"Mediaeval" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a radical reversal of things this was; what a jumbling together of extravagant incongruities; what a fantastic conjunction of opposites and irreconcilables—the home of the bogus miracle become the home of a real one, the den of a mediaeval hermit turned into a ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... mediaeval mystic once said, 'There is nothing weaker than the devil stripped naked.' Would it were true! For there is one thing that is weaker than a discovered devil, and that is my own heart. For we all know that sometimes, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... independent visitors to different countries, say a mediaeval Mahommedan in Tartary and a modern Englishman in Dahomey, or a Jesuit missionary in Brazil and a Wesley an in the Fiji Islands, agree in describing some analogous art, or rite, or myth among the people they have visited, it becomes difficult or impossible to set down ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... the wealthier sects had established Buddhist schools on the Western plan; and the Shinshu could already boast of its scholars, educated in Paris or at Oxford,—men whose names are known to Sanscritists the world over. Certainly Japan will need higher forms of faith than her mediaeval ones; but these must be themselves evolved from the ancient forms,—from within, never from without. A Buddhism strongly fortified by Western science will meet the future needs of ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... were a momentous epoch in the development of Western civilisation. It was the dawn of modern history, of the history of Europe in the form in which we know it to-day. The old order was in a state of liquidation. The mediaeval ideal, described by Dante, of a universal monarchy with two aspects, spiritual and temporal, and two heads, emperor and pope, was passing away. Its place was taken by the modern but narrower ideal of separate polities, each pursuing ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... feel flattered at the success of the dangerous expedition. Had we not captured, more by sheer good luck than strategy, the only piano-tuner in mediaeval France? ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... bend in the village street. Where the road took a turn stood an aged church; nestling beside it in a little garden was a grey, semi-fortified mediaeval dwelling. The garden was surrounded by high spiked railings, planted on a low stone wall. Sitting on the wall beside the entrance was an American soldier. He had a small French child on either knee—one arm about each of them; thus embarrassed he was doing his patient ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... old man. "Why, Mr. Brown, you are crazy! I have educated her upon the combined principles of Rousseau, of Pestalozzi, of Froebel, and of Herbert Spencer. And you—you only graduated at Yale, an old fogy mediaeval institution! No, sir! not till I meet a philosopher whose mind has been symmetrically developed can I consent ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... pre-Roman days. The central power of Rome, though no longer exerted politically through curators and prefects, was no less effective in the potent hands of the clergy and in the traditions of the imperial jurisprudence by which the legal ideas of mediaeval society were so strongly coloured. So powerful, indeed, was this twofold influence of Rome, that in the later Middle Ages, when the modern nationalities had fairly taken shape, it was the capacity for local self-government—in spite of all the Teutonic reinforcement it had had—that ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske
... 28, 681). A good illustration of the circular type of mediaeval map, which is sometimes little better than a panorama of legends and monsters. Christ at the top; the dragons crushed beneath him at the bottom; Jerusalem, the navel of the earth, in the middle as a sort of bull's-eye to a target, all show a "religious" geography. The line of queer figures, on ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... "higher critic" with all his offences is no worse than the orthodox "apologist," see p. 21. For the important admission that the same criterion must be applied in researches into our own sacred books as into others, and even into the mediaeval chronicles, see p. 26. For justification of critical scepticism regarding the history given in the book of Daniel, see pp. 27, 28, also chap. ix. For very full and explicit statements, with proofs, that ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... medicine-men deceased, and the Polynesians of Tokelau in like manner have claimed it as the abode of departed kings and chiefs, then these pleasant fancies may be compared with that ancient theory mentioned by Plutarch, that hell is in the air and elysium in the moon, and again with the mediaeval conception of the moon as the seat of hell, a thought elaborated in profoundest bathos by Mr. ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... inscriptions in long thin Arabic characters. Few rooms in the Kasbah were decorated in this manner, and it had instantly occurred to me that, concealed somewhere, was one of those secret ways which, whether in the Oriental palace, or the mediaeval European castle, are so suggestive ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... to his taste for the uncommon in life. If he had not sometimes found occasions for satisfying both, he could not have lived in Paris and London at all, but would have gone back to Constantinople, which is the last refuge of romance in Europe, the last hiding-place of mediaeval adventure, the last city of which a new Decameron of tales could still be told, and might ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... gentleness in its exercise, than the Italian nation, and especially the Holy Roman people." The lines with which Mr. Swinburne closed his "Dedication" of Songs before Sunrise to Joseph Mazzini are worthy of finding a place side by side with the words of the mediaeval seer:— ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... with the spirit of some mediaeval monastic painter, an enthusiastic servant of art in its purest, severest form, a combination of poet and anchorite, is also there; for he loves the gentle musician, who seems to be a visitor from the world of spirits. Eugene ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... in parallel columns. My own preliminary chapter to this book—a mere explanation of the presence of the dukes of Burgundy in the Netherlands—grew into an account of a sovereign whom they deposed and was published under the title of A Mediaeval Princess. ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... found himself involved. Here he was, committed to a strange and desperate enterprise. Nor was this all, for about him were other complications, totally different from those which might be expected in connection with such a mediaeval adventure, complications which, though they are frequent enough in the civilised life of men, were scarcely to be looked for in the wilds of Africa, and amidst savages. Among his companions were his ward, who chanced also ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... and worship. I often wonder, when I sit here in Berkeley's window-seat, and look across the quad to the carved pinnacles on the Founder's Tower there, whether any of us can ever hope to leave behind to our successors any legacy at all comparable to the one left us by those nameless old mediaeval masons. It's a very saddening thought that we for whom all these beautiful things have been put together—we whom labouring humanity has pampered and petted from our cradles upward, feeding us on its whitest bread, ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... had stayed his impatience; and he blessed her sympathetic understanding. But just then—steeped in India at her most magical hour—it was hard to believe in the Residency household; in English dinner-tables and English detachment from the mediaeval medley of splendour and squalor, of courage and cruelty and dumb endurance, of arts and crafts and all the paraphernalia of enlightened knowledge that was Jaipur. It seemed more like a week than a few hours ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... old walls were battered down. Pembroke Castle, whose great round tower still stands, had protected William Marshall against Llywelyn and had enabled an important district to remain a "little England beyond Wales," was the last mediaeval castle to take an important part in war. The Scotch were soon defeated at the battle of Preston, and the king was brought to trial and put to death, the death-warrant being signed by two Welshmen—John Jones of Merioneth and Thomas ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards
... the Spanish Armada was dreamed of; before Sir John Hawkins, Captain Price, Coft, Keat or others for whom the honor of the introduction of tobacco has been claimed, drew breath—smoking was to some extent indulged in by our forefathers and (still medicinally, of course) in this country. In mediaeval times, when the Ceramic art was but little practiced, and when all the domestic vessels that were produced were of the rudest and coarsest character both in material, form, and decoration, it is not to be expected that pipes for the ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... and engraved by the same person and Francesco Gallimberti, at Venice. I do not find the name of Carpatio in the ordinary dictionaries of painters, and shall be glad to learn whether he has here represented an historical event, or an incident of some mediaeval romance. I suspect the latter must be the case, as Cornubia is the Latin word used for Cornwall, and I am not aware of its having any other application. Is this print the only one of the kind, or is it ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 46, Saturday, September 14, 1850 • Various
... Cromwell, III. 24-27.—The Fifth Monarchy notion was by no means an upstart oddity of thought among the English Puritans of the seventeenth century. It was a tradition of the most scholarly thought of mediaeval theologians as to the duration and final collapse of the existing Cosmos; and it may be traced in the older imaginative literature of various European nations. Thus the Scottish Sir David Lindsay's long poem entitled Monarchy, or Ane Dialogue betwix Experience and one Courtier ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... every cross-roads the brooding crucifixes hang. The British mind does not like this constant reiteration of mishandling and defeat in the death of Christ. It does not seem to it to be the final message of the Cross. Indeed, it is the product of the mediaeval, monkish mind. It was not until the tenth century that the representations of the Crucifixion showed Our Lord as dead; it was much later before the emphasis was laid on agony and despair. Once from among the ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan
... "the Varennes Flight," the duke, his daughter and his valet stealthily took a slow train for Vannes and arrived one evening, at the old feudal castle that towers over the headland of Sarzeau. The duke at once organized a defence with the aid of the Breton peasants, true mediaeval vassals to a man. On the fourth day, Mussy arrived; on the fifth, Caorches; and, on the seventh, d'Emboise, whose wound was not as severe as ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... was in one of these long, lonely nights that this story came to me. I had studied and loved the curious tales of the Three Wise Men of the East as they are told in the "Golden Legend" of Jacobus de Voragine and other mediaeval books. But of the Fourth Wise Man I had never heard until that night. Then I saw him distinctly, moving through the shadows in a little circle of light. His countenance was as clear as the memory of my father's face as I saw it for the last time a few months before. The narrative of his journeyings ...
— The Story of the Other Wise Man • Henry Van Dyke
... Chetham College, with its library dating from the seventeenth century, and claiming to have been the first free library in England, and doubtless the world. In the cloistered picturesqueness of the place, its mediaeval memorials, and its ancient peace, I found myself again in those dear Middle Ages which are nowhere quite wanting in England, and against which I rubbed off all smirch of the modernity I had come ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... head at her, and drove on ahead into the streets—the churches, the abbey, and other buildings on this clear bright morning having the liny distinctness of architectural drawings, as if the original dream and vision of the conceiving master-mason, some mediaeval Vilars or other unknown to fame, were for a few minutes flashed down through the centuries to an unappreciative age. Giles saw their eloquent look on this day of transparency, but could not construe it. He turned ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... in the mediaeval cab with Denny driving. There was no luggage. Esther hoped a great deal from that. But it proved there was too much to come by cab, and Denny brought it afterward, shabby trunks of a sophisticated ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... he had found everywhere at home. He said that England was a hundred, five hundred, years behind in such matters; and I could not deny that, even when cowering over the quart pot to warm the hands and face, one was aware of a gelid mediaeval back behind one. To be warm all round in an English house is a thing impossible, at least to the traveller, who finds the natives living in what seems to him a whorl of draughts. In entering his own room he is apt to find the window has been put down, but this is not merely to let in ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... and Efficacy of Indulgences" [1] is the full title of the document commonly called "The Ninety-five Theses." The form of the document was determined by the academic practice of the Middle Ages. In all the Mediaeval Universities the "disputation" was a well-established institution. It was a debate, conducted according to accepted rules, on any subject which the chief disputant might elect, and no student's education was thought to be ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... and loaded with their nests, a representation of the outward Church as established under Constantine the Great; in the leaven that is mixed among the three measures of meal, the pervading and transforming influence of Christianity in the mediaeval Church among the barbarous races of Europe; in the parable of the treasure in the field, the period of the Reformation; in the parable of the pearl, the contrast between Christianity and the acquisitions of modern culture and secularism; and in the last ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus, induced him at the age of fifteen to enter the order of S. Dominic, exchanging his secular name for Tommaso. But the old alliance between philosophy and orthodoxy, drawn up by scholasticism and approved by the mediaeval Church, had been succeeded by mutual hostility; and the youthful thinker found no favour in the cloister of Cosenza, where he now resided. The new philosophy taught by Telesio placed itself in direct antagonism to the pseudo-Aristotelian tenets of the theologians, ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... and behind her peeped several neat maids in caps and aprons. A little valet-like under-butler appeared and tried to balance Snagsby by hovering two steps above him on the opposite side of the Victorian mediaeval porch. ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... for her by trying to understand. It was no small thing for a man like Borrodaile, who, for the rest, found it no easier than others of his class rightly to interpret the modern scene as looked down upon from the narrow lancet of the mediaeval tower which was ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... dreary, mournful picture, suggestive of melancholy mediaeval myths, and most abnormal phantasms; and would more appropriately have draped the walls of some flagellating ascetic's cell, than the luxuriously furnished room that now ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... put in my power by one of the singular chances which have always helped me in my work when it was in the right direction, to present to the University of Oxford the most distinct expression of this first principle of mediaeval Theology which, so far as I know, exists in fifteenth-century art. It is one of the drawings of the Florentine book which I bought for a thousand pounds, against the British Museum, some ten or twelve years ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... rationalistic explanation, Bible criticism has been the wrestling-ground of the most extravagant exegesis, of bold hypotheses, and hazardous conjectures. No Latin or Greek classic has been so ruthlessly attacked and dissected; no mediaeval poetry so arbitrarily interpreted. As a natural consequence, the aesthetic elements were more and more pushed into the background. Only recently have we begun to ridicule this craze for hypotheses, and returned ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... progress of our inquiries, hitherto, we have met with little that can be called romantic in the narrowest sense. Though the literary movement had already begun to take a retrospective turn, few distinctly mediaeval elements were yet in evidence. Neither the literature of the monk nor the literature of the knight had suffered resurrection. It was not until about 1760 that writers began to gravitate decidedly toward the Middle Ages. The first peculiarly mediaeval type that contrived to secure a foothold in ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... had his own rooms done over. Mediaeval setting. Romanesque arches. Stained-glass ...
— Ptomaine Street • Carolyn Wells
... shameful stepping down from high moral position boastfully assumed. We should set example in these respects, not follow in the selfish and vulgar greed for territory which Europe has inherited from mediaeval times. Our declaration of war upon Spain was accompanied by a solemn and deliberate definition of our purpose. Now that we have achieved all and more than our object, let us simply keep our word. Third article of the protocol leaves everything concerning the control of the Philippine Islands ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... Understanding nature can reveal the | presence in the world of divine ideas | and archetypes. Bacon's rejection of | any natural philosophy founded on | allegorical interpretations of | Scriptures meant a withdrawal from | exemplarism and symbolism, both | common features of mediaeval | philosophy and still flourishing in | the seventeenth century. As all works | —says Bacon—show the power and | ability of their maker, but not his | image, so God's works "do shew the | omnipotency ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... much," she wrote to Helen, "on the superiority of the unseen to the seen. It's true, but to brood on it is mediaeval. Our business is not to contrast the two, ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... sombre with oak and heavy red velvet hangings, but rendered more cheerful by books, photographs, and pictures. Morley was fond of reading, and during his ten years' residence at The Elms had accumulated a large number of volumes. Between the bookcases were trophies of arms, mediaeval weapons and armor, and barbaric spears from Africa and the South Seas, intermixed with bows and clubs. The floor was of polished oak, with here and there a brilliantly colored Persian praying-mat. The furniture was also of oak, and cushioned in red Morocco leather. ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... went, I heard one hailing me, and glancing round, saw that in the hedge was a wicket-gate, and over this gate a man was leaning. A little, thin man with the face of an ascetic, or mediaeval saint, a face of a high and noble beauty, upon whose scholarly brow sat a calm serenity, yet beneath which glowed the full, bright eye of ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... curse. That manner was determined in part at least by the nature of the typical negroes themselves. Impulsive and inconstant, sociable and amorous, voluble, dilatory, and negligent, but robust, amiable, obedient and contented, they have been the world's premium slaves. Prehistoric Pharaohs, mediaeval Pashas and the grandees of Elizabethan England esteemed them as such; and so great a connoisseur in household service as the Czar Alexander added to his palace corps in 1810 two free negroes, one a steward on an American merchant ship and the ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... it is in the air. It is not a conflict by sword. You know they tell the legend among the old mediaeval stories that in one of the great battles on one of the plains of Europe, after the quiet darkness of the night had settled over the scene, the field strewn all over with the forms of the mangled and the dead, there were seen in the shuddering midnight air to rise spirit forms maintaining the deadly ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889 • Various
... as the motif of Greek history, as it is a persistent refrain in Greek literature. The plunder of Asia made Rome an empire whose capital was on the Bosphorus more centuries than it was on the Tiber. Mediaeval civilization rose to its height when the Italian cities wrested from Constantinople the mastery of the Levantine trade; and in the sixteenth century, when the main traveled roads to the Far East shifted to the ocean, direction of European affairs ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... fear; and though I did not stop in my advance, yet I went on slowly, like a man who should have passed a bourne unnoticed, and strayed into the country of the dead. For there, upon the narrow new-made road, between the stripling pines, was a mediaeval friar, fighting with a barrowful of turfs. Every Sunday of my childhood I used to study the Hermits of Marco Sadeler—enchanting prints, full of wood and field and mediaeval landscapes, as large as a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and in what form, ought woman's work in the Church to be organized? What was the deaconess of St. Paul's epistles? What light on this subject do the primitive and the mediaeval Churches yield us? Can "sisterhoods" be established without weakening the sense of personal responsibility in those Christian women who are not thus wholly set apart to charitable and spiritual work? Can they be multiplied without danger of introducing into Protestant communions the evils ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft
... surely manifest that the service which the modern industrial State looks for from its members is not the same in kind and is much more complex in its nature than that which was required during the mediaeval period, and that if this service is to be efficiently supplied, then there is need for Higher Schools varied in type and having ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... a favourite mediaeval legend depicted in one of the windows of the cathedral at Bourges, which exposes in a characteristic fashion this weakness of the Stoic's creed. The Evangelist St John, when at Ephesus, remarked in the forum the ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... hoards, the greedy withholder of good things from men; and the slaying of a dragon is the crowning achievement of heroes—of Siegmund, of Beowulf, of Sigurd, of Arthur, of Tristam—even of Lancelot, the beau ideal of mediaeval chivalry" (Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. viii., p. 467). But if in the West the dragon is usually a "power of evil," in the far East he is equally emphatically a symbol of beneficence. He is identified with emperors and kings; he is the son of heaven the bestower of all bounties, ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... front of a stone apartment house; and Jill, getting out, passed under an awning through a sort of mediaeval courtyard, gay with potted shrubs, to an inner door. She was impressed. The very atmosphere was redolent of riches, and she wondered how in the world Uncle Chris had managed to acquire wealth on this scale in the extremely short space ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... win him six months' respite, during which he was to travel on a meagre pittance, and somehow prove his ultimate ability to increase it by his pen. The quaint conditions of the test struck me first: it seemed about as conclusive as a mediaeval 'ordeal.' Then I was touched by her having sent him to me. I had always wanted to do her some service, to justify myself in my own eyes rather than hers; and here was a beautiful embodiment ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... not every day in the Nineteenth century that one comes in contact with a human being who has had to submit to the "ordeal by fire" in this literal mediaeval fashion; who has endured perils, insults, physical privations and torments, coupled with intense and ceaseless anxiety for years; and this in extreme youth before the troubles and difficulties of life have more gradually and gently taught the lessons of endurance and ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... le Cure de St. Eustace and M. le Cure de Ste. Agatha, though the priestly calling seemed all they had in common. The first was small of stature, thin of face, looking like a mediaeval, though he was a modern, saint; the other tall, well filled out like an epicure, yet not even Bonhomme Careau, the nearest approach to a scoffer in the two parishes, ever went so far as to call the Cure of Ste. Agatha ...
— The City and the World and Other Stories • Francis Clement Kelley
... the most learned of English poets, and we may infer that while at this seat of learning he laid the foundations for his wide scholarship in the diligent study of the Greek and Latin classics, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, the pastoral poetry of Theocritus and Vergil, and the great mediaeval epics of Italian literature. On account of some misunderstanding with the master and tutors of his college, Spenser failed to receive the appointment to a fellowship, and left the University in ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... beyond the bare furniture, tapestry hangings, tools of the craftsmen, and weapons of the warrior, there were few household goods of a portable nature. In mediaeval England the oak chest was sufficient to contain the valuables of a large household; and very often beyond a cabinet or sideboard or corner cupboard there were few receptacles where anything of value could be ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... the vitalizing power of the rod may be found embalmed in many a curious mediaeval legend. The budding rod, borrowed from the tradition of Aaron's, is, for instance, very frequent. Thus in the story of St. Christophoros, as preserved in Von Buelow's Christian Legends of Germany, we read of the godly man carrying the Child-Christ on his back through ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... the groans of despairing captives in the miserable cells. In one of these toads and adders were the companions of the captive. Another poor wretch reposed on a bed of sharp flints, while the torture-chamber echoed with the cries of the victims of mediaeval cruelty, who were hanged by their feet and smoked with foul smoke, or hung up by their thumbs, while burning rings were placed on their feet. In Peak Castle, Derbyshire, a poor, simple squire, one Godfrey Rowland, was confined ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... of great antiquity, and so far back as A.D. 600 it seems to have been a walled city. Remains of the mediaeval Wall exist in very perfect condition, at the back of the Eagle Inn in High Street, and in other parts of the city. In 676 Rochester was plundered by Ethelred, King of Mercia; and in 884 the Danes sailed up the Medway and besieged it, but were ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... Don Francisco de Mogente had purposely avoided crossing the bridge, where to this day the night watchman, with lantern and spear, peeps cautiously to and fro—a startlingly mediaeval figure. It seemed also that the traveler was expected, though he had performed the last stage of his journey on foot ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... performed as if their destiny depended on the die. Baroni would not permit the children's box to be carried round to-night, as he thought it an unfair tax on the generous stranger, whom he did not the less please by this well-bred abstinence. As for the mediaeval and historic groups, Sidonia could recall nothing equal to them; and what surprised him most was the effect produced by such miserable materials. It seemed that the whole was effected with some stiffened linen and paper; but the divine touch of art turned everything to gold. One statue of Henri ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... of Alva was still at home. The thirteenth-century cathedral towered above a sixteenth-century mass of tiled roofs, ending abruptly in walls and a landscape that had not changed. The taste of the town was thick, rich, ripe, like a sweet wine; it was mediaeval, so that Rubens seemed modern; it was one of the strongest and fullest flavors that ever touched the young man's palate; but he might as well have drunk out his excitement in old Malmsey, for all the education he got from it. Even in art, one can hardly begin with Antwerp Cathedral and ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... After the coming of the barbarians, bishops and monks continued to write in Latin and they carried this practice among the peoples of England and Germany who were still speaking their native languages. Throughout almost the whole mediaeval period, acts, laws, histories, and books of science were written in Latin. In the convents and the schools they read, copied, and appreciated only works written in Latin; beside books of piety only the ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... practically an upland plateau, and yet its area lies wholly within the walls of what may be designated as one building. It is a long-violated retreat; all its corner-stones, plinths, and architraves were carried away to build neighbouring villages even before mediaeval or modern history began. Many a block which once may have helped to form a bastion here rests now in broken and diminished shape as part of the chimney-corner of some shepherd's cottage within the distant horizon, and the corner-stones of this heathen altar may form the base-course ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... day was dropping into night. Since early morning the castle had been busy in the various ceremonies with which mediaeval England observed the feast of her patron Saint; the garrison had been paraded and inspected; the archers had shot for a gold bugle, and the men-at-arms had striven for a great two-handed sword; ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... opposite to St. Michael's Church, one of the three famous spires of Coventry, you behold a mediaeval edifice, in the basement of which is such a venerable and now deserted kitchen as I have above alluded to, and, on the same level, a cellar, with low stone pillars and intersecting arches, like the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... the ruined tower where, as a half-paralysed infant, he had been herded with the lambs. But all these causes together, and others, join to produce a freer effect in The Eve. The eighteenth century is farther off; the genuine mediaeval inspiration is nearer. And it is especially noticeable that, as in most of the early performances of the great poetical periods, an alteration of metrical etiquette (as we may call it) plays a great part. Scott had not yet heard ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... Paisley Castle, and that he had never met any of the family except the earl and his aged countess. Lady Cochrane and the Covenanting servants could have given a thumb-nail sketch of him which would have done for a mediaeval picture of Satan, and an accompanying letter-press of his character which would have been a slander upon Judas Iscariot. Her heroic ladyship had, however, never met Claverhouse, and she prayed God she never would, not because she was afraid ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... at Worms, on that ever-memorable April day in 1521, before the panic-stricken princes, Luther insolently flung at the emperor his defiance of the mediaeval church, the crash, though all unheard by the ears of men, shook to their base the crumbling foundations upon which, for hundreds of years, the institutions of Europe had rested. The sixteenth century thenceforward was a period of disintegration and reconstruction, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... domain was called The Lawn, and consisted of something over half an acre of flower-garden and shrubbery, a two-stall stable and coach-house, a conservatory and fernery, and a moderate-sized house in the gothic or mediaeval style, with mullioned windows in the dining-room and oriels in the best bedroom, and with a great deal of unnecessary stone-work and wooden excrescence ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... smiled. "Well, of course, it all sounds very fanciful," he said. "One must read him as one reads all those curious old mediaeval authors, who are full of pseudo-science and theories based on fables. His great charm to me is his style, which is singularly rich and chaste. But I've no doubt whatever, myself, that a great deal of this ancient lore, which we have ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... tenure by which a religious corporation holds lands on condition of praying for the soul of the donor. In mediaeval times many of the wealthiest fraternities obtained their estates in this simple and cheap manner, and once when Henry VIII of England sent an officer to confiscate certain vast possessions which a fraternity of monks held by frankalmoigne, ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... maid by my side I could hardly believe in my good fortune. By her presence and my own resulting happiness the mean surroundings became glorified and the commonest objects transfigured into things of beauty. What a delightful thoroughfare, for instance, was Fetter Lane, with its quaint charm and mediaeval grace! I snuffed the cabbage-laden atmosphere and seemed to breathe the scent of the asphodel. Holborn was even as the Elysian Fields; the omnibus that bore us westward was a chariot of glory; and the people who swarmed verminously ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... identity by the druggists who reduced their time-honored remains to a powder. Their dust was made merchandise, but their characters were respected. Moreover, there was an object and a motive, even if mistaken ones, on the part of the mediaeval charlatans. But what ointment, what soothing syrup, what panacea has been the result of all this pulverizing of Semiramis and Sardanapalus, Mucius Scaevola and Junius Brutus? Are all the characters graven so deeply by the stylus ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... of all sorts and conditions of mankind. These are the stories that are said to be immortal. They have been repeated and re-repeated in many forms and to all kinds of audiences. They have been recited and sung in royal palaces, in the halls of mediaeval castles, and by the camp fires of warring heroes. Parents have taught them to their children, and generation after generation has preserved their memory. They have been written on parchment and printed in ...
— Hero Tales • James Baldwin
... described as a designer of wall-papers. If Morris had been a hatter instead of a decorator, we should have become gradually and painfully conscious of an improvement in our hats. If he had been a tailor, we should have suddenly found our frock-coats trailing on the ground with the grandeur of mediaeval raiment. If he had been a shoemaker, we should have found, with no little consternation, our shoes gradually approximating to the antique sandal. As a hairdresser, he would have invented some massing of the hair ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... Uyeno, of old the place of temples, and now of parks and exhibitions, in the northern part of the city. The Mikado's forces then moved on the strongholds of the rebels at Aidzu, but foreigners knew very little of what was then going on. After a visit to the mediaeval capital of the Shoguns, at Kamakura, he took the steamer southward to Nagasaki, and again set his face eastward. He was again a traveller to the Orient, that is, to America. On the homeward steamer, the Colorado, were forty-one first-class passengers, ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... to reject many of the statements of Donatus, criticism has procured for us more than a fair compensation from another source. A series of detailed studies of the numerous minor poems attributed to Vergil by ancient authors and mediaeval manuscripts—till recently pronounced unauthentic by modern scholars—has compelled most of us to accept the Appendix Vergiliana at face value. These poems, written in Vergil's formative years before he had adopted the reserved manner of the classical ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... prints, pictures in water and oil, and mirrors of various shapes, there was tapestry on the inside of the door, a bust of Dante above a cabinet of black oak, a piece of bas-relief in soapstone, a gargoyle in wood, a brass censer, a mediaeval lamp with open mouth, and a small ivory crucifix nailed to the ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... and his interest in the middle ages; the mediaeval revival at the close of the eighteenth century; The Castle of Otranto; Walpole's bequest to later romance-writers; Smollett's incidental anticipation of the methods of Gothic Romance; Clara Reeve's Old English Baron ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... a complex 'body corporate' founded in the old days of 'purveyance.' There was the mysterious 'Board of Green Cloth' formed by the great officers and supposed to have judicial as well as administrative functions. Cumbrous mediaeval machinery thus remained which had been formed in the time when the distinction between a public trust and private property was not definitely drawn or which had been allowed to remain for the sake of patronage, ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... knowledge of forms is gained, the pupil receives lessons in combination. Such subjects as these are given: a vase of flowers, a mediaeval or classic vase, shields, Helmets, escutcheons, &c., of different styles. The first prize composition was a hunting frieze, modelled, in which were introduced fanciful combinations of leaf and scroll work, dogs, ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... there in one form or another. It caused the ruin of the Roman Empire; it brought the downfall of mediaeval Europe, and whenever a splendid civilization springs up the curse of sex-bondage in one form or another grows ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... resorted on the Sabbath, rather than to the Temple. The synagogue, popular, convenient, and social, almost supplanted the Temple, except on grand occasions and festivals. The Temple was for great ceremonies and celebrations, like a mediaeval cathedral,—an object of pride and awe, adorned and glorious; the synagogue was a sort of church, humble and modest, for the use of the people in ordinary worship,—a place of religious instruction, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... account of the levity and audacity of their sex'; a law which looks apocryphal, but which, even if genuine, could not have been of universal application.... The law of ancient Rome, though admitting their testimony in general, refused it in certain cases. The civil canon laws of mediaeval Europe seem to have carried the exclusion much further. Mascardus says: 'Feminis plerumque omnino non creditur, et id dumtaxat, quod sunt feminae qua ut plurimum solent esse fraudulentre fallaces, et dolosae' [Generally speaking, no credence at all is given to women, ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... curiously mediaeval. The steam-tram has been rushing along for some miles, past beer gardens and villas, when suddenly it slows to walking pace as we twist in and out over the bridges of a moat, and creeping through ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... Abbey of Chiaravalle, a few miles from Milan, has a central tower on the intersection of the cross in the style of that of the Certosa of Pavia, but the style is mediaeval (A. D. 1330). Leonardo seems here to mean, that in a building, in which the circular form is strongly conspicuous, the campanile must either be separated, or rise from the centre of the building and therefore take the form of a ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... those who were free, and, although dependent on them, had certain rights guaranteed by contract. The absolute monarchy found in nearly all nations, at the opening of modern times, was forced by its struggle with the mediaeval aristocracy to favor the emancipation of the serfs and of the lower classes. Even in Russia, Iwan III. (1462-1505) seems to have restored to the peasantry the right of migration, of which they had been deprived by the invasion of the Mongols, nor did they lose ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... to the Crusades. It is found in the Greek martyr acts, which were probably composed in the eighth century, where it is told of Saint Eustache, who was before his baptism a captain of Trajan, named Placidus, and the same legend reappears, with modifications of the details, in many mediaeval collections and forms the subject of several romances. In most versions the motif is similar to that of the story of Job. The following is the outline of the original legend, according ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... also under the guidance of Lassagne, beginning with "Ivanhoe," in which the pictures of mediaeval life cleared the clouds from my vision and gave me a far wider horizon. Next the vast forests, prairies, and oceans of Cooper held me; and then I came to Byron, who died in Greece at the very time when I was entering on my apprenticeship to poetry. The romantic movement in France was beginning ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... Dionysus takes us back, then, into that old Greek life of the vineyards, as we see it on many painted vases, with much there as we should find it now, as we see it in Bennozzo Gozzoli's mediaeval fresco of the Invention of Wine in the Campo Santo at Pisa- -the family of Noah presented among all the circumstances of a Tuscan vineyard, around the press from which the first wine is flowing, a painted idyll, with its vintage colours still opulent in decay, and not without its solemn touch of ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... then prevalent, which belongs rather to the office of the historian of the Reformation. It will be sufficient, therefore, if we glance hastily at some of the partial and abortive efforts directed toward the reform of doctrine and manners of which mediaeval France ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... melted before the fire the person represented by it was supposed, similarly to waste away. It will be remembered that Horace ("Sat." i, 8, 30 sq.) speaks of the waxen figure made by the witch Canidia in order that the lover might consume away in the fires of love. Roman and mediaeval sorcery had its origin in ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... is, next to ending at the end, the whole art of writing; as for the middle you may fill it in with any rubble that you choose. But the beginning and the end, like the strong stone outer walls of mediaeval buildings, contain and ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... had read in the newspapers of the splendid mediaeval castle which he had bought from the Earl of Weymount, a castle perched high upon the granite rocks facing the Channel, between the Lizard and St. Ruan. He had spent a fortune in restoring it, yet he very seldom visited it. The historic place, ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... of an immense arched gateway, apparently of the mediaeval period, with a porter's lodge on one side, slightly recessed. The gates were of stout oak thickly studded with big-headed nails and bolts. In the heavy oaken door of the lodge was set a brass "judas," a small grille closed by an ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... of which Greif was a student, and which shall be called for convenience Schwarzburg, was one of the oldest in the country. The town in which it was situated possessed in a high degree the associations and the architectural features which throw a mediaeval shadow over many northern cities, causing even the encroaching paint- brush of modern progress to move in old-fashioned lines of subdued colour. In northern lands antiquity is not associated with the presence of dirt, as it is in the south. Nuremberg does not ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... the centre of the main hall. The glory and beauty of ancient sculpture refresh and satisfy beyond expression a sense wholly wearied and well-nigh nauseated with contemplation of endless sanctities and agonies attempted by mediaeval art, while yet as handless as accident or barbarism has left the ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... a dream of the night) down the well-remembered reaches of the Thames betwixt Streatley and Wallingford, where the foothills of the White Horse fall back from the broad stream, I came upon a clear-seen mediaeval town standing up with roof and tower and spire within its walls, grey and ancient, but untouched from the days of its builders of old. All this I have seen in the dreams of the night clearer than I can force myself to see ...
— A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson • William Morris
... came forward with my offering, and a certain significant shyness in her manner that were enough to throw me into a state of hopeless imbecility. And I was always miserably conscious that Consuelo possessed an exalted sentimentality, and a predilection for the highest mediaeval romance, in which I knew I was lamentably deficient. Even in our most confidential moments I was always aware that I weakly lagged behind this daughter of a gloomily distinguished ancestry, in her frequent incursions into a vague but poetic past. There was something ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... vocabularies and dictionaries. Among these special mention must be made of the Dictionary of Sir Thomas Elyot, Knight, the first work, so far as I know, which took to itself in English what was destined to be the famous name of DICTIONARY, in mediaeval Latin, Dictionarius liber, or Dictionarium, literally a repertory of dictiones, a word originally meaning 'sayings,' but already by the later Latin grammarians used in the sense of verba or vocabula 'words.' The early vocabularies and dictionaries ...
— The evolution of English lexicography • James Augustus Henry Murray
... mere dry and unintelligent orthodoxy, and Froude had entered with earnest purpose into Church ways of practical self-discipline and self-correction. Bishop Lloyd's lectures had taught him and others, to the surprise of many, that the familiar and venerated Prayer Book was but the reflexion of mediaeval and primitive devotion, still embodied in its Latin forms in the Roman Service books; and so indirectly had planted in their minds the idea of the historical connexion, and in a very profound way the spiritual sympathy, ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... was a protest against the ignorance of the mediaeval age. The discovery of the New World was the first sign of the real renaissance of the Old World. It created new heavens and a new earth, broadened immeasurably the horizon of men and nations, and transformed ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... all lovers of beautiful illustrations of Mediaeval Art, that Messrs. Sotheby and Wilkinson will sell by auction on Monday next the entire stock of the magnificent publications of Mr. Henry Shaw, F.S.A., whose Dresses and Decorations of the Middle Ages are a type of the whole. Such an opportunity of securing copies at a reasonable ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 235, April 29, 1854 • Various
... in fact, by satisfying this demand. Professor Huxley holds up to scorn mediaeval education, with its neglect of the knowledge of nature, its poverty even of literary studies, its formal logic devoted to "showing how and why that which the Church said was true must be true." But the great mediaeval universities were ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... Brancacci Chapel; but we do not doubt that he too felt the beneficent influx of the new style, of which Masaccio was the greatest champion, and that he followed it, leaving behind, up to a certain point, the primitive giottesque forms. There is in his art, the great mediaeval ideal rejuvenated and reinvigorated by the spirit of newer times. Being in the beginning of his career, as is generally believed, only an illuminator, he continued, with subtle delicacy and accurate, almost timid design, to illuminate in ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... the terse and popular ballads, which were chanted by minstrels, wandering from town to town and from village to village. Among the heroes of these ballads we find that "wight yeoman," Robin Hood, who wages war against mediaeval capitalism, as embodied in the persons of the abbot-landholders, and against the class legislation of Norman game laws which is enforced by the King's sheriff. The lyric poetry of the century is not the courtly Troubadour song or the Petrarchian ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... outline sketch of the general characteristics of modern philosophy. These may be most conveniently described by comparing them with the characteristics of ancient and of mediaeval philosophy. The character of ancient philosophy or Greek philosophy,—for they are practically the same,—is predominantly aesthetic. The Greek holds beauty and truth closely akin and inseparable; "cosmos" is his common expression for the world and for ornament. The universe is for him ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... bas-reliefs and busts, and containing a bronze copy of the Laocoon, for which Sir Robert (or rather we English) paid a thousand pounds; or they might be seen hopping speedily through the ground-floor apartments where there could be little to arrest the footsteps of the mediaeval-minded Vertue. Who but a courtier could give one glance at a portrait of George I., though by Kneller? Who that was a courtier in that house would pause to look at the resemblance, also by Kneller, of the short-lived, ill-used Catherine ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... successive aggressions of Persian, Saracen, and Turk. It was equally impossible to understand the rise of the Papal power, the all-important politics of the great Saxon and Swabian emperors, the relations of mediaeval England to the Continental powers, or the marvellously interesting growth of the modern European system of nationalities. [Sidenote: When did the Roman Empire come ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... to have to record it. It is always sweeter if a woman does not box ears. The action is shrewish, benighted, mediaeval, nay, barbarous; and this box was a very hard one indeed, extraordinarily hard for so little a hand and so fasting a girl. But we know she had twice already been on the verge of doing it; and the pent-up vigour of what the policeman had not got and what the mother in the ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... with a long speech by Werner and were continued by a Dutch journalist, who took the contrary side but was listened to with exemplary patience. He was controverted by Domela Niewenhuis, the leader of the Dutch, who looks a mediaeval saint but speaks with great vigour and ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... with the new governor of Orange. The city became the starting-point for a continuous series of incursions. It was not war, but open rapine. The very traders were plundered of their wares when they fell into his hands. One might have fancied that a mediaeval robber-baron had reappeared on the banks of the Rhone. It was true that Glandage, making a virtue of bluntness, was wont to say that "there was nothing Huguenot about him but the point of his sword." None the less did his ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... digged it, by the direction of the lawgiver, with their staves." Deborah's song has something of the communal note; and when Miriam dances and sings with her maidens, one is reminded of the many ballads made by dancing and singing bands of women in mediaeval Europe,—for instance, the song made in the seventh century to the honor of St. Faro, and "sung by the women as they danced and clapped their hands." The question of ancient Greek ballads, and their relation ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... Troilus and Creseide, a mediaeval tale, already attempted by Boccaccio in his Filostrate, but borrowed by Chaucer, according to his own account, from Lollius, a mysterious name without an owner. The story is similar to that dramatized by Shakspeare in his tragedy of the same title. This is in decasyllabic verse, ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... The best parallel to the Italian emigration to the provinces during the late Republic and early Empire is perhaps to be found in the mediaeval German emigrations to Galicia and parts of Hungary (the Siebenbuergen Saxons are an exception), which Professor R.F. Kaindl has so well and minutely described. The present day mass emigration of the lower classes is something ...
— The Romanization of Roman Britain • F. Haverfield
... fully charged. Maggie, that strange girl found in the heart of London's darkness, alone, without friends or parents, was a witch, a devilish, potion-dealing witch, who might, at any time, fly through the night-sky on a broom-stick as surely as any mediaeval old hag. These visions might be exaggerated for many human beings, not so for Grace. Having no imagination she was soaked in superstition. She clung to a few simple pictures, and was exposed to every terror that those ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... various manners. She has her being in the past tense, and her future, if she could have it after her taste, would be the past made present. She has many aspirations, and few of them are realized, but all of them are sketched in faint hues upon the mist of her mediaeval atmosphere. She is, in the language of a lyric from ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... early saints too, for my Amiens book, and feel that I ought to be scratched, or starved, or boiled, or something unpleasant, and I don't know if I'm a saint or a sinner in the least, in mediaeval language. How did saints feel themselves, ...
— Hortus Inclusus - Messages from the Wood to the Garden, Sent in Happy Days - to the Sister Ladies of the Thwaite, Coniston • John Ruskin
... elements. There were the old, old residents and their offspring, people who squabbled violently among themselves as to whose ancestor came aboard the Mayflower first, and which in what capacity. There were the mediaeval spinsters who always reach their best development in the semi-small New England town, spinsters who have clubs and theories, and yet play golf, and frivol delightfully above their luncheon tables. And there were college girls in hordes, alert young things, ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... Atchley's Parish Clerk and his Right to Read the Liturgical Epistle (Alcuin Club Tracts), and other works, give much information with regard to the antiquity of the office, and to the duties of the clerk of mediaeval times; and from these books I have derived much information. By the kindness of many friends and of many correspondents who are personally unknown to me, I have been enabled to collect a large number of anecdotes, recollections, facts, and biographical sketches of many clerks ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... a short book, but it was quite hard to transcribe on account of so much of it being in mediaeval English, with its inconsistent and ...
— Mistress Margery • Emily Sarah Holt
... destined to survive, when every other sort of democracy was free to destroy itself. And whenever democracy destroying itself is suddenly moved to save itself, it always grasps at rag or tag of that old tradition that alone is sure of itself. Hundreds have heard the story about the mediaeval demagogue who went ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton |
