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Ancestor   /ˈænsˌɛstər/   Listen
Ancestor

noun
1.
Someone from whom you are descended (but usually more remote than a grandparent).  Synonyms: antecedent, ascendant, ascendent, root.



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"Ancestor" Quotes from Famous Books



... thee remember his spiritual necessities only. He wanteth, of a truth, little in temporalities that the world can offer, though the desires of life often lead him who hath most in quest of more. It would seem that an ancestor of Don Camillo was anciently a senator of Venice, when the death of a relation brought many Calabrian signories into his possession. The younger of his sons, by an especial decree, which favored a family that had well served the state, took these estates, while the ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper

... be recalled, and he would be left without the capital necessary for carrying on his business upon the same enlarged scale—seeing he now supplied many of the little country shops. It would be a grand move then, if, by a far-sighted generalship, a careful copying of the example of his great ancestor, he could get a permanent hold of some of Annie's property.—Hence had come the descent upon Mrs Forbes, and ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald

... Europe by a silver ribbon. It was she who, emerging formerly from the bosom of Edebali,[55] had come to hide herself in that of Osman. The remembrance of the fantastic vision, which had presaged a universal domination to his ancestor, inflamed the courage of Suleiman, and made him resolve to unite Europe and Asia by transporting the Ottoman power from the shores of Asia Minor to the strands of the Greek empire, and thus to realize the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... other player holds his hands in readiness to catch the ball. He has the appearance of a very careful fielder. Here we have the rudimentary idea of cricket; but how they scored their game, what rules they had, we cannot determine. Stool-ball claims also to be an ancestor of cricket, and consists in one player defending a stool with his hand from being hit by a ball bowled by another player. Here is a simple form of the modern game, the stool being used as a wicket, and the hand for ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield

... Border with his followers. He was met by the Earl of Angus, the Maxwells, the Johnstons, and the Scotts. In one of the engagements which ensued the Douglases appeared to have gained the day, when an ancestor of the Naesmyths, who fought under the royal standard, took refuge in the smithy of a neighbouring village. The smith offered him protection, disguised him as a hammerman, with a leather apron in front, and asked him to lend a hand at ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth

... The people of Cho-Sen are fanatical ancestor-worshippers, and that old pirate of a booty-lusting Dutchman, with his four cunies, in far Kyong-ju, did no less a thing than raid the tombs of the gold-coffined, long-buried kings of ancient Silla. The work was done in the night, and ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London

... vainly striving to solve the mystery of his new-found chum, was watching him closely from between his own fore-paws. In his comical head—adorned with its one good ear and its one bad one, and furthermore beautified by the outstanding whiskers inherited from his Airedale ancestor—he was trying to come to some sort of an understanding. At the outset he had accepted Neewa as a friend and a comrade—and Neewa had thanklessly given him a good mauling for his trouble. That much Miki could forgive and forget. What he could not forgive ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood

... new relative that he stood on his head in the middle of the floor to express his feelings. When the excitement had died down a bit, Alan drew his stool up beside the Shepherd's knee and said: "Won't you please tell us about Rob Roy, Cousin Campbell? If he's an ancestor of mine, I ought to know more ...
— The Scotch Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins

... special services which they had rendered to the king. Thus a broken kudurru among M. de Morgan's finds records the confirmation of a man's claims to certain property by Biti-liash II, the claims being based on a grant made to the man's ancestor by Kurigalzu for services rendered to the king during his war with Assyria. One of the finest specimens of this class of charters or title-deeds has been found at Susa, dating from the reign of Melishikhu, a king of the Third Dynasty. The document in question records a grant of certain ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall

... repeat—that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would rather be a man—a man of restless and versatile intellect—who, not content with (an equivocal[1]) success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley

... gently. "Just a few whiffs more. There now—where are your wheezes? My Indian ancestor knew a thing or two, you see. I must confess that I never tried hornet's nest smoke before. I believe that you will not wheeze again for a long time, Simon. Good-day." Dr. Whiskers bowed ...
— Grand-Daddy Whiskers, M.D. • Nellie M. Leonard

... on the 27th day of April, 1768, at Lebanon in Connecticut. His remotest ancestor in this country was Captain John Mason (an officer who had served with distinction in the Netherlands, under Sir Thomas Fairfax), who came from England in 1630, and settled at Dorchester in the Colony of Massachusetts. His great-grandfather lived at Haddam. His grandfather, born in ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster

... and Margaret as compared with the larger destinies of the Green Swash Mining Company were as the humble and unadorned mole-hill to the glories of the Himalaya. People had criticised the Duke's financial career in England. Why had he sold that snuffbox that Marie Therese gave to his ancestor when—well, you know when? Why had he converted those worm-eaten manuscripts, whereon were traced many valuable things in a variety of ancient tongues, into coin of the realm? And why had he turned his ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford

... March had arrived. The sun, which Dubartas, that classic ancestor of periphrase, had not yet dubbed the "Grand-duke of Candles," was none the less radiant and joyous on that account. It was one of those spring days which possesses so much sweetness and beauty, that all Paris ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo

... percentage of the cone crop and bury it for winter. The seeds in the uneaten cones germinate, and each year countless thousands of conifers grow from the seeds planted by these squirrels. It may be that the seed from which Old Pine burst had been planted by an ancient ancestor of the protesting Douglas who was in possession, or this seed may have been in a cone which simply bounded or blew into a hole, where the seed found sufficient mould and moisture to give it ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills

... exceedingly in his far-off children's children, for that the son of Cronos hath taken old age clean away from their limbs, and they are called immortals, being his offspring. For the strong son of Heracles is ancestor of the twain, I and both are reckoned to Heracles, on the ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang

... ancestor. Like you, I loved the chase beyond everything in life—beyond our holy faith or the welfare of any human being, man, woman, or child. To all that stood in my path I showed no mercy. There came a time when famine visited the land. ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence

... that lived in his body began to fight against one another most fiercely. Each ate his fellow until he became very big. At last the man died, and only one organism remained alive. This organism then flew away, and became the ancestor of the bats. The light of day so dazzled his eyes, that he could not fly very far, so he decided to fly only at night. And ever since, his descendants, too, have hidden themselves in the day-time, and come out only when ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler

... I afterwards found to be the case) that my relatives were really Protestants, though they did not openly declare themselves to be so; that their family had held these opinions from the time when many of the noblest in Spain had espoused them. Their ancestor had providentially escaped the doom which the horrible Inquisition had inflicted on the greater number of those who had become Protestants: having made his way to America with his wife, he had settled in this then remote region; ...
— The Young Llanero - A Story of War and Wild Life in Venezuela • W.H.G. Kingston

... adventurer who had been Mrs. Carroll's immigrant ancestor to the Virginia wilds pushed her on to dare the situation. She also sat upright, and the two ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton

... hand, a kind of writing much esteemed among the Portuguese. They are not physically equal to the European Portuguese, but possess considerable ability; and it is said that half-castes, in the course of a few generations, return to the black color of the maternal ancestor. The black population of Angola has become much deteriorated. They are not so strongly formed as the independent tribes. A large quantity of aguardiente, an inferior kind of spirit, is imported into the country, which is most injurious in its effects. We saw many ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone

... attention it excited, to the production of other work, and among them the Rowley Poems. At this time he was in his 16th year; but some years before he had fabricated Burgum's pedigree, and some poetry by a pretended ancestor of his, of the alleged date of 1320, called "The Romaunte of the Knyghte." The house where Burgum lived, and where Chatterton first tried his powers of deception, is the central one of the three seen above the ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various

... the hopes and fears of those poor barbarians, darkness never to be removed has hidden from us for ever. In later days monkish historians, whom Milton afterwards followed, ignored these poor early relations of ours and invented, as a more fitting ancestor of Englishmen, Brute, a fugitive nephew of AEneas of Troy. But, stroll on where we will, the pertinacious savage, with his limbs stained blue and his flint axe red with blood, is a ghost not easily to be exorcised from the banks of the Thames, and in some Welsh veins his blood no ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... generations. But the worst of it is that the most picturesque of all distinctions, like being the twentieth baron, let us say, in direct descent, is really of the nature of a stigma; a man whose twentieth ancestor was a baron has no excuse for not being ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson

... ancestor and early settler had built it—the beginning of it—before Kinnicutt had even become a town; and—rare exception to the changes elsewhere—generation after generation of the same name and line had inhabited it until now. Aunt Faith, exultingly, told each curious visitor ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... of their owner's deadly enemy. This is the first vague hint which Scott gives us as to the real identity of the "Knight of Snowdoun." To throw a further glamor of romance about the prophetical weapon, he tells us that it was given by fairies to an ancestor of its present owner, namely, to Archibald, third Duke of Angus, called Tine-man (Loseman) because he always lost his men in battle, and that this gift was made while Archibald was in league ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott

... may be assured of so much wealth, whatever the value of the thing so settled may be,—but that the son or grandson or descendant may enjoy the satisfaction which is derived from saying, my father or my grandfather or my ancestor sat in that chair, or looked as he now looks in that picture, or was graced by wearing on his breast that very ornament which you now see lying beneath the glass. Crown jewels are heirlooms in the same way, as representing not the ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope

... of the houses—I mean the stone-and-lime houses—of Durnmelling and Thornwick, was curious; and that they had at one time formed part of the same property might have suggested itself to any beholder. Durnmelling was built by an ancestor of Godfrey's, who, forsaking the old nest for the new, had allowed Thornwick to sink into a mere farmhouse, in which condition it had afterward become the sole shelter of the withered fortunes of the ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald

... anything on earth that shows so strongly in the blood as the soldier element, and Elizabeth Harrison, whose great ancestor faced the perils of the frontier warfare, was a leader by force of her inherited ability as a leader. She was elected drill sergeant for the college girls of ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller

... resumed. "You know, his ancestor was a brother-in-law of the Duke of Wellington. He himself seems to have absorbed some of the great duke's fondness for the fair. Before he came to us he was with England's legation in Mexico. 'Twas there he first met the Dona Lucrezia. ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough

... 'Nobility rests on excellence and inherited wealth,' his own saying, 'Nobility rests on personal excellence or on that of forefathers.' But elsewhere he is not satisfied with this conclusion. He blames himself, because even in Paradise, while talking with his ancestor Cacciaguida, he made mention of his noble origin, which is but a mantle from which time is ever cutting something away, unless we ourselves add daily fresh worth to it. And in the 'Convito' he disconnects ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt

... Captain by the female branch, the male being extinct), I would leave nothing undone to obtain the Toison, in order to enjoy the honour and the sensible pleasure of being struck by this sword, and with such great respect for my ancestor. But to return to the ceremony from which this ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon

... Horus, Haroeris-Harmakhis, and the Minor Ennead, like the Great Ennead, began with a sun-god. This assimilation was not pushed so far as to invest the younger Horus with the same powers as his fictitious ancestor: he was the sun of earth, the everyday sun, while Atumu-Ra was still the sun pre-mundane and eternal. Our knowledge of the eight other deities of the Minor ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... another distant settlement was established. William Claiborne, Secretary of the Council of State of Virginia, with one hundred men, settled Kent Island 150 miles up Chesapeake Bay. In the Assembly of February 1632 both "Kiskyacke and the Isle of Kent" were represented by Capt. Nicholas Martiau, ancestor of George Washington. ...
— Virginia Under Charles I And Cromwell, 1625-1660 • Wilcomb E. Washburn

... always insist that they are of Scottish and not of Irish origin. On this point it will be sufficient to quote the late Hon. Leonard Allison Morrison, of New Hampshire. Writing twenty-five years ago he said: "I am one of Scotch-Irish blood and my ancestor came with Rev. McGregor of Londonderry, and neither they nor any of their descendants were willing to be called 'merely Irish.' I have twice visited," he adds, "the parish of Aghadowney, Co. Londonderry, from which they came, in Ireland, and all that locality is filled, not with 'Irish' but with ...
— Scotland's Mark on America • George Fraser Black

... gratitude, wasn't it, in spite of the slighting way in which Mr Moynham had spoken of the modern Greeks and their ways? However, he had to "take it all back," as he said, when he drank the health of Monsieur Pericles—who seemed, by the way, to be much better off than his illustrious ancestor, and whom we put down as the Sultan Haroun el Raschid in disguise—in a glass of the very wine that he had sent on board ...
— Tom Finch's Monkey - and How he Dined with the Admiral • John C. Hutcheson

... a thing more to be proud of that one's father should have made a great tunnel and railway like that, than that one's remote ancestor should have built a great ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy

... Mary Tudor, or witness the play on the stage, will carry away the impression that my ancestor was a vulgar yeoman, in some way connected with the stables, whereas he was a man of ancient lineage, a trusted friend and servant of the queen, who confided to him in time of danger the Lieutenancy of the Tower, ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone

... with little plates of gold which they removed before eating. The men of this province employed themselves only in hunting, catching birds, and making war, the hard work all devolving upon the women and slaves. These Zardanians have neither idols nor churches, but they each worship their ancestor, the patriarch of the family. Their tradesmen carry their goods about on barrows like the bakers in France. They have no doctors, but only enchanters, who jump, dance, and play musical instruments around the invalid's bed till he ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne

... with De Lery, in earnest conversation, walked the handsome Claude de Beauharnais,—brother of a former Governor of the Colony,—a graceful, gallant-looking soldier. De Beauharnais was the ancestor of a vigorous and beautiful race, among whose posterity was the fair Hortense de Beauharnais, who in her son, Napoleon III., seated an offshoot of Canada upon the imperial throne of France long after the abandonment of their ancient colony by the corrupt House ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... in his hands instinctively looks up at the heavens. He has inherited that instinct from his great ancestor, who brought down fire and thought to men, and taught them to ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer

... occasion were present the Archbishop of Canterbury and the arrogant Bishop of London,—the latter the son of the Earl of Devonshire, of the great family of the Courtenays. Wyclif was attended by the Duke of Lancaster and the Earl Marshal,—Henry Percy, the ancestor of the Dukes of Northumberland,—who forced themselves into the Lady's chapel, behind the high altar, where the prelates were assembled. An uproar followed from this unusual intrusion of the two most powerful men of the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord

... 'We accept, King, the gift.' With his knife he made a scratch around the sunstreak on the floor, took the shine of it three times into the fold of his kirtle"—his pocket, we should say nowadays—"and went his way." Eventually he became king of Macedonia, and ancestor of Alexander the Great.] ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin

... through her veins, awakening under her heart some nameless, unsuspected existence that had slumbered there all these years and that went out through her throbbing fingertips to his that answered. She wondered if the hoydenish blood of some lawless ancestor, long asleep, were calling out in her to-night, some drop of a hotter fluid that the centuries had failed to cool, and why, if this curse were in her, it had not spoken before. But was it a curse, this awakening, this wealth before undiscovered, this music set free? For the first time in her ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather

... a beautiful old age, you must live a beautiful youth, for we ourselves are posterity and every man is his own ancestor. I am today what I am because I was ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard

... seemed to Nancy all wrong—her sitting here in the tempered summer light, playing cards throughout the afternoon. Inherited from some conscientious ancestor, shame stirred for a few minutes in her blood and she hated herself, and the club, and the women she played with. This was not a woman's work in the world. Her children scattered about their own affairs, her household in the hands of strange women, her husband playing ...
— Undertow • Kathleen Norris

... actually. I felt cold all over, as if plunged into an icy mountain stream. Ravillanus claimed as his ancestor Cassius Ravilla and aimed at emulating him. Certainly, as a magistrate, he quite frankly talked and acted as if acquittal were a disgrace to the court, and the object of each trial not impartial justice but the conviction of the accused. He was perfectly sincere, ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White

... They know everything. They have already mastered every fact in natural history that can be learnt upon the estate; and they will do almost anything, and are so unscrupulous that I fear sometimes they are going to take after some criminal ancestor there may have been in the family, although I never heard of one, and go to the bad altogether. Now, what is to be done with such children? I hardly dare allow myself to hope that they have good qualities enough to save ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand

... in leopard or ox skins. Cattle formed their chief wealth, stock breeding and hunting and fighting their main pursuits. Mentally they were men of tact and intelligence, with a national religion based upon ancestor worship, while their government was a patriarchal monarchy limited by an aristocracy and almost feudal in character. The common law which had grown up from the decisions of the chiefs made the head of the ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois

... and well versed in all the wonderful events and traditions of the neighborhood. He recollected Rip at once, and corroborated his story in the most satisfactory manner. He assured the company that it was a fact, handed down from his ancestor the historian, that the Kaatskill Mountains had always been haunted by strange beings. That it was affirmed that the great Hendrick Hudson, the first discoverer of the river and country, kept a kind of vigil there every twenty years, with his crew of the Half-moon; being permitted in ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith

... girl is complimented when you curiously regard her because her mother was beautiful? What attenuated consumptive, in whom self-respect is yet unconsumed, delights in your respect for him, founded in honor for his stalwart ancestor? ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis

... families living in such a house traced descent from a common female ancestor, and formed a clan. Each clan had its own name,—usually that of some animal, as the Wolf, the Bear, or the Turtle,—its own sachem or civil magistrate, and its own war chiefs, and owned all the food and all the property, except weapons and ornaments, in ...
— A School History of the United States • John Bach McMaster

... like Aunt Amy and if it proved too big for the house oven the baker could bake it in his. Jane was delighted. She told Bubble that it was to be a "hugeous" cake, the like of which was never seen in Coombe and she defied Ann to produce any relative or ancestor whatever whose wedding-cake had even faintly approached such dimensions. Ann retorted that big wedding-cakes were vulgar and that her Aunt Sykes did not think it proper for a widow woman to have a wedding-cake ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay

... from Coventry, Conn., was a relation of John Wright. His descendants have honored the college, as some of them still honor the memory of an ancestor, whose name is inseparably and prominently connected with the civil and religious history of the town. His heart and hand were with President Wheelock, and his log ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith

... distended claws. Some instinct of danger made Rodriquez turn and he was just in time to grapple with the brute, clutching it by the throat. The lion had some advantage in weight but not a great deal, for my brave ancestor was probably three hundred pounds of sinew, bone and muscle. So that the struggle was not such an unequal one, but it was terrific while it did last. Finally, though torn and bleeding, the man subdued the beast, and had it ...
— Frontier Boys on the Coast - or in the Pirate's Power • Capt. Wyn Roosevelt

... lay in his time were only woods and marshlands. No Monument, no Lincoln Memorial, no houses. Lying in the river like a great green ship, he could see the island which had once belonged to his ancestor, George Mason. Once? Now it probably still did. He could make out figures moving at the bank of it, and a ferry pushing off from ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson

... recourse to reason; whose office it is to discover, as was before observed, what the law of nature directs in every circumstance of life; by considering, what method will tend the most effectually to our own substantial happiness. And if our reason were always, as in our first ancestor before his transgression, clear and perfect, unruffled by passions, unclouded by prejudice, unimpaired by disease or intemperance, the task would be pleasant and easy; we should need no other guide but this. But every man now finds the contrary in his own experience; that his reason is ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone

... Maria's visions were humanly real to her, and as such she liked and understood them. If the first Galland were half a robber, to disguise the fact because he was her ancestor was not playing fair. It made him only ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer

... and nearer. She could hear his tread marching into her life, and could see his face. It was very moving, as she remembered it. A long line of scholarly forbears had dowered him with a refinement and grace quite startling in this unornamented spot, and some old Acadian ancestor had lent him beauty. His eyes were dark, and they held an unfathomable melancholy. The line of his forehead and nose ran haughtily and yet delicate; and even after years of absence, Dilly sometimes caught her breath when she thought ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown

... was considered an ancestor of the violin, but since Mr. Heron-Allen brought his legal acumen and skill in sifting evidence to bear on the subject, we find that it must unquestionably be looked upon as the last of its race, and not as a direct forerunner of anything ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George

... (populus) after migration took possession of a district, it was beyond doubt divided into clans, gentes, which were the oldest kinship divisions in Italian society. All members of a clan had the same name, and were believed to descend from a common ancestor.[135] According to the later juristic way of putting it, all would be in the patria potestas of that ancestor supposing that no deaths had ever occurred in the gens; and, indeed, the idea that the gens is immortal in spite of the ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler

... composed is, in my belief, neither mind nor matter, but something more primitive than either. Both mind and matter seem to be composite, and the stuff of which they are compounded lies in a sense between the two, in a sense above them both, like a common ancestor. As regards matter, I have set forth my reasons for this view on former occasions,* and I shall not now repeat them. But the question of mind is more difficult, and it is this question that I propose to discuss in these ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell

... 'My ancestor of the time of the Ligue,' I replied, 'married a Huguenot lady out of the Saintonge, riding two hundred miles through an enemy's country to bring off his bride; and ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson

... David Chalmers, of Halifax County, I believe, was the President, and Willoughby Newton, a life-long Whig, among the Vice-Presidents. P. H. Aylett, a grandson of Patrick Henry, was the first speaker. And his eloquence indicated that the spirit of his ancestor survived in him. But he was for moderation and delay, still hoping that the other Convention would yield to the pressure of public sentiment, and place the State in the attitude now manifestly desired by an overwhelming majority of ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones

... me upstairs showed me a trace or two of Melchiorre's background. The sleeping Apostles are said to be by Giovanni D'Enrico; they will not bear comparison with Tabachetti's St. Joseph. The benefactor was Count Pio Giacomo Fassola di Rassa, a collateral ancestor of the historian. People who have become lethargic in their self- indulgence, or who are blinded through some bad habit, will find relief at this chapel. I have met with nothing to show that there was any earlier chapel with the same subject, ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler

... fortune, with a horse, his sword, and a bag of crowns—the latter saved for him by a father's stern frugality, a mother's tender self-denial. A week ago he had never seen a game of chance. Then he had seen; the dice had fallen in his way, the devil of play, cursed legacy of some long-forgotten ancestor, had awoke within him, and this was the end. "I accept," he ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman

... Edward is such a type, as are all individuals who receive hereditary food-and-shelter privileges,—such as the present Duke of Bedford, for instance, who yearly receives $75,000 from the good people of London because some former king gave some former ancestor of his the market privileges of Covent Garden. The irresponsible rich are likewise non-scabs,—and by them is meant that coupon-clipping class which hires its managers and brains to invest the money usually left it ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London

... rights I should rule Peru. As it is, I am a poor gentleman with very little money. That," added Don Pedro with emphasis, "is why I wish to recover the mummy of my great ancestor." ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume

... which he could raise no grain and he let it go to waste and died a pauper. His heirs discovered that on this little English possession there was a copper mine and they are living in luxury to-day in the possession of that which belonged to their ancester [Transcriber's note: ancestor?] all the time but was not appropriated and ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman

... circumstances, forsooth! when a mother's sudden terror brings an idiot child into the world,—when the restive eye of his great-grandfather, whom he never saw, looks at you from your two-year-old, and the spirit of that roving ancestor makes the boy also a fugitive and a vagabond on the earth! No, no. We may coax circumstances a little, and shove them about, and make the best of them, but there they are. We may try to get out of their way; but they will trip us up, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various

... reference to certain grievances to which the Christians were subjected, that "the philosophy which we profess truly flourished aforetime among the barbarous nations; but having blossomed again in the great reign of thy ancestor, Augustus, it proved to be, above all things, ominous of good fortune to thy kingdom." Thus we have indubitable evidence that it was the Eclectic philosophy of the Jewish, or ancient Christianity, which "blossomed again," ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill

... who colonized Iceland in the last quarter of the ninth century brought with than the language then spoken throughout the whole of Scandinavia. This ancestor of the modern Scandinavian tongues has been preserved in Iceland so little changed that every Icelander still understands, without the aid of explanatory commentaries, the oldest preserved prose written in their country 850 years ago. The principal ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various

... the going down of the same; then he took possession of all that land, seeing that he had grievously wounded the sun and forced him to hide behind the mountains. Upon this story is founded the lordship of all the caciques of Mizteca, and upon their descent from this mighty archer, their ancestor. Even to this day, the chiefs of the Miztecs blazon as their arms a plumed chief with bow and arrows and shield, and the sun in front of him setting behind ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly

... Thomas Barnard, a minister of Andover, from 1682 to 1718,—the great-grandfather of the Rev. Thomas Barnard, D.D., the first minister of the North Church in this city, who died Oct. 1, 1814, in the sixty-seventh year of his age, also an ancestor of Capt. Edward Barnard, of this city. We insert the title page and other extracts therefrom, which we trust will impart the same interest to our readers as ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks

... Francisco, a great crowd had assembled to wish us bon voyage, conspicuous among them being my paternal ancestor, who would have liked well enough to make the entire trip, and who would doubtless have done so could he have spared the necessary time from his business at Marshalltown. Here, too, we bade farewell to Jim Hart, Van Haltren and others of the party who had accompanied us on our ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson

... This ancestor, "an energetic, plucky, good-natured, genial man," married Rebecca Hazeltine, of Chester, N. H. When the frame of the house was up and the corner room partitioned off, the bride and groom began housekeeping. Her wedding ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis

... inseparably connected with the name of Havemeyer, for to the Havemeyers is due its development and its formation into a so-called trust, which practically controls the market, and which has won great wealth for its organizers. The ancestor of the Havemeyers was a thrifty German who came to this country in the latter part of the eighteenth century, and, after engaging in various pursuits, opened a little sugar refinery in New York City, which soon brought him a comfortable income. There, in ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson

... some pains in his Memoirs to show the length and quality of his pedigree, which he traces back to the times of the Second and Third Edwards. Noting the fact, we pass on to a nearer ancestor, his grandfather, who seems to have been a person of considerable energy of character and business talent. He made a large fortune, which he lost in the South-Sea Scheme, and then made another before his death. He was one of the Commissioners of Customs, and sat at the Board with the poet Prior; ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison

... doctor know that he has not from some ancestor this fatal diathesis? Children rarely if ever betray to their children a knowledge of the vices or crimes of their parents. The death by consumption, cancer or fever is a part of oral family history, but not so the death from intemperance. ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur

... more appropriate meter used by Longfellow in his Evangeline. With a dictionary and a literal translation it is easy enough to puzzle out Horace, who is more modern in his thought and who is, in a way, the ancestor of our present vers-de-societe writers. There is also this advantage in the translation of Horace: One finds a chance to compare his translation with the work of many others, for Horace has been more ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow

... learned eyes) lie buried a multitude of persons of all ranks; for it was once a monastery of Gray Friars. Among them is John of Bourbon, one of the prisoners taken at the battle of Agincourt. Here also lies Thomas Burdet, ancestor of the present Sir Francis, who was put to death in the reign of Edward IV., for wishing the horns of a favourite white stag, which the King had killed, in the body of the person who advised him to do ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various

... maternal ancestor had recognized a woman chief (Mamzrau monwi), and saved her at the place of massacre called Maski, and now he asked her whether she would be willing to initiate the woman of Walpi in the rites of the ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes

... very queer idea, Nancy. You know well that she was named after a brave ancestor. It was hoped she would have been a boy, and her father gave her the name he had intended for a boy; only we softened it, Nancy, softened ...
— Terry - Or, She ought to have been a Boy • Rosa Mulholland

... the names of the respective parishes in the city of Westminster in 1630; how far back do their records extend; and what charge would be made for a search in them? I wish to trace a family whose ancestor was born in that city, but in what parish I am ignorant. Were any churches in Westminster, as distinguished from London, destroyed in ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 184, May 7, 1853 • Various

... he, eyeing the countenance of that ingenious youth. "He is a strange fellow—he asked me the other day, if I ever read the History of England, and told me there was a great deal in it about his ancestor, a Roman General, in the time of William the Conqueror, called Caractacus. He told me at the last New-market, that he had made up a capital book, and it turned out that he had hedged with such dexterity, ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... collected by Colebrooke. You would of course have mentioned this in your account if anything of the sort had existed in the tenth book. But even the Pitris, the fathers, are not mentioned, but it passes on straight to Yama the first ancestor. Haug, too, has discovered nothing; if you know anything about it, communicate it to me in the course of May, for my second volume goes to press on the 1st June. I shall read it aloud to George and Miss Wynn here, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller

... know about the name. He felt very grateful to her for her kindness. He hoped the book had shown him the writing of his ancestor, but he did not know. His parents died when he was a little boy, and if he had any relatives alive, they were unknown to him. He should be glad to believe that the Herrnhuter was his grandfather or great-grandfather. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various

... only about a hundred feet from the prison, which economized and still economizes the tumbrel and the horse of M. de Bourg. By the way, have you noticed that the executioner remains noble and keeps his title? For the rest, the square is excellently arranged for spectators, and my ancestor, Montrevel, whose name it bears, doubtless, foreseeing its ultimate destiny, solved the great problem, still unsolved by the theatres, of being able to see well from every nook and corner. If ever they cut ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere

... the other possible hypotheses. But in fact no single opponent of the ape-hypothesis has been able to combat it with any other phylogenetic hypothesis that has the faintest glimmer of probability. Not one opponent has suggested, or can suggest, any other animal form that can serve as our nearest ancestor than the ape. No one has ever reproached me by saying that Mother Nature has endowed me with too little imagination; on the contrary, I am often accused of having a superfluity of that gift of the gods; ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel

... scene of the Dialogus, and he is the chief character of the conversation. He had written his first tragedy under Nero,[123] and at the time of the Dialogus (A.D. 79-81) his Cato—a fabula praetexta—was the talk of Rome.[124] He had written another historical drama on the ancestor of Nero, L. Domitius Ahenobarbus, the persistent foe of Julius Caesar, who perished on the field of Pharsalia.[125] He had also written plays on the more hackneyed themes of Medea and Thyestes.[126] He had all the opportunities ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler

... Our great ancestor, Joe Miller, has recorded, in his "Booke of Jestes," an epitaph written upon an amateur ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 5, 1841 • Various

... I repeated, as Eunane still looked earnestly into my face, "and Eveena has seen at the same moment, one long ages since departed this world—the Teacher of this belief, the Founder of that Society which holds it, the ancestor of her own house—in ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg

... ancestor, Richard Henry Lee, had been born many years earlier in the same old mansion where Robert Edward Lee first saw the light of day. Richard Lee it was, who was a boyhood friend and confidant of George Washington; and who later became ...
— Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers • J. Walker McSpadden

... them, who were carousing in a hollow of the moor, surrounded by bushes. They instantly seized on his horse's bridle with many shouts of welcome, exclaiming—(for he was well known to most of them) that they had often dined at his expense, and he must now stay and share their good cheer. My ancestor was a little alarmed, for, like the Goodman of Lochside, he had more money about his person than he cared to risk in such society. However, being naturally a bold lively-spirited man, he entered into the humour of the thing, and ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott

... with dazed eyes. His arms fell to his sides. "All right, my good Victor; I'm not mad," he said. "Don't be scared! Did you ever hear of a chap called Damocles? He's an ancestor of mine, and history has a funny fashion of repeating itself. But there'll be a difference this time all the same. He couldn't eat his dinner for fear of a naked sword falling on his head. But I'm going to eat mine—whatever ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell

... of some far-off ancestor showing," he said. "It is what they call a reversion. You know, Henry, that Braxton was always mean and sulky. I never saw anybody else so spiteful and jealous as he is, and maybe he thinks he will be a big ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler

... secured the goodwill of the best living critics. Would that Mr. Leslie Stephen {56}—who wrote his life in the Dictionary of National Biography—would that Mr. Edmund Gosse—who has so recently published a great biography of Cowper's memorable ancestor, Dr. Donne—were, one or other of them, here to-day; or Mr. Austin Dobson, who has visited Olney, and described his impressions; or Dr. Jessopp, who lives near Cowper's tomb in East Dereham Church. These writers are, alas! not with us, and some presentment ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter

... the very door-sill. Within she saw a huge, raftered hall hung with antlers and guns and saddles, pelts, fox-brushes. There was a stuffed bloodhound, the ancestor perhaps of Jove and Juno. A horse's head protruded from the wall, nostrils dilated, glassy eyes starting from the sockets, as if the poor creature were still running his ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly

... these reasons did not influence the conversion of Doctor Rizal's paternal ancestor, Lam-co (that is, "Lam, Esq."), for this Chinese had a Chinese godfather and was not married till many ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig

... head of a troop, instead of flying or paying ransom, offers his breast, stands firm, and protects a patch of the soil with his sword. To perform this service he has no need of ancestors; all that he requires is courage, for he is himself an ancestor; security for the present, which he insures, is too acceptable to permit any quibbling about his title.-Finally, after so many centuries, we find each district possessing its armed men, a settled body of troops capable of resisting nomadic invasion; the community is no longer a prey to strangers. ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine

... success that is doubtful! And the name that I bear? Rameau! It is not with talents as it is with nobility; nobility transmits itself, and increases in lustre by passing from grandfather to father, and from father to son, and from son to grandson, without the ancestor impressing a spark of merit on his descendant; the old stock ramifies into an enormous crop of fools; but what matter? It is not so with talents. Merely to obtain the renown of your father, you must be cleverer than he was; you must have inherited his fibre. The fibre has failed me, but ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley

... thinning, sowing,—I find it one of the happiest seasons of the year. It is partly the stimulus of the autumn air, partly the pleasure of getting at the ground. I think there are some of us, city folk though we be, who must have the giant AntA|us for ancestor. We still need to get in close touch with the earth now and then. Children have a true instinct with their love of barefoot play in the dirt, and there are grown folks who still love it—but we call it gardening. The sight and the feel ...
— More Jonathan Papers • Elisabeth Woodbridge

... MacIan is a maniac. But this honest shopkeeper and editor whom I have dragged on my inhuman escapades, you cannot keep him. He will go free, thank God, he is not down in any damned document. His ancestor, I am certain, did not die at Culloden. His mother, I swear, had no relics. Let my friend out of your front door, ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton

... of demons are classified only such spirits as are believed to enter into relations with the human race; the term therefore includes (1) human souls regarded as genii or familiars, (2) such as receive a cult (for which see ANCESTOR WORSHIP), and (3) ghosts or other malevolent revenants; excluded are souls conceived as inhabiting another world. But just as gods are not necessarily spiritual, demons may also be regarded as corporeal; ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various

... cavalier of his time; but if his bearing was that of a young hero of fiction, his deeds were those of an accomplished and disciplined modern soldier. He was born at New Rumley in Harrison County, of a Hessian ancestor who had come over to fight for King George against the country which Custer lived and died to serve, and he inherited from him the blue German eyes, and the yellow German hair which he loved to wear long, and flying about ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells

... to him; and probably he was the next male heir of the first baronet, as that is the usual mode of limiting titles. In the Heralds' College there is a pedigree of Sir Isaac Newton, signed by himself, in which he traces his descent to the brother of the ancestor of the second baronet. It should seem, therefore, that Sir Isaac was himself descended from the Chief Justice. It would confer a great obligation on the writer if any of your readers could afford any assistance to clear up the pedigree of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 190, June 18, 1853 • Various

... Manchus fled. This defeat was a blow from which Nurhachu never recovered; his chagrin brought on a serious illness, and he died in 1626, aged sixty-eight. Later on, when his descendants were sitting upon the throne of China, he was canonised as T'ai Tsu, the Great Ancestor, the representatives of the four preceding generations of his family being ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles

... of a brave nation. Canst thou blame De Vallance for catching my coronet before it fell to the ground by a false attainder? Why should the title lie in abeyance? Is it not better worn by one allied to our house than by an alien? Who so fit to sit in the baronial chair of our common ancestor as my sister's son, now I am exscinded ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West

... descendants of Gamaliel, removed to Lyme, Conn., about the year 1700, where he married, in 1704, Mary Bronson, a granddaughter of Matthew Griswold, the ancestor of a family distinguished in American history. Remick, a grandson of the Thomas last referred to, married Susannah Matson, whose sister was the mother of Connecticut's noble war governor, Hon. William A. Buckingham. The first child of Remick and Susannah (Matson) Wait, born in Lyme, Feb. 9, 1787, ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, January 1886 - Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 1, January, 1886 • Various

... complexion, and his soft glossy black hair, curling close and crisp to the head, betrayed a dark drop in him, probably African. In the West Indies he would certainly have been set down as a quadroon. There was no record of negro blood in the family, however, no trace of any ancestor who had lived abroad; and the three moors' heads with ivory rings through their noses which appeared in one quarter of the scutcheon were always understood by later generations to have been a distinction conferred for some special butchery-business ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... sooner or later, perishes, while portions of the moiety B are detached and, as offspring, continue the life of the species. Thus, if we trace back an organism along the direct line of descent from its remotest ancestor, B, as a whole, has never suffered death; portions of it, only, have been cast off and died in ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... at a large gilt frame, new to him, containing the genealogical tree of the Princes Bolkonski, opposite which hung another such frame with a badly painted portrait (evidently by the hand of the artist belonging to the estate) of a ruling prince, in a crown—an alleged descendant of Rurik and ancestor of the Bolkonskis. Prince Andrew, looking again at that genealogical tree, shook his head, laughing as a man laughs who looks at a portrait so characteristic of the original as to ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy

... was chosen by his fellow-deputies of Calais to congratulate the Convention, and did so in a brief address, dated October 27, which was loaned by M. Charavay to the Historical Exposition of the Revolution at Paris, 1889, where I made the subjoined translation: "folly of oar ancestor", who have placed us under the necessity of treating gravely (solennellement) the abolition of a phantom (fantome).—Thomas ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine

... in the condition of the lower man. But with the Conservative all such improvement is to be based on the idea of the maintenance of those distances. I as a Duke am to be kept as far apart from the man who drives my horses as was my ancestor from the man who drove his, or who rode after him to the wars,—and that is to go on for ever. There is much to be said for such a scheme. Let the lords be, all of them, men with loving hearts, and clear intellect, and noble instincts, and ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope

... considerable time. Both sexes displayed the same timid reserve in their presence, and deported themselves in the same respectful manner as they did on the preceding day. It appeared that the Fellatas inhabiting Acba, though very numerous, are but one family, for the Landers were informed, that their ancestor separated himself from his friends, relatives, and acquaintances, and exiling himself for ever from his native country, he travelled hither with his wives and children, his flocks and herds. The ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish

... England, the pendulum has swung from one extreme to the other. In Canada it has remained stationary. There, in the country where they settled, the United Empire Loyalists are still regarded with an uncritical veneration which has in it something of the spirit of primitive ancestor-worship. The interest which Canadians have taken in the Loyalists has been either patriotic or genealogical; and few attempts have been made to tell their story in the cold light of impartial history, ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace

... conform to the tradition of HER family. This was the leveling tradition; the elevating of labor and the pulling down of capital until there was a dead level of equality—or, perhaps, with labor a bit in the saddle. Probably a remote ancestor of hers had been a member of an ancient guild; perhaps one had risen with Wat Tyler. Not a man of the family, for time beyond which the memory of man runneth not, but had been a whole-souled, single-purposed labor man—trade-union man—extremist— revolutionist. ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland

... deal; the only way to get rid of it, is for the man to get rid of his own sin. No special sin may be recognizable as having caused this or that special physical discomfort—which may indeed have originated with some ancestor; but evil in ourselves is the cause of its continuance, the source of its necessity, and the preventive of that patience which would soon take from it, or at least blunt its sting. The evil is essentially unnecessary, and passes with the attainment ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald

... was finished, the prince died, and irretrievably in debt. His executors were glad to sell to the trustees of the ancestors of the chief of the house of Brentham the incomplete palace, which ought never to have been commenced. The ancestor of the duke was by no means so strong a man as the duke himself, and prudent people rather murmured at the exploit. But it was what is called a lucky family—that is to say, a family with a charm that always attracted and absorbed heiresses; and perhaps the splendor of CRECY HOUSE—for ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli

... proceed, little by little, without breach of continuity; that the higher ever proceeds from the lower; the more complex ever unfolds from the more simple. For every species or form, it points out some ancestor or natural antecedent, from which by gradual modification, it has been derived. And in natural selection, the influence of the environment, sexual selection, use and disuse, sterility, and the variability of the organism, Science shows us some of the secondary factors or conditions of this ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various

... not regarded by the descendants of their common ancestor, Charles the Second, in the light of kindred whom the rules of decorum, and the usages of society might induce them to disclaim, or at all events, to acknowledge with shame or reluctance; the vitiated ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson

... old-fashioned and they were; Mrs. Wyeth's grandfather had bought them himself in Hongkong in the days when he commanded a clipper ship and made voyages to the Far East. The teaspoons were queer little fiddle-patterned affairs; they were made by an ancestor who was a silversmith with a shop on Cornhill before General Gage's army was quartered in Boston. And cups and spoons and napkins were so clean that it seemed almost sacrilegious to soil them ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln

... of the literary race are perpetually sighing for lodges in the wilderness, and dwellings in the desert! Monsieur Dumas might indeed be reluctant to accept the flattering overtures of a country which is known to cherish such antipathies to his great ancestor Ham, and all that interesting family; and is quite, excusable for preferring the persecutions of French courts of justice, to the patronage which American law would more fully accord to his books than to his person; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various

... There is Indiana Frusk of Apex City, and Millard Binch, a combination in which the Dickens of American Notes would have found amusement. Hotels with titles like The Stentorian are not exaggerated. Miss Spragg's ancestor had invented "a hair waver"; hence the name Undine: "from undoolay, you know, the French for crimping," as the simple-hearted mother of the girl explained to a suitor. Mrs. Wharton has been cruel, with a glacial cruelty, to her countrywomen of the ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker

... possibilities of English name-making—i.e. that every surname must be (i) personal, from a sire or ancestor, (ii) local, from place of residence, [Footnote: This is by far the largest class, counting by names, not individuals, and many names for which I give another explanation have also a local origin. Thus, when I say that Ely is Old Fr. Elie, i.e. Elias, I assume that the reader will know ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley

... country, made of sunshine and of laughter, To raise upon the high seat of thy glory A child of night, misfortune, and the Escurial! What if, when I were seated there, the past, Plunging its yellow hands into my soul, With hideous claws unearthed some ancestor: Some Rudolph or some Philip? Ah! I dread Lest at the humming of Imperial bees The monster sleeping in me ...
— L'Aiglon • Edmond Rostand

... without understanding, but his eyes served a better purpose. Away back in the line of the Scottish Gordons there must have been an ancestor with the seer's gift of insight, and some drop or two of his blood had come down to this sober-faced country boy searching the faces of the excursionists for his cue of ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde

... doctrine of Inaction and Postponement, stern men and practical women have frowned upon Stevenson. In their opinion instead of being up and doing he consecrated too many hours to the idleness of literature. They feel towards him as Hawthorne fancied his ancestor the great witch judge would have felt towards him. Hawthorne imagines that ghostly and terrible ancestor looking down upon him and exclaiming with infinite scorn, 'A writer of storybooks. What kind of employment is that for an ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent

... worker and gains a dependent. Every taxpayer of the community must contribute to the support which he is unable to provide for himself. He watches other children romp and play and laugh; but he neither romps, nor plays, nor laughs. He is inert. Some ancestor chained him to the rock, and the vultures of disease and unhappiness are feeding at his vitals. He asks for bread, and they give him a stone; he asks for life, and they give him a living death; he asks for ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson

... generations well in hand, and to take in large family histories, we never see an individual in a face of any stock we know, but a mosaic copy of a pattern, with fragmentary tints from this and that ancestor. The analysis of a face into its ancestral elements requires that it should be examined in the very earliest infancy, before it has lost that ancient and solemn look it brings with it out of the past eternity; and again in that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... writers but poets. In our neighbour-country Ireland, where, too, learning goes very bare, yet are their poets held in a devout reverence. Even among the most barbarous and simple Indians, where no writing is, yet have they their poets who make and sing songs, which they call "Arentos," both of their ancestor's deeds and praises of their gods. A sufficient probability, that if ever learning comes among them, it must be by having their hard dull wits softened and sharpened with the sweet delight of poetry; for until they find a pleasure in ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney

... earldom of Huntingdon, which had been forfeited, was restored, in 1185, and was conferred by William upon his brother, David, the ancestor ...
— An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707) • Robert S. Rait

... Castle too. And I loved the tale of Willie Armstrong, Kinmont Willie, treacherously given up to Lord Scrope, for the worst dungeon of all, by troopers who in taking him violated a border truce. His escape was a real romance; and I am glad Lord Buccleugh, who saved him, was an ancestor of Sir Walter Scott. ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... heads of the government of their country. [127] Another member of the Scottish Privy Council, Alexander Stuart, Earl of Murray, the descendant and heir of the Regent, abjured the religion of which his illustrious ancestor had been the foremost champion, and declared himself a member of the Church of Rome. Devoted as Queensberry had always been to the cause of prerogative, he could not stand his ground against competitors who were willing to pay such ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... 6. The Commentator excludes from the operation of the harsh rule in this 20th sloka, an heir, who is supposed to deny his ancestor's debt or liability through ignorance; but he attempts to justify the rule itself by ...
— Hindu Law and Judicature - from the Dharma-Sastra of Yajnavalkya • Yajnavalkya

... uncommon handsome woman for a squaw, and had, as I perhaps should have qualified when I answered so about this girl, some white blood in her veins; or rather had, as the old chief once told me, somewhere away back among the gone-by generations, a female ancestor, a pure white woman, who was made captive by the Indians, and married into their tribe, and who was as handsome as a picture. But the white blood seemed to have been pretty much lost among the descendants, till the appearance of this nonsuch of a girl, in whom every drop of ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson

... is given to an ancestor, and if in the same deed directly or indirectly the gift is made to the heir or heirs of the body of the said ancestor, these last words have the force of ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb

... said an elderly woman, who introduced herself as the old man's daughter, and had placed bread and milk before the guest. "There are secrets in every family, and we have ours, but he'll never tell those old tales. All I can tell you is that an ancestor of little Blanche went to wreck and ruin because of some fine lady's doings, and killed himself. The story is that his boys turned out bad. One of them saw his crime, and never got over the shock; he was foolish like, ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton

... "Dubois is right, my life is no longer my own; yesterday, my mother also told me the same thing. Who knows what might happen if I were to fall? The same as happened at the death of my ancestor Henry the Fourth, perchance. After having reconquered his kingdom step by step, he was about—thanks to ten years of peace, economy, and prosperity—to add Alsace, Lorraine, and perhaps Flanders, to France, while ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)

... since I was knee high to a grasshopper. You see, my great grandfather used to live in Montreal in the days when the Northwest Fur Company was in competition with the Hudson Bay Company, and my ancestor was employed each Spring to set out from Montreal with some, big batteaus manned by French Canadian voyageurs, who would row and sail all the way through most of the Great Lakes to Fort William, where the agent had collected heaps of valuable ...
— The, Boy Scouts on Sturgeon Island - or Marooned Among the Game-fish Poachers • Herbert Carter

... lions and tigers. Species, Felis domesticus. I start taking notes: "'The first civilized people to keep cats were the Egyptians, thirteen centuries before Christ.... Fifty million years earlier the ancestor of the cat family roamed the earth, and he is the ancestor of all present-day carnivores. The Oligocene cats, thirty million years ago, were already highly specialized, and the habits and physical characteristics of cats have ...
— It's like this, cat • Emily Neville



Words linked to "Ancestor" :   ascendent, progenitor, ancestress, ancestral, forbear, sire, descendant, foremother, root, forefather, primogenitor, father, relative, forebear, relation



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