"Mediaeval" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 1187 Giraldus Cambrensis came to Oxford and read his Expugnatio Hiberniae in public lectures, and entertained the doctors of the diverse faculties and the most distinguished scholars. [Footnote: Bishop Stubbs's "Lectures on Mediaeval and Modern History," p. 141, 8vo, 1886.] Oxford was doubtless at that time more renowned, but Cambridge followed not far behind. If the friars settled at Cambridge early in their career, it was because there was a suitable home for them there—an opening as we say—which the flourishing ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... publications for this purpose; he has had pupils of great merit, and he must be considered the master of the whole generation of modern wood-engravers, just as Cheret is the undisputed master of the poster. Lepere's ruling quality is strength. He seems to have rediscovered the mediaeval limners' secrets of cutting the wood, giving the necessary richness to the ink, creating a whole scale of half-tones, and specially of adapting the design to typographic printing, and making of it, so to say, an ornament and a decorative extension for the type. Lepere ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... It is the greatest miracle of our time. The comparative absence of either religion or philosophy among them to-day makes the spectacle of their docility, to me, far more remarkable than anything in the history of mediaeval martyrdom. When I come to consider also the prodigiously irritant influences of modern life in its legislation, journalism, amusements, swift locomotion, and, not least, its education for the masses, then I see wireless telegraphy and such things as ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... 'constitutive cell' of English mediaeval society.[20] The structure is always the same; under the headship of the lord we find two layers of population, the villeins and the freeholders; and the territory is divided into demesne land and tributary land of two classes, viz. that of the villeins and that of the freeholders. The cultivation ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... household. By the practice of rigid economy in family expenses I have been able to accumulate a large number of black-letter books and a fine collection of curios, including some fifty pieces of mediaeval armor. We have lived in rented houses all these years, but at no time has Alice abandoned the hope and the ambition of having a home of her own. "Our house" has been the burthen of her song from one year's end to the other. I understand that this becomes a monomania with a woman who lives ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... Middle Ages. There is the same naive presentation; the same introduction of the buffoon to offset tragedy with comedy; the same tendency to overemphasize the comic parts until all sense of reverence is lost. In some respects India and Mediaeval Europe are ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... hundred and seventy-five winters, for its Western features and comforts; but that Kieff, in its venerable maturity of a thousand summers, should be so spick and span with newness and reformation seemed at first utterly unpardonable. The inhabitants think otherwise, no doubt, and deplore the mediaeval hygienic conditions which render the town the most unhealthy in Europe, in the matter of the death-rate from ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... dear, why not admit it when you know it's true? You know quite well they would make a lovely couple. Just fancy them going up the aisle at St. Satisfax! It would be like mediaeval Kings and Queens." For Sally was still in that happy phase of girlhood in which a marriage is a wedding, et praeterea aliquid, but not much. "But," she continued, "I couldn't give up any of mamma—no, not so much as that—if she was to marry twenty Mr. Fenwicks." As the quantity indicated ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... restored him to her faithful arms! And so it befell that the poor man-tiger was obliged to take to the woods, where for many a day he dined on his old neighbours of the village, till he was at length shot, and recognised! In this superstition will be seen the prototype of the wolf-mania of mediaeval Europe. In Brittany, men betook themselves to the forests in the shape of wolves, out of a morbid passion for the amusement of howling and ravening; but if they left in some secure place the clothes they had thrown ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various
... tower, which is built in the ancient wall of the mediaeval town, is the tower of Caterina Cornaro, and one sees from most of my windows, so high are they, the whole Marca Trevigiana, with its tragic and dramatic associations of the early Middle Ages; the Eccelini, the Azzi, the incessant wars in which towns were treated by the tyrants like ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... glaring contrast with the evidence of the senses, that it failed of acceptance in antiquity or the middle ages. It found no favor with minds like those of Aristotle, Archimedes, Hipparchus, Ptolemy, or any of the acute and learned Arabian or mediaeval astronomers. All their ingenuity and all their mathematical skill were exhausted in the development of a wonderfully complicated and ingenious, but erroneous history. The great master truth, rejected for its simplicity, ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... finished epic. But its originally heathen Teutonic character is overlaid there with admixtures of Christian chivalry. In the Edda and other Scandinavian sources, the tale appears in fragmentary and lyrical shape, but in a purer version, without additions from the new faith or from mediaeval chivalry. It is in the Sigurd-, Fafnir-, Brynhild-, Gudrun-, Oddrun-, Atli-, and Hamdir Lays of the Norse Scripture that the original nature of the older German songs, which must have preceded the epic, can best be guessed. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... compassion go out to the weakest, so it is with the Indian teacher and his pupil. There is the relation something very human, something very ennobling. He would say it was essentially human rather than distinctively Eastern. For do we not find something very like it in Mediaeval Europe? There too before the coming of the modern era with its lack of leisure and its adherence to system and machinery, there was a bond as sacred between the master and his pupils. Luther used to salute his class ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... would pay for itself by quicker passages," she argued; "and it would be as good as insurance. I know. I've knocked about amongst reefs myself. Besides, if you weren't so mediaeval, I could be skipper and save more than ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... wrapped in mysterious gloom, we passed in silence with bitter-sweet memories of that day of days when we had first trodden its steps together: through the Central Saloon, the Mediaeval Room and the Asiatic Saloon, and so into the long ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... had an opportunity of inspecting the glorious assemblage of masterpieces of workmanship and design which were collected together at the Exhibition of Ancient and Mediaeval Art last spring, must have felt a desire to possess some more lasting memorial of that unparalleled display than the mere catalogue. {14} So strong, indeed, was this feeling at the time, as to call several announcements of works in preparation, commemorative of the Exhibition, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 62, January 4, 1851 • Various
... began with a long speech by Werner and were continued by a Dutch journalist, who took the contrary side but was listened to with exemplary patience. He was controverted by Domela Niewenhuis, the leader of the Dutch, who looks a mediaeval saint but speaks with ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... little else; and, before proceeding to examine the residuum of truth that probably exists in connection with this subject, it will be well for us briefly to examine the other and darker side of this curious relic of mediaeval superstition, and to see it in its most sombre hues. A belief for which more than nine million persons were either burned or hanged since it sprang into being; in whose cause five hundred persons were executed in three months in 1515 in Geneva alone, is not to be put aside as unworthy of a moment's ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... Semeca, called Teutonicus, a canon of Halberstadt in Germany, who was interested in the unchurchly study of mediaeval science and reputed to be a magician, possessing the vegetable stone supposed to make plants grow at will, having the same power over organic life that the philosopher's stone of the alchemists had over minerals, so that, like Albertus Magnus, another such mage of the ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... existed for much more than a century when it became possessed through the magnificence of Rede, Bishop of Chichester, of its wonderful library, so that not only has it the oldest quadrangle, but also the oldest mediaeval library in the kingdom. There is not a room in Oxford so impressive with a sense of antiquity. Its lancet windows, its rough desks sticking out from the bookcases, the chains which thwart the project of the book-thief, all help to obliterate the ages; though the decorations of the ceiling, ...
— Oxford • Frederick Douglas How
... to different countries, say a mediaeval Mahommedan in Tartary and a modern Englishman in Dahomey, or a Jesuit missionary in Brazil and a Wesley an in the Fiji Islands, agree in describing some analogous art, or rite, or myth among the people they have visited, it ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... getting to the subject of my visit. The old man listened to me with great composure, but with a marked accession of mysterious importance in his manner. So mediaeval astrologers drew down their brows with a solemn assumption of supernatural wisdom when consulted by some noble client—noble, but pitiably mortal in the presence of their hidden knowledge. He had put his book down as ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... text), consoles the captive with 'the very best wine,' secretly stored, for his private enjoyment, by the cruel and hypocritical Mussulman. She confesses the state of her heart, and inquires as to Lord Bateman's real property, which is 'half Northumberland.' To what period in the complicated mediaeval history of the earldom of Northumberland the ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... Russian; but he began, at once, to speak English, and said that he would prefer to speak that language, for the sake of practice. His pronunciation, although queer, was fairly intelligible, and I had little difficulty in understanding him; but his talk had a strange, mediaeval flavour, due, apparently, to the use of obsolete idioms and words. In the course of half an hour, I became satisfied that he was talking the English of the fifteenth century—the English of Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Fletcher—but how he had learned such English, in the nineteenth century and ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... read Wordsworth and Keats rather than Scott, George Eliot rather than Thackeray, German literature as well as French. He was national rather than provincial, open-minded not prejudiced, modern and not mediaeval. His characteristics — to be still further noted in the succeeding chapter — are all in direct contrast with those of the conservative Southerner. There have been other Southerners — far more than some men have thought — who have had his spirit, and have worked with heroism ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... late a writer as Macchiavelli was so decidedly imbued with the earlier or mediaeval conception of the position of a prince that he treats it as a matter which is self-evident: he never discusses it, but tacitly takes it as the presupposition and basis of his advice. It may be said generally that ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... whether he merits six feet of earth. But if you ask him what he can conquer—he can conquer the stars. Thus comes the thing called Romance, a purely Christian product. A man cannot deserve adventures; he cannot earn dragons and hippogriffs. The mediaeval Europe which asserted humility gained Romance; the civilization which gained Romance has gained the habitable globe. How different the Pagan and Stoical feeling was from this has been admirably expressed in a famous quotation. Addison makes ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... begets affection, which may deepen into love; but devotion and awe are plants hard to rear in our harsh climate; besides, can it be well denied that there is something in a huge collection of the ancient learning, of mediaeval folios, of controversial pamphlets, and in the thick black dust these things so woefully collect, provocative of listlessness and enervation and of a certain Solomonic dissatisfaction? The two writers of modern times, ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... in the Trevisan, is a very picturesque mediaeval fortified town, the ancient Acelum. It lies at the foot of a hill which is surrounded by the ruins of an old castle; before it stretches the great plain of the rivers Brenta and Piave, where Treviso, Vicenza, and Padua may be clearly recognised. The Alps encircle it, and in the ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... books Mr. Baldwin presents respectively the legends relating to the Trojan War, the great Siegfried myth of Northern Europe, and the mediaeval romance of Roland and Charlemagne, bringing before the reader, with great spirit, with scholarly accuracy and with unfailing taste these heroic figures and the times in which their adventures are ...
— A Jolly Fellowship • Frank R. Stockton
... caught this up, and bantered without discretion, in a way not becoming towards anybody, especially one some years her elder. Mary was good-humoured, but evidently did not like being asked if she had stayed in the mediaeval court, because she was afraid the great bulls of Nineveh would run at her with ...
— Countess Kate • Charlotte M. Yonge
... translated most of his emotions into motion. So he set off briskly, turning into the crowded part of the city. Here were narrow, winding streets; old houses that overhung above and almost touched, shutting out all but a thin line of sky; mediaeval doorways of heavy oak and iron that opened into courtyards, where once armed men had lounged, but where now broken wagons and other ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... with earnest purpose into Church ways of practical self-discipline and self-correction. Bishop Lloyd's lectures had taught him and others, to the surprise of many, that the familiar and venerated Prayer Book was but the reflexion of mediaeval and primitive devotion, still embodied in its Latin forms in the Roman Service books; and so indirectly had planted in their minds the idea of the historical connexion, and in a very profound way the spiritual sympathy, of the modern with the ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... yard without that announcing cry. It was mediaeval, the Blight said, positively—two lorn damsels, a benighted knight partially stripped of his armor by bush and sharp-edged rock, a gray palfrey (she didn't mention the impatient asses that had turned homeward) and she wished I had a horn to wind. I wanted a "horn" badly ...
— A Knight of the Cumberland • John Fox Jr.
... when Palma—seizing her opportunity—summons Sordello thither in his character of her minstrel, and reveals to him her projects for him and for herself, their interview is woven into the historical picture of a great mediaeval city suddenly called to arms. What Sordello sees when he goes with Palma to Ferrara, belongs to the history of all mediaeval warfare; and his sudden and premature death revives the historical tradition though in a new form. The intermediate details of his minstrel's career ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... matters of public interest such as has probably never before been seen in any great country. Public spirit of equal or greater intensity may have been witnessed in small and highly educated communities, such as ancient Athens or mediaeval Florence, but in the United States it is diffused over an area equal to the whole of Europe. Among the leading countries of the world England is the one which comes nearest to the United States in the general diffusion of enlightened public spirit and political capacity ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... century. To gain an accurate, really specific knowledge of the properties of elementary bodies was reserved for the chemists of a recent epoch. The vague Greek questionings as to organic evolution were world-wide from the precise inductions of a Darwin. If the mediaeval Arabian endeavored to dull the knife of the surgeon with the use of drugs, his results hardly merit to be termed even an anticipation of modern anaesthesia. And when we speak of preventive medicine—of bacteriology in all ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... shepherd's path and the Roman road is probably short in comparison with that between the mere chamois track and the first thing that can be called a path of men. From the Roman we go on to the mediaeval road with more frequent stone bridges, and from the mediaeval ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... island around the earth, a chain of forts and factories dotting the newly-discovered and yet undiscovered points of vantage, on island or promontory, in every sea; a watery, nebulous, yet most substantial empire—not fantastic, but practical—not picturesque and mediaeval, but modern and lucrative—a world-wide commonwealth with a half-submerged metropolis, which should rule the ocean with its own fleets and, like Venice and Florence, job its land wars with mercenary ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... he meets with the phenomena of her sanctity and begins to perceive that the difference between the character she produces in her saints and the character of the noblest of those who do not submit to her is one of kind and not merely of degree. If she is merely mediaeval, how is it that she commands such allegiance as that which is paid to her in modern America? If she is merely European, how is it that she alone can deal with the Oriental on his own terms? If she is merely the result of temporal circumstances, how is it ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... Doubtless, as religious ideas advanced and the conception of the nature of the gods became higher, there came the notion that they did not dwell in houses made with hands; yet a Greek temple, just like a mediaeval cathedral, might be made beautiful as a pleasing service and an honour to the deity to whom it was dedicated; and there was a continuous tradition in practice from the lower conception to the higher, nor is it easy to draw the line at any particular ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner
... in every sentence he writes of the Middle Ages; always vital, right, and profound; so that in the matter of art, . . .there is hardly a principle connected with the mediaeval temper, that he has not struck upon in those seemingly careless and too rugged rhymes of his. There is a curious instance, by the way, in a short poem *1* referring to this very subject of tomb and image sculpture; all illustrating just one of those phases of ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... long, the corners of her mouth were sharp, and, thanks to this general sharpness, the expression of her face was biting. Swathed in a closely fitting black dress with a mass of lace at her neck and sleeves, with sharp elbows and long pink fingers, she recalled the portraits of mediaeval English ladies. The grave concentration of her face increased ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... is mediaeval Germany in the time of the feuds and robber barons and romance. The kidnapping of Otto, his adventures among rough soldiers and his daring rescue make up a spirited ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... In mediaeval days, "ladies, at all events, as represented by the poets, were not, on the whole, very prudish. Meleranz surprised a lady who was taking a bath under a lime tree; the bath was covered with samite, and by it was a magnificent ivory bed, surrounded by tapestries representing the history ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Adige, and looked across the river. Far away the Alps that look down on Garda glistened under the stars; the citadel on its hill, the houses across the river were alive with lights; to the left the great mediaeval bridge rose, a dark, ponderous mass, above the torrents of the Adige. Overhead, the little outside restaurant was roofed with twining vine-stems from which the leaves had fallen; colored lights twinkled among them and on the white tables underneath. The night was mild ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in the golden age of chivalry; and he simply transferred its setting to this chivalrous story of ancient Greece. The arms, the lists, the combat, the whole environment are those of the England of Edward III, not the Athens of Theseus. Dryden has left this unchanged, realizing the charm of its mediaeval simplicity. As Dryden gives it to us the poem is an example of narrative verse, brisk in its movement, dramatic in its action, and interspersed with descriptive passages that stimulate the ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... of the present century there began to be a disposition to grant to mediaeval times their proper place in the history of the preservation and dissemination of books, and Merryweather's Bibliomania in the Middle Ages was one of the earliest works in English devoted to the subject. Previous to that time, those ten centuries lying between the fall of the Roman ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... was, as befitted its Chatelaine, the most Elizabethanly complete abode in Riseholme, the rest of the village in its due degree, fell very little short of perfection. It had but its one street some half mile in length but that street was a gem of mediaeval domestic architecture. For the most part the houses that lined it were blocks of contiguous cottages, which had been converted either singly or by twos and threes into dwellings containing the comforts demanded by the twentieth century, but externally ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... conditions of mankind. These are the stories that are said to be immortal. They have been repeated and re-repeated in many forms and to all kinds of audiences. They have been recited and sung in royal palaces, in the halls of mediaeval castles, and by the camp fires of warring heroes. Parents have taught them to their children, and generation after generation has preserved their memory. They have been written on parchment and printed ...
— Hero Tales • James Baldwin
... on his way home; he had reached the corner of Theresa Street when he ran into the crowd. He stopped out of idle curiosity. The first division of the parade came up: it consisted of three heralds in gaudy mediaeval costumes, and back of them were three councillors ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... her a fire shovel. 'It is not necessary,' replied the child, and having laid cold ashes on her palm, she placed a glowing ember on them and bore it away safely. 'With all my wisdom,' said the sage, 'I should never have thought of that!' The jest is of mediaeval antiquity—possibly pre-Latin—it was in later days, however, versified by Schurrias—an extremely aged and dying woman being ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... to say that I have absolutely no faith in the future of which you speak! It is my opinion that democracy is the fatal enemy of art. How can you speak of ancient and mediaeval states? Neither in Greece nor in Italy was there ever what we understand by ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... dog. It, too, came from the East. It is found in the Pantcha-Tantra, in the Hitopadesa, in Bidpai's Fables, in the Arabic original of The Seven Wise Masters, that famous collection of stories which illustrate a stepdame's calumny and hate, and in many mediaeval versions of those originals [6]. Thence it passed into the Latin Gesta Romanorum, where, as well as in the Old English version published by Sir Frederick Madden, it may be read as a service rendered by a faithful hound against a snake. This, too, like Tell's master-shot, is as the lightning ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... spongy organism of gloom stood the coarse and sudden sculpture of his torment; the big mouth of night carefully spurted the angular actual language of his martyred body. I had seen him before in the dream of some mediaeval saint, with a thief sagging at either side, surrounded with crisp angels. Tonight he was alone; save for myself, and the moon's minute flower pushing ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... its ironical promptings were but fleeting. Five minutes' drive and we were in the true Jena with the real flavor of mediaeval-ism about us. Here is the hostelry where Luther met the Swiss students in 1522. There is nothing in that date to suggest our Iowa village, nor in the aspect of the hostelry itself, thank fortune. And there rises the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... no aristocracy of sanctity, nor does the name of saint belong only to those who live high above the ordinary tumults of life and the secularities of daily duty. You may be as true a saint in a factory—ay! and a far truer one—than in a hermitage. You do not need to cultivate a mediaeval or Roman Catholic type of ascetic piety in order to be called saints. You do not need to be amongst the select few to whom it is given here upon earth, but not given without their own effort, to rise to the highest summits of holy conformity with the divine ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... that part of our race which was most living and progressive, was baptized into a death; and endeavoured, by suffering in the flesh, to cease from sin. Of this endeavour, the animating labours and afflictions of early Christianity, the touching asceticism of mediaeval Christianity, are the great historical manifestations. Literary monuments of it, each, in its own way, incomparable, remain in the Epistles of St. Paul, in St. Augustine's Confessions, and in the two original and ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... modern and the ancient notion of a distinction between primary and derivative matter is, to a certain extent, real. For this ethereal 'Urstoff' of the modern corresponds very closely with the prhote hyle of Aristotle, the materia prima of his mediaeval followers; while matter, differentiated into our elements, is the equivalent of the first stage of progress towards the heschhate hyle, or finished matter, of ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
... a place in Quedlinburg. I still remember with pleasure Steuerwald's beautiful winter landscapes, into which he so cleverly introduced the mediaeval ruins of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... To-morrow he was to die. He was to die because his life long he had sought to rob others of the tiny grain, of their God-given dignity as men, and that too, even as they were awaking to its possession. The vanity, the presumptuous, inconsistent vanity of it all! Under the dark mediaeval cloak he had planned enlightenment, he, who had tried to rule without parliament, without constitution! He would have made a people believe in God's injustice, in God's choice of a man like them to be a demigod over them. Hence the ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... severely monachal. Let me cite a single instance. She gave me her miniature in a medallion. I wore it over my heart, a practice much affected by men; but one day, while idly rummaging about a shop filled with curiosities, I found an iron "discipline whip" such as was used by the mediaeval flagellants. At the end of this whip was a metal plate bristling with sharp iron points; I had the medallion riveted to this plate and then returned it to its place over my heart. The sharp points pierced my bosom with every movement and caused such strange, voluptuous anguish ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... instrument from which the artist extorts exquisite and sinister music. We turn our heads away, but the tune of cracking souls haunts our ear. As much to Rops as to Baudelaire, Victor Hugo could have said that he had evoked a new shudder. And singularly enough Rops is in these plates the voice of the mediaeval preacher crying out that Satan is alive, a tangible being, going about the earth devouring us; that Woman is a vase of iniquity, a tower of wrath, a menace, not a salvation. His readings of the early fathers and his pessimistic temperamental bent ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... In mediaeval times it had no doubt been a main defence of the place. It was very deep in parts, especially at the waist or narrow that was spanned by the decayed bridge. There were hundreds of carp and tench in it older than any He in Cumberland, and also enormous pike ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... we thought of doing long ago at Sens, when you wished to write a critical history of Philosophy and I a great mediaeval romance about Nogent, the subject of which I had found in Froissart: 'How Messire Brokars de Fenestranges and the Archbishop of Troyes attacked Messire Eustache ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... still extant in Persia, China, and India, and even among the nations of the West, in the rustic nooks and corners of the Roman Catholic countries of Europe. But the existing nations, which still preserve that old ethnic worship and the mediaeval superstitions, are mere lingerers and camp-followers in the march of humankind. Under the ample skirts of the Roman Church still cower and lurk the superstitions of the old ethnic world, baptized to be sure, and called by new names. The Roman see has ever had a lingering kindness ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... or amercement by fine, known to the Mosaic, Roman, and old English law. Gad, sir, the Jews might have made you MARRY his widow or sister. An old custom, and I think superseded—sir, properly superseded—by the alternative of ordeal by battle in the mediaeval times. I don't myself fancy these pecuniary fashions of settling wrongs,—but ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... clear, would not of itself involve this immediate impulse to end a sequence of notes on one rather than on another. Nor is tonality, in the all- pervasive sense in which we understand it, a characteristic of ancient, or of mediaeval music, while the tendency to end on a certain tone, which we should to-day call the tonic, was always felt. Thus, since complete tonality was developed late in the history of music, while the closing on the tonic was certainly prior to it, the finality of ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... is set in aristocratic circles in the fifteenth century. For that reason there is a great deal of mediaeval English. However, most of the unusual words are explained as they occur, so there is no problem with comprehension. The last chapter is headed "Historical Appendix", and contains potted lives of most of the people whom ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... or distress, in a word, of any kind with our landlady's opulent figure, we found a difficult acrobatic mental feat. She presented to the eye outlines and features that could only be likened, in point of prosperity, to a Dutch landscape. Like certain of the mediaeval saints presented by the earlier delineators of the martyrs as burning above a slow fire, while wearing smiles of purely animal content, as if in full enjoyment of the temperature, this lady's sufferings were doubtless an invisible discipline, the hair shirt which her hardened ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... provincial assemblies. But the scheme of standing on the ancient ways, and raising a new France on the substructure of the old, brought out the fact that whatever growth of institutions there once had been had been stunted and stood still. If the mediaeval polity had been fitted to prosper, its fruit must be gathered from other countries, where the early notions had been pursued far ahead. The first thing to do was to cultivate the foreign example; and ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... radical reversal of things this was; what a jumbling together of extravagant incongruities; what a fantastic conjunction of opposites and irreconcilables—the home of the bogus miracle become the home of a real one, the den of a mediaeval hermit turned ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... pavan, a favorite dance in the days of Louis le Grand, imitated its stately step. In the days of chivalry the most solemn oath was taken on the peacock's body, roasted whole and adorned with its gay feathers, as Shallow swore "by cock and pie." I saw the fairest of all the fair dames at a grand mediaeval banquet proudly bearing the bird to the table. The woman who hesitates is lost. I bought the pair, and ordered them ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... force and gravity and dignity which befits the subject, and in such a way that after years will find nothing to smile at and nothing to unlearn. They have to be taught as the mind of the present time can best apprehend them, not according to the portraiture of mediaeval pictures, but in a language perhaps not more true and adequate in itself but less boisterous and more comprehensible to our self-conscious and introspective moods. Father Faber's treatment of these last things, hell and heaven, would furnish matter for instruction not beyond the understanding ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... beg his wife to take him on trust, yet, after all, he takes his wife on trust, and he tells her at the outset that he cannot reveal the truth about himself. Elsa is vastly preferable to the ordinary distressed mediaeval maiden, if only because a woman who is too weak to be worth a snap of the fingers does move us to pity, whereas the ordinary mediaeval is cut out of pasteboard, and does not affect us at all. The King is perhaps merely ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... breathe but a mumble-toothed and terrible old hag. The ruin stands above a desolate marsh, its vast Italian buildings of Palladian splendour looking more forlorn in their decay than the older and austerer mediaeval towers, which rise up proud and patient and defiantly erect beneath the curse of time. When at length what used to be the castle town of Les Baux is reached, you find a naked mountain of yellow sandstone, worn away by nature into bastions and buttresses ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... flippancy his venerable name. Men, in proportion to their intellect, have admitted his transcendent claims. The way to know him, is to compare him, not with nature, but with other men. How many ages have gone by, and he remains unapproached! A chief structure of human wit, like Karnac, or the mediaeval cathedrals, or the Etrurian remains, it requires all the breadth of human faculty to know it. I think it is truliest seen, when seen with the most respect. His sense deepens, his merits multiply, with study. When we say, here is a fine collection ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... with their thumbs, or cut them with sharp knives which damage the margins. It is so difficult to keep paper knives, and ivory paper knives are the favourite pasture of some scholars, who bite the edges till the weapon resembles a dissipated saw. To avoid this temptation some employ mediaeval daggers, or skene dhus, but the edges spoil a book. Cigarette ashes are very bad for books, so is butter, also marmalade. Dr. Johnson and Wordsworth are said to have been very careless with their books. Dr. Johnson used to clean his from dust by knocking them together, as Mr. Leighton says ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... dimensions, which can alone fully satisfy the exigencies of his art. We take leave, however, to observe, that such ought not to be the reasoning of an English nobleman or gentleman. In the first place, what is really erected in a proper and legitimate style of architecture, be it classical or mediaeval, can never become "old-fashioned" or ugly. Is Hampton Court old-fashioned and ugly? is Audley End so? are Burghleigh and Hatfield so? If they are, go and build better. Is Windsor Castle so? yes, a large portion ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... Martel (Charles with the Hammer) the Frankish chieftain, saved Europe from a Mohammedan con-quest. He drove the Moslems out of France, but they maintained themselves in Spain where Abd-ar-Rahman founded the Caliphate of Cordova, which became the greatest centre of science and art of mediaeval Europe. ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... one time there had stood there "a burgh-kenning, or watch-tower of the city, called in some language a barbican;" and modern etymologists perfect Stow's observation by tracing the name, through the mediaeval Latin barbacana, to the Persian bala khaneh, meaning "upper chamber," whence our less corrupt form balcony, actually identical with barbican. [Footnote: Stow, as quoted in Cunningham's London, Art. "Barbican;" and Wedgwood's Dict. ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... Just as when sojourning in a country devoid of monuments and ruins, the mind at length absolutely hungers for some grand, ecclesiastical building, some glorious vestige of early ages; so when we have once grown familiar with mediaeval towns and outlines, it becomes an absolute necessity occasionally to run away from our prosy nineteenth century habitations, and refresh our spirit, and absorb into our inmost nature all these refining old-world charms. It is ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... originally a martial significance, implying capacity in the wielding of the spear. {1a} Its first recorded holder is John Shakespeare, who in 1279 was living at 'Freyndon,' perhaps Frittenden, Kent. {1b} The great mediaeval guild of St. Anne at Knowle, whose members included the leading inhabitants of Warwickshire, was joined by many Shakespeares in the fifteenth century. {1c} In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the surname is found far more frequently in Warwickshire than ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... part of Europe more wanting in what is known as 'scenery' than Flanders; and those who journey there must spend most of their time in the old towns which are still so strangely mediaeval in their aspect, or in country places which are worth seeing only because of their connection with some event in history—Nature has done so little for them. Thus the interest and the attraction ...
— Bruges and West Flanders • George W. T. Omond
... future life. The country enchanted him. He was smitten with love for it, as men are smitten with a beautiful face. And the white Moorish city had one special charm for him—it was seldom quite free from Americans, Among the mediaeval loungers in the narrow streets, it filled his heart with joy to see at intervals two or three big men in buckskin or homespun. And he did not much wonder that the Morisco-Hispano-Mexican feared these Anglo-Americans, ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... to be divinely appointed agents of the Judge of all the earth: His creatures chosen to punish His creatures. And so behind those professors, away back in history, were ranged Catholic popes and Protestant archbishops, and kings and queens, Protestant and Catholic, and great mediaeval jurists, and mailed knights and palm-bearing soldiers of the cross, and holy inquisitors drowning poor old bewildered women, tearing living flesh from flesh as paper, crushing bones like glass, burning the shrieking human body to cinders: this in the name of a Christ whose ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... by that sovereign as the representative of Prussia in the German Diet, he carried with him a reputation for unflinching devotion to the Crown, for a conservatism which had been styled not only "mediaeval" but "antediluvian," and for startling originality in his views as well as fearlessness in expressing them. The latter attribute he displayed when, in reply to a remark of a French diplomat on a question of policy, ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... and the nature of their discoveries. In the latter movement, as in the former, Italy took the lead. The martyr Giordano Bruno was the brave Columbus of modern thought,—the first who broke loose from the trammels of mediaeval ecclesiastical tradition, and reported a new world beyond the watery waste of scholasticism. Campanella may represent the Vespucci of the new enterprise; Lord Bacon its Sebastian Cabot,—the "Novum Organum" being the Newfoundland of modern experimental science. Des Cartes was the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... (Weltmacht oder Niedergang). To assimilate Germany to ancient Rome the Kaiser on occasion reminds himself of Caesar and affects to reign, not by the will of the people, but by divine right. No living monarch has said or done more to revive this mediaeval fetich. To his soldiers he has recently said: "You think each day of your Emperor. Do not forget ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... devilish delight in using all the arts of delusion which the astral plane puts in their power in order to lead others into the same excesses which have proved so fatal to themselves. Quoting again from the same letter:—"These are the Pisachas the incubi and succubae of mediaeval writers—demons of thirst and gluttony, of lust and avarice, of intensified craft, wickedness and cruelty, provoking their victims to horrible crimes, and revelling in their commission". From this class and the last are drawn the tempters—the devils of ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... seminary. He had subsequently studied law and had practised for some time, when he had suddenly abandoned his profession in order to accept the ill-paid post of librarian and secretary to the father of the present Prince Montevarchi. Probably his love of mediaeval lore had got the better of his desire for money, and during the five and twenty years he had spent in the palace he had never been heard to complain of his condition. He lived in a small chamber in the attic and passed his days in the library, ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... present is doubtless to be found in the inflexibility of the institution of the family, under which lovers are allowed to live together and bring into existence the children of their love. The family, as we have it, was shaped under the stress of mediaeval disorder. In such a time men are willing to pay any price for peace and quiet. And so the barbarian invaders, living among the broken fragments of Greek and Roman civilization, gradually shaped feudalism, culminating in absolute monarchy, ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... not personal; but she certainly attracted me. She attracts me still. A man must have some outlet for the natural and instinctive emotions of our common humanity; and if a monastic Oxford community imposes celibacy upon one with mediaeval absurdity—why, Selah Briggs is, for the time being, the only possible sort of outlet. One needn't marry her in the end; but for the moment it is certainly very excellent fooling. Not unsentimental either—for my part I could never care for mere coarse, commonplace, venal wretches. ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... had been secretary to the last of the Counts of Spada, one of the most powerful families of mediaeval Italy, and he, dying in poverty, had left Faria an old breviary, which had been in the family since the days of the Borgias. In this, by chance, Faria found a piece of yellowed paper, on which, when put in the fire, writing began to appear. From the remains of the paper he made out ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... inextricable way in which Socrates is entangled in that history (although we have all seen many a Scriptural personage so transmuted under far less colourable pretenses or advantages), still it is evident that the mediaeval schoolmen did practically treat Socrates as something of that sort—as a mythical, symbolic, or representative man. Socrates is the eternal burthen of their quillets, quodlibets, problems, syllogisms; for them he is the Ulysses of the Odyssey, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... who has the slightest regard for historical monuments, who values mediaeval architecture, or cares in the least degree for the beautiful and the picturesque, must heartily sympathize with M. Victor Hugo in his protest against the proposed scheme for uniting the wonderful island of Mont St. Michel with the mainland by means of a causeway, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... vein of interest, and were a revelation of humanity under aspects and influences hitherto unobserved by the ripe civilization of Europe. The taste which had become cloyed with endless imitations of the feudal and mediaeval pictures of Scott turned with fresh delight to such original figures—so full of sylvan power and wildwood grace—as Natty Bumppo and Uncas. European readers, too, received these sketches with an unqualified, because an ignorant ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... hangings, bearing strange devices and inscriptions in long thin Arabic characters. Few rooms in the Kasbah were decorated in this manner, and it had instantly occurred to me that, concealed somewhere, was one of those secret ways which, whether in the Oriental palace, or the mediaeval European castle, are so suggestive of ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... If he had not sometimes found occasions for satisfying both, he could not have lived in Paris and London at all, but would have gone back to Constantinople, which is the last refuge of romance in Europe, the last hiding-place of mediaeval adventure, the last city of which a new Decameron of tales could still be told, ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... to conceive of a greater responsibility than that of a mediaeval Inquisitor. The life or death of the heretic was practically at his disposal. The Church, therefore, required him to possess in a pre-eminent degree the qualities of an impartial judge. Bernard Gui, the most experienced Inquisitor ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard
... riddles which may be found in one form or another in nearly every folklore on the earth. Even Samson had a riddle. Always popular, they seem to have been especial favourites in early Oriental literature, in the mediaeval Latin races, and, in slightly more modern times, amongst the Teutonic and Scandinavian peoples. Perhaps King John and the Abbot is the best English specimen, for it is to-day as pleasing to an audience ...
— Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Second Series • Frank Sidgwick
... those of the kings and queens of mediaeval, as well as later, times, differ greatly from those of other lands. This is perhaps not so much in their degree of splendour and luxury as in the sentiment which attaches itself to them. In France there has ever been a spirit ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... wrote to Helen, "on the superiority of the unseen to the seen. It's true, but to brood on it is mediaeval. Our business is not to contrast the ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... about the year 1860, when the question of abolition was shaking the Bear from head to tail, that this unique movement began. By some obscure trait of national heritage, there sprang up, almost at the same hour, through the mediaeval gloom that still enveloped Peter's Empire, a thousand points of unwonted light. They were to be found burning at once in the twilight of isolated manors and the midnight of the serf's hut: in the city palace, and its neighboring tenement. Yet they sprang up among ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... men developed more regular and ample measures. They evolved the hexameter; the laisse of the Chansons de Geste; the strange technicalities of Scandinavian poetry; the metres of Vedic hymns; the choral odes of Greece. The narrative popular chant became in their hands the Epic, or the mediaeval rhymed romance. The metre of improvised verse changed into the artistic lyric. These lyric forms were fixed, in many cases, by the art of writing. But poetry did not remain solely in professional and literary hands. The mediaeval minstrels and jongleurs (who may best be studied ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... vigour. Opposed to this was the other great undercurrent in Italian life, mystical, religious and speculative, which had run through the nation from the earliest times, and received fresh volume from mediaeval Christianity, encouraging ecstatic mysticism to drive to frenzy the population of its mountain cities. Umbrian painting is inspired by it, and the glowing words of Jacopone da Todi expressed in poetry the same religious fervour which the life of Florence and Perugia ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... be free from these feudal tyrannies, these mediaeval chains and manacles that the Norman kings imposed on a conquered people. We must be as free as the United States ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... erection thereon of additional premises for the accommodation of the growing Postal staff. The work began on the 26th September. The cost of the new wing was estimated at L16,000. Beneath the superstructure there were two tiers of ancient cellars, one below the other, forming part of the original mediaeval mansion once owned by the Creswick family; and the removal of these was attended with much difficulty. The new building was opened for business on the 4th ...
— The King's Post • R. C. Tombs
... was beyond Jessie's powers to negotiate. They stood looking across it at the inviting shades of an avenue of heavy red willows, with its winding alley of tawny grass fringing the stately pine woods, whose depths suggested the chastened aisles of some mediaeval cathedral. ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... between Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning had all the wonder and beauty of a mediaeval romance, with the notable addition of being historically true. The familiar story of a damosel imprisoned in a gloomy dungeon, guarded by a cruel dragon—and then, when all her hope had vanished, rescued by the sudden appearance of the brilliant knight, who carried her away from her dull prison ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... But whereas others have called attention to the classical and Italian sources for English critical ideas, I am able to show that in addition to these sources, the English critics were profoundly influenced by English mediaeval traditions. That these mediaeval traditions derived ultimately from post-classical rhetoric and that they were for the most part later discarded as less enlightened and less sound than the critical ideas of the Italian Aristotelians ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... stage-management of the play. He dried the tears of girlish neophytes at rehearsals. He helped to number the stalls. He showed a passionate interest in the tessellated pavement of the entrance. He taught the managerial typewriting girl how to make afternoon tea. He went to Hitchin to find a mediaeval chair required for the third act, and found it. In a word, he was fully equal to the post of acting manager. He managed! He managed everything and everybody except Edward Henry, and except the press-agent, a functionary whose conviction of his own indispensability and importance was so ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... characteristic, or, equally, to the traces here and there of an apparent carelessness of workmanship; or, yet again, to the new and very marked partiality for scenes and situations of English and modern rather than mediaeval and foreign life." ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... revived in Europe in the fifteenth century by Luca Della Rubbia, who was born in 1388. He discovered the art of glazing earthenware. In the former of these rooms, all sorts of weapons and defensive apparatus are met with—modern, mediaeval, and antique; some are highly finished, others very rude. In the Majolica Room, there is much matter for study, and those will fail to appreciate the value of the collection who have not learned something of the history of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various
... There were the old, old residents and their offspring, people who squabbled violently among themselves as to whose ancestor came aboard the Mayflower first, and which in what capacity. There were the mediaeval spinsters who always reach their best development in the semi-small New England town, spinsters who have clubs and theories, and yet play golf, and frivol delightfully above their luncheon tables. And there were college girls in hordes, alert young things, critical alike of evil ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... waiters and its amazing repertoire of English jams; the tea and liquor atelier of the same hostelry, with its high dome and its sheltering palms; the pretty little open air restaurant of the Kuenstlerhaus in the Lenbachplatz; the huge catacomb of the Rathaus, with its mediaeval arches and its vintage wines; the lovely al fresco cafe on Isar Island, with the green cascades of the Isar winging on lazy afternoons; the cafe in the Hofgarten, gay with birds and lovers; that in the Tiergarten, from the terrace of which ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... true answer to the investigations which are now taking place," exclaimed the doctor, "there was a great deal to be said for those mediaeval folk who burnt sorcerers and witches! I suppose you would admit that they were right in their belief that by so doing they were getting rid of very dangerous, as well as unpleasant, elements from out of ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... but one which never fails of its effect. This anti-hygienic crack in the wall, with its suggestions of yoni-worship, attracted me so strongly that I begged a priest to explain to me its mystical signification. But he only said, with a touch of mediaeval contempt: ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... into the mire. There!—But I want to say it! I want to save the existing order. I want, Christianity, instead of the Mammonism we 're threatened with. Great fortunes now are becoming the giants of old to stalk the land: or mediaeval Barons. Dispersion of wealth, is the secret. Nataly's of that mind with me. A decent poverty! She's rather wearying, wants a change. I've a steam-yacht in my eye, for next month on the Mediterranean. All our set. She likes quiet. I believe in my ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... noblest proof of his love of England lies in the work which immortalizes his name. In his "Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation," Baeda was at once the founder of mediaeval history and the first English historian. All that we really know of the century and a half that follows the landing of Augustine we know from him. Wherever his own personal observation extended, the story is told with ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... Sams's collection of Egyptian antiquities were bought by Joseph Mayer, Esq, F.S.A., of Liverpool, about two years ago, to add to his previous assemblage of similar monuments, and are placed by him, with a very valuable collection of mediaeval antiquities, in the Egyptian Museum, 8. Colquitt Street, Liverpool. The small charge of sixpence for each visit opens the entire collection to the public; but it is a lamentable fact, that the curiosity or patriotism ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 213, November 26, 1853 • Various
... literary heritage has been waiting, precariously subjected to the vicissitudes of earthly circumstance. Like a lone great manuscript within the cloister of a mediaeval monk, Brann's work might have perished utterly soon after its creation, like a song of magic music held but fleetingly within ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... fell.' Here is pure fable, not legend, but still a curious forecast of twentieth century bombs from a rigid dirigible. It is to be noted in this case, as in many, that the power to fly was an attribute of evil, not of good—it was the demons who built the chariot, even as at Friedrichshavn. Mediaeval legend in nearly every case, attributes flight to the aid of evil powers, and incites well-disposed people to stick to the solid earth—though, curiously enough, the pioneers of medieval times were very largely of priestly type, as ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... on the occurrence of the supra-condyloid foramen in the human humerus; anthropomorphous apes more bipedal than quadrupedal; on the capacity of Parisian skulls at different periods; comparison of modern and mediaeval skulls; on tails of quadrupeds; on the influence of natural selection; on hybridity in man; on human remains from Les Eyzies; on the cause of the difference ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... Nikola is one of the most remarkable. The last of the mediaeval chieftains of Europe—a survival from a past age—he is an epitome of the good and bad qualities of his race. In common with that of other half-wild races the Montenegrin mind is credulous and child-like and at the same time crafty and cunning. With a very limited outlook, the Balkan ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... which played in the unfinished universe before the creation of man. The Muses smiled with a look more of complaisance than approval, as they reviewed the army of Troubadours and Minnesingers and the crowd of romancers who followed in their train. They decided that the joyous array of early mediaeval literature was full of promise, though something of its tone and temper was past the comprehension of pagan goddesses. The legends of saints and pictures of martyrdoms were especially mysterious to them, and they regarded them raptly, not smilingly, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... first struggle to involve the globe. No general movement of man has been so wide-spreading, so far-reaching. Quite local was the supremacy of any ancient people; likewise the rise to empire of Macedonia and Rome, the waves of Arabian valor and fanaticism, and the mediaeval crusades to the Holy Sepulchre. But since those times the planet has undergone ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... away with horror from even the sins that they are willing to do, when they are put plainly and bluntly before them. As an old mediaeval preacher once said, 'There is nothing that is weaker than the devil stripped naked.' By which he meant exactly this—that we have to dress wrong in some fantastic costume or other, so as to hide its native ugliness, in order to tempt men to do it. So we have two sets of names for wrong ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... are curiously mediaeval. The steam-tram has been rushing along for some miles, past beer gardens and villas, when suddenly it slows to walking pace as we twist in and out over the bridges of a moat, and creeping through the tunnel of a rampart are ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... the gold-mine. Porportuk was content to plod and accumulate. Klakee-Nah went back to his large house and proceeded to spend. Porportuk was known as the richest Indian in Alaska. Klakee-Nah was known as the whitest. Porportuk was a money-lender and a usurer. Klakee-Nah was an anachronism—a mediaeval ruin, a fighter and a feaster, happy ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... Science; Oxford was in the thirteenth century the great centre of the Friars' movement in England. Others will remember that in the next century it produced, in John Wycliffe, the great opponent of the Friars, the man who, as the first of the Reformers, is to many the most interesting figure in mediaeval English religious history. In the sixteenth century, Oxford plays no great part in the actual revolution in the English Church; yet it will be a place attractive to many who cherish the memory of the "Oxford Reformers," the members of Erasmus' ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells
... at Quebec is a turreted pile of masonry wandering down a cliff over the very cellars of the ancient Castle of St. Louis. A twentieth-century hotel, it simulates well a mediaeval fortress and lifts against the cold blue northern sky an atmosphere of history. Old voices whisper about its towers and above the clanging hoofs in its paved court; deathless names are in the wind which blows from the "fleuve," the great ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... which he was to travel on a meagre pittance, and somehow prove his ultimate ability to increase it by his pen. The quaint conditions of the test struck me first: it seemed about as conclusive as a mediaeval 'ordeal.' Then I was touched by her having sent him to me. I had always wanted to do her some service, to justify myself in my own eyes rather than hers; and here was a beautiful embodiment of ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... those years, it happened that he had never been within Paisley Castle, and that he had never met any of the family except the earl and his aged countess. Lady Cochrane and the Covenanting servants could have given a thumb-nail sketch of him which would have done for a mediaeval picture of Satan, and an accompanying letter-press of his character which would have been a slander upon Judas Iscariot. Her heroic ladyship had, however, never met Claverhouse, and she prayed God she never would, not because she was afraid of him or of the devil himself, but because she knew ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... Paris. A few moments later, having picked up a cab, he was driving rapidly westward, down the broad, still seething Boulevard du Temple, and, as he suddenly became aware with a sharp pang at his heart, past the entrance to the quiet mediaeval square, where, only four short days ago, he and Peggy walking side by side, had held the conversation which was to prove pregnant of so much short-lived joy, and of such ...
— The Uttermost Farthing • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... ought to be written from the angle of Klingsor, who was an enlightened Arabian, physician, scientist and probably Aristotelian.... The Knights, and Wagner with them, call him a wizard, which was a crude mediaeval way of 'slanging' any man who preferred knowledge ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 3rd, 1920 • Various
... from the farm which bears its name. Ere that last elevation of the land, however, to which our country owes the level marginal strip that stretches between the present coast-line and the ancient one, the sea must have found its way to the old farm. Loch Maree (Mary's Loch), a name evidently of mediaeval origin, would then have existed as a prolongation of the marine Loch Ewe, and Kinlochewe would have actually been what the compound words signify—the head of Loch Ewe. There seems to be reason for holding that, ere the latest elevation of the land took place in our island, ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... of Gods and Heroes," "King Arthur and His Knights" and "The Mabinogeon" the aim has been to supply to the modern reader such knowledge of the fables of classical and mediaeval literature as is needed to render intelligible the allusions which occur in reading and conversation. The "Legends of Charlemagne" is intended to carry out the same design. Like the earlier portions ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... but as subject to modification by later and personal revelations. The theosophical idea has had followers from the earliest times. Since the Christian era we may class among theosophists such sects as Neo-Platonists, the Hesychasts of the Greek Church, the Mystics of mediaeval times, and, in later times, the disciples of Paracelsus, Thalhauser, Bohme, Swedenborg and others. Recently a small sect has arisen, which has taken the name of Theosophists. Its leader was an English gentleman who had become fascinated with the doctrine of Buddhism. ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... unluckily for themselves, never took much interest in their transatlantic possessions while they had them; and their dealings with the Indians then, and ours afterwards, and those of the Americans since, have never been exactly of the kind that give on both sides a subject such as may be found in all mediaeval and most Renaissance matters; in the Fronde; in the English Civil War; in the great struggles of France and England from 1688 to 1815; in the Jacobite risings; in La Vendee; and in other historical periods ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... leaning out of the window, contemplated the high road. It was a very fine high road, straight and level, kept in excellent order by turn pikes at every eight miles. A pleasant greensward bordered it on either side, and under the belvidere the benevolence of some mediaeval Chillingly had placed a little drinking-fountain for the refreshment of wayfarers. Close to the fountain stood a rude stone bench, overshadowed by a large willow, and commanding from the high table-ground on which it was placed a wide view of cornfields, meadows, and distant hills, ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the window decided upon, Robin planted morning-glory seeds where it was to be. By dint of much pushing and hauling the logs were finally put in place, and the roof battened down. The window was truly worthy of a mediaeval castle, for it was simply an oblong hole, boxed in with a casement made from some scraps of boards, while a slab shutter, swung on leather hinges, ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... her West Indian possessions remained unfulfilled. At last, at the close of one of the bloodiest and most brutal wars that even Spain ever waged with her own colonists, the United States intervened, and in a brief summer campaign destroyed the last vestiges of the mediaeval Spanish domain in the tropic seas alike of the West and the ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... kind of half fort, half castle that the Germans build in every district as an impregnable refuge in case of native risings. With watch towers and battlements, these forts are after the style of mediaeval buildings. Equipped with food supplies and a well, they can resist any attack short of artillery. Learning from the natives that the force consisted of two German officers and about sixty Askaris, my friend determined not to send back for the column that was waiting to ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... attribute to him alone the magnificent conception, the tireless energy, and the heroic purpose which established the great pillars of the Corpus Juris Civilis which is the legal foundation of mediaeval and of modern Europe, the basis of all Canon Law and of all Civil Law in every civilised country. Of his great ecclesiastical polity perhaps we must speak with less enthusiasm, though not with less wonder; while his glorious buildings remain only less enduring than his codification ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... worship. I often wonder, when I sit here in Berkeley's window-seat, and look across the quad to the carved pinnacles on the Founder's Tower there, whether any of us can ever hope to leave behind to our successors any legacy at all comparable to the one left us by those nameless old mediaeval masons. It's a very saddening thought that we for whom all these beautiful things have been put together—we whom labouring humanity has pampered and petted from our cradles upward, feeding us on its ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... "secret" which is neither recondite nor perplexing. It is simply that Debussy, instead of depending upon the strictly limited major and minor modes of the modern scale system, employs almost continuously, as the structural basis of his music, the mediaeval church modes, with their far greater latitude, freedom, and variety. It is, to say the least, a novel procedure. Other modern composers before Debussy had, of course, utilized the characteristic plain-song progressions to secure, ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... Victoires, but the populace so thronged that square that two days later it was moved half filled to Paris's most historic point, the Champ de Mars. The transfer was made at midnight through the narrow dark streets of mediaeval Paris. Eyewitnesses have left descriptions of the scene. Torch-bearers lighted on its way the cortege the central feature of which was the great bag, half filled with gas, flabby, shapeless, monstrous, mysterious, borne along by men clutching ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... Knights Templar. Removing from humbler quarters in Holborn, the order, having become wealthy and ambitious, bought a tract of land extending from the walls of Essex House to Whitefriars, and from the river to Fleet Street. They erected a church, a priory, and other buildings clustered around in the mediaeval fashion, and in imitation of the Temple near the Holy Sepulchre ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... most opaque of bodies. Metals would be more or less transparent, and a telegraph wire through the air would look like a long narrow hole drilled through an impervious solid body. A dynamo in active work would resemble a conflagration, whilst a permanent magnet would realise the dream of mediaeval mystics, and become an everlasting lamp with no expenditure of energy or consumption ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... was gathering. In a distant province of Russia at first, then on the banks of the Volga, and finally in Moscow itself, the old cry was raised, the hideous mediaeval charge revived, and the standard of persecution unfurled against the Jews. Province after province took it up. In Bulgaria, Servia, and, above all, Roumania, where, we were told, the sword of the Czar had been drawn to protect the oppressed, Christian atrocities took ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... a moment on the ideas we have so far reached. They would more than suffice to describe the whole tragic fact as it presented itself to the mediaeval mind. To the mediaeval mind a tragedy meant a narrative rather than a play, and its notion of the matter of this narrative may readily be gathered from Dante or, still better, from Chaucer. Chaucer's Monk's Tale is a series of what he calls 'tragedies'; and this means in fact ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... the development that took place in Europe, giving us as a result remarkably close analogues of the Western tales. This I suspect to have been the case of some of our stories where, parallel with the localized popular versions, exist printed romances (in the vernacular) with the mediaeval flavor and setting of chivalry. To give a specific case: the Visayans, Bicols, and Tagalogs in the coast towns feared the raids of Mindanao Mussulmans long before white feet trod the shores of the Islands, and many traditions of conflicts with these pirates are embedded ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler |
