"Spinet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... occupied by a party of twenty young men, accompanied by a like number of females, some of whom were playing at dice and cards, some drinking, others singing Bacchanalian melodies, others dancing along the aisles to the notes of a theorbo and spinet. Leonard was so inexpressibly shocked by what he beheld, that unable to contain himself he mounted the steps of the pulpit, and called to them in a loud voice to desist from their scandalous conduct, and no longer profane the house ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... fortunate children who have to do for themselves-much-needed lessons in these days of automatic, ready-made, easy entertainment which deaden rather than stimulate the creative faculty. And there sits the little old spinet-piano Sophia Thoreau gave to the Alcott children, on which Beth played the old Scotch airs, and played at ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... Italians led all Europe in the arts. At a later period the clavichord was copied by the Germans and Belgians. It was used by them for centuries on account of its simple construction and low price. Mozart always carried one with him as part of his baggage when traveling. The virginal, spinet, and harpsichord followed the clavichord in rapid succession, considering that the last named instrument had been in favor for such a long time, with seemingly no attempt at improvement. All of these three ...
— How the Piano Came to Be • Ellye Howell Glover
... my Lord heard of the news, he did not make any long face. "The money will come very handy to furnish the music-room and the [v]cellar," he said, "which is getting low, and buy your Ladyship a coach and a couple of horses. Beatrix, you shall have a [v]spinet; and Frank, you shall have a little horse from Hexton fair; and Harry, you shall have five pounds to buy some books." So spoke my Lord, who was generous with his own, and indeed with other folks' money. "I wish your aunt would die once a year, Rachel; we could ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... a point on the other side of the room. The platitude brought him, by some process of inversion, the vision of a drawing-room in Addison gardens, occupied by his mother and sisters, engaged with whatever may be Kensington's substitutes at the moment for the spinet and the tambour frame; and he had a disturbed sense that they might characterise such a statement differently, if, indeed, they would consent to characterise it at all. He looked at the wall as if, being a solid and steadfast object, it ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... short time some young men came in. They appeared to be brothers and cousins of the young ladies, or perhaps there was a lover or so among them. One went to a spinet which stood at the end of the room, and another brought in a violin and began to strike up a dancing air. Then, to show that we were civilised beings, O'Driscoll and I rose to our feet, and each offering a hand to a young lady, we commenced a minuet to the air which was being played. We flattered ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... remarkable qualities which I have never found in any other machine. For instance, singular to relate, Mendelssohn and I were fooling about here the other night, and when he saw this machine he thought it was a spinet of some new pattern; so what does he do but sit down and play me one of his songs without words on it, and, by jove! when he got through, there was the theme of the whole thing printed on a sheet of ...
— The Enchanted Typewriter • John Kendrick Bangs
... she assumed the vapours. She schooled herself in the mysteries of Ombre, of Macao. She spent hours over the tambour-frame. She rode out on horse-back, with a riding-master. She had a music-master to teach her the spinet; a dancing-master, too, to teach her the Minuet and the Triumph and the Gaudy. All these accomplishments she found mighty hard. She was afraid of her horse. All the morning, she dreaded the hour when it would be brought round from the stables. She dreaded her ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... scale, through the whole range of cymbal and spinet, "flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, dulcimer, and all kinds of music," stand literally before me, and a strange revelation it is. Is it the same faculty which produces that grand piano of Bechstein's, and that clarion organ of Silbermann's, and that African ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... the contents of the house, all of which will have to be sold and divided among his first cousins or their heirs. The only bequests made besides the money to the hospital are to Celia Fair and Allan Whittredge. Celia is to have the spinet, and Allan that beautiful old ring, if ever it comes to light again. I wish Cousin Thomas had left Celia some money. She was one person for whom he had a ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... dance rhythms. They were, moreover, simple, direct and easily understood of the people.[70] This development was furthered by the perfecting of two groups of instruments: The violins, by the great Italian masters; and those precursors of our modern pianoforte, the harpsichord, clavichord and spinet. We find, consequently, the Italians—of whom Corelli was most prominent—combining these dances into groups called Sonate da Ballo: and the French composers Couperin and Rameau, developing the possibilities of keyed stringed instruments in graceful pieces to which fantastic titles, ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... (which is now my constant practice) the trillo." He learned to play the lute, the flute, the flageolet, and the theorbo, and it was not the fault of his intention if he did not learn the harpsichord or the spinet. He learned to compose songs, and burned to give forth "a scheme and theory of music not yet ever made in the world." When he heard "a fellow whistle like a bird exceeding well," he promised to return another day and give an angel for a lesson in the art. Once, he writes, "I ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... On spinet old, Clarissa plays The melodies of by-gone days. Forgotten fugue, a solemn tune, The bars of stately rigadoon. With head bent down to scan each note, A crimson ribbon round her throat, The very birds to sing forget As some old-fashioned ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... selected for her reception-room; the old wooden floors had been polished till they appeared to be the finest parquet; gilt chairs deeply cushioned, and also of that delicate yellow colour which the favourite loved, had been brought from Paris; a spinet with a beautifully painted case stood near the window; a quaint sixteenth-century stove which had been in the state room at the castle had been chosen by her as harmonising well with the yellow hangings, being made of light blue tiles. In an alcove, especially constructed ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... know my evening amusements! To draw patterns for ruffles, which I had not materials to make up; to play Pope Joan with the curate; to read a sermon to my aunt; or to be stuck down to an old spinet to strum my father to ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... 'VIRGINAL.' Date, latter half of 16th century. Outside of case (not visible in picture) covered with red velvet. Inside finely decorated. Has three locks. Is more properly a Spinet, the case not being square, but of the usual Spinet shape—viz., one long side (front view), and four shorter ones forming a ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor
... chair; a very droll porcelain figure of Littenhausen was bowing to a very stiff soldier in terre cuite of Ulm; an old violin of Cremona was playing itself, and a queer little shrill plaintive music that thought itself merry came from a painted spinet covered with faded roses; some gilt Spanish leather had got up on the wall and laughed; a Dresden mirror was tripping about, crowned with flowers, and a Japanese bonze was riding along on a griffin; a slim Venetian ...
— The Nuernberg Stove • Louisa de la Rame (AKA Ouida)
... Betsy Ross," proclaimed Nyoda. "Trees, you'll have to turn into a chair in this scene, and More Trees, you turn into another chair. Guns, you will become a spinet and a spinning wheel respectively, and Moon, you'll turn into a table. First Soldier, you'll become Betsy Ross. Now then! All the stage settings get in ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey
... afternoon in May and watched her restoring to its place, with delicate strokes of her finger-tips, the lock of her soft, shining hair.How could any one so fine have thriven amid conditions so exhausting? Those hard toiling fingers, now grasping the heavy hoe, once used to tinkle over the spinet; the small, sensitive feet, now covered with coarse shoe-packs tied with leather thongs, once shone in rainbow hues of satin slippers and silken hose. A sunbonnet for the tiara of osprey plumes; a dress spun and woven by her own hand out of her own ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... prose of Swift, but we discover a quaint attractiveness in the artificiality of Augustan manners, dress, and speech. Lace and brocade, powder and patch, Dutch gardens, Reynolds' portraits, Watteau fans, Dresden china, the sedan chair, the spinet, the hoop-skirt, the talon rouge—all these have receded so far into the perspective as to acquire picturesqueness. To Scott's generation they seemed eminently modern and prosaic, while buff jerkins and coats of mail were poetically ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... lov'd them well enow until Richard came home the last Time from Abroad, a Young Man in the Beauty of his Youth, who saw not Jessamine the poor Cozzen, but Jessamine the fair woman. He would have me sing him Ballads, he would hang Entranc'd upon the Spinet when I play'd. Now would he fetch me a flower for my hair, placing of it himself. And now 't was a knot of ribband for my dress, and himself fetch'd home broach and ear-rings for my Birthday Gift, ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... Josias Mode, host at the French Ordinary in York County, whose widow, before 1679, married Charles Hansford, of York, owned two violins. It is reasonable to conclude, therefore, that guests at his hostelry were frequently entertained with music from that instrument. The virginal (a small rectangular spinet without legs) was the most common of instruments known to have been in possession of the colonists, while they also owned and played the fiddle, both small and large, the cornet, the recorder (a flageolet or old type of flute), ...
— Domestic Life in Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - Jamestown 350th Anniversary Historical Booklet Number 17 • Annie Lash Jester
... should go to Newtake. The piano, indeed, had never been there before. It was a present to Damaris from her dead husband, who purchased the instrument second-hand for five pounds at a farm sale. Its wiry jingle spoke of evolution from harpsichord or spinet to the modern instrument; its yellow keys, from which the ivory in some cases was missing, and its high back, stained silk front, and fretted veneer indicated age; while above the keyboard a label, now growing indistinct, set forth that one "William Harper, ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... other things in the room besides the pictures: a few chairs, the brocade of which matched the tapestry on the wall; an inlaid spinet; three bronzes. Before one of the bronzes Lewis stopped involuntarily. From its massive, columned base to the tip of the living figure it was in one piece. Out of the pedestal itself writhed the tortured, reaching figure—aspiring man ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... marriage is a mantrap baited with simulated accomplishments and delusive idealizations. When your sainted mother, by dint of scoldings and punishments, forced you to learn how to play half a dozen pieces on the spinet which she hated as much as you did—had she any other purpose than to delude your suitors into the belief that your husband would have in his home an angel who would fill it with melody, or at least play him to sleep after dinner? You married my friend ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... invited Jefferson to visit him at his fine estate, called "The Forest," a few miles out from Williamsburg. Now, in the family of Mr. Wayles dwelt his widowed daughter, the beautiful Martha Skelton, gracious and rich as Jefferson in worldly goods. She played the spinet with great feeling, and the spinet and the violin go very well together. So, together, Thomas and Martha played, and sometimes a bit of discord crept in, for Thomas was absent-minded and, in the business of watching the widow's fingers touch ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... the few families in those days that possessed a musical instrument, and it had been the delight of Marcia's heart. She seemed to have a natural talent for music, and many an hour she spent at the old spinet drawing tender tones from the yellowed keys. The spinet had been in the family for a number of years and very proud had the Schuyler girls been of it. Kate could rattle off gay waltzes and merry, rollicking tunes that fairly made the feet of the sedate village maidens flutter in time to their melody, ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... my youth to play a little upon the spinet. Glumdalclitch kept one in her chamber, and a master attended twice a-week to teach her: I called it a spinet, because it somewhat resembled that instrument, and was played upon in the same manner. A fancy came into my head, that I would entertain the king and queen with an English tune upon ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... holding scrolls; men in rich doublets, their hands on their swords; women in elaborate dresses of a hundred tucks, and hooped out prodigiously. He was especially struck by one, a lady in green, who played with long white hands on a spinet. But the massive and numerous oak bookcases, strictly wired with strong brass wire, and the tall oak fireplace, surmounted with a portrait of a man in a red coat holding a letter, whetted the edge of his depression, and Mike looked round with a ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... she might only appear to be irritable. Miss Jessie could not play cards; but she talked to the sitters-out, who, before her coming, had been rather inclined to be cross. She sang, too, to an old cracked piano, which I think had been a spinet in its youth. Miss Jessie sang "Jock of Hazeldean" a little out of tune; but we were none of us musical, though Miss Jenkyns beat time, out of time, by way of appearing ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... originally cost about five shillings in London; we even dozed on the top of a dining-room table; and last, but not least, to avoid giving ourselves up as a meal to unwelcome visitors, we avoided beds altogether, and slept on the top of a grand piano, or, more properly speaking, an old-fashioned spinet, the notes of which gave forth a hard and tinny ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... were more at home in a kitchen than a drawing-room. They did better execution at a tub than at a spinet, and could handle a rolling-pin more satisfactorily than a sketch-book. At a pinch, they could even use a rake or fork to good purpose in field or barn. Their finishing education was received at the country school ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... alarmed. You are naturally nervous and timid, and this is merely a poor, cowardly conceit that has got into your head; but your own good sense will soon show you the folly of yielding to a mere fancy. Amuse yourself on the spinet, and play some brisk music that will cheer your spirits; it ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... in the house, Madam Wetherill's two cousins will spend the winter in town, Miss Betty Randolph from Virginia, and Martha Johns from some western county. There will be lessons on the spinet and ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... from the environment in the way of musical instruments of adequate tonal powers. Such instruments never existed in the history of the art until about the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The organ, the violin and the predecessor of the pianoforte, the spinet, came to practical form at nearly the same time. At the same time the instruments of plucked strings—the guitars, lutes and other instruments which until then had occupied the exclusive attention of musicians—began to go out. ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... various property; took a hand at piquet or backgammon of evenings with me and my mother; or, being an ingenious lad enough (though of a mean boorish spirit, as became the son of such a father), accompanied my Lady Lyndon's spinet with his flageolet; or read French and Italian with her: in both of which languages her Ladyship was a fine scholar, and with which he also became conversant. It would make my watchful old mother very angry to hear them conversing in these languages; for, not understanding a word of either ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... other two rooms, perhaps more so, because she reflected, with an immense satisfaction, that it might be her very own. The room was furnished throughout with satinwood; blue china bowls decorated the tops of cabinets; a painted satinwood spinet stood in a corner; the hearth was open and tiled throughout with blue Dutch tiles; the fire burned in a brass brazier which was ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... do not understand dancing—you care not for the politer arts—you can get no more music out of a spinet than by pulling a dead hog by the ear. By nature you were made for a man—a man of war—I do not mean a seventy-four, Colonel George, like that hulk which brought the hulking Mr. Braddock into our river. His Excellency, too, is a man of warlike ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... extinguished hesitation. Slipping on a cloak, she reached the verandah without meeting a soul. He put out a hand. Purely on impulse she gave him her left one; and he conducted her down the steps with mock ceremony, as if leading her out to tread a measure to unheard strains of the viola and spinet. ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... finer pursuits of mental powers had been totally neglected. Books were unknown at Tregunter, excepting a few magazines or periodical publications, which at different periods Miss Robinson borrowed from her juvenile neighbours. There was, however, an old spinet in one of the parlours. Music had been one of my early delights, and I sometimes vainly endeavoured to draw a kind of jingling harmony from this time-shaken and neglected instrument. These attempts, however, frequently subjected ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... then she accomplished the more literary labour of a stray novel that had wandered down to the Manorhouse, or an abridgment of ancient history, in which was omitted everything but the proper names. To these attainments she added a certain modicum of skill upon the spinet, and the power of singing old songs with the richest and sweetest voice that ever made one's eyes moisten or ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton |
