Milesian kings. The whole circuit of the British Isles was united under the name of Stuart. As a hundred years before the last great province of France had been gradually united to the French crown, and even within human memory ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... with their armament, the Athenians with ten ships and two thousand Milesian heavy infantry took the town of Scandea, on the sea; and with the rest of their forces landing on the side of the island looking towards Malea, went against the lower town of Cythera, where they found all the inhabitants encamped. A battle ensuing, the Cytherians held their ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... the answer, ere the questioner could set foot on the deck, in accents short, sharp, prompt, and decisive, albeit with a strong Milesian flavour, from the chief mate. He was the officer of the watch, and was standing alongside the man at the wheel on the weather-side of the ship, with a telescope under his arm and a keen look of attention in ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... unlikely that the 'Milesian Tales' contained the germs of many of those now in the Arabian Nights; indeed it is scarcely possible to doubt that the Greek empire must have left deep impression on the Persian intellect. So also many of the ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... attend this chapel, and the bulk, as already intimated, are of the Milesian order. At the rear, where many of the poor choose to sit, some of the truest specimens of the "finest pisantry," some of the choicest and most aromatic Hibernians we have seen, are located. The old swallow-tailed ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... his territory. Similarly two other friends, Sophaenetus the Stymphalian (5), and Socrates the Achaean, had orders to get together as many men as possible and come to him, since he was on the point of opening a campaign, along with Milesian exiles, against Tissaphernes. These orders were duly carried out by the officers ...
— Anabasis • Xenophon
... The curly black hair of the Milesian spoke for him as clearly as the blue-gray eye. He shaved clean and he looked clean. An ancestry of hard workers left limbs that lifted him to almost six feet of strong manhood. His skin was ruddy and fresh. Two years younger than Thornton, he yet looked younger by five. And Callovan, like Thornton, ...
— The City and the World and Other Stories • Francis Clement Kelley
... has hitherto been said about the early traditions of either Briton or Gael. No word, either, about their early records. Nothing about the Triads, Aneurin, Taliessin, Llywarch Hen, and Merlin on the side of the Welsh; nothing about the Milesian and other legends of the Irish. Why this silence? Have the preceding investigations been so superabundantly clear as to lead us to dispense with all rays of light except those of ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... the President, Kid Mullaly, paced upon the floor with a lady on his arm. As the Loreley's was her hair golden. Her "yes" was softened to a "yah," but its quality of assent was patent to the most Milesian ears. She stepped upon her own train and blushed, and—she smiled into the eyes of ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... Presbyterian Church because it was near, and because I was told that the minister was one skilled to preach the gospel to the poor. Found myself half an hour too early, so watched the congregation assemble. The Scottish face everywhere, an utter absence of anything like even a modified copy of a Milesian face. Presbyterianism in Ulster must have kept itself severely aloof from the natives; there could have been no proselytizing or there would have been a mixture of faces typical of the absorption ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... Greece, but the mother country also, in the great and perilous attempt to resist the Persian. High above all the states of the elder Greece soared the military fame of Sparta; and that people the scheming Milesian resolved first to ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... tried to live by literature, and produced "The Fatal Revenge; or, the Family of Montorio," the first of a series of romances, in which he outdid Mrs. Radcliffe and Monk Lewis. "The Fatal Revenge" was followed by "The Wild Irish Boy," for which Colburn gave him L80, and "The Milesian Chief," all full of horrors and misty grandeur. These works did not bring him in much money; but, in 1815, he determined to win the height of dramatic fame in his "Bertram; or, the Castle of St. Aldebrand," ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... Darwin Nitrous Oxide Plants Insects Men Dog Ant and Bee Black, Colonel Holland and the Dutch Religion Gentilizes Women and Men Biblical Commentators Walkerite Creed Horne Tooke Diversions of Purley Gender of the Sun in German Horne Tooke Jacobins Persian and Arabic Poetry Milesian Tales Sir T. Monro Sir S. Raffles Canning Shakspeare Milton Homer Reason and Understanding Words and Names of Things The Trinity Irving Abraham Isaac Jacob Origin of Acts Love Lord Eldon's Doctrine as to Grammar Schools Democracy The Eucharist St. John, xix. 11. Divinity ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... which the Jew regarded Caesar, with which the Scot regarded Edward the First, with which the Castilian regarded Joseph Buonaparte, with which the Pole regards the Autocrat of the Russias. It was the boast of the highborn Milesian that, from the twelfth century to the seventeenth, every generation of his family had been in arms against the English crown. His remote ancestors had contended with Fitzstephen and De Burgh. His greatgrandfather had cloven down the soldiers of Elizabeth in the battle of the Blackwater. His ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... salutation that was also a blessing. We pulled up the car and they gathered about the Friar, looking up at him from under their broad-brimmed black hats, the countenances for the most part dark and primitive, the type more of Firbolg than Milesian origin. ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... utterly impossible; for why?—there would be tumults, and risings, and broken heads, and bloody bones, and all the natural results of Irish intercommunion with their fellow creatures, no doubt—perhaps even a little more riot and violence than merely comports with their usual habits of Milesian good fellowship; for, say the masters, the Irish hate the negroes more even than the Americans do, and there would be no bound to their murderous animosity if they were brought in contact with them on the same portion of the works of the Brunswick Canal. Doubtless there is some truth in this—the ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... of honour—and a highly honourable maid—to the Queen of Spain. The Irish regiments long employed in the Spanish service had become more or less naturalized in that country, which accounts for the great number of thoroughly Milesian names still to be found there, some of them, as O'Donnell, owned by men of high distinction. Among other officers who had settled with their families in the Peninsula was a Colonel O'Byrne, who, like most of his countrymen there, died penniless, leaving his widow with a pension and his daughter ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... keeping with the exterior, though in the drawing-rooms, where rich furniture and fine paintings actually lumber the apartments, there is evident the lack of a nice perception of the 'fitness of things,' and over the whole hangs a 'dusty air,' which reminds one that the Milesian Bridget does not 'flourish' ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... This Milesian Diogenes is in many respects the most remarkable man in county Clare, after, if not before, The O'Gorman Mahon himself. He is also the dirtiest. But the grime on Mr. Considine has a romantic origin. It is the fakir's ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... Duffee. He was an Irishman of the Pat Freney stripe, and I fancy there are many, with gray heads and wrinkled fronts, who can look upon the cicatrices resulting from his merciless blows, and remember that Milesian malignity of face, with its toad-like nose, with the same vividness with which it presents itself to me to-day. Yes, I remember it, and have cause. When scarcely ten years of age, in his little log school-house, the aforesaid resemblance forced itself upon me with such vim that involuntarily ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... frequent use of pithy sentiment, but at rapidity and rush of expression; this now prevails throughout Asia, and is characterised not only by a stream of eloquence but by a graceful and ornate vocabulary: Aeschylus of Cnidos, and my own contemporary Aeschines the Milesian, are examples of it. They possess a fine flow of speech, but they lack precision and grace of sentiment. Both these classes of oratory suit young men well, but in older persons they show a want of dignity. Hence Hortensius, who excelled in both, obtained as a young man the most ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... only a wholesale hatching of huge hawk-moths that came whizzing around Lang when he turned on the electric lights; and which, escaping, swarmed throughout the house, filling it with their loud, feathery humming, and the shrieks of Milesian domestics. ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... into a prouerb, grammata Ephesia the Ephesian letters, which were certaine Characters and wordes, by vertue whereof they obtained good successe in all businesse, victory against others, euasion and escape from dangers; and as we reade in Suidas, a Milesian armed with these letters, ouer-came thirty Champions in the games of Olimpus, but being remoued by the Magistrate, hauing intelligence thereof, himselfe was subdued. Of these see Athen[e,]us Deipnosophiston ...
— A Treatise of Witchcraft • Alexander Roberts
... laid upon you for seven days. This is a hungry country and no man should waste food. I shall enter Jerusalem to-morrow by daybreak; we, my companion and I, have no further use for these. They are Milesian ducks, fattened on nuts. And this is Falernian—Roman. I pray you, allow me to leave them with your servant ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... connected them with the hills or mounds, the last resting-places of the mighty dead. Some of these bore their names, while other beings were also associated with the mounds (sid)—Fomorians and Milesian chiefs, heroes of the sagas, or those who had actually been buried in them.[201] Legend told how, after the defeat of the gods, the mounds were divided among them, the method of division varying in different versions. In an early version the Tuatha De Danann are immortal and the Dagda divides ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... Milesian element embraces the cause of France furnishes a puzzle for many thoughtful minds; and yet its solution is simple. In planning a passage of the Rhine, LOUIS NAPOLEON proposes to ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 22, August 27, 1870 • Various
... nature has bestowed so much bounty, the inhabitants are, it is greatly to be feared, cannibals. In some two or three islands, a solitary white man was found, one of whom, Paddy Connell, (an Irishman, of course), a short, wrinkled old man, with a beard reaching to his middle, in a rich Milesian brogue, related his adventures during a forty years' residence at Ovolan, one of the Feejees. Paddy, with one hundred wives, and forty-eight children, and a vast quantity of other live stock, expressed his content ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... why the devil they call me Kelly," he mused. "No episode that I ever heard of is responsible for that Milesian misnomer. Quand meme! It sounds prettier from you than it ever did before. I'd rather hear you call me Kelly than Caruso sing my name ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... the other day. Sheil told me at Brooks's that one of his Irish members (Macnamara) was close to Lord John in the House, and looked at him in vain for a sign of recognition. Lord John stared, but made no sign; the affronted Milesian frothed up instantly and said, 'Confound him, I'll vote against him.' They pacified him so far as his vote was concerned; but Sheil naturally enough observed that it was a very unwise thing to neglect people's little vanities and ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... Thales the Milesian, one of the Seven Wise Men, says that the overflowing of the Nile arises from the Etesian winds; for that they blow up the river, and that the mouths of the river lie exactly opposite to the point from which they blow; and accordingly, that the wind ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... with Kilkenny blood in his veins, is firm in his belief that he ought not to be afraid of snakes, and does for India a little of what St. Patrick did completely for Ireland. The other "live boys," though not so much inclined as the Milesian to battle with the cobra-de-capello, have some experience in shooting tigers, leopards, deer, pythons, crocodiles, and other game, though not enough to wholly satisfy ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... other things they fought a battle by night); and yet they still carried on the war with equally balanced fortitude. In the sixth year a battle took place in which it happened, when the fight had begun, that suddenly the day became night. And this change of the day Thales, the Milesian, had foretold to the Ionians, laying down as a limit this very year in which the change took place. The Lydians, however, and the Medes, when they saw that it had become night instead of day, ceased from their fighting and were much more ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... result of a series of differentiations and compositions of an originally homogeneous substance, in spite of the fact that he is not yet able to effect the transformations in his laboratory, so, all those centuries ago, the Milesian sage seized on the same root idea and made it the basis of a world philosophy. It is a long cry from the old idea, familiar to Homer, that mist or vapour is condensed air to the cosmology of a Herbert Spencer, and yet nature is so rich in material for prompting intuitions ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... at notoriety was her grand masked ball at the Argyll rooms in 1818; an entertainment which, for elegant display and superior arrangement, did great credit to her taste, or to that of her broad-shouldered Milesian friend, to whom it is said the management of the whole was committed. The expense of this act of folly has been variously 318estimated; and the honour of defraying it gratuitously allotted to an illustrious commander, whose former weakness and culpability has been amply redeemed by years ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... complete in all its parts. The king, by law and in fact—the king who, by his Scottish descent, his creed, and his misfortunes, was dear (mistakenly or not) to the majority of the then people of Ireland—presided in person over that Parliament. The peerage consisted of the best blood, Milesian and Norman, of great wealth and of various creeds. The Commons represented the Irish septs, the Danish towns, and the Anglo-Irish counties and boroughs. No Parliament of equal rank, from King to Commons, sat here since; none sat here before or since ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... wars; and they were enabled to accomplish their object by the geographical and nautical charts, which they are said to have obtained from the Phoenicians, and by means of the sphere constructed by Anaximander the Milesian. The eastern parts of the Mediterranean, however, seem still to have been unexplored. Homer tells us that none but pirates ventured at the risk of their lives to steer directly from Crete to Lybia; and when the Ionian ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... oursels and civiloization are all broke down!" exclaimed Felix McGavonty, who sometimes used his Milesian dialect in order, as he put it, not to lose his ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... under the stacks of rags. In one bed a gray-haired, disheveled head cuddled close to the yellow locks of a slumbering child. While we are reconnoitering, something like a huge dog runs past and dives under the bed. "What is this, good friend?" we ask. "Oh, only the goat," replied a merry Milesian. "Do the goats live with you all in this room?" "To be sure they do, sir; we feeds 'em tater skins, and milks 'em for the babies," Country born as we were, we have often longed to keep a dairy in this city, but it never occurred to us that a bedroom ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... was originally published in my prose work, Leaves from Margaret Smith's Journal, as the song of a wandering Milesian schoolmaster. In the seventeenth century, slavery in the New World was by no means confined to the natives of Africa. Political offenders and criminals were transported by the British government to the plantations of Barbadoes and Virginia, where they were sold like ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... are but three," said a native of the place, who knew them well; "the Black Bull, the White Bull, and the Red Bull,—where is the fourth?"—"Sure and do you not know, the Dun Cow—the best of them all?" replied the unconscious Milesian. ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... Elpidias! I don't wish to inflict any evil upon you. But if you are tired of following my arguments to their logical conclusions, permit me to relate to you an allegory of a Milesian youth. Allegories rest the mind, and the relaxation ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... thoughtless person, whose follies had been visited upon himself and his family, with the evil consequences of crimes, had died in America; and his sister, the richly-jointured widow of a baronet, of old Milesian blood, who during his life had been inexorable to his entreaties to befriend the poor girl, left as it were in pledge at a London boarding-school, had relented upon hearing of his death, had come to England, settled all pecuniary matters to the full satisfaction of the astonished ...
— Honor O'callaghan • Mary Russell Mitford
... think, Paddy, the commodore here is going to bang a forty-two pound shot into our stomachs after all the good prog he's filled them with?" added Stingo, sotto voce, while the rotund Milesian threw his head back and twinkled careless ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... but appeared to possess great vigour and activity. He had a beard that reached to his middle, and but little hair, of a reddish-grey colour, on his head. He gave me no time for inquiry, but at once addressed me in broad Irish, with a rich Milesian brogue. In a few minutes he made me acquainted with his story, which, by his own account, ...
— The Book of Enterprise and Adventure - Being an Excitement to Reading. For Young People. A New and Condensed Edition. • Anonymous
... total in themselves, but are woven into a larger narrative by whose proportions they are dwarfed, so that their true completeness is disguised. "He cares not how he loiters by the way; he is always ready to beguile his reader with a Milesian story—one of those quaint and witty interludes which have travelled the world over and become part, not merely of every literature, but of every life." It is to three of these chance loiterings of this Kipling of Rome in its ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... may remember, must reckon as the knave; and therefore is consistently regarding an ominous trisyllable, which rhymes to "knavish tricks" in the national anthem; our suit now leads us in regular succession to the queen, a topic (it were Milesian to say a subject) whereon now, as heretofore, my loyalty shall never be found lacking. In old Rome's better antiquity, a slave was commissioned to whisper counsel in the ear of triumphant generals or emperors; and, in old England's less enlightened youth, a baubled fool was privileged to ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... demon pierced, it is true, like a gnawing worm, through all the luxuries of the Roman world; there was no resource against it, either in beautiful slaves, or Ionian dances, or magnificent repasts, or the combats of gladiators, or Milesian tales, or the voluptuous pictures which garnish the walls of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Athumia poisoned all, and the demon possessed the voluptuary in the midst even of the debauch. But if, fatigued with these alternate pleasures and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... satirical ballad on the administration of Tyrconnel. In this little poem an Irishman congratulates a brother Irishman, in a barbarous jargon, on the approaching triumph of popery, and of the Milesian race. The Protestant heir will be excluded. The Protestant officers will be broken. The Great Charter, and the praters who appeal to it, will be hanged in one rope. The good Talbot will shower commissions on his countrymen, and will cut the throats of the English. These verses, which ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... unfortunately said so with only too much truth,—had put the twelve pounds into his own private pocket. The officer's duty in the matter took him to the chairman of the Relief Committee, a stanch old Roman Catholic gentleman nearly eighty years of age, with a hoary head and white beard, and a Milesian name that had come down to him through centuries of Catholic ancestors;—a man urbane in his manner, of the old school, an Irishman such as one does meet still here and there through the country, but now not often—one who, above all things, was ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... estate and all almost) there is not an ancient name of Ireland, of the blood-royal thereof descended, but we can bring, from father to father, from the present man in being to Adam—and I, Thaddy O'Roddy, who wrote this, have written all the families of the Milesian race from this present ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... haggard and sickly; her eyes were heavy with sleep and hunger: real Milesian eyes they were, dark, delicate blue, glooming out from black shadows with a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... magnificent green and gold livery suit, his hair powdered, and fastened in a queue, the whiteness contrasting with the dark brows, and the eyes and complexion of that fine Irish type that it is the fashion to call Milesian. He looked proud of his dress, which was viewed in those days as eminently becoming, and did in fact display his well-made figure and limbs to great advantage; but he looked anxiously about, and his first ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge |
