"Errantry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be apprehended of the solemn scene upon the white page of the boy's mind. A spirit of religion has breathed through it all, so exalted, so warm, so personal; the passionate mediaeval Christianity which expressed itself in crusades and religious orders and knight-errantry. The cry of the Saviour (Erloesung's Held, Hero of Redemption, the poet characteristically calls him) has rung so piercingly, there seems but one answer from a humanly constituted simple heart: "Did you indeed suffer so much and die for love of me and my brothers? ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... good old times were come back in Pomerania, when every one trusted to his own good sword, and were not led like sheep at the beck of another; for the treasury and all the courts of justice were closed. So the glorious times of knight-errantry must come again, such as their forefathers had seen." His companions had promised to elect him captain; but then he must give them handsel for that, and the gold chain would just sell for the sum he wanted. ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... rambles into prose, as was his custom, on a sort of knight- errantry after thoughts and images:—"The lawn thou hast chosen for thy bridal shift—thy shroud may be of the same piece. That flower thou hast bought to feed thy vanity—from the same tree thy corpse may be decked. ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... cold of mountain snows, and the scorching sun of the tropics, these were the lot of every cavalier who came to seek his fortunes in the New World. It was the reality of romance. The life of the Spanish adventurer was one chapter more—and not the least remarkable —in the chronicles of knight-errantry. ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... plainly enjoying the amazement he provoked by his style of language. "The spirit of a stray cat at midnight, the tastes of the prowling hyena! The fat thief I saw running away into the woods! When such as these began to take to the road, knight-errantry vanished from the face of the earth. The varlets borrowed the grand idea of care-free itinerancy and debased it, as waiters borrow a gentleman's evening dress for their menial uniform, and drunken coachmen wear the ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... to which my incautious knight-errantry has exposed me; I begin, indeed, to take you for a very mischievous sort of person, and I fear the poor devil from whom I rescued you will be amply revenged for his disgrace, by finding that the first use you make of your freedom is to doom ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... Florence in the year 1432, and who was deeply versed in the Bible, composed a poem, called the 'Morgante Maggiore,' which he recited at the table of Lorenzo de Medici, the great patron of Italian genius. It is a mock-heroic and religious poem, in which the legends of knight-errantry, and of the Popish Church, are turned to unbounded ridicule. The pretended hero of it is a converted giant, called Morgante; though his adventures do not occupy the twentieth part of the poem, the principal personages being Charlemagne, Orlando, and his cousin Rinaldo of Montalban. Morgante has two ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... medal of the Legion of Honor, I should have decorated him on the spot. I believe it repaid me for my annoyance to have found such ample goodness, such chivalry, such kindness, growing as it were by the wayside. It was as if the world had rolled back into the days of knight-errantry, when to rescue and protect distressed damsels ranked next to religious worship. Sure am I if my weatherbeaten old man had lived at that time, none would have been more renowned for gentle deeds: in this prosaic age he is but a watchman on a railroad. I was ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... continued not only what Boiardo did, but what he intended to do; for as its subject is Orlando's love, and knight-errantry in general, so its object was to extol the house of Este, and deduce it from its fabulous ancestor Ruggiero. Orlando is the open, Ruggiero the covert hero; and almost all the incidents of this supposed irregular poem, which, as Panizzi has shewn, is one of the most regular in the world, ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... which they now call their own: The Spaniards and French, likewise, improved it into their respective tongues. From its great affinity to the Latin, it was called Romance, a name which the Spaniards still give to their own language. As the first legends of knight-errantry were written in Provencal, all subsequent performances of the same kind, have derived from it the name of romance; and as those annals of chivalry contained extravagant adventures of knights, giants, and necromancers, every improbable story or fiction is to this day called a romance. ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... mercy? Can I not establish plantations, build and sow, and make the desert valleys laugh with corn? Shall I not have my Spenser with me, to fill me with all noble thoughts, and raise my soul to his heroic pitch? Is not this true knight-errantry, to redeem to peace and use, and to the glory of that glorious queen whom God has given to me, a generous soil and a more generous race? Trustful and tenderhearted they are—none more; and if they ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... is very just, and is very formidable; and upon the one or other of its horns, has been transfixed every adventurer that has hitherto gone forth on the knight-errantry of speculation. Every man who lays claim to a direct knowledge of something different from himself, perishes impaled on the contradiction involved in the assumption, that consciousness can transcend itself: ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... Sacred heaven, the memory of such a treatment was not to be endured! No future lustration could ever remove the stain: and, what was perhaps still worse in the present case, the offender having ceased to exist, the lustration which the laws of knight-errantry prescribe was rendered impossible. ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... hall-door, clapped on his hat, grasped his stout oak stick, and telling his housekeeper to let them know, in case his guests should miss him, that he was obliged to go out for ten minutes or so on parish business, forth sallied the stout priest, with no great appetite for knight-errantry, but still anxious to rescue, if so it might be, the distressed princess, begirt with giants and enchanters, at ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... a little while, and then to have availed himself of the confidence and affection he had inspired, so as to gather the remnants of his mission again, we cannot say. At any rate, he consoled himself for the disastrous failure at Natal by setting forth on a fresh scheme of Christian knight-errantry on behalf of ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... greatly than to be a king seated upon a throne with a golden crown upon my head and all men kneeling unto me. Yea; meseems that because of my joy in these things I have no room in my heart for such a love of lady as thou speakest of, but only for the love of knight-errantry, and a great wish for to make this world in which I now live the better and the happier for my dwelling in it. Thus it is, Croisette, that I have no lady for to serve in the manner thou speakest of. Nor will I ever have such, saving only the Lady Guinevere, the ...
— The Story of the Champions of the Round Table • Howard Pyle
... particular notions. One is, that it should always be a subject. For example, a history of Piracy; in connexion with which there is a vast deal of extraordinary, romantic, and almost unknown matter. A history of Knight-errantry, and the wild old notion of the Sangreal. A history of Savages, showing the singular respects in which all savages are like each other; and those in which civilised men, under circumstances of difficulty, soonest become like savages. A history of remarkable characters, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... England; Godwine, Leofric, and Siward divide among them the administration of the realm. The next generation, the warriors of Stamfordbridge and Senlac, of York and Ely, are fast growing into maturity. Harold Hadrada is already pursuing his wild career of night-errantry in distant lands, and is astonishing the world by his exploits in Russia and Sicily, at Constantinople and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... on and sent an interpreter to the Russian lines, challenging the bravest of the Russians to fight with him for life, goods and freedom. It must be borne in mind that those were the days of chivalry and knight-errantry, when such adventures and challenges were common things and good faith was kept with those who made them. So no force or treachery was attempted against the daring knight, although we should hardly have looked ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... ing, a son or descendant; and this etymology gives the true conditions of their rule: they were popular leaders—elected in the witenagemot on the death of their predecessors.[8] We observe, too, the spirit of adventure—a rude knight-errantry—which characterized these ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... squat little man rolled forward, affectionate concern on his great ugly face, and he set one of his podgy hands on his godson's shoulder. "Now listen to me, Andre," he reasoned. "This is sheer knight-errantry—moonshine, lunacy. You'll come to no good by it if you persist. You've read 'Don Quixote,' and what happened to him when he went tilting against windmills. It's what will happen to you, neither more nor less. Leave things as they are, ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... was to him he never learned. For only one other word did he have more use and I believe it was the only one he knew, "hyaku—hurry!" Over there I was in constant fear for him because of his knight-errantry and his candor. Once he came near being involved in a duel because of his quixotic championship of a woman whom he barely knew, and disliked, and whose absent husband he did not know at all. And more than once I looked for a Japanese to draw his two-handed ancestral sword when Dick ...
— Appreciations of Richard Harding Davis • Various
... the form of an armored man on horseback was the quintessence of the Age of Chivalry—not the Age of Chivalry as exemplified by the vain and boasting nobles who had constituted nine-tenths of the knight-errantry profession and who had used the quest of the Holy Grail as an excuse to seek after mead and maidens, but the Age of Chivalry as it might have been if the ideal behind it had been shared by the many instead of by the few; the ...
— A Knyght Ther Was • Robert F. Young
... volume (8vo, pp. 240) "Scharkan, Conte Arabe," etc. Traduit par M. Asselan Riche, etc. Paris: Dondey-Dupre. 1829. It has its longueurs and at times is longsome enough; but it is interesting as a comparison between the chivalry of Al-Islam and European knight-errantry. Although all the characters are fictitious the period is evidently in the early crusading days. Caesarea, the second capital of Palestine, taken during the Caliphate of Omar (A.H. 19) and afterwards recovered, was fortified in A.H. 353 963 as a base ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... the time—men who, loving liberty and hating oppression, took the law into their own hands and executed a rough and ready justice between the rich and the poor which embodied the best traditions of knight-errantry, whilst they themselves lived a free and merry life on the tolls they exacted from their wealthy victims. Such a man may well have been the original Robin Hood, a man who, when once he had captured the popular imagination, ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... extent successful, man, for defending his rights in good earnest, would arouse more sympathy throughout the nation than the accumulated wrongs and sufferings of more than three millions of our submissive colored population." Even now, when mere Quixotic knight-errantry and his own positive violation of the rights of individuals and society had put his life in forfeit, this sympathy for his boldness and misfortune came to him in large measure. Questioned by Governor Wise, Senator Mason, and Representative Vallandigham about ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... undertaken in this spirit of daring adventure, none has surpassed, for hardihood and variety of incident, that of the renowned Hernando de Soto, and his band of cavaliers. It was poetry put in action. It was the knight-errantry of the old world carried into the depths of the American wilderness. Indeed the personal adventures, the feats of individual prowess, the picturesque description of steel-clad cavaliers, with lance and helm and prancing steed, ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... their sweet womanly guidance and gentle but firm control, triumphantly bringing good out of evil in spite of adverse circumstance. Beatrice, Rosalind, Viola, Helena, and Isabella are all, not without a tinge of knight-errantry that does not do the least violence to the conception of tender, delicate womanhood, the good geniuses of the little worlds in which their influence is made to be felt. Events must inevitably have gone tragically but for their ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... protection of some other man; and whom could she so properly choose to be her guardian as a person of quality, of fortune, of honour; and who, besides a gallant disposition which inclines men to knight-errantry, that is, to be the champions of ladies in distress, had often declared a violent attachment to herself, and had already given her all the instances of ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... bishop, and followed by the praises and vows of the people, sallied forth to vindicate the chastity of women and to redress the wrongs of travellers and peaceable men. The adventurous humor inspired by the Crusade heightened and extended this spirit; and thus the idea of knight-errantry was formed. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... feelings of the time. The two princes, William and Geoffrey, give a mutual challenge; each gives the other notice of the garb and shield that he will wear that he may not be mistaken. The spirit of knight-errantry was coming in, and we see that William himself in his younger days was touched by it. But we see also that coat-armour was as yet unknown. Geoffrey and his host, so the Normans say, shrink from the challenge and decamp in the night, leaving the way open for a sudden march upon Alencon. ...
— William the Conqueror • E. A. Freeman
... Whitehall. Lauzun was in every respect the man for the present emergency. He had courage and a sense of honour, had been accustomed to eccentric adventures, and, with the keen observation and ironical pleasantry of a finished man of the world, had a strong propensity to knight errantry. All his national feelings and all his personal interests impelled him to undertake the adventure from which the most devoted subjects of the English crown seemed to shrink. As the guardian, at ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Wagtail, and Gelid, cold and frozen as he is, have both taken a fancy to me—and no wonder, knowing my pleasant qualities as they do ahem; so, for their sakes, I volunteer on this piece of knight—errantry as much as'— ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... Quixote's life is entirely in the imagination; this enables him to see castles in windmills, beauty and refinement in coarseness and vulgarity, and poetry, wisdom, and genius in bombastic and absurd works on chivalry, love, and knight-errantry. To emphasize the romantic and preposterous exaltation of the mad gentleman of La Mancha, we have his coarse, vulgar, practical, almost grovelling squire, Sancho Panza. The master lives in the clouds; Sancho is most at home in the mud. Everything ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... duty, but only a happy dream. There has been in my family, here and there, a vein of fancy, or of mysticism turning sometimes to religious fervour, again sometimes to soldierly enthusiasm and a knight-errantry in arms, the ruin and despair of cool statesmanship. On this element Owen's teaching laid hold and bent it to a more modern shape. I would not be a monk or a Bayard, but would serve humanity, holding my throne ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... looking at this girl with the dark, tragic eyes and refined, pale face and graceful gestures, in the funny instinctive British way tried to place her socially. Was she a lady? It made such a difference. This was the girl for whom Doggie had performed his deed of knight-errantry; the girl whom she proposed to take back to Doggie. For the moment, discounting the uniform which might have hidden a midinette or a duchess, she had nothing but the face and the gestures and the beautifully modulated voice to go upon, and between the ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... had a long and confidential talk," the young artist continued, "and came to the conclusion that Doctor Oleander was at the bottom of the matter, and that, wherever you were, you were an unwilling prisoner. Of course, to a gentleman of my knight-errantry, that was sufficient to fire my blood. I put lance in rest, buckled on my armor, mounted my prancing charger, and set off to the ogre's castle to rescue the captive maiden! And for the rest, you know it. I came, I ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... been born during the period of the conflict and her early youth having been spent almost before the echo of the guns had died, Miss Guiney's work was much influenced by this background of association. The symbolism of her poetry is frequently drawn from battle or from knight-errantry, as in "The Wild Ride", "The Kings", "The Vigil-at-Arms", "The Knight Errant", "Memorial Day", etc. Valor, transmuted to a spiritual quality, may, indeed, be said to be the keynote of Miss Guiney's work. ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... the leader to return to his duty and allegiance. We admire Mr Scott's genius as much as any of those who may be misled by its perversion; and, like the curate and the barber in Don Quixote, lament the day when a gentleman of such endowments was corrupted by the wicked tales of knight-errantry ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... a very different spirit, however, from that of romance or of knight-errantry which inspired the bosoms of the citizens whose acclamations now rent the air on her approach. They beheld in the princess whom they welcomed the daughter of that Henry who had redeemed the land from papal tyranny and extortion; the sister of that young and godly Edward,—the Josiah of English ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... a moment, doubting how much of her thought it would be justifiable to confide to her companion. A certain vein of knight-errantry in her character inclined her to set lance in rest and ride forth, rather recklessly, to redress human wrongs. But in redressing one wrong it too often happens that another wrong—or something perilously approaching one—must be inflicted. To save pain in ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... power and glory. To the impressibility of the senses was added the romantic spirit of adventure, which kept the knighthood of Europe in a constant ferment, and for lack of war, burst forth in tournaments, in private feuds, or in the extravagances of knight-errantry. The feudal system, growing up to meet the necessities of conquerors living on conquered territory, and founded on the principle of military service as a condition of land tenure, made of Europe a vast army. The military profession ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... escape, either through the vent of sensual indulgence, or through that of mere dreaming sentimentalism, was forced to flow forth in the only remaining channel, that of self-consecration to perilous adventures, glorious services, feats of toil and penance. When arms and knight-errantry fell out of fashion, in a more settled age, this force of enthusiasm, no longer flashing forth in warlike emprise, illumined the saloon; the current of feeling, instead of being directed upon the field, circled in the breast, and sparkled out in genial talk and graceful ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... difficult, and softens the severe; The cloud on Nature's beauteous face dispels, Restores bright order, easts the brute beneath, And re-enthrones us in supremacy Of joy, e'en here. Admit immortal life, And virtue is knight-errantry no more: Each virtue brings in hand a golden dower Far richer in reversion: Hope exults, And, though much bitter in our cup is thrown, Predominates and ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... as send your reply by special hand. I await it uneasily. It may be that I have the spleen, but though I have done with knight-errantry for distrest beauty, I wonder sometimes whether my little Anne Carew have not a happier fate than any woman of fashion. 'Tis but a modest grange in Devon; but those two simple souls will taste of happiness ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... the genius of Cervantes hurried Don Quixote and Sancho served to moderate the extravagances of knight-errantry. The adventures of Hudibras and Ralpho, undertaken to extinguish the sports and pastimes of the people, aided greatly in staying the hand of fanaticism, which had suppressed all stage plays and interludes as "condemned by ancient ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... and to risk the future. In the flickering motive which guided her as she entered the shop, one would hardly have recognized the lusty impulse which had sent her ancestors on splendid rambles of knight-errantry, yet its hidden source was the same. The simple purchase of twelve yards of blue silk which she had wanted for weeks! To an outsider it would have appeared a small matter, yet in the act there was the intrepid struggle of a personal will to enforce its desire upon destiny. She would win back ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... the frost of the world's unconcern fall upon young manhood's unfolding powers. Let us beware how we extinguish the feeblest of youth's idealisms. Let us check not the onset of his knight-errantry. And the world does these things—not purposely, not even knowingly, but thoughtlessly. Many a young man has had his life's work kept back and the ardor of it chilled by rebuff ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... little while ago," said he, mustering up courage, with an effort, to speak to this wondrous mass of knight-errantry; "at all events the Diamond-drop, of which I know you are the fragments, told me you were going to some Palace in the ...
— The Story of a Dewdrop • J. R. Macduff
... Panza went along, they were overtaken by a gentleman in a fine green coat, who rode a very good mare. This gentleman stared very hard at Don Quixote, and the two began to speak together about knight-errantry, and were so interested in what they were saying, that Sancho took the opportunity of riding over to ask for a little milk from some shepherds, who were milking ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... love, chivalry, and religion were blended together, resembled that of some paladin of romance; as the chimerical enterprises, in which he was perpetually engaged, seem rather to belong to the age of knight-errantry, than to ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... and all the works of Cervantes, but chiefly of his Don Quixote. The ridicule of knight errantry shewn to have been but a secondary object in the mind of the author, and not the principal cause of the delight which the work continues to give to all nations, and under all the revolutions of manners ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... Tenebrosum, with its mysteries and terrors. At a single stroke from the arm of the intrepid Genoese the mediaeval superstitions which peopled the unknown seas had fallen like fetters from these daring and adventurous souls. The slumbering spirit of knight-errantry awoke suddenly within their breasts; and when from their frail galleons they beheld with ravished eyes this land of magic and alluring mystery which spread out before them in such gorgeous panorama, they plunged into the glittering waters with waving swords and ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... was composed of men too cool and practical to be put readily in a heat, or to indulge in knight-errantry, and above all to run a tilt with such a fiery hero as Peter the Headstrong. They knew the advantage, however, to have always a snug, justifiable cause of war in reserve with a neighbor who had territories worth invading; so they devised a reply to Peter ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... "Knight-errantry, by the Host!" quoth he, and his brows shot up on his steep brow. Then they came down again to scowl. "No doubt, my preux-chevalier, you will have definite knowledge of the groundlessness of these same slanders," he said, moving backwards, away from me, ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... flashed splendidly about the subjugated worlds, performing prodigious feats of valor and destruction, half pirate and half hero. The story had it that he'd been driven from his native Tralee by the invaders, and that now he fought Mekin in magnificent knight-errantry, and that it was he who'd set alight the flame of rebellion on so ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... interview from which he had just come so that Josephine would be moved by it, would welcome his interference, and come again to nurse her uncle's wife. Thus thinking, he had hurried along, but when he met Day his knight-errantry received a check. ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... the occasion) is cited in mitigation of the Tyro's regrettable fickleness, he—to his shame be it chronicled—having practically forgotten the woe-begone damsel's very existence within eighteen short hours after his adventure in knight-errantry. Her tear-ravaged and untidy plainness had, in that brief time, been exorcised from memory by a more potent interest, that of Beauty on her imperial throne. Setting forth the facts in their due order, ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Europe, Asia, and Africa, on the walls, lost their typographical characteristics, and shone out to me in the guise of tapestried chronicles, ancient as those of Bayeux, describing deeds of gallant chivalry—so my fancy pictured—and love, and knight-errantry, painted over with oriental arabesques in crimson gilding, the cunning handiwork of the potent sun-god. Her coming in effected all this ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... madame, the age of knight-errantry is over—nothing for nothing is the ruling principle of our own prosaic day. To be plain with you, I can't afford to quarrel with Le Prun for nothing; and, if you persist in refusing my services, I must only make it up ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... amused his parents, and teased the young lady. Nor was he wholly actuated by the jealousy of proprietorship, for he knew the devotion with which Antony regarded Queen Mary, and did not wholly trust him. His sense of honour and duty to his father's trust was one thing, Antony's knight-errantry to the beautiful captive was another; each boy thought himself strictly honourable, while they moved in parallel lines and could not understand one another; yet, with the reserve of childhood, all that passed ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sunset, dark shadows and glowing orange lamps, beauty somewhere mysteriously rapt away from him, tangible wrong in a brown suit and an unpleasant face, flouting him. Mr. Hoopdriver for the time, was in the world of Romance and Knight-errantry, divinely forgetful of his social position or hers; forgetting, too, for the time any of the wretched timidities that had tied him long since behind the counter in his proper place. He was angry and adventurous. It was all about him, ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... need to study the bent, broad shoulders and thin sinewy limbs to measure the hardness and steepness of his path; he climbed it like a bridegroom, humming quaint snatches of hymns to lull his human waywardnesses, and all the fever and errantry of our own vain career shrink abashed before ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... glimpses of the fortress through some of the avenues of magnificent trees. On a clear day, when the towers of the castle are sharply outlined against the sky and surmounted by the brightly colored royal standards, one might easily imagine himself back in the good old days of knight-errantry. Windsor is shown to visitors at any time when the royal family is not in residence. Queen Victoria and Albert, the Prince Consort, are buried in Frogmore Park, near by, but the tombs are sacredly guarded from the public. The grounds surrounding the castle are laid out ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... "Hast thou sped So ill in amors?" Answered This Gobertz, "By my head, She scorneth me." "Hauberc and arms then, instead Of lute and begarlanded Poll, take you," he said, "For errantry." ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... her side, Vittoria found herself left a widow shortly after the great battle of Pavia in 1525 wherein Francis I. of France surrendered to the Emperor Charles V. The Marquis of Pescara, after the usual career of bloodthirsty adventures which passed in those days for a life of knight-errantry, died at Milan towards the close of this year, leaving behind him an unenviable reputation for treachery towards his master. But however hard were the things said of the deceased Fernando d'Avalos by the outside world, no breath of suspicion seems ever to have penetrated to the heart of the faithful ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... errantry, every one meeting a stranger had to suppose him an enemy; ten to one he was. And the sign and proof of friendly intention was raising the right hand without a weapon in it. The hand was raised high, to be seen as far as they could shoot with a bow, ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... describes it as belonging to "the Prince of Palermo, a man of immense fortune, who has devoted his whole life to the study of monsters and chimeras, greater and more ridiculous than ever entered into the imagination of the wildest writers of romance and knight-errantry." He tells us this palace was surrounded by an army of statues, "not one made to represent any object in nature. He has put the heads of men to the bodies of every sort of animal, and the heads of every other animal to the bodies of men. Sometimes he makes a compound of five or six animals ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... proposes to write a story of loose, generous, informal design he had better place it in the mouth of the adventurer. True that in so far as it is romantic, and a story of youth, and a story in which an air from an age of knight-errantry blows into modern times, so that something like a clash of armour and a splintering of spears seems to mingle with the noises of modern life—true that in so far as it is all this, Harry Richmond is not ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... a hole-and-corner business, and God only knows why," he answered. "All I know is that her brother, Peter, tried to make conditions about the marriage, and that, although at first Papa would not hear of them, he afterwards took some fancy or knight-errantry or another into his head. But, as I say, it is a hole-and-corner business. I am only just beginning to understand my father "—the fact that Woloda called Papa "my father" instead of "Papa" somehow hurt me—"and though ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... imitation, expended in rude but magnificent display the wealth which they extorted from the people. A tone of romantic and chivalrous gallantry (which, however, was often disgraced by unbounded license) characterized the intercourse between the sexes; and the language of knight errantry was yet used, and its observances followed, though the pure spirit of honourable love and benevolent enterprise which it inculcates had ceased to qualify and atone for its extravagances. The jousts and tournaments, the entertainments and revels, which each petty court displayed, invited to ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... the annals of the long and glorious reign of the great Elizabeth, it becomes evident that, so far from having passed away with the tilt and tournament, with the complete suits of knightly armor, and the perilous feats of knight-errantry, the fire of chivalrous courtesy and chivalrous adventure never blazed more brightly, than at the very moment when it was about to expire amid the pedantry and cowardice, the low gluttony and shameless drunkenness, ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... even in his tender youth. Suddenly he hears the bell ringing to matins, but its sound, chiming in with his melancholy fancies, seems to him like a voice exhorting him to write his story. In the spirit of poetic errantry he determines to comply with this intimation; he therefore takes pen in hand, makes with it a sign of the cross to implore a benediction, and sallies forth into the fairy-land of poetry. There is something extremely fanciful in all this, and it is ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... not larger than the fishing-craft of Gloucester and Marblehead,—one was of twelve, the other of fifteen tons,—held their way across the Atlantic, passed the tempestuous headlands of Newfoundland and the St. Lawrence, and, with adventurous knight-errantry, glided deep into the heart of the Canadian wilderness. On board of one of them was the Breton merchant, Pontgrave, and with him a man of spirit widely different, a Catholic of good family,—Samuel de Champlain, born in 1567 at the small seaport of Bronage ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... but resumed his former tone. "So thou wouldst begin thine errantry like Sir Hildebert and Sir Hildebrand in the 'Rose garden'? Have a care. Such quests end in mortal conflict between the ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... people, the contempt of all knowledge which does not wear the academic garb, show the same foible, the same conceit, the same spirit of caste among those who, from the sixteenth century to the present day, have occupied the most prominent rank in the society of Germany. Professorial knight-errantry still waits for its Cervantes. Nowhere have the objects of learning been so completely sacrificed to the means of learning, nowhere has that Dulcinea,—knowledge for its own sake,—with her dark veil and her barren heart, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... circulating library in Edinburgh, he began to devour its works of fiction, characteristically rejecting love stories and domestic tales, but laying hold upon "all that was adventurous and romantic," and in particular upon "everything which touched on knight-errantry." For two or three years he used to spend his holidays with his schoolmate, John Irving, on Arthur's Seat or Salisbury Crags, where they read together books like "The Castle of Otranto" and the poems of Spenser and Ariosto; or composed and narrated ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... to give up political knight-errantry and to stick to sober business. Very carefully and in the most conservative spirit I took stock of the situation. I was still a couple of years on the right side of fifty, young looking for my age (an advantage), a ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... scenery on which the poet's sweetness, or tenderness, or strength was to be put forth. The masquerade, when his subject belonged to peace, was one of shepherds: when it was one of war and adventure, it was a masquerade of knight errantry. But a masquerade was necessary, if he was to raise his composition above the vulgarities and trivialities of the street, the fire-side, the camp, or even the court; if he was to give it the dignity, the ornament, the unexpected ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... thinks Blue Beard is a type of the castle-lords in the days of knight-errantry. Some say Henry VIII. (the noted wife-killer) was the "academy figure." Others think it was Giles de Retz, marquis de Laval, marshal of France in 1429, who (according to Mezeray) murdered six of his seven wives, and was ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... ideas have prevailed. A remote, an expensive, a murderous, and, in the end, an unproductive adventure, carried on upon ideas of mercantile knight-errantry, without any of the generous wildness of Quixotism, is considered as sound, solid sense; and a war in a wholesome climate, a war at our door, a war directly on the enemy, a war in the heart of his country, a war in concert with an internal ally, and in combination with the external, ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... be. Institutions become effete. Age is apt to sap the strength of movements as of men. Feudalism and the Crusades had commissioned the knight-errant; and now, when law began to hold sword for itself, the self-constituted legal force—knight-errantry—was no longer needed. But to know when an institution has served its purpose is little less than genius. Some things can be laughed down which can not be argued down. A jest is not infrequently more potent than ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... Doctor June, "'fighting' is one name for it. I am tempted to say that 'drudgery' is another name. Errantry, ministry, service, or whatever. It all comes to the same thing: 'What is that in thine hand?' Well, now, who of us ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... best families of France. But the boiling valour of these fiery youths was equally difficult to restrain or direct; and, after losing two-thirds of their number in desperate, but irregular, sallies against the Turkish lines, the survivors of this piece of knight-errantry re-embarked for Christendom in January, leaving the heads of their fallen comrades ranged on pikes before the tent of Kiuprili. A stancher reinforcement was received in the spring of 1669, by the arrival of 3000 Lunenburghers, whose commander, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... evidences of an infamous plot to drain Canadian traffic southward to United States ports and roads: to others they seemed to be philanthropic endeavours to rescue Western Canada from the clutches of monopoly. They were not, however, due to either political intrigue or knight-errantry, but to the same desire for profit which had led the Canadian Pacific to build up its great system in the western states. Other things being at all equal, it was of course desirable that Canadian traffic ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... history of Spain, what could make the pupils understand better the spirit of knight-errantry, its faults and its qualities, than a recital from "Don Quixote" or from the tale of ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... politically, are we not inclined, at times, to think those men died in vain? We gained the shadow; have we the substance? We gained an unparalleled prestige for courage, but are the people to-day better morally, socially, and politically? Let the world answer. The days of knight-errantry had their decadence; may not the days of the South's ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... wandered away upon a flight of discovery. Who, I again thought, could this intending visitor be, who was to come, armed with the prerogative to make my stay-at-home father forthwith leave his household goods—his books and his child—to whom he clung, and set forth on an unknown knight-errantry? Who but Uncle Silas, I thought—that mysterious relative whom I had never seen—who was, it had in old times been very darkly hinted to me, unspeakably unfortunate or unspeakably vicious—whom I had seldom heard my father ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... to regard nothing more sacred than their word of honour, to believe earnestly, rigidly, and firmly in the inane code of knight-errantry, and if necessary to seal their belief by death, and to look upon a king as a being of a higher order. Politeness and compliments, and particularly our courteous attitude towards ladies, are the result of training; ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... ever tell the girl, Melchior, of our mad excursion into the forests of the Apennines, in search of a Spanish lady that had fallen into the hands of banditti; and how we passed weeks on a foolish enterprise of errantry, that had become useless, by the timely application of a few sequins on the part of the husband, even before we started on the chivalrous, ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... father. Now I believe the first quarrel arose from the absurdist thing possible, as your father says; but Roland was exceedingly touchy on all things connected with his ancestors. He was always poring over the old pedigree, or wandering amongst the ruins, or reading books of knight-errantry. Well, where this pedigree began, I know not, but it seems that King Henry II. gave some lands in Cumberland to one Sir Adam de Caxton; and from that time, you see, the pedigree went regularly from father to son till Henry V. Then, apparently ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... surprising, therefore, that he failed to choke back the curse quick risen to his lips when the throb of the Mercury's engine came over the crest of the hill. Never was mailed dragon more terrible to the beholder, even in the days of knight-errantry. In an instant his well-conceived project had gone by the board. He saw himself discredited, suspected, a skulking plotter driven into the open, a self-confessed trickster utterly at the mercy of some haphazard question that ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... collier, his brother is in a steel works. Probably he and I know, better than John Ruskin, how rough work "takes the life out of us." But when I continue, and read to him what the wise man teaches concerning justice to men, and never-failing knight-errantry towards women, and love for natural beauty, even awe-struck George becomes slightly sardonic, and his mouth comes down at the corners. Let me formulate his thoughts. He is asking how can one be just when the work's got to be done, and blame must ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... France that is scarcely French, and an Italy that is extremely un-Italian, comes to simple pictures of London middle-class life, such as those of Jonson or Middleton) is a very happy piece of work indeed, despite the difficulty of working out its double presentment of burlesque knight-errantry and straightforward comedy of manners. In Love's Pilgrimage, with a Spanish subject and something of a Spanish style, there is not enough central interest, and the fortunes by land and sea of The Double Marriage do not make it one of Fletcher's most interesting ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... readers are aware of the enormous popularity of the romances of chivalry, but they are apt to imagine that these represent a purely ideal state of things. This is undoubtedly the case as far as knight-errantry is concerned, but certain distinctive habits and customs of chivalry prevailed in Spain and elsewhere long after the feudal system and the earlier and original form of chivalry had passed away. One of the most ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... of "Vanity Fair," in the concert rooms at Covent Garden, as Colonel Newcome and Clive had done before me, and took my beer and mutton with those kindly eyes measuring me through their spectacles, I felt that such grand companionship lifted me from the errantry of my career into the dignity of ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... are the pioneers of civilization. Sometimes—to-day we have many cases in point as regards the social crusade of brave women against taxation without representation—they are martyrs as well as pioneers. But the splendid spirit of knight-errantry, which shone so vividly with the fire of enthusiasm in medieval days, is still abroad in our midst to-day. A few militant personalities fight for a great cause, a great principle— the raising of a better moral tone amongst us, the betterment of the lives ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... full amount of her slumber is justly imputable to the gross darkness which so long enveloped the horizon of Russia. Whose business was it to rouse her? What nation could be supposed to possess so much of the spirit of knight-errantry, as to be induced to instruct her savages as to the advantages of cultivating commerce, without a cautious regard to its own particular interests in the first place? But the bold, though somewhat impolitic seaman, has perhaps stumbled on the real cause ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... perhaps scarcely capable of loving a woman whom he might be compelled to acknowledge as his superior. This elderly New-Englander had in him none of the spirit of knight-errantry. He had been a good, faithful husband to his wife, but he had never set her on a pedestal, but a trifle below him, and he had loved her there ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... incredulity; but it seemed firm enough, solidly embedded in the stonework of the causeway and immovable at the city end. So he straddled it and, averting his eyes from the scenery beneath him, hitched ingloriously across, collecting splinters and a very distinct impression that, as a vocation, knight-errantry was not without ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... his nephew, who is selected as his page; he performs the duty of a squire, in ancient knight errantry, takes charge of his horse, arms, and accoutrements; and he remains in this office until he is old enough to gain his own spurs. Hawking is also a favourite amusement, and the chiefs ride out with the falcon, or small eagle, on their wrist ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... the reverend fathers gave money sometimes to the wayfarer, but accepted none in return for food and shelter. That part of me in which the conventional is concentrated said: 'Stop at the inn;' but the other part, which has the curiosity and the errantry of the man who has never been perfectly civilized, said: 'Go on, and whatever happens pass the ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... set such great store. It had the negative value of providing artificial trials for young gentlemen with patrimony and no occupation who might otherwise be living idly on their country estates, or dissolutely in London. Knight-errantry, in chivalric society, had provided the hardships and discipline agreeable to youth; travel "for vertues sake, to apply the study of good artes,"[55] was in the Renaissance an excellent way to keep a young man profitably busy. For besides the academic advantages of ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... a time tongue-tied in acute distress. This was his first adventure in knight-errantry and he had served before neither as page nor squire. He would have given his head to say the unknown words that might comfort her. All he could do was to pat her on the shoulder in a futile way and bid her not to cry, which, as all the world knows, is the greatest ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... attracted a grosser mind. He only felt that Miss Bartlett knew of some vague influence from which the girl desired to be delivered, and which might well be clothed in the fleshly form. Its very vagueness spurred him into knight-errantry. His belief in celibacy, so reticent, so carefully concealed beneath his tolerance and culture, now came to the surface and expanded like some delicate flower. "They that marry do well, but they that refrain ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... And when the highest peak we round, Then lightly graze along the ground, And cover the heath, where eye can see, With the flower of witch-errantry. ...
— Faust • Goethe
... of reading it was particular, that he had diligently perused, and accurately remembered, the old romances of knight-errantry. ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... some, nay, with many, and the strength of England is in them, and the hope; but we have to turn their courage from the toil of war to the toil of mercy; and their intellect from dispute of words to discernment of things; and their knighthood from the errantry of adventure to the state and fidelity of a kingly power. And then, indeed, shall abide, for them and for us, an incorruptible felicity, and an infallible religion; shall abide for us Faith, no more ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... Frederick Walker's, the romance of harvest in an autumn land; Burne-Jones's "The Mill," and a copy in oils of a knight of Gustave Moreau's, riding in armor over the summit of a hill into an unseen country of errantry, some fairy-land forlorn. There was, too, an old Venetian mirror in a curiously ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... of restraint. I knew it was useless to urge on him the desirability of inaction until the army moved. Be might perhaps have understood me and listened to me, were the warfare he was now engaged in only the red knight-errantry of an Indian seeking glory. But he had long since won ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... President was remarkable among the men of his time for his lifelong fidelity to one woman, for since the days of knight-errantry such devotion has been as rare as it is beautiful. The young lawyer came of Scotch-Irish parentage, and to this blending of blood were probably in part due his deep love and steadfastness. There was rather more ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... exclusively with lofty gentlemen like the Earl and her father, or with titled dames; now, however, she learned that here, in Obed Chute, there was as fine an instinct of honor, as delicate a sentiment of loyalty to friendship, as refined a spirit of knight-errantry, as strong a zeal to succor the weak and to become the champion of the oppressed, and as profound a loathing for all that is base and mean, as in either of those grand old gentlemen by whom her character had been moulded. Had Obed Chute been born an English lord his manners might ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... than it was; are now come to represent it to us as it is and ever will be."[357] "Among all the books that ever were thought on," writes another, who curiously enough had about the same opinion of the favourite novels of his time as Sidney had had of the drama a century earlier, "those of knight errantry and shepherdry have been so excellently trivial and naughty, that it would amuse a good judgment to consider into what strange and vast absurdities some imaginations have straggled ... the Knight constantly killing the gyant, or it ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... the saddle. The secret of this endurance lay perhaps in his unconsciousness that he was in the saddle at all. It was as much his natural seat as office stools to other mortals. He made no capital out of errantry, his temperament being far too like his red-gold hair, which people compared to flames, consuming all before them. His vices were patent; too incurable an optimism; an admiration for beauty such as must sometimes have caused him to forget which woman he was most in love with; too ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... had a warm regard. The very honesty of his character, his habit of saying just what he meant (so foreign to the Count's own practice), his ingenuous delight in all that he saw, his modern knight-errantry based upon an absurdly old-fashioned notion of right and wrong and justice and all such stuff as that, these were the very qualities to win the admiration of a man of the world who possessed none of them. ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... is not a man. He is wanting in the highest attributes of humanity. The honor and nobleness of the old "knight-errantry" consisted in defending the innocence of men and protecting the chastity of women against the assaults of others. But the truer and nobler knighthood protects the property and the character, the innocence and the chastity of others against ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... society to which they belong. Roland is a variation on the one perpetual heroic theme; it has a grander setting, a grander accompaniment, than Byrhtnoth or Waldere, but it is essentially the old story of the heroic age,—no knight-errantry, but the last resistance of a ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... the principles of reason and religion, natural and revealed, to replenish the earth with inhabitants than to depopulate it by killing those already in existence. Besides, it is time for the age of knight-errantry and mad heroism to be at an end. Your young military men, who want to reap the harvest of laurels, do not care, I suppose, how many seeds of war are sown; but for the sake of humanity it is devoutly to be wished, that the manly employment of agriculture, and the humanizing benefits of ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... first in ruth, I watch thy votaries by land and sea Armed with thy sacred sign go forth to fight Anew the battle of humanity Beneath the flag of mercy and of right; No holier band a holier realm e'er trod Than this—the world's knight-errantry ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... not? Understanding of my poor bubbling mind, anyhow, and—Nature's furnishing of young women's minds is a mighty subtle business, not very much more clearly understood to-day than in the era of knight-errantry. ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... Count Robert's course of knight-errantry did not seem to be in the least intermitted by his marriage; on the contrary, when he was called upon to support his renown, his wife was often known also in military exploits, nor was she inferior to him in thirst after fame. ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... of La Mancha himself. In the next instant two gentlemen entered the room, and as soon as they perceived Don Quixote, they fell on his neck and embraced him, saying that they were pleased and proud beyond measure to meet so distinguished and illustrious a personage, their own morning star of knight-errantry. One of the gentlemen, Don Jeronimo, assured him that there was no doubt in his mind that he was the real Don Quixote of the First Part, and not the counterfeit one of the Aragonese Second Part. With these words he put his copy of the Second Part, which he had just been reading, into Don Quixote's ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... truly the monarch of Castile and Aragon, than Ferdinand and Isabella, enthroned beneath the golden vaults of the conquered Alhambra. And Robinson, with the simple training of a rural pastor in England, when he knelt on the shores of Delft Haven, and sent his little flock upon their Gospel errantry beyond the world of waters, exercised an influence over the destinies of the civilized world, which will last to the ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... unimaginable. Her own fortune was made, she believed, in serving her. Both the magister and her brother had sworn it, and, living in an age of marvels—dragons, portents from the heavens, and the romances of knight errantry—she was ready to believe it. It was true that the lady's room had proved a cell more bare and darker than her own at home, but Katharine's bright and careless laughter, her fair and radiant height, and her ready kisses and pleasant words, made the girl ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... harvest-time, and piano-tuner where pianos are. Here is brave comradeship, the sharing of adventures, the ready wit of jovial vagrants. The book is a harmless picaresque, a geste of innocent rogue-errantry; its place is with Lavengro and The Cloister and the Hearth, in that ancient, endless order of tales which link up age with age and land with land in the unaltering, unfrontiered fellowship of the road that kept the spirit of poetry alive ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... do remember," he drawled. "Why, of course—of course! It was a matter of knight-errantry and ladies fair! But who was it whose choice conflicted ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... well, was soon explaining matters to Duke Sigismund, who presently advanced to the heir of Angus, wrung his hand, and gave him to understand that he accepted him as a comrade in their doughty enterprise, and honoured his proceeding as a piece of knight-errantry. He was free from any question whether George was to be esteemed a rival by hearing it was the Lady Joanna for whose sake he thus adventured himself, whereas it was not her beauty, but her sister's intellect ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... lost her mother, and took to reading romances, which, it seems, were books of knight-errantry, at the close of the chivalric period. These romances were innumerable, and very extravagant and absurd, and were ridiculed by Cervantes, half-a-century afterwards, in his immortal "Don Quixote." Although Spain was mediaeval ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... the first mystery; what had become of the English general's head? The second riddle is, what had become of the Brazilian general's heart? President Olivier might be called a visionary or a nuisance; but even his enemies admitted that he was magnanimous to the point of knight errantry. Almost every other prisoner he had ever captured had been set free or even loaded with benefits. Men who had really wronged him came away touched by his simplicity and sweetness. Why the deuce should he diabolically revenge himself only once ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... of Nigel Bruce was pale, but there was firmness in the glance of his bright eye, and a smile unclouded in its joyance on his lip. The frivolous lightness of the courtier, the mad bravado of knight-errantry, which was not uncommon to the times, indeed, were not there. It was the quiet courage of the resolved warrior, the calm of a spirit at peace with itself, shedding its own high feeling and poetic glory over ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... among the overwhelming throng of their followers who had been long brutalized on the other side of the channel. In this connection the proud, revengeful and chivalrous natives were had at a sad disadvantage; for then, as to-day, they were characterized by a spirit of knight-errantry, which disdained to take an ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... ranging, roving, strolling, itineracy, peregrination, pilgrimage; digression, expatiation, departure, deviation, divergence, errantry; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... wanting. For in spite of her students, until within thirty years Japan slumbered still in the Knight-time of the Middle Ages, and so long as a man carried about with him continually two beautiful swords he felt it incumbent upon him to use them. The happy days of knight-errantry have passed. These same cavaliers of Samurai are now thankful to police the streets in spectacles necessitated by the too diligent study of German text, and arrest chance disturbers of the public peace for a miserably small ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... they would. The worst on't was when we got through the wicket; for we were carried, to get out our pass or discharge, before a more dreadful monster than ever was read of in the legends of knight-errantry. They called him Gripe-men-all. I can't tell what to compare it to better than to a Chimaera, a Sphinx, a Cerberus; or to the image of Osiris, as the Egyptians represented him, with three heads, one of a roaring lion, t'other of a fawning cur, and the last ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... but an early flame of mine, who had been fool enough to marry an Austrian baron with a long mustache and short affection? But it was an affair of my own that called me there—nothing to do with knight-errantry, any more than you coming to Genoa had to do with ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... to look upon chivalry merely as a knightly institution which had to do solely with tournaments, banquets, knight-errantry, and the rescuing of encastled maidens. The modern acceptance of the term omits all those gentle qualities of mind which go to make the true chivalric disposition. We associate chivalry with 'fair play' combined with 'manliness'; and humility has no part ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... that was adventurous and romantic I devoured without much discrimination, and I really believe I have read as much nonsense of this class as any man now living. Everything which touched on knight-errantry was particularly acceptable to me, and I soon attempted to imitate what I so greatly admired. My efforts, however, were in the manner of the ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... we have him innocent and ingenuous as an angel, yet hard put to it to convince anyone but himself of his guilelessness. A millionaire (dollars) with a wife of economic disposition, who declines to spend his money for him, he feels drawn to a course of knight-errantry and rides abroad in search of damsels in pecuniary distress, with the avowed object of "spreading a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 25th, 1920 • Various
... to inflame his appetites, in his new province of a moralist will serve him, a little turned, to expose the enormity of those appetites in other men. When Cervantes, with such proficiency of fondness dwells upon the Don's library, who sees not that he has been a great reader of books of knight-errantry—perhaps was at some time of his life in danger of falling into those very extravagances which he ridiculed so happily ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... continu'd her Errantry for above a Fortnight, having no more Money than just thirty Shillings, half of which brought her to Sir Christian Kindly's House in Lancashire. 'Twas near five a Clock in the Afternoon when she reach'd that happy Port, when, coming to the Hall Door, she enquir'd for the ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... into a bookshop when they happen to need some particular book. Do they never drop in for a little innocent carouse and refreshment? There are some knightly souls who even go so far as to make their visits to bookshops a kind of chivalrous errantry at large. They go in not because they need any certain volume, but because they feel that there may be some book that needs them. Some wistful, little forgotten sheaf of loveliness, long pining away on an upper ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... told, is the best hiding-place in the world. I have written nothing but what I will stand in to at the word of command. Women love to engage in knight-errantry, now-and-then, as well as to encourage it in the men. But in your case, what I propose will not seem to have anything of that nature in it. It will enable me to perform what is no more than a duty in serving and comforting a dear and worthy friend, who labours under undeserved oppression: ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... adventurous lives of Western pioneers and immigrants has suggested nearly as many stories as the chivalric deeds of knight-errantry. These tales of frontier life are, however, as a rule, characterized by such wildness of fancy and such extravagancy of language that we have often wondered why another Cervantes did not ridicule our border romances by describing a second Don Quixote's ...
— In School and Out - or, The Conquest of Richard Grant. • Oliver Optic
... wandering freaks, and his poor mother was reduced almost to despair, when one day he arrived at her door almost as forlorn in plight as the prodigal son. Of his thirty pounds not a shilling was left; and instead of the goodly steed on which he had issued forth on his errantry, he was mounted on a sorry little pony, which he had nicknamed Fiddle-back. As soon as his mother was well assured of his safety, she rated him soundly for his inconsiderate conduct. His brothers and sisters, who were tenderly attached to him, interfered, and succeeded ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... than miss the satisfaction of roasting Queen Pintiquiniestra and the pastorals of Darinel the Shepherd and his damned unintelligible speculations, I would burn my own father along with them, if I found him playing at knight-errantry." So into the yard went "Olivante de Laura, the nonsensical old blockhead," "rough and dull Florismart of Hyrcania," "noble Don Platir," with nothing in him "deserving a grain of pity," Bernardo del Carpio, and Roncesvalles, and Palmerin de Oliva. What ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... means of maritime protection. Moreover, it was afterwards perceived, that immense gain would accrue to the Exchequer from the maintenance of this station as a port of entree into the Netherlands for English manufactures; and though at a day when knight-errantry was infinitely more in vogue than commercial enterprise, these interests were carefully studied, so that the conquest of a small piratical town was turned to vastly better account than ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various |
