"King Arthur" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to the period of King Arthur and his Round Table. At that time Cornwall, we learn, was subject to Ireland, to the extent at least of owing tribute. But the subject country, with increase of power, had become impatient of the tax, and, when the Irish hero Morold was sent to collect it, a knight of ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... just as the extreme beauty of a few superb women was more effective against the plainness of the crowd. The result was mediaeval, and amusing; sometimes coarse to a degree that might have startled a roustabout, and sometimes courteous and considerate to a degree that suggested King Arthur's Round Table; but this artistic contrast was surely not the perfection that Motley had in his mind. He meant something scholarly, worldly, and modern; he was thinking of his ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... King Arthur (if the whole story be not a fable) who was so famous for beating the Saxons in ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... his large works in a serious form is the second sonata, called the "Eroica." This is designated by the composer as a "flower from the realm of King Arthur," and it is dedicated to Dr. William Mason. Beginning very seriously and slowly, it almost immediately rises to intense vigor, which, after a while, gives place to a second subject—a song-melody in ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... of the tricksy Paupukkeewis, the boastful Iagoo, and the strong Kwasind. If a Chinese traveler, during the middle ages, inquiring into the history and religion of the western nations, had confounded King Alfred with King Arthur, and both with Odin, he would not have made a more preposterous confusion of names and characters than that which has hitherto disguised the genuine personality of the great Onondaga reformer. ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... attempted in poetry by Tennyson in the least inspired of his works, The Idylls of the King. In "Lancelot and Elaine" and "Guinevere" (as Julia Magruder points out, North American Review, April, 1905) Guinevere is married to King Arthur, whom she has never seen, when already in love with Lancelot, so that the "marriage" was merely a ceremony, and not a real marriage (cf., May Child, "The Weird of Sir Lancelot," North ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... over the highest battlement of the castle of St. Michael's Mount, with not a ledge or coigne of vantage 'twixt you and the fathomless ocean under you, distant three thousand feet? Last, do I forget you clambering up the goat-path to King Arthur's castle of Tintagel, when, in my vain wish to follow, I grovelled and clung to the soil like a Caliban, and you, in the manner of a tricksy spirit and stout Ariel, actually danced up and down ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... broken his heart, ruined his life, and practically compared him to Roland Bean, and his pride should have built up an impassable wall between them, but—she had cake and cocoa. In similar circumstances King Arthur ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... gateways are known as Henry VIII.'s, St. George's, and King George IV.'s, while within is the Norman or Queen Elizabeth's Gate. The Round Tower or Keep was built for the assemblage of a fraternity of knights which King Edward intended to model after King Arthur's "Knights of the Round Table," but the project was abandoned after the institution of the Order ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... stable; a rude natural rock in Hope Dale is his chair; a chasm at Chatsworth is his leap; Blackstone Edge, in Lancashire, is his bed."[20] In fact, his name bids fair to overrun every remarkable object of the sort which has not been already appropriated to King Arthur or the Devil; with the latter of whom, at least, it is presumed, that, however ancient, he will not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... Good King Arthur is gone. It bit deep, that blow which Mordred, the strong traitor, struck when the spear stood out a fathom behind his back; and Morgan la Fay came too late to heal the grievous wound that had taken cold. The frank, kind, generous heart, that would ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... in seemly sort The ladie was full fain; But King Arthur, all sore amazed, No answer made again. 'What wight art thou," the ladie said "That will not speak to me? Sir, I may chance to ease thy pain, Though I be foul to see." The Marriage of ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... Oger, who, like a true Breton, believed himself descended from King Arthur, Sir Tristram, and half the knights of the Round Table, replied that his blood was to that of Hereward as wine to peat-water; and that Bretons used furze-toppings only to scourge the backs of ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... along the canyon side, while a high lattice on the other shows dim outlines of the hills beyond. In the wall are arches with gates so curved as to leave circular openings, through which we get glimpses of the sea. It makes me think of King Arthur's castle at Tintagel. In the lattice there is a wicket gate. There is something very alluring about a wicket gate—it connotes a Robin. Unfortunately, my Robin can only appear from Friday to Monday, but I'm not complaining. Any one is fortunate who can count on romance two days out of seven. ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... Of a great tourney made by King Arthur and the two kings Ban and Bors, and how they went over ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... moss-covered cabin on the burn-side, beneath Craig Castle in Mid-Lothian, and was hospitably entertained by its simple inhabitants. Wallace repaid their kindness with a few ballads, which he sung accompanied by his harp. As he gave the last notes of "King Arthur's Death in Glory," the worthy cotter raised his head from the spade on which he leaned, and asked whether he could not sing ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... way by which that country far beyond the stars may be reached, may become the habitual dwelling-place and fortress of our nature, instead of being the object of its vague aspiration in moments of indolence. At the Round Table of King Arthur there was left always one seat empty for him who should accomplish the adventure of the Holy Grail. It was called the perilous seat because of the dangers he must encounter who would win it. In the company of the epic poets there was a place left for whoever should embody the Christian ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... ten years more with Henry Irving after "Henry VIII." During that time we did "King Lear," "Becket," "King Arthur," "Cymbeline," "Madame Sans-Gene," "Peter the Great" and "The Medicine Man." I feel too near to these productions to write about them. The first night of "Cymbeline" I felt almost dead. Nothing seemed right. "Everything is so slow, so slow," ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... replied the King; "no sword on earth, were it the Excalibur of King Arthur, can cut that which opposes no steady resistance to ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... from a brick bat, and the assailants were clambering over the outer wall. So the Baron called for his Sunday hauberk of Milan steel, and his great two-handed sword with the terrible name:—it was the fashion in feudal times to give names to swords: King Arthur's was christened Excalibar; the Baron called his Tickletoby, and whenever he took it in hand, it was ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... said she, "thanks to this courteous stranger. And now, sir," she continued, springing into her saddle, "it is not fit that I leave you without a word more. Clerk or no, you have acted this day as becomes a true knight. King Arthur and all his table could not have done more. It may be that, as some small return, my father or his kin may have power to advance your interest. He is not rich, but he is honored and hath great friends. Tell me what is your purpose, and see if he ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... that such a book would not be complete without some characters that are no less real because they have lived only in the minds of men. No explanation is needed for semi-historical characters like King Arthur, Robin Hood and William Tell, while Don Quixote, the Prince of Madness, and Rip Van Winkle, the Prince of Laziness, have been included, not because they were essentially heroic in themselves (although Don Quixote might well have claimed the laurel) but ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... Lord Fauntleroy? And do you know about Sir Lancelot, and the Holy Grail, and King Arthur and his Round Table, and the Lady Rowena, and Ivanhoe, ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... and gone—with the Puritan world of Miles Standish, the Revolutionary days of Paul Revere, the Dutch epoch of Rip Van Winkle; or with not even this comparatively recent national interest, it takes the child back to the strange folk of the days of King Arthur and King Robert of Sicily, of Ivanhoe and the Ancient Mariner. Thus when the child leaves school his literary studies do not connect helpfully with those forms of literature with which—if he reads at all—he is most likely to be concerned: the short story, ...
— Boy Life - Stories and Readings Selected From The Works of William Dean Howells • William Dean Howells
... several directions and find traces of the good work of the Trust. At Barmouth a beautiful cliff known as Dinas-o-lea, Llanlleiana Head, Anglesey, the fifteen acres of cliff land at Tintagel, called Barras Head, looking on to the magnificent pile of rocks on which stand the ruins of King Arthur's Castle, and the summit of Kymin, near Monmouth, whence you can see a charming view of the Wye Valley, are all owned and protected by the Trust. Every one knows the curious appearance of Sarsen stones, often called Grey Wethers from their likeness to a flock of sheep ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... a religious body not inconsiderable in that Calvinistic Wales. He told us how the Holy Grail had been deposited with the monks of Strata Florida, the famous old abbey near Aberystwyth; but I forgot who made them this trust, unless it was King Arthur's knights, and I am not sure whether the fact is matter of legend or history. What I remember is that when the abbey was suppressed by Henry VIII., certain of the escaping monks came with the relic to the gentle house where we then were, and placed it in the keeping of the family who have guarded ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... the recognised characters and legends, or varying them so as to make them more picturesque and interesting—perhaps even improving them—but all the time believing no more in the stories they are telling, or in the deities themselves, than Tennyson need have believed in King Arthur and Guinevere. The gods are good poetic material and are sure to afford popular, or at least inoffensive, reading. The poets doubtless do something to humanise and beautify the popular conception of a deity, but they ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... two verses of this stanza also characterize the King Arthur of the 'Idylls of the King'. *1* In the next stanza we have ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... as Sir Mordred was at Dover with his host, there came King Arthur with a great navy of ships, galleys, and carracks. And there was Sir Mordred ready waiting upon his landing, to let his own father to land upon the land that he was king of. Then was there launching of great boats and small, and ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... Hlangwhane position, some of the commandos seem to have trekked away towards the north, and even Botha for a time appears to have lost heart and to have suggested to Joubert that the siege of Ladysmith should be raised. The Boer leaders had already, like King Arthur, ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... in conditions and institutions. That was barbarism; and it was Iowa! And it was in my lifetime. It was in a region now as completely developed as England, and it goes back to things as raw and primitive as King Arthur's time. I wonder if his knights were not in the main, pretty shabby rascals, as bad as Dick McGill—or Cow Vandemark? But Gertrude has not yet heard ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... Almonry at Westminster, at the sign of the Red Pole. It produced in all sixty-four books, nearly all of them in English, some of them written by Caxton himself. One of the most important of them was Sir Thomas Malory's History of King Arthur, the storehouse from which Tennyson drew the stories which form the groundwork of his Idylls of ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... Middle Ages has some points of light, always around a man. The great Frederic Barbarossa stands for Germany, as does William Tell for Switzerland, as Ivan the Great for Russia, as the Cid for Spain, as King Arthur for England and ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... Wales and had a cathedral and a number of other churches dedicated to him. Without too grossly admitting my ignorance, I tried to draw out from my mentor some further biographical facts that my imagination might work on during my stay. He thought that St. David was some relation to King Arthur, but just what the relation was, and whether he was only a relative by marriage, he didn't know. It wasn't very much information, but I was profoundly ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... roamed about in the twilight, and talked, and talked, and talked, as only true lovers can talk, be they Strephon and Daphne in life's glad morning, or grey-haired Darby and Joan; and lastly they went down to the hike, and rowed about in the moonlight, and talked of King Arthur's death, and of that mystic sword, Excalibur, 'wrought by the lonely maiden ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... De Nugis Curialium he chattered over the manners of his contemporaries, and in his satirical poems scourged the greed and vices of the clergy, whilst on the other hand he took a principal part in spreading a knowledge of the legend of the high-souled King Arthur and of the quest of the Holy Grail. Giraldus Cambrensis again, or Gerald of Wales, wrote on all sorts of subjects with shrewd humour and ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... to Camelot, Glad, though for shame his heart waxed hot, For hope within it withered not To see the shaft it dreamed of shot Fair toward the glimmering goal of fame, And all King Arthur's knightliest there Approved him knightly, swift to dare And keen to bid their records ...
— The Tale of Balen • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... left. And so there grew great tracts of wilderness, Wherein the beast was ever more and more, But man was less and less, till Arthur came. For first Aurelius lived and fought and died, And after him King Uther fought and died, But either failed to make the kingdom one. And after these King Arthur for a space, And through the puissance of his Table Round, Drew all their petty princedoms under him. Their king and head, and made ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... Confidence-Table," said Voltaire, "of which D'Argens has so often spoken to me, and which has seemed to me like the Round-Table of King Arthur. Long ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... the happy season to achieve them. To take familiar instances, here were the untold tales of Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims; the unwritten cantos of the Fairy Queen; the conclusion of Coleridge's Christabel; and the whole of Dryden's projected epic on the subject of King Arthur. The shelves were crowded; for it would not be too much to affirm that every author has imagined and shaped out in his thought more and far better works than those which actually proceeded from his pen. And here, likewise, where the unrealized conceptions of youthful poets ...
— A Select Party (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... gun, and tramp for miles, and wonder at himself. He had all sorts of fancies. He thought of his wickedness and his wasted time, and compared himself with the great men in the books who had been in similar evil straits,—with Marc Antony, with King Arthur in Gwendolen's enchanted castle, and with Geraint the strong but slothful,—rather far-fetched this last comparison,—and of all the rest. It was a grotesque variety, but amid it all he really suffered. And he would make good resolves and, for the moment, firm ones, and return ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... his subject and retarding speed again, "that opens up a wide field. In Celtic mythology Avallon is Ynys yr Afallon, the Island of Apples. It is the Land of the Blessed, where Morgana holds her court. Great heroes like King Arthur and Ogier le Dane were carried there after death, and, as apples were the only first-rate fruit known to the northern nations, a place where they grew in luscious abundance came to be regarded as the soul-kingdom. Merlin says that fairyland ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... life, in bronze; among which my guide pointed out to me those of Clovis, Godfrey of Bouillon, Albert the Wise, Charles V, Philip II of Spain, Rudolph of Hapsburgh, and to my great astonishment the British King Arthur; there were twenty-eight statues altogether. But on my return to my inn, I found that my guide had made a great error respecting King Arthur, and that the said statue represented Prince Arthur, son of Henry VII, King of England, and not the old Hero of Romance; and my hostess' book further ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... Illustrations. Agatha's Husband. With Illustrations. Head Of the Family. With Illustrations. Two Marriages. The Laurel Bush. About Money, and other Things. My Mother and I. With Illustrations. Miss Tommy: A Mediaeval Romance. Illustrated. King Arthur: Not a Love Story. Sermons out of Church. ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... more like those of Odin and Thor, with not a little of Pantagruel, than anything in the characters of the Chippewa Manobozho, or the Iroquois Hiawatha. The name of this divinity is Glooskap, meaning, strangely enough, the Liar, because it is said that when he left earth, like King Arthur, for Fairyland, he promised to return, and has never done so. It is characteristic of the Norse gods that while they are grand they are manly, and combine with this a peculiarly domestic humanity. Glooskap is the Norse god intensified. He is, however, more of a giant; he grows to a more ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... when she came nigh him she deemed him a knight of the Round Table, whereof she hoped to have some comfort; and then she conjured him: By the faith that he ought unto him in whose service thou art entered in, and for the faith ye owe unto the high order of knighthood, and for the noble King Arthur's sake, that I suppose that made thee knight, that thou help me, and suffer me not to be shamed ...
— A Knyght Ther Was • Robert F. Young
... tradition. There is a whole class of traditions attached to personages about whose historical existence there can be but little doubt, and just because of the accretion of tradition round them their historical existence has oftentimes been denied. The most famous example in our history is of course King Arthur, and so great an authority as Sir John Rhys is obliged to resort to a special argument to account for the problems he is faced with. He argues, and argues strongly, for an historic Arthur—an Arthur ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... legs,—but by slow climbing, is, we may presume, the object of all teachers, leaders, legislators, spiritual pastors, and masters. He who writes tales such as this, probably also has, very humbly, some such object distantly before him. A picture of surpassing godlike nobleness,—a picture of a King Arthur among men, may perhaps do much. But such pictures cannot do all. When such a picture is painted, as intending to show what a man should be, it is true. If painted to show what men are, it is false. The true picture of life as it is, if it could be adequately painted, would ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... Theodore Lyman, able and forceful afterward as soldier, scientist, and congressman, who died prematurely; but the music and details were arranged by Joseph C. Heywood, later a devout Catholic, ending his career in Rome as Chamberlain of Pope Leo XIII. In the cast Heywood was King Arthur and Lyman, general of the army. There were besides, a throng of warriors, lords, and ladies wonderful to behold. The costumes were elaborate. Old trunks and attics of our friends were ransacked for ancient finery and appointments that might be made to serve. Provision was made ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... the theme; scenical opportunities; the poetry independent of the creed; Milton's choice of subject; King Arthur; Paradise Lost; attractions of the theme: primitive religion, natural beauty, dramatic interest; difficulties of the theme, and forbidden topics; how Milton overcomes these difficulties by his episodes, his similes, and the tradition that he adopts concerning the fallen ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... lost in places, that wound through the woodland three-quarters of a mile to his house. And as he moved through the park, through sunlight and shadow of these great trees that were his, he felt like a knight of King Arthur, like some young knight long exiled, at last coming to his own. He longed with an unreasonable seizure of desire to come here to live, to take care of it, beautify it, fill it with life and prosperity ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... the utmost importance, however,—and this Professor Bain fails to do—to distinguish between two kinds of belief. There are men who believe and others who disbelieve the Koran or the Bible; I can accept or reject the historical existence of King Arthur or Napoleon; but, if I understand them, I cannot disbelieve the demonstrations of Euclid, nor the relations of subject and object, nor the formal laws of thought. No sane man, acquainted with the properties ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... recognise if you have ears to hear. So you see that already our English prose not only achieves the 'high moment,' but seems to obey it rather and be lifted by it, until we ask ourselves, 'Who could help writing nobly, having to tell how King Arthur died or how the Bruce?' Yes, but I bid you observe that Malory and Berners are both relating what, however noble, is quite simple, quite straightforward. It is when prose attempts to philosophise, to express thoughts as well as to relate ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... chivalry contained in the romances were adopted in actual life. Knights and ladies took upon themselves adventures and cultivated manners, which vied in extravagance with those of imaginary beings. The personality of King Arthur was so intensely realized, that for centuries it was believed that he would one day return from beyond the grave to resume his glorious rule. On his tomb were supposed ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... and they were put upon their honor only." Chandos's poet adds, "Many a dame and many a damsel, right amiable, gay, and lovely, came to dance there, to sing, and to cause great galas and jousts, as in the days of King Arthur." ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... plain that it was not unusual to represent a sword that possessed excellent qualities as being ornamented with gold, and the hilt is the part of the sword that naturally lends itself to ornamentation. Other examples of richly ornamented swords are King Arthur's sword, Excalibur, whose "pommel and haft were all of precious stones";[99] Roland's sword, Durendal, which had a golden hilt;[100] and the sword of Frothi II, which also had ...
— The Relation of the Hrolfs Saga Kraka and the Bjarkarimur to Beowulf • Oscar Ludvig Olson
... this he was greatly displeased, for he wist well that they might not again say their avows. "Alas!" said King Arthur unto Sir Gawaine, "ye have nigh slain me with the avow and promise that ye have made. For through you ye have bereft me of the fairest fellowship and the truest of knighthood that ever were seen ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... but gradually I saw in the distance so beautiful a thing—such a silent, white, fairy-like city, under such a brilliant sky, that I lost all earthly fear, and, in spite of the tangible railway carriage in which I was, I felt as if, like King Arthur, I was being borne by fairies to their ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... himself the whole of a crime shared with another by asking Heaven to charge the bill on him. And in "King Arthur," written ten years after the Preface from which I have quoted his confession about Dubartas, we have a passage precisely of the kind ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... is he a novelist, humorist or essayist. Is "Roughing It" more typical of his genius than "Tom Sawyer" or "Huckleberry Finn"? How shall we characterize "Puddin' Head Wilson"? Under what category shall we place "A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur" and "Joan of Arc"? The query reminds us once more that literature means personality as well as literary forms and that personality is more important than are they. And again we turn away regretfully (remembering that this is an attempt to study not fiction in all its manifestations, but ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... is true of the Arthurian Legend and the story of the Holy Grail. Dante knew of King Arthur's fame, and mentions him in the Inferno. To Dante he was a Christian hero, and the historical Arthur may have been a Christian; but much in the story goes back to the pagan Celtic religion. We can find ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... In the days of King Arthur, Merlin, the most learned enchanter of his time, was on a journey; and, being very weary, stopped one day at the cottage of an honest ploughman to ask for refreshment. The ploughman's wife, with great civility, immediately brought him some milk in a ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... observing at the same time, that to ask a good woodsman to shoot at a target so broad as had hitherto been used, was to put shame upon his skill. "For his own part," he said, "and in the land where he was bred, men would as soon take for their mark King Arthur's round-table, [Footnote: King Arthur's round table. This was the famous table, made by the magician Merlin, which was given to King Arthur as a wedding gift by the father of Guinevere. It could seat 150 knights.] which held sixty ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... French epics, we lay no stress on the story of his incest with his sister, Gilain, "whence sprang Roland." The House of Thyestes, whence Agamemnon sprang, is marked by even blacker legends. The scandal is mythical, like the same scandal about the King Arthur, who in romance is so much inferior to his knights, a reflection of feudal jealousies and hatreds. In places the reproaches hurled by the peers at Charles read like paraphrases of those which the Achaean princes cast at Agamemnon. Even Naismes, the ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... Earl; "here you rove gallantly, and at free will, through our dominions, fulfilling of appointments, and achieving amorous adventures; while we are condemned to sit in our royal halls, as dull and as immovable as if our Majesty was carved on the stern of some Manx smuggling dogger, and christened the King Arthur ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... Wales, all come from the same Latin word, castrum, which means a military camp or fortified place. So that we might guess, if we did not know, that at Lancaster, Doncaster, Manchester, Winchester, Exeter, and at the old capital of the famous King Arthur, Caerleon, there were some of those Roman camps which were dotted over England in the days when the Romans ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... secretary of Charles the Great, Turpin, Archbishop of Rheims, who was himself present in the scenes that he describes. It was—like Geoffrey of Monmouth's nearly contemporary "History of British Kings," from which were drawn tales of Gorboduc, Lear and King Arthur—romance itself, and the source of romance in others. It is at the root of many tales of Charlemagne and Roland that reached afterwards their highest artistic expression in Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso." ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... enclosed by mountains, clad in the hazy purple of coming night,—with his face turned steadily down the long, long road, "the road that the sun goes down." Dauntless, reckless, without the unearthly purity of Sir Galahad though as gentle to a pure woman as King Arthur, he is truly a knight of the twentieth century. A vagrant puff of wind shakes a corner of the crimson handkerchief knotted loosely at his throat; the thud of his pony's feet mingling with the jingle of his spurs is borne back; and as the careless, gracious, lovable figure ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various
... particular object as present here and now. Although never having had the actual particular experience, a person can, with the eye of the imagination, picture as now present before him any particular object or event, real or imaginary, such as King Arthur's round table; the death scene of Sir Isaac Brock or Captain Scott; the sinking of the Titanic; the Heroine of Vercheres; ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... here. Last autumn he made a walking tour into Cornwall with Alfred Tennyson, to tread in the steps of King Arthur. Tennyson was dreadfully afraid of being recognised and mobbed, and desired to be called 'the other gentleman,' which straightway became convertible now and then into 'the old gentleman,' much to his vexation. But Mr. Prinsep is in the roses and lilies of youth, and comparatively speaking, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... the distinguished American artist Howard Pyle undertook to retell and illustrate the legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. His four-volume work has long been considered one of the outstanding interpretations of the ...
— The Story of the Champions of the Round Table • Howard Pyle
... he, "let your nephew ride hard to-morrow at dawn with a brief drawn up on parchment and well sealed with a seal: bid him ride to King Arthur at Carduel. Sire, he sleeps with the peers in your chamber; go you out when the first sleep falls on men, and if he love Iseult so madly, why, then I swear by God and by the laws of Rome, he will try to speak with her before he rides. But if he do so unknown to you or to me, then slay me. ...
— The Romance Of Tristan And Iseult • M. Joseph Bedier
... approach from Europe to the Western Continent was by Iceland and Greenland—especially in those early days when ocean navigation was unknown. Iceland is nearer to Greenland than to Norway; and Greenland is part of America. But in Iceland there were Celtic settlers in the early centuries; and even King Arthur, according to the history of Geoffrey of Monmouth, sailed north to that "Ultima Thule." During the ninth century a Christian community had been established there under certain Irish monks. This early civilization, however, was destined ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... and republicanism. We have, at the same time, taken care not to forget ourselves in this new distribution of supremacy. France is to furnish the stock of the new dynasties for Austria, England, Spain, Denmark, and Sweden. What would you think, were you to awake one morning the subject of King Arthur O'Connor the First? You would, I dare say, be even more surprised than I am in being the subject of Napoleon Bonaparte the First. You know, I suppose, that O'Connor is a general of division, and a commander of the Legion of Honour,—the bosom friend of Talleyrand, and courting, ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... of the struggle between the Britons and the Saxons was King Arthur, but it was not until many many years after the time in which he lived that all the splendid stories of his knights, of his Round Table, and of his great conquests began to take the form in which we know them. Indeed, in the earliest Welsh tales ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... all situated close together, some fifteen or twenty miles farther on, along the coast. The first among them that we reached was Tintagel Castle, an ancient ruin magnificently situated on a precipice overhanging the sea, and romantically, if not historically, reputed as the birthplace of King Arthur. ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... Bachelor" Unknown "Johnny Shall Have a New Bonnet" Unknown The City Mouse and the Garden Mouse Christina Rossetti Robin Redbreast Unknown Solomon Grundy Unknown "Merry Are the Bells" Unknown "When Good King Arthur Ruled This Land" Unknown The Bells of London Unknown "The Owl and the Eel and the Warming Pan" Laura E. Richards The Cow Ann Taylor The Lamb William Blake Little Raindrops Unknown "Moon, So Round and Yellow" Matthias Barr The House That ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... The Alliterative Romance of the Death of King Arthur; now first printed, from a Manuscript in the Library of Lincoln ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various
... take it up and make it their stock in trade: they decorate it in a masquerade of frippery and finery, feathers and furbelows, like a clown dressed for a fancy ball; and the poor barbarian legend survives at last, if it survives at all, like the Conflagration in Ovid or King Arthur in Tennyson—a hippopotamus smothered in flowers, ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... you see," said Anne, "in the poem Elaine is in love with a knight named Lancelot, and he doesn't love her, and she dies, and when she is dead they put her on a barge and send her to the court of King Arthur, where Lancelot is one of the knights, and there is a letter to him in her hand, and a lily, and ...
— Judy • Temple Bailey
... common belief of the Welsh nation that King Arthur was still alive in Fairyland, and would return again to reign ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... brave King Arthur, Thus feasting in thy bowre; And Guenever thy goodly queen, That fair and ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... as fierce as some of those told of King Arthur's knights. Long and sturdily the two champions fought, foot to foot, sword to scimitar, until their shields and armor were rent and hacked and the ground was red with their blood. Never had those hills seen so furious a fight by so well-matched ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... haunt of his, it was too near the young partridges, which were weakly that season. A kestrel is harmless compared to a crow. Surely the translators have wrongly rendered Don Quixote's remark that the English did not kill crows, believing that King Arthur, instead of dying, was by enchantment turned into one, and so fearing to injure the hero. Must he not have meant a rook? [Note: It has since been pointed out to me that the Don may have ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... King Arthur, Merlin, the famous enchanter, was out on a journey, and stopped one day at the cottage of an honest ploughman to ask for refreshment. The ploughman's wife brought him some milk in a wooden bowl, and some brown bread on ...
— The History Of Tom Thumb and Other Stories. • Anonymous
... slumber. They plundered morning, noon, and night, Were rough, uncouth, and impolite, No 'By your leave' or 'S'il vous plait' They came to rob, remained to prey. Horsa Horsa was slain in four-five-five, 455 Leaving Hengist still alive To live out his allotted term, Surviving partner of the Firm. King Arthur Time has many a fable wound About King Arthur's table round, Where Knights quaffed cordials, wines and ales, And told their little fairy tales. Augustine About six hundred years A.D. 597 To teach us Christianity Came Augustine. Wondrous Story; ...
— A Humorous History of England • C. Harrison
... one of the smaller collections printed by Warner, between the tartlet formed of meat and the tartlet de fritures, of which the latter approaches more nearly our notion. The imperfect comprehension of harmonies, which is illustrated by the prehistoric bag-pudding of King Arthur, still continued in the unnatural union of flesh with sweets. It is now confined to the cottage, whence Arthur may have himself introduced it at Court and to the Knights of ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt
... reconsidered; a missing letter, with the contents of which he was familiar, and which, therefore, could be of little value to him, and it was enough. He stood before her accused, and went out from her presence wronged, insulted, splendid as King Arthur in ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... therefore in the first few lectures on English literature to glance at the character of our old Saxon ancestors, and the legends connected with their first invasion of the country; and above all at the magnificent fables of King Arthur and his times which exercised so great an influence on the English mind, and were in fact, although originally Celtic, so thoroughly adopted and naturalised by the Saxon, as to reappear under different forms in every age, and form the keynote of most of our fictions, from Geoffrey ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... who is to be Denmark's deliverer when heavy troubles come upon her, is one which has its counterpart in other countries, resembling that of our own King Arthur and the German Frederick Barbarossa. When Denmark's necessity demands, Holger Danske will come to her aid; till then he sits "in the deep dark cellar of Kronborg Castle, into which none may enter. He is clad in iron and steel, and rests his ...
— Denmark • M. Pearson Thomson
... Mark Twain's hero, suddenly transported back to King Arthur's Court is landed in a surprising and unknown world. But one of King Arthur's knights brought to life at the court of the present German Emperor aside from steam, electricity, gun powder, telegraph and telephones would find the system as despotic as in the days when the enchanter, Merlin, ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... of the adventures and deeds of Sir Launcelot, fully and beautifully illustrated in Mr. Pyle's characteristic style, and uniform with his other two books, "The Story of King Arthur and His Knights" and "The Story of the Champions of the Round Table." This book takes up the adventures of the greatest of the Arthurian heroes, from the very beginning, and also that of his ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... are times," replied Simon, "when King Arthur and his Round Table could not make stand against them. I wish, Henry, you would speak more reverently of the Highlanders. They are often in Perth, both alone and in numbers, and you ought to keep peace with them so long as they will keep ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... King Arthur. An heroick poem. In twelve books. London, for Awnsham and John Churchill, and Jacob ...
— The Library of William Congreve • John C. Hodges
... knights—Beleobus, Caradoc, Driam, Eric, Floll, and Galahad—but on no occasion did any person have as his neighbour one who had before sat next to him. On the first evening they sat in alphabetical order round the table. But afterwards King Arthur arranged the two next sittings so that he might have Beleobus as near to him as possible and Galahad as far away from him as could be managed. How did he seat the knights to the best advantage, remembering that rule that no knight may have ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... Lancelot and set it in rhyme forgot, and was heedless of, the fair adventure of Morien. I marvel much that they who were skilled in verse and the making of rhymes did not bring the story to its rightful ending. Now as at this time King Arthur abode in Britain, and held high court, that his fame might wax the greater; and as the noble folk sat at the board and ate, there came riding a knight; for 'twas the custom in Arthur's days that while the king held court no door, small nor great, should be shut, but all men were ...
— The Romance of Morien • Jessie L. Weston
... wonderful; they talked of Avalon and of that vanished legendary world of King Arthur and his knights, and in the early evening they came to Wells and a pleasant inn, with a quaint little garden before its front door that gave directly upon the cathedral. The three tourists devoted a golden half hour before dinner to the sculptures on the ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... afraid the good fairies and brave knights went the way of all flesh with King Arthur's round table; and even if they were in existence, none of them would take the trouble to limp down so far to save such an ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... John Bulmer, taking affairs in order; "and because in this noble and joyous history of the great conqueror and excellent monarch, King Arthur, I find much diverting matter; and because, to be quite frank, Claire, I consider an existence without you neither alluring ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... book I greatly enjoy, for it is full of the tales of the mighty King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. You will like to hear me read these brave stories when you are tired with your day's work, or on rainy days when you can neither hunt nor ride. Then you know not how to amuse yourselves and time is heavy on your hands, since ...
— Dramatic Reader for Lower Grades • Florence Holbrook
... back as the days of the good King Arthur, whose existence has been so enshrouded in fable that many have come to believe him a myth, we read that Queen Guenever II., of unhappy memory, having spent her last years in repentance, was buried in Ambreabury, Wiltshire. The place of ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... rather thicker than a man's thumb. He began to peel this, observing that to ask a good woodman to shoot at a target so broad as had hitherto been used, was to put shame upon his skill. "For my own part," he said, "and in the land where I was bred, men would as soon take for their mark King Arthur's round table, which held sixty knights around it. A child of seven years old," he said, "might hit yonder target with a headless shaft; but," added he, walking deliberately to the other end of the lists, and sticking the willow wand upright in the ground, "he ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... even with chivalry, as if the kitchen and the nursery were less important than the office in the city. When his swagger is exhausted he drivels into erotic poetry or sentimental uxoriousness; and the Tennysonian King Arthur posing as Guinevere becomes Don Quixote grovelling before Dulcinea. You must admit that here Nature beats Comedy out of the field: the wildest hominist or feminist farce is insipid after the most commonplace "slice ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... King Arthur, in his Bohemian days, carried an adamantine shield, the gift of some fairy relative. Not only was it impenetrable, but, so intolerable was its lustre, it overthrew all foes before the lance's point could reach them. Observing this, the chivalric monarch had a cover made ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... churches and convents founded by them in Brittany. King Kenwalk of Wessex showed thus also a royal munificence to the Celtic monastery of Glastonbury, only stipulating in return that the British monks there, condoning past injuries, should offer a prayer for him when they knelt at the tomb of King Arthur. ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... and the rejoicings which were supposed to take place, in heaven and earth, upon Charles' attaining the pinnacle of uncontrolled power, was originally the intended termination of the opera; which, as first written, consisted of only one act, introductory to the drama of "King Arthur." But the eye and the ear of Charles were never to be regaled by this flattering representation: he died while the opera was in rehearsal. A slight addition, as the author has himself informed us, adapted the conclusion of his piece to this new and ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... be added, that, in historic eras, the mythopoeic fancy is not inactive. Stories of marvelous adventure clustered about the old Celtic King Arthur of England and the "knights of the Round-Table," and fill up the chronicles relating to Charlemagne. Wherever there is a person who kindles popular enthusiasm, myths accumulate. This is eminently true in an atmosphere like that which prevailed in the mediaeval period, when imagination ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... King Arthur there lived a ploughman and his wife who wished very much to have a son; so the man went to Merlin, the enchanter, and asked him to let him have a child, even, if it were "no bigger than his thumb." "Go home and ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... multiplied indefinitely by going back into the past ages and reading the histories and stories of the knights of King Arthur, of the Crusaders, and of the great explorers ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... but vivid touches of the past meet those who visit the Wall. At "King Arthur's Well," for example, near Thirlwall, the tiny chives growing in the crevices of the rock are presumably descendants of those acclimatized there by Roman gastronomy. At Borcovicus ("House-steads") the wheel-ruts still score the pavement; at Cilurnum the hypocaust of the bath is still blackened ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... was popular. Cologne swords were great favourites in England. King Arthur's sword was ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... the hubbub of thoughts and ideas that filled my mind. I had been plunged into a new world, and floundered about in it pretty hopelessly, I can tell you. The days of knight-errantry had come over again, and chance, mightier even than King Arthur, had commanded me to serve a sweet lady in distress. But I had had no training, no preliminary squireship, in which I could learn how things were done by watching brave and accomplished knights do them. I had lived among the parts of speech, not among the facts of ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... Prentice, and Raymond. Their standards were high. Their energy was tremendous. And when they came to blows the combat was terrific. But Greeley, the last survivor, found his Camlan in 1872. He was ambushed and came to his end much as King Arthur from a race that he had trusted and defended. In Greeley's defeat for the Presidency all theorists who had dwelt upon the so-called "Power of the Press" received a shuddering blow. The men who had affected to believe that the press could make and unmake destinies ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... finish. The most important labor of this later time includes "The Princess," "Maud and Other Poems," "Enoch Arden," the dramas "Becket," "Queen Mary," and "Harold," "Tiresias," "Demeter," "The Foresters," but above all, and most notably, that grand epic of King Arthur's time,—"The Idylls of the King." In the latter, the most characteristic, and perhaps the most permanent, of Tennyson's work, the poet manifests his historic sense and love for England's legendary past, and achieves his ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... then he also dragged down his father's kingdom into disgrace and ruin. The minstrels repaid Charlemagne for his kindness to them. They gave him everlasting fame; for all through the Middle Ages the legend of Charlemagne grew, and he shares with our King Arthur the honour of being the hero of one of the greatest romance-cycles of the Middle Ages. Every different century clad him anew in its own dress and sang new lays about him. What the monkish chroniclers in their ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... not the only member of the mess who made jokes about the knights of King Arthur's fellowship. But Maitland went on reading out selected passages from Mallory, and there is no doubt that everyone, even Dalton, became interested. Haddingly, the padre, made no attempt to conceal the fact that he was ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... have been King Arthur?" exclaimed Dorothy, wide-eyed with interest. "Why, just think ...
— The Royal Book of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... pr'tendin' to be King Arthur when he found out Guinevere was in love with Launcelot," he rather lamely explained as he walked away to the window and stood staring out over the prairie. But for the life of me I can't understand what should have turned his thoughts ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... over almost to grotesqueness just to show it was not done for mere delight in the frank naturalism of the functions with which it deals. That Mark Twain had made considerable study of this frankness is apparent from chapter four of 'A Yankee At King Arthur's Court,' where he refers to the conversation at the famous Round ...
— 1601 - Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors • Mark Twain
... will deal the more civilly with his two poems, because nothing ill is to be spoken of the dead; and therefore peace be to the manes of his Arthurs! I will only say, that it was not for this noble knight that I drew the plan of an Epic poem on King Arthur, in my preface to the translation of Juvenal. The guardian angels of kingdoms were machines too ponderous for him to manage; and therefore he rejected them, as Dares did the whirlbats of Eryx, when they were thrown before him by Entellus. Yet from that preface ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... companion, in tones yet shriller than his own; "I am none of thy houris, and thou art no such infidel trash as the Mohammed of whom thou speakest. May my curse rest upon his coffin! I tell thee, thou ass of Issachar, thou art King Arthur of Britain, whom the fairies stole away from the field of Avalon; and I am Dame ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... tomes, commemorating the constancy of the olden times; in which times, we are told, "Men and wymmen coulde love togyders seven yeres, and no licours lustes were betwene them, and thenne was love, trouthe, and feythfulnes; and lo in lyke wyse was used love in King Arthur's dayes."[4] ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... curious proofs of the actual British origin of the legend is in the statement that the death of Havelok's father occurred as the result of a British invasion of Denmark for King Arthur, by a force under a leader with the distinctly Norse name of Hodulf. The claim for conquest of the north by Arthur is very old, and is repeated by Geoffrey of Monmouth, and may well have originated in the remembrance of some successful raid on the Danish coasts by the Norse settlers in the Gower ...
— Havelok The Dane - A Legend of Old Grimsby and Lincoln • Charles Whistler
... it was taken from the story of Florent, in the first book of Gower's "Confessio Amantis;" or perhaps from an older narrative from which Gower himself borrowed. Chaucer has condensed and otherwise improved the fable, especially by laying the scene, not in Sicily, but at the court of our own King Arthur. ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... a sympathetic vein. "Though the success of the 'Prophetess' and 'King Arthur' (two dramatic operas in which the patentees[A] had embark'd all their hopes) was in appearance very great, yet their whole receipts did not so far balance their expense as to keep them out of a large debt, which ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... Waller, which gave me an opportunity of taking my leave of Colonel Goring the Governor, now embarqueing for France. This day was fought that signal Battaile at Edgehill. Thence I went to Southampton and Winchester, where I visited the Castle, Schole, Church, and King Arthur's Round Table, but especially the Church, and its Saxon Kings' Monuments, which I esteemed a worthy antiquity. 12th. November, was the Battle of Braineford surprisingly fought, and to the greate consternation of ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... How King Arthur held in Wales, at a Pentecost, a great feast, and what kings and lords came to ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... first in 1589, and a second edition followed in 1598-1600. The first volume tells of voyages to the north; the second to India and the East; the third, which is as large as the other two, to the New World. With the exception of the very first voyage, that of King Arthur to Iceland in 517, which is founded on a myth, all the voyages are authentic accounts of the explorers themselves, and are immensely interesting reading even at the present day. No other book of travels has so well expressed the spirit and ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... called leonine; but whence they derived that appellation, the learned Camden [18] confesses himself ignorant; so that the style carries no certain marks of its age. I shall only observe farther, on this head, that the characters are nearly of the same form with those on king Arthur's coffin; but whether, from their similitude, we may venture to pronounce them of the same date, I must refer to the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... choose one, two, or three that seem most excellent where all are so good. A mother of a few generations ago whose small boy was eager to read tales of chivalry simply gave him "Le Morte D'Arthur"; there was no "children's edition" of it, no "Boy's King Arthur," no "Tales of the Round Table." The father whose little girl desired to read for herself the stories of Greece he had told her put into her hands Bulfinch's "Age of Fable"; he could not, as can fathers to-day, give ...
— The American Child • Elizabeth McCracken
... roadside, and near the end of a small cottage, is the stone known as the Table Men, a block of granite nearly eight feet in length, and three feet high. The word "main", or "men", is the old Cornish for "stone". Here, according to tradition, a great battle took place between King Arthur and some Danish invaders, and the stone is also said to have been used as a royal dining table, when the number of kings who dined here is given by some old topographers as three, while others speak of seven. Hals gives their names as follows: ...
— The Cornish Riviera • Sidney Heath
... were growing thereon. After many years the briar appeared, and he took to wife the widow of King Doged. She foretold to her stepson, Kilhuch, that it was his destiny to marry a maiden named Olwen, or none other, and he, at his father's bidding, went to the court of his cousin, King Arthur, to ask as a boon the hand of the maiden. He rode upon a grey steed with shell-formed hoofs, having a bridle of linked gold, and a saddle also of gold. In his hand were two spears of silver, well-tempered, headed ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... me to go with them, but I thought I might perhaps be in the way. Lord Bidborough is frightfully pleased to be able to hire a motor to drive. On Saturday he has promised to take the boys to Dryburgh and to the Eildon Hills. Mhor is very keen to see for himself where King Arthur is buried, and make a search for ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... talked of other matters, and of the great jousting at Allhallowtide next coming, between King Arthur and the ...
— The Legends Of King Arthur And His Knights • James Knowles
... Town" paints his ideal of a Christian minister—simple, poor, and devoted to his holy work,—has nothing but contempt for the friars at large, and for the whole machinery worked by them, half effete, and half spasmodic, and altogether sham. In King Arthur's time, says that accurate and unprejudiced observer the "Wife of Bath," the land was filled with fairies—NOW it is filled with friars as thick as motes in the beam of the sun. Among them there ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... has referred to phallic principles in a number of the early chivalric societies of England. He states that the Knights of the Round Table of King Arthur had phallic emblems and other features similar to those of the Rosicrucians. The same author submits considerable evidence to indicate that the Order of the Garter is of much greater antiquity than is generally believed and that phallic principles were associated with it. A similar contention ...
— The Sex Worship and Symbolism of Primitive Races - An Interpretation • Sanger Brown, II
... pathologic hypertrophy of the labial tissues can produce revolting deformity, such as is seen in Figure 100, representing an individual who was exhibited several years ago in Philadelphia. We have in English the expression, "pulling a long lip." Its origin is said to date back to a semimythical hero of King Arthur's time, who, "when sad at heart and melancholic," would let one of his lips drop below his waist, while he turned the other up like a ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... sometimes, so perfectly to give a setting—the right setting—to her little self. She wore her heavy dark hair bobbed, and it curled about her small head exquisitely, giving her the look of a Raphael Cherub or a boy page in the court of King Arthur. With a flat band of silver olive leaves about her brow, and the soft hair waving out below, nothing more was necessary for a costume save a brief drapery of silver spangled cloth with a strap of jewels and a wisp of black malines for a scarf. She was always startling and lovely ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... royal castle, supposed to have been begun by King Arthur, its buildings much increased by Edward III. The situation is entirely worthy of being a royal residence, a more beautiful being scarce to be found; for, from the brow of a gentle rising, it enjoys the prospect of an even ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... the historian or belles-lettres antiquary, has recently been published at Leipzig, under the title of Die Alexandersage bei den Orientalern (or the Legend of Alexander as it exists in the East), by Dr. FREDERICK SPIEGEL. With the exception of King Arthur, no personage plays a more extended role in the romantic European legends of the middle ages, than Alexander; but our readers may not be generally aware that the feats of this great conqueror are still perpetuated under a thousand strange forms even on the remote East, generally under ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... On Reading Omar Khayyam The Beggar's Valentine Honor Among Scamps The Gamblers On the Road to Nowhere Upon Returning to the Country Road The Angel and the Clown Springfield Magical Incense The Wedding of the Rose and the Lotos King Arthur's Men Have Come Again Foreign Missions in Battle Array Star of My Heart Look You, I'll Go Pray At Mass Heart of God The Empty Boats With a Bouquet of Twelve Roses St. Francis of Assisi Buddha A Prayer to All the Dead Among Mine Own People To Reformers in Despair Why I Voted the Socialist Ticket ...
— General William Booth enters into Heaven and other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... exhilarating still was the extreme punctiliousness with which the old gentleman raised the handle of his foil to his chin after he had made his point, and saluted his antagonist as if he had been some knight of King Arthur's table. ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... unknown to the rude mediaeval romances. Ariosto and Tasso wrote with the great epics of Homer and Vergil constantly in mind, and all about them was the brilliant light of Italian art, in its early freshness {71} and power. The Faery Queene, too, was a tale of knight-errantry. Its hero was King Arthur, and its pages swarm with the familiar adventures and figures of Gothic romance; distressed ladies and their champions, combats with dragons and giants, enchanted castles, magic rings, charmed wells, forest hermitages, etc. But ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... 1. When good King Arthur ruled this land, He was a goodly king— He stole three pecks of barley-meal, To make ...
— The Baby's Opera • Walter Crane
... vein, called on his people to rally and save the luster of his loyalty from soil at the hands of rebels; and they came. From all the North ready acclaims went up, and women shed tears of joy, such as in King Arthur's day rewarded some peerless deed of Galahad. In truth, it was a manly thing to hide dishonorable plunder beneath the prostrate body of the South. The Emperor Commodus, in full panoply, met in the arena disabled and unarmed gladiators. The servile Romans applauded his easy victories. ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... King Arthur, who held sway in Camelot with his Knights of the Round Table, was supposedly a king of Britain hundreds of years ago. Most of the stories about him are probably not historically true, but there was perhaps a real king named Arthur, or with a name very much ...
— In the Court of King Arthur • Samuel Lowe
... King Arthur and Galahad and all them instead of reading the Scientific American, and about these fool horseless carriages and stuff——There never will be any practical ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... d'Arthur: Selections from the Stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Edited by B.M. ...
— Chatto & Windus Alphabetical Catalogue of Books in Fiction and General Literature, Sept. 1905 • Various
... and hard in the getting! Even the Muses were not bountiful, for my men and I wellnigh ate Edmund Spenser out of Kilcolman. He sends you greeting, Mortimer; swears he is no jealous poet, and begs you to take up that old scheme which he forsook of King Arthur and his Knights—" ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... and Tristrem and Ysolde, in the legend, took Hodain to be their intimate companion, because he had once shared with them "the drink of might." So, too, the great Theron walked as the close companion of the Gothic king; and Cavall became the trusty servant and liegeman of King Arthur. The huge white hound Gorban sat ever at the side of the Welsh bard Ummad as he sang his songs; and the beautiful Bran was the friend for life of Fingal. Most men have heard of William the Silent's spaniel, who saved his master's life; and many may have seen the form of the dog, fashioned in ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... surnamed "The Desirous," and also "The Haughty." He was son of Lot (king of Orkney) and Margawse half-sister of king Arthur. His brothers were sir Gaw'ain, sir Ga'heris, and sir Gareth. Mordred was his half-brother, being the son of king Arthur and Margawse. Sir Agravain and sir Mordred hated sir Launcelot, and told the king he was too familiar with the queen; so ...
— 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.
... names are graved upon the stone, Not yet have moved upon this worldly stage; But will within seven hundred years be known, To the great honour of a future age. What time king Arthur filled the British throne, This fountain Merlin made, enchanter sage; Who things to come upon the marble fair Made sculpture by a ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... help thoes in Trubble." It came at the very end, just next the important one which forbade any hint of sharp practice in dog trading; and had been added after they had listened to the Woman's story about King Arthur and his Knights. ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling
... family inquiries go. It is now quite certain that we are a second-rate lot, and came out of Cunningham or Clydesdale, therefore BRITISH folk; so that you are Cymry on both sides, and I Cymry and Pict. We may have fought with King Arthur and known Merlin. The first of the family, Stevenson of Stevenson, was quite a great party, and dates back to the wars of Edward First. The last male heir of Stevenson of Stevenson died 1670, 220 pounds, 10s. to the bad, from drink. About ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... The Book of King Arthur, and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table. The Original Edition of Caxton revised for modern use. With Introduction, Notes, and Glossary. ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... suspected the latter, when he began the ballad of "Sir Gawaine's Wedding." She would have silenced it, but feared to draw more attention on her charge, who had never heard the song, and did not know what was coming, but listened with increasing eagerness as she heard of King Arthur, and of the giant, and the secret that the King could not guess, till as ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the curtain rose on a medieval castle hall richly done in the new stage-craft made in Germany and consisting of pink and blue cheesecloth. The Child King Arthur and the Child Queen Guinevere were disclosed upon thrones, with the Child Elaine and many other celebrities in attendance; while about fifteen Child Knights were seated at a dining-room table round, which was covered with a large Oriental rug, and displayed (for the knights' refreshment) a banquet ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... vomiting frogs. When I read that, I said some of the croakers of the present day would be better for such a vomit. Others say that the walls of a city fell down in answer to prayer. They tell us that King Arthur was not born like other mortals; that he had great luck in killing giants; that one of the giants that he killed wore clothes woven from the beards of kings that he had slain, and, to cap the climax, the authors of this history were rewarded for having written the only ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... yere Of Christ, 517. king Arthur in the second yeere of his reigne, hauing subdued all parts of Ireland, sailed with his fleet into Island, and brought it and the people thereof vnder his subiection. The rumour afterwards being spread thorowout all the other ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... As I suppose this was done by A. T.'s order, I have written to acknowledge the Gift, and to tell him something, if not all, of what I think of them. I do not tell him that I think his hand weakened; but I tell him (what is very true) that, though the main Myth of King Arthur's Dynasty in Britain has a certain Grandeur in my Eyes, the several legendary fragments of it never did much interest me; excepting the Morte, which I suppose most interested him also, as he took it up first of all. I am not sure if such a Romance as Arthur's ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... King Arthur's reign, Tom's history first begun; A farmer's wife had sigh'd in vain to have a darling son! A fairy listen'd to her call, and granted her the same; But being very small, Tom Thumb ...
— An Entertaining History of Tom Thumb - William Raine's Edition • Unknown |
