"Ancients" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Palladian in treatment, on the stage of what so far we have regarded as a late modification of a playhouse of Shakespeare's day. Evidently Inigo Jones contemplated the erection of a permanent architectural proscenium, as the ancients called it, of the type, though far more modest, both in scale and ornamentation, of Palladio's Theatro Olimpico at Vicenza, which we know he visited in about 1600, some twenty years after its erection. This proscenium, given in plan and elevation, ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... conscious, that no one is so well qualified, as myself, to describe the series of my thoughts and actions. The authority of my masters, of the grave Thuanus, and the philosophic Hume, might be sufficient to justify my design; but it would not be difficult to produce a long list of ancients and moderns, who, in various forms, have exhibited their own portraits. Such portraits are often the most interesting, and sometimes the only interesting parts of their writings; and if they be sincere, we seldom complain of the minuteness or prolixity of these personal memorials. ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... of Taste between the Ancients and Moderns—Classical and Romantic Poetry and Art—Division of Dramatic Literature; the Ancients, their Imitators, and the ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... conceived they beheld the apparitions of those beings whom their national mythology associated with such scenes. In such moments of undecided battle, amid the violence, hurry, and confusion of ideas incident to the situation, the ancients supposed that they saw their deities, Castor and Pollux, fighting in the van for their encouragement; the heathen Scandinavian beheld the Choosers of the slain; and the Catholics were no less easily led to recognize the warlike Saint George or Saint James in the very front of the ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... basis of his Shortest Way with the Dissenters. The laugh of the populace was then on Defoe's side, partly, perhaps, because the Government had prosecuted him. But in the changes of the troubled times, the Oxford Doctor, nurtured in "the scolding of the ancients," had found a more favourable opportunity. His literary skill was of the most mechanical kind; but at the close of 1709, when hopes of peace had been raised only to be disappointed, and the country was suffering from the distress of a prolonged war, people were more in ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... It was not strange that this should be so, for many associations still bound the Christians of the early centuries to the things they had turned away from. Thus, the horse is frequently found upon the funeral vases and marbles of the ancients; the peacock, the bird of Juno, was the emblem of the apotheosis of the Roman empresses; the palm and the crown had long been in use; and the funeral genii of the heathen Romans were in some sort the type of the later Christian angels. But although this ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... exist as to the comparative merle of the ancients and the moderns in the arts, in poetry, eloquence, and all that depends on imagination, there can be no doubt that in science the moderns have eminently the advantage. It could not be otherwise. In the early ages of the world, as in ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... exceeds that, isn't there? Wasn't there a Persian measure somewhat longer, fathered by Herodotus or another of the ancients? I am sure there was—or ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... I'm told Some ancients like my rusty lay, As Grandpa Noah loved the old Red-sandstone march of Jubal's day I used to carol like the birds, But time my wits has quite unfixed, Et quoad verba,—for my words,— Ciel! Eheu! ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... confusion seems not a little confounded. Also, one Grand Lodge of a very limited territory, and few adherents, adopted the title of Grand Lodge of all England, while another which commenced in the middle of the century assumed the title of "The Ancients," and dubbed the older and parent Grand Lodge "The Moderns." Besides, there are traces of an unrecorded Grand body calling itself "The Supreme Grand Lodge,"[143] as if each were trying to make up in name what was lacking in numbers. Strict search and due inquiry into the causes ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... nothing visionary in what St. Gregory pointed at in one of his letters to St. Clement; if, in a word, Columbus proved by his discovery the existence of the land which Madoc had visited before him, as Hakluyt and Powell pretended; and ascertained for a certainty that which for the ancients had always been so uncertain, problematical, and mysterious—his glory becomes only the more splendid, and more an object ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... by a bold fiction, bordering upon truth, displays in an Elysium and Tartarus, the eternal mansions of the good and bad, the strongest incentive to virtue and penalty to vice. Indeed, that both this and the Odyssey had a moral object, and that this object was recognized by the ancients, may be inferred from Horace, who says of Homer, in reference to the ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... may seem (in the simplicity we have described it) yet it requires great reading, both of the ancients and moderns, to be a master of it. Mr. Philips hath given us manifest proofs of his knowledge of books; it must be confessed his competitor has imitated some single thoughts of the antients well ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... and so burnt up with drought, that you cannot have as much water for twelve pence as will satisfy one person for a whole day. Most part of their provisions are brought from Cairo in Egypt, by the Red Sea, or Mare Erythreum of the ancients, and is landed at the port of Gida, Joddah or Jiddah, which is about forty miles from Mecca. The rest of their provisions are brought from the Happy Arabia, or Arabia Felix, so named from its ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... question died of a consumption, and Sir Thomas recapitulates his disease, symptoms and death; contrasting each feature with the celebrated examples of history; moralising and discussing the opinions of the ancients upon these points as he goes along; and showing by his own experience that a man 'after a cough of almost fifty years, in whom all the lobes adhered unto the Pleura,' might yet die of stone in the bladder. Doubtless the friend ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... of felicity and make his life-tide happy and his endeavour constant!" Then arose the sixth Wazir and said, "Allah favour thee with all fell city, O King, in this world and in the next world! Verily, the ancients have left us this saying, 'Whoso prayeth and fasteth and giveth parents their due and is just in his rule meeteth his Lord and He is well pleased with him.' Thou hast been set over us and hast ruled us justly and thine every step in this hath been blessed; ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... was reduced to charcoal, and, as may easily be imagined, fell all to pieces when it was touched. Some of these papyrus rolls were found fastened together with paper of coarser texture, of that quality which the ancients called emporetica, and these probably formed the parts and books ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... humanitarian, the philanthropic movement, characteristic of the eighteenth century, and which was the strong impulse of the revolution, was absolutely incomprehensible. Alfieri was, in the sense of certain ancients, a hard-hearted man, indifferent, blind and deaf to suffering. That a man of education and mind, a gentleman, should have to sweep the ground with his hat on the passage of another man, because that other happened to wear a ribbon and a star; that he should be liable to exile, to imprisonment, ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... Tacitus, Dialogus c. 16, as an appreciation of historical perspective unusual in ancient writers: "The four hundred years which separate us from the ancients are almost a vanishing quantity if you compare them with the duration of the ages." See the whole passage, where the Magnus Annus of ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... certain verse makers of our day receive for a little song in one of our popular magazines. Its success was immediate, though, like all his work, it met with venomous criticism. Dryden summed up the impression made on thoughtful minds of his time when he said, "This man cuts us all out, and the ancients too." Thereafter a bit of sunshine came into his darkened home, for the work stamped him as one of the world's great writers, and from England and the Continent pilgrims came in increasing ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... hold in esteem the studies of the schools. I was aware that the languages taught in them are necessary to the understanding of the writings of the ancients; that the grace of fable stirs the mind; that the memorable deeds of history elevate it; and, if read with discretion, aid in forming the judgment; that the perusal of all excellent books is, as it were, to interview with the noblest men of past ages, ...
— A Discourse on Method • Rene Descartes
... superstition; or, with the light still shining on her, her eye may be dim or disordered, and she may stumble at noonday. But the light is as pure as in the days of the apostles; and, if we have eyes to profit by it, we may "understand more than the ancients." The art of printing has supplied us with facilities for the study of the Scriptures which were denied to the fathers of the second century; and the ecclesiastical documents, relative to that age, which have been transmitted to us from antiquity, contain, ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... called costus was highly prized by the ancients, and specimens may be met with at a few of the London drug-houses. It has been shown by Dr. Falconer to be the produce of a genus of the thistle tribe, to which he has given the name of Aucklandia. The root of A. Costus ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... the English Kingfisher are identical with those of the American, though the former is the more brilliant bird in plumage. (See BIRDS, Vol. I, p. 61.) The ancients had a very absurd idea as to its nesting habits. They believed that the bird built a floating nest, and whenever the old bird and her charge were drifted by the winds, as they floated over the briny deep, the sea remained calm. He was, therefore, ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography, Vol. II., No. 5, November 1897 - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... "may be a far better scholar than I—may be full of the wisdom of the Ancients, and the teachings of all the great thinkers and philosophers, and yet starve to death—indeed frequently does; but who ever heard of a ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... the morale and mechanism of ancient fighting; the word melee employed by the ancients was many times stronger than the idea to be expressed; it meant a crossing of arms, not a confusion ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... which is our happiness, and seeking the best remedy for thy pain, I am about to do with thee what the ancients did with their sick: they exposed them on the steps of their temples, that every one who came to adore the divinity ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... roots of all our Natural Science. All the world over these are the heritage of all men, though the inheritance be richer or poorer here and there: they are shown forth in the lore and wisdom of hunter and fisherman, of shepherd and husbandman, of artist and poet. The natural history of the ancients is not enshrined in Aristotle and Pliny. It pervades the vast literature of classical antiquity. For all we may say of the reticence with which, the Greeks proclaim it, it greets us nobly in Homer, it sings ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... being able to change what is not good;— these are the things which occasion me solicitude.' 'I am not one who was born in the possession of knowledge; I am one who is fond of antiquity and earnest in seeking it there.' 'A transmitter and not a maker, believing in and loving the ancients, I venture to compare myself with our old P'ang [1].' Confucius cannot be thought to speak of himself in these declarations more highly than he ought to do. Rather we may recognise in them the expressions of ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) Unicode Version • James Legge
... on comparison, so that all his blindfold vituperation of a noble art is chimera, not reasoning; it is, in fact, a retrograde step in science and logic. This is to evade the Baconian method, humble and wise, and crawl back to the lazy and self-confident system of the ancients, that kept the world dark so many centuries. It is [Greek] versus Induction. "[Greek]," ladies, is "divination by means of an ass's skull." A pettifogger's skull, however, will serve the turn, provided that pettifogger has been bitten ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... Theological and Scientific Theories of an Evolution in Animated Nature. Ideas of evolution among the ancients In the early Church In the medieval Church Development of these ideas from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries The work of De Maillet Of Linneus Of Buffon Contributions to the theory of evolution at the close of the eighteenth century The work of Treviranus and Lamarck ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... boy, he had come upon a great globe of the heavens, a much-prized curiosity of his old schoolmaster. Upon it appeared all the principal stars linked up into their constellations, the shadowy linking lines forming the figures of the Imaginary Ones associated with them in the minds of the ancients. There, on the varnished round of the globe, ranged the Great and Little Bears, and the Dogs, and the Archer, and the Flying Horse, the Lion, and the Crab, and the Whale, and the Twins, and Perseus and Andromeda, ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... progress in Europe. It is an old idea, not only among the ancients but in modern times. In the last century it was advocated in a very artistic way by Dr. Becker, a physician of Germany, and Guirand, an architect in France. These gentlemen proposed that the ashes of ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... in the South we discover the wandering Arabs, the pirates of the desert, and the mountaineers of Lebanon, who live in a state of perpetual discord. Over this immense line of countries centuries have passed, and left no trace behind; all that the ancients and the crusaders have related to us of them, is typical of their condition at this day. The bows and arrows, the armour, exhibited as objects of curiosity in our museums, are still in use among them. It is only by chance, or by profiting by their intestine divisions, that ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... poor priest, whose only learning is some knowledge of the ancients," responded Don Inocencio. "I recognize the immense value, from a worldly point of view, of Senor Don Jose's scientific knowledge, and before so brilliant an oracle I ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... their own eyes. When nature divided the human race into two parts, she did not cut it exactly through the middle! The difference between the positive and negative poles, according to polarity, is not merely qualitative but also quantitative. And it was in this light that the ancients and people of the East regarded woman; they recognised her true position better than we, with our old French ideas of gallantry and absurd veneration, that highest product of Christian-Teutonic stupidity. These ideas have only ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Thames River," he shot at me in his masterful way. "I was looking at things past, and people dead and gone. We ancients do that. I saw London streets and crowds; I read the posters which told that Kitchener was drowned at sea, and then I saw, a year later, England in panic; I saw an almighty meeting in Trafalgar Square and I heard speeches which burned my ears—men urging Englishmen ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... and overgrown pelicans of many varieties, enrich the ornithological kingdom, while among insects and reptiles are found some less desirable specimens, such as tarantulas. The natives of the island hold the old tradition of the ancients, that one bitten by a tarantula will dance himself to death. The plumage of Australian birds is varied and brilliant, and the natives make pretty fans by arranging the feathers in assorted colors; while a sort of head-dress worn by both men and women on the occasion of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... rendered the polar circles much more familiar to this age, than to any that has preceded it, so far as existing records show. We say "existing records;" for there is much reason for believing that the ancients had a knowledge of our hemisphere, though less for supposing that they ever braved the dangers of the high latitudes. Many are, just at this moment, much disposed to believe that "Ophir" was on this continent; though for a reason ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... brother, deem this not mere kindness of me, for that the lad is mine own son and 'tis incumbent on me to stand in the stead of my brother, his sire. So be thou fully satisfied!" And Quoth she, "I pray Allah by the honour of the Hallows, the ancients and the moderns, that He preserve thee and cause thee to continue, O my brother-in-law and prolong for me thy life; so shalt thou be a wing over-shadowing this orphan lad; and he shall ever be obedient to thine orders nor shall he do aught save whatso thou biddest him thereunto." The Maghrabi ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... Augereau, "Are you republicans?" immediately laid down their arms. The contest was then decided. Augereau took possession of the palace, and arrested the opposition deputies. Barthelemy and Carnot, with forty members of the "Council of Five Hundred," eleven of the "Council of the Ancients," and ten other persons of note were condemned to be deported to Cayenne. Most of these underwent their punishment; but some escaped, and others were pardoned. Thirty-five journalists were likewise ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... mountain-ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapor only, which were last gilded by his rays. The island of Atlantis, and the islands and gardens of the Hesperides, a sort of terrestrial paradise, appear to have been the Great West of the ancients, enveloped in mystery and poetry. Who has not seen in imagination, when looking into the sunset sky, the gardens of the Hesperides, and the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... m'sheen inside me!" And Whinnie's explorations are surely worth emulating. I too have a machine inside me which some day I'll be compelled to rediscover. It is a machine which, at present, is merely a pump, though the ancients, I believe, regarded it as the seat of ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... known to the ancients were wines and beers. That these were used for medicinal as well as beverage purposes is evident from sacred and secular history. About the tenth century of the Christian era, an Arabian alchemist discovered the art of distillation, by which the active principle ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... is in great part merely a protest against paganism; its ideal is negative rather than positive, passive rather than active." He says, that, in certain most important respects, "it falls far below the best morality of the ancients." Now, the object of systems of morality is to take possession of human life, to save it from being abandoned to passion or allowed to drift at hazard, to give it happiness by establishing it in the practice ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... call him to order! I will have a hearing, and I close the argument by the unanswerable assertion of Ruskin: 'That the Egyptians and Greeks (the most civilized of the ancients) both gave to their spirit of wisdom the form of a woman, and for symbols, the ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... cold, hard fact, it is your modern who is ancient; the ancients were younger. Consider the Greeks and their naive joy in creation! The twentieth-century man brings forth his works of art in sorrow. His music shows it. It is sad, complicated, hysterical and morbid. ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... so valuable to you as Ted's "eddication,"' he said; 'but a gentleman should have some acquaintance with the classics, Nick, both in our tongue (the nobility of which is not near so well understood as it might be) and in the tongues of the ancients.' ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... and Its Revelations, gives two drawings of it. Carpenter argues that it is impossible to accept that optical lenses had ever been made by the ancients. Never occurred to him—someone a million miles or so up in the air—looking through his telescope—lens ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... the Pacific.] The world of the ancients was confined to the shores of the Mediterranean; and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans sufficed at one time for our traffic. When first the shores of the Pacific re-echoed with the sounds of active commerce, the trade of the world and the history of the world may be really said to have begun. ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... year made a curious discovery, that in a province of this kingdom, not fifty miles from its capital, a sort of devotion is still paid to Priapus, the obscene divinity of the ancients (though under another denomination), I have thought it a circumstance worth recording; particularly as it offers a fresh proof of the similitude of the Popish and Pagan religion, so well observed by Dr. Middleton in his celebrated Letter from Rome; therefore ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... Jardin! and, to show how characteristic they are, how different are they from each other! It is to be regretted that this art is of modern invention. What treasures might we not have possessed, had this inestimable secret been known to the ancients! We should not be left to conjecture the merits of Apollodorus, Zeuxis, Parrhasius, Timanthes, Apelles. We might have had outlines—first thoughts—"etched thoughts," by Phidias himself. And, as the art of design was earlier than any of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... Solomon (Vol. vii., p. 381.).—In reply to EDINA'S Query, Huet's treatise De Navigationibus Salomonis was published in 1698, 12mo., at Amsterdam, and before his work on the Commerce of the Ancients was printed. EDINA will find a short extract of its contents in vol. ii. p. 479. of Dr. Aikin's Translation of Huet's Autobiography, published in 1810 in two volumes 8vo. The subject is a curious and interesting one; but, from my perusal of the tract, I should scarcely say that ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 183, April 30, 1853 • Various
... flies, View not the world with worldling's eyes; Nor turn with weather of the time. Foreclose the coming of surprise: Stand where Posterity shall stand; Stand where the Ancients stood before, And, dipping in lone founts thy hand, Drink of the never-varying lore: Wise ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... The Desert is a myth. The king of beasts never leaves his rich domain, the thick forest and pouring cascade, where water and animals of prey abound, for the naked, arid, sandy, and rocky wastes of The Sahara. The ancients and moderns, however, have persisted in representing Africa, not only as a country full of monsters, but ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... understand the reverence with which the ancients regarded their mysterious river, which, rising no one knew where, year by year continued its majestic flow, and by its regular inundations brought wealth to the country, and it is no wonder that the rising of its waters ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... sacred and august: there was a temple to her in the Palatine under the name of Rhamnusia;[667] so great, indeed, was the propensity of the ancients to trust to the revolution of events, and to believe in the divinity of Fortune, that in the same Palatine there was a temple to the Fortune of the day.[668] This is the last superstition which retains its hold over the human heart; and, from concentrating in one object the credulity so natural to ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... however, is not perfect. It is one of the best rules of the ancients, showing the desirability of reciprocity, but it does not demand that our desires be always just, nor does it insure that what we want done to ourselves will always be what others most need. It would be consistent with the Golden Rule for a convivial ...
— The Mistakes of Jesus • William Floyd
... then again during the early period of standing Armies, the expression that we had offered battle to the enemy in vain, had more sense in it than it has now. By the ancients everything was constituted with a view to measuring each other's strength in the open field free from anything in the nature of a hindrance,(*) and the whole Art of War consisted in the organisation, and formation of the Army, that is in the ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... are directed against antiquated forms of it,—Mahometan, Jewish, or philosophical. In like manner, in the seventeenth age, we see, as we look back, that the Christian sermons were mostly directed against older forms of unbelief,—the atheism of the ancients, or of the Paduan school; and that the contemporary unbelief had not become definite enough to enable the Christian writers to apprehend its nature. This fact too explains another circumstance. The preachers evince a bitterness, which is not merely the rudeness common ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... tracks; the rain gullied clay banks about the naked house, the four dwarf ash seedlings where the dish-cloths were always hung to dry before the kitchen door. The world there was the flat world of the ancients; to the east, a cornfield that stretched to daybreak; to the west, a corral that reached to sunset; between, the conquests of peace, dearer-bought than ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... why, i. 215. human labor called by the ancients instrumentum vocale, v. 140. that on which the farmer is most to rely for the repayment of his capital, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... she was devoted. Both Queen and subjects had fled; but among the deserted wigwams were six more Englishmen, whom Celoron warned off like the others, and who, like them, pretended to obey. At a neighboring town they found only two withered ancients, male and female, whose united ages, in the judgment of the chaplain, were full two centuries. They passed the site of the future Pittsburg; and some seventeen miles below approached Chininguee, called Logstown by the English, one of the chief places ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... suggested. But perhaps I would not. I might go about barking my shins and burning my fingers, making idiotic experiments in the endeavour to prove that I was an exception to all the rules, and knew a little more than all the ancients. So let not the young man be discouraged if he has committed follies; for there seems to emerge a peculiar and vivid wisdom from error, from making an ass of one's self, and all that, more useful to one's own life than any wisdom he can get from ...
— 21 • Frank Crane
... who presented himself at this altar of intelligence, was an author, who recommended himself to a gratis advice, by observing, that a prophet and poet were known by the same appellation among the ancients; and that, at this day, both the one and the other spoke by inspiration. The conjurer refused to own this affinity, which, he said, formerly subsisted, because both species of the vates were the children of fiction; ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... superstition from religion; and that the word was first applied to those who prayed all day ut liberi sui sibi superstites essent—might survive them. On the etymology no one will depend who knows the remarkable absence of any etymological instinct in the ancients, in consequence of their weak grasp of that sound inductive method which has created modern criticism. But if it be correct, it is a natural and pathetic form for superstition to take in the minds of men ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... repair to the Hall of the Ancients, and pass the night in reviving the memory of the wise, whose sayings ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... which, as I conceive, the gods tossed among men by the hands of a new Prometheus, and therewith a blaze of light; and the ancients, who were our betters and nearer the gods than we are, handed down the tradition, that whatever things are said to be are composed of one and many, and have the finite and infinite implanted in them: seeing, then, that such is the order of the world, we too ought ...
— Philebus • Plato
... night—the thoughtful, watchful, wakeful, guardian night, with no cloud to sully its tremulous radiance. How pretty a fable, I reflect, would the ancients have associated with the Southern Cross, shimmering there in the serene sky! Dare I, at this inspiring moment, attempt what they missed, merely because they lacked direct inspiration? Those who once lived in Egypt ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... hopes of happiness and pleasure in the body, and to base its sense of life upon it. The body, being a mental concept formed of false thought, passes away, from sheer lack of a definite principle upon which to rest. Therefore the sense of life embodied in it passes away with it. You know, the ancients had some idea of the cause of disease when they attributed it to demons, for demons at least are mental influences. But then, after that, men began to believe that disease was sent by God, either to punish them for their evil deeds, or to discipline and train them for ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... Knowledge of technique and of the methods by which its difficulties are overcome is the foundation of all appreciation of art. The only true connoisseur is the one who can enter into the delight felt by the artist in creating his work. Exercise leads to invention. The ancients well said that the contortions of the sibyl generated her inspiration. Critics have been sneeringly defined as "those who have failed in literature and art," but this is not true of the greatest critics, who never carried their creative work to the point of success simply ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... sent by the ancients from hill to hill were ether vibrations. The greater the fires, the greater were the vibrations and consequently they carried farther to the receiver, which was the eye. If a signal is to be sent a great distance by light the source of that ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... of the several Authors of Satire. 1. The Ancients; Homer, Simonides, Archilochus, Aristophanes, Menippus, Ennius, Lucilius, Varro, Horace, Persius, Petronius, Juvenal, Lucian, the Emperor Julian. 2. The Moderns; Tassone, Coccaius, Rabelais, Regnier, Boileau, Dryden, ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... and the four Indians walked together to the village. At the door of one of the largest wigwams, one of the ancients stood to receive them. According to their custom, on such occasions, he was entirely unclothed. This probably was the savage mode of indicating that there were no concealed weapons about the person. This man, with his hands ...
— The Adventures of the Chevalier De La Salle and His Companions, in Their Explorations of the Prairies, Forests, Lakes, and Rivers, of the New World, and Their Interviews with the Savage Tribes, Two Hu • John S. C. Abbott
... truths, with other wisdom of the ancients, were lost in the spiritual darkness of the Middle Ages. Modern medicine looks upon these claims and teachings of the Hippocratic School as "superstition without any foundation in fact." However, the great sages of antiquity, drawing upon a source ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... appearances, and boasted a familiar intercourse with the world of spirits, were regarded by their countrymen with peculiar reverence, and considered as the first and chiefest men in the state. For this mitigated view of such dark and mysterious proceedings the ancients were in a great degree indebted to their polytheism. The Romans are computed to have acknowledged thirty thousand divinities, to all of whom was rendered a legitimate homage; and other countries in ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... should have every indulgence that an adoring husband could yield her.' And then he said much more, but as lovers always sing the same repetitive song, and have no more strings to their lyre than the ancients had before Mercury expanded it, I confess to not listening over carefully, and will leave you to imagine the eloquence of a manly and honourable love. Ah, sweetheart! you do wrong to reject him. Thou hast a quiet soothing ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... and kept until the 15th, when the army reached the Gulf of Bomba. In this bay, known to the ancients as the Gulf of Plataea, it is said that the Greeks landed who founded the colony of Cyrene. Eaton had written to Captain Hull to meet him here with the Argus, and, relying upon her stores, had made this the place ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... and of his solicitude for farther improvement, appeared in 1803. The Braut von Messina was an experiment; an attempt to exhibit a modern subject and modern sentiments in an antique garb. The principle on which the interest of this play rests is the Fatalism of the ancients: the plot is of extreme simplicity; a Chorus also is introduced, an elaborate discussion of the nature and uses of that accompaniment being prefixed by way of preface. The experiment was not successful: with a multitude of individual beauties this Bride of Messina ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... nothing and destroyed everything. At the present hour it glorifies itself in this electricity which it thinks it discovered. But electricity was known and used in remotest antiquity, and if the ancients could not explain its nature nor even its essence, the moderns are just as incapable of identifying that force which conveys the spark and carries the voice—acutely nasalized—along the wire. This century thinks it discovered the terrible science ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... system to be followed is not the least important part of the business. The useful should be preferred to the useless, and in this the example of the ancients might be followed with advantage. They had no dead languages to study, and the mind appears to have been in many cases expanded, ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... for the clarionet and oboe, and Sir Chanticleer for the trumpet. An entire chapter of his book he devoted to surmises concerning the "Music before the Flood." The poor man felt himself superior to the poetic fancies of the ancients, which at least foreshadowed the Truth, but had found no firm ground on ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... her of her Southern home; and the fragrance of the orange-groves was as incense waved by the memory of her childhood. The ruins of Rome interested her less than any other features of the landscape; for, like Bettini, she never asked who any of the ancients were, for fear they would tell her. The play of sunshine on the orange-colored lichens interested her more than the inscriptions they covered; and while their guide was telling the story of mouldering arches, she was ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... the "purple" in next line; an allusion to the famous Tyrian dye of the ancients. Cf. Pope, Windsor Forest, 142: "with fins ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... and not daring to reflect for itself. For it beseems each understanding, in following another, not to despair of itself discovering something better. If that is done, there remaineth no doubt but that in time this art will again reach the perfection it attained amongst the ancients. ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... successors of Augustus imitated his example, and even Tiberius had an imperial library, chiefly consisting of works concerning the empire and the acts of its sovereigns. These Trajan augmented by the Ulpian library, denominated from his family name. In a word, we have accounts of the rich ornaments the ancients bestowed on their libraries; of their floors paved with marble, their walls covered with glass and ivory, and their shelves and desks ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... teaching you a fact but too little known, that a classical education, properly understood, is the foundation of all learning. There is little that is worth saying which has not already been beautifully said by the ancients, little that is worthy of meditation on which they have not already profoundly reflected, save, indeed, the one great subject of Christian meditation. This foundation, my dear Angela, you possess to an eminent degree. Henceforth you will need no assistance from me or any other man, for, ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... were great mathematicians, philosophers, and divines of the ages in which they lived, and had no other knowledge but what by their own study, and the instructions of the ancients of their sect they had improved themselves in. All of the Magi were not thus learned, only those of the higher order. The priesthood, like the Jewish, was communicated only from father to son, except to the royal family,[70] whom they were bound to instruct, the better to fit them for government. ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield
... ended, the Ladies are to be brought into the Library, unto the Banquet there; and a Table is to be covered and furnished with all Banquetting Dishes, for the Lord Chancellour, in the Hall; where he is to call to him the Ancients of other Houses, as many as may be on the one side of the Table. The Banquet is to be served in, by ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... you, or you remember. Those which helped to make this bit of stone are called coral-insects: but they are not really insects, and are no more like insects than you are. Coral-polypes is the best name for them, because they have arms round their mouths, something like a cuttlefish, which the ancients called Polypus. But the animal which you have seen likest to most of them ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... older than she was. She was dressed in black; her hair hung in plaits; her neck, arms, and feet were bare; the belt at her waist was clasped by a large garnet which threw out sombre fires. In her hand she held a wand, and she was raised on a sort of platform which stood for the tripod of the ancients, and from which came acrid and penetrating fumes; she was, moreover, fairly handsome, although her features were common, the eyes only excepted, and these, by some trick of the toilet, no doubt, looked inordinately large, and, like the garnet in her ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... with mention of knots, and in the eighth book of "Odyssey" Ulysses is represented as securing various articles of raiment by a rope fastened in a "knot closed with Circean art"; and as further proof of the prominence the ancients gave to knots the famous Gordian Knot may be mentioned. Probably no one will ever learn just how this fabulous knot was tied, and like many modern knots it was doubtless far easier for Alexander to cut ...
— Knots, Splices and Rope Work • A. Hyatt Verrill
... of the nineteenth century must honor such men, if it would do a church's work; must take pains to make such men as these, or it is a dead church, with no claim on us, except that we bury it. A true church will always be the church of martyrs. The ancients commenced every great work with a victim! We do not call it so; but the sacrifice is demanded, got ready, and offered by unconscious priests long ere the enterprise succeeds. Did not Christianity begin ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... star of genius had arisen, and was blazing with quite a dazzling brilliancy. The great Mr. John Home, of Scotland, had produced a tragedy, than which, since the days of the ancients, there had been nothing more classic and elegant. What had Mr. Garrick meant by refusing such a masterpiece for his theatre? Say what you will about Shakspeare; in the works of that undoubted great poet (who had begun to grow vastly more popular in ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... sailor? How many who have seen it have seen it only in the midst of danger and distress, the last strip of earth which their mortal eyes beheld! Think of the amount of suffering which a single strand has witnessed! The ancients would have represented it as a sea-monster with open jaws, more terrible than Scylla and Charybdis. An inhabitant of Truro told me that about a fortnight after the St. John was wrecked at Cohasset he found two bodies on the shore at the Clay Pounds. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... his own body, and read the anatomy lecture. But I will not heighten the difficulty while I advise the attempt. Only, as in difficult things, you would do well to make use of all that may strengthen and assist you; the word of God; the society of good men; and the books of the ancients; there is one way more, which is by diversion, business, and activity; which are also necessary to be used in their season. But I myself, who live to so little purpose, can have little authority or ability to advise you in it, who are a person that are and may be much more so, generally ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... of Homer, I would say in a degree, but somewhat lower, of those great Ancients who are the most accessible to us in English—AEschylus, Aristophanes, Virgil, and Horace. What I have said of Shakespeare I would say of Calderon, of Moliere, of Corneille, of Racine, of Voltaire, of Alfieri, of Goethe, of those dramatists, in many forms, and with genius the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... because she felt so lonely, poor dear! Then there is Undine, but she only appears on the operatic stage, and that but rarely. Under our present strenuous existence, where all is bent towards material success, there is no place for the sprites whose voices the ancients heard in the twilight silence. How could any properly constituted nymph play hide-and-seek with the moonbeams, or cast an eye upon a handsome boatman, from under the well-regulated bank of a river of to-day? As far as present-day mortals are concerned, ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... grasped in these hands henceforth devoted to more peaceful labors; but the duties of the citizen, and of the citizen who has received his baptism in fire, are still incumbent upon us. Though young in years, we should remember that henceforth, and as long as we live in the land, we are the ancients,—the veterans of the Republic. As such, it is for us to protect in peace what we preserved in war; it is for us to look at all things with a view to the common country and not to the exigencies of party politics; it is for us ever to bear in mind the higher allegiance ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... that which was called Ager Publicus. In fine, it was a fundamental principle of the public law of Rome that the lands and the persons of the people conquered belonged to the conqueror, the Roman people, who either in person or by their delegates disposed of them as it seemed best. Among the ancients war always decided concerning both liberty ...
— Public Lands and Agrarian Laws of the Roman Republic • Andrew Stephenson
... every day are legion. It would be useless to attempt to classify them, worse than useless to try to enumerate them. They are of all sizes, colors, descriptions and shapes. They have much in common, but differ widely in particular. No locality is destitute of this venerable and classic falsehood. The ancients used it, the moderns still cling to it; the poor find it handy, the rich could not keep house without it; it abounds in every clime and thrives in every latitude. The polite hostess says to the departing guest: ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... is true, the ancients we may rob with ease; But who with that mean shift himself can please?" ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... Doctor Edward Everett Hale made the prediction in an article in "The Forum" that writing (in the mechanical sense) would become a lost art, and that the people of future centuries would point to us as "the ancients," who communicated our ideas by means of this slow and clumsy process. According to Doctor Hale's vision, the writing of all this present period would come to be regarded in much the same light as that in which we look at the Egyptian hieroglyphics or the papyrus. At that time the phonograph, if ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... Master-pieces of Human Nature were produced, Men shined by a noble Simplicity of Behaviour, and were Strangers to those little Embellishments which are so fashionable in our present Conversation. And it is very remarkable, that notwithstanding we fall short at present of the Ancients in Poetry, Painting, Oratory, History, Architecture, and all the noble Arts and Sciences which depend more upon Genius than Experience, we exceed them as much in Doggerel, Humour, Burlesque, and all the trivial Arts of Ridicule. We meet with ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... too, the source of the stream—"out of his belly." Will you observe for a moment the rhetorical figure here? I used to suppose it meant "out of his heart." The ancients, you remember, thought the heart lay down in the abdominal region. But you will find that this book is very exact in its use of words. The blood is the life. The heart pumps the blood, but the stomach makes it. The seat of life is not in the heart, but in the stomach. If you will take down ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... by which the ancients entered the infernal regions. The fact that access to the infernal regions was obtained by a lake is believed by the learned Marcus Ansello Scrutator to have suggested the Christian rite of baptism by immersion. ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... and the ladder rounds were still unbroken in Kya-ki-me, then the Black Mexicans came from their abodes in Everlasting Summerland. One day, unexpectedly, out of Hemlock Canon they came, and descended to Kya-ki-me. But when they said they would enter the covered way, it seems that our ancients looked not gently at them; for with these Black Mexicans came many Indians of So-no-li, as they call it now, ... who were enemies of our ancients. Therefore, these our ancients, being always bad-tempered, and quick to anger, made fools of themselves after ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... in respect to plan and general arrangement, is very different from that of the dwellings built in our towns at the present day. The chief reasons for the difference arise from the absence of windows and chimneys in the houses of the ancients, and of course the leaving out of windows and chimneys in a house makes it necessary to ...
— Rollo in Naples • Jacob Abbott
... the spray flies afar, sprinkling the face watching under the pale cliffs. Let us get out of these indoor narrow modern days, whose twelve hours somehow have become shortened, into the sunlight and the pure wind. A something that the ancients called divine can be found ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... death it was, All due obsequies made, the castle gates Were opened, and emerged therefrom, in deep And sombre black, a mournful train, which bore Unto the grave the mother and the child. There in the ancients' tombs they were reposed Together, by the graves where many years Had slept his fathers in a silent sleep. The old church bell tolled mournfully, and all The village mourned, while many wept among The aged and the feeble, who had known The kindness of her way, ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar
... story—the story of the wind, told by people who thought that the wind was not what we call a force but a person, and that when he called those who heard must follow if he chose; for "the piper is no other than the wind, and the ancients held that in the wind were ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... but what are to be found there.' MONBODDO. 'Yet no character is described.' JOHNSON. 'No; they all develope themselves. Agamemnon is always a gentleman-like character; he has always [Greek: Basilikon ti]. That the ancients held so, is plain from this; that Euripides, in his Hecuba, makes him the person to interpose[247].' MONBODDO. 'The history of manners is the most valuable. I never set a high value on any other ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... a very beautiful goose called the Egyptian Goose, or goose of the Nile. Its feathers are very handsomely marked with black, brown, green, and white. It is the goose so often represented, in old fresco paintings of heathen temples, by the ancients. This goose is famous for its devotion to its young. The old birds will remain with their offspring during times of most imminent danger, refusing to save themselves and leave ...
— Mamma's Stories about Birds • Anonymous (AKA the author of "Chickseed without Chickweed")
... the origins of our knowledge of electricity and magnetism are lost in the mists of antiquity, but there are two facts which have come to be regarded as the starting-points of the science. It was known to the ancients at least 600 years before Christ, that a piece of amber when excited by rubbing would attract straws, and that a lump of lodestone had the property of drawing iron. Both facts were probably ascertained ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... on frothing toast Looking toward the melancholy host; Praised the old wall-eyed mare to please the groom; Laughed to the laughing maid and fetched her broom; Stood in the background not to interfere When the cool ancients frolicked at their beer; Talked only in my turn, and made no claim For recognition or by voice or name, Content to listen, and to watch the blue Or grey of eyes, or what ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... The ground-lines of a fort. This certainly showed a degree of advancement beyond what the Somali now enjoy, inasmuch as they have no buildings in the interior, though that does not say much for the ancients. The plan of the church is an oblong square, 48 by 27 feet, its length lying N.E. and S.W., whilst its breadth was directed N.W. and S.E., which latter may be considered its front and rear. In the centre of the N.W. wall there was a niche, which evidently, if built by Christians, was intended ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... the rights of the proletariate of speech. More than fifty years before, the younger Pliny, himself an effective witness for the delicate power of the Latin tongue, had said,—"I am one of those who admire the ancients, yet I do not, like some others, underrate certain instances of genius which our own times afford. For it is not true that nature, as if weary and effete, no longer produces what is admirable." And he, Flavian, would prove himself the true master of the opportunity ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... this difference only, that in the election of that representative body the right of suffrage was communicated to a part only of the people. From these facts, to which many others might be added, it is clear that the principle of representation was neither unknown to the ancients nor wholly overlooked in their political constitutions. The true distinction between these and the American governments, lies IN THE TOTAL EXCLUSION OF THE PEOPLE, IN THEIR COLLECTIVE CAPACITY, from any share in ...
— The Federalist Papers
... the word of God [1] deceitfully." The Hebrew embodies the term "devil" in another term, serpent,—which the senses are supposed to take in,—and then defines this serpent as "more subtle than all the beasts of the field." Subsequently, [5] the ancients changed the meaning of the term, to their sense, and then the serpent became a ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... term is derived from 'limen' and 'post,' which explains why we say that the person who has been captured by the enemy and has come back into our territories has returned by postliminium: for just as the threshold forms the boundary of a house, so the ancients represented the boundaries of the empire as a threshold; and this is also the origin of the term 'limes, signifying a kind of end and limit. Thus postliminium means that the captive returns by the same threshold at which he ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian
... America, the fourth part of the earth, of which the ancients knew naught, they sailed in the course of the sun until they discovered an archipelago of many islands in the eastern ocean, adjacent to farther Asia, inhabited by various peoples, and abounding in rich metals, precious stones, and pearls, and all manner of fruit. There ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga
... and numbered many disciples when this essay was written; but in the time of Laelius it had but recently invaded Rome, and Amafanius, who must have been his contemporary, was the earliest Roman writer who expounded its doctrine] I on the other hand attach superior value to the authority of the ancients whether that of our ancestors who established religious rites for the dead which they certainly would not have done if they had thought the dead wholly unconcerned in such observances [Footnote: This is sound reasoning as these rites ...
— De Amicitia, Scipio's Dream • Marcus Tullius Ciceronis
... the lines of Aristophanes referred to above, is cited as the ideal of a glorious death! But if he died by poison, the draught was not bullock's blood—the deadly nature of which was one of the vulgar fables of the ancients. In some parts of the continent it is, in this day, even ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 1707. The feelings expressed in Addison's essays on the ballads were part of the general patriotic archaism which at that time was moving in rapport with cyclic theories of the robust and the effete, as in Temple's essays, and was complicating the issue of the classical ancients versus the moderns. Again, these feelings were in harmony with the new Longinianism of boldness and bigness, cultivated in one way by Dennis and in another by Addison himself in later Spectators. The tribute to the old writers in Rowe's ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... with an obstinate and ardent desire of dying. We have several examples in our own times of persons, even young children, who for fear of some little inconvenience have despatched themselves. And what shall we not fear, says one of the ancients—[Seneca, Ep., 70.]—to this purpose, if we dread that which cowardice itself has ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... articulations of the hands and feet still retained their elasticity. The whole of Rome, men and women, to the number of twenty thousand, visited the marvel of Santa Maria Nova that day. I hasten to inform you of this event, because I want you to understand how the ancients took care to prepare not only their souls but also their bodies for immortality. I am sure that if you had had the privilege of beholding that lovely young face, your pleasure ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... Landers, the question was mooted by the Geographical Society of London, whether the Quorra or Niger, as discovered by Lander, was the same river as the Kigir of the ancients. Upon the whole subject it would have been sufficient to refer to D'Anville and Rennell, who favour the affirmative of the question, and on the opposite side to M. Wakkenaer, who of all later writers has examined it with the greatest diligence, had not recent discoveries ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... evergreen; there is nothing black to be seen about a growing plant, and it has often puzzled its admirers as to the cause of its specific name, which is in reference to the black roots of a year or more old. It would appear, moreover, that this is not the true "Black Hellebore" of the ancients (see remarks under H. Orientalis). This "old-fashioned" flower is becoming more and more valued. That it is a flower of the first quality is not saying much, compared with what might be said for it; and, perhaps, no plant under cultivation is ...
— Hardy Perennials and Old Fashioned Flowers - Describing the Most Desirable Plants, for Borders, - Rockeries, and Shrubberies. • John Wood
... per cent. 6 was pronounced to be the ordinary and legal standard of interest; 8 was allowed for the convenience of manufacturers and merchants; 12 was granted to nautical insurance, which the wiser ancients had not attempted to define; but, except in this perilous adventure, the practice of exorbitant usury was severely restrained.[33] The most simple interest was condemned by the clergy of the East and West; but the sense of mutual benefit, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... other, or of any excellence conceived to have been either summoned by an incantation, or struck out by an accident. And of late, among our leading masters, the loss has not been merely of the system of the ancients, but of all system whatsoever: the greater number paint as if the virtue of oil pigment were its opacity, or as if its power depended on its polish; of the rest, no two agree in use or choice of materials; not many are consistent even in their own practice; and the most zealous ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... that you derive from the Marechal, your father; curb it, or you are lost. These little ebullitions of passion give but slight satisfaction, and bring about great misfortunes. I have observed you give way to them too much. Oh, did you but know the advantage that a calm temper gives one over men! The ancients stamped it on the forehead of the divinity as his finest attribute, since it shows that he is superior to our fears and to our hopes, to our pleasures and to our pains. Therefore, my dear child, remain passive in the scenes you are about to witness; but see them you must. Be present ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... III. The ancients unanimously believed the Iliad the production of a single poet; in recent times a contrary opinion has been started; and in Germany, at this moment, the most fashionable belief is, that that wonderful poem was but a collection ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... written. There was a very great practical obstacle, too, in the way of its general introduction, in the want of any suitable materials for writing. To cut letters with a chisel and a mallet upon a surface of marble is a very slow and toilsome process. To diminish this labor the ancients contrived tables of brass, copper, lead, and sometimes of wood, and cut the inscriptions upon them by the use of various tools and implements. Still it is obvious, that by such methods as these the art of writing could ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott |
