"Ancestry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the possessions of an illustrious ancestry are about to slide from out your line for ever; that the numerous tenantry, who look up to you with the confiding eye that the most liberal parvenu cannot attract, will not count you among their lords; that the proud park, ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... least, said those who were privileged to know. There were tropical strains in her blood-strains from some flowery land in the Caribbean Sea-strains which refused to mingle in harmonious fashion with the white elements in her ancestry. She was neither lovely nor lovable, and it was regarded as a kindly dispensation of Heaven that some malformation of the lower limbs kept her confined to her boudoir, where no visitors ever called save a few misguided newcomers ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... her lordly trappings, and be content with the democratic style of America? Were the pride of ancestry, the patrician spirit, the gentle courtesies and refined pursuits, splendid attributes of rank, to be erased among us? We were told that this would not be the case; that we were by nature a poetical people, a nation easily duped by words, ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... her own expression, Nevis and Bath House were in an uproar. The unforeseen engagement following on the heels of the famous poet's transformation, the haughty departure of Mrs. Nunn, and the manifest approval of Lady Hunsdon and Lady Constance, who called assiduously at The Grange, the distinguished ancestry and appearance of Miss Percy, and the fact that the wedding was to take place on the island instead of in London, combined to make a sensation such as Nevis had not known since the marriage of Nelson and Mrs. ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... names of their rivers, forests, or towns. They were classified as accessories to inanimate things; and having no monuments which reminded them of their origin, they became as it were without recollections or associations; and degenerated, as may be almost said, into a people without ancestry. ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... are still their souls' darlings. They entered the modern world just as science began to marry with commerce and industry, and so their unworn, fresh, and youthful intellectual vigor found expression in industry. Renan writes that he owes his pleasure in intellectual things to a long ancestry of non-thinkers, and he claims to have inherited their stored-up mental forces. Germany is not unlike that. Her recent industrial and intellectual activity may be the release from bondage, of the centuries of stored-up intellectual energy from ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... inhabitants. There you will find every species of warlike arms to subdue and to over-run countries; every species of arms of gentility, banners, escutcheons, books of pedigree, stanzas and poems relating to ancestry, with every species of brave garments; admirable stories, lying portraits; all kinds of tints and waters to embellish the countenance; all sorts of high offices and titles; and, to be brief, there is every thing there that is adapted to ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... was well and favorably known in Germany, and his fate was keenly and particularly mourned. Germans have also noted that many Americans of direct Teutonic ancestry or origin were among the shining marks in the death list. Colonel John Jacob Astor is claimed as of German, extraction, as well as Isidor Straus, Benjamin Guggenheim, Washington Roebling and Henry B. Harris. All of them had been ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... our father and our mother? Or can we point to any Romulus and Remus for our founders? Our ancestry is lost in the universal paternity; and Caesar and Alfred, St. Paul and Luther, and Homer and Shakespeare are as much ours as Washington, who is as much the world's as our own. We are the heirs of all time, and with all nations we divide our inheritance. On this Western Hemisphere all tribes ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... meek reply, "I cannot boast an illustrious ancestry; but at least I shall never be called upon to blush for my posterity. Yonder mule colt ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... he had, at first, put himself and his private funds at Jude's disposal. He had had hopes that by so doing he might help Jude to decent manliness. But that hope soon died. Jude, lazy with the inertness of a too sharply defined ancestry, became rapidly a ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... Massachusetts, where her aunt, Mrs. Horace Pallant, entertained in an almost royal fashion and was eager to set her match-making arts to work on behalf of her only unmarried niece. Enid had gone to the very edge of well-bred lengths to land Courtney Millet, but Scots ancestry and an incurable habit of talking sensibly and rather well had handicapped her efforts. She had confided to Primrose with a sudden burst of uncharacteristic incaution that she seemed doomed to become an old man's darling. Her last words to the sympathetic ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... by his parents to one of the states which are called pivotal states. There he had grown up—farm boy first, teacher of a district school, self-taught lawyer, county attorney, state legislator, governor, congressman for five terms, a floor leader of his party—so that by ancestry and environment, by the ethics of political expediency and political geography, by his own record and by the traditions of the time, he was formed to make an acceptable ...
— The Thunders of Silence • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... Rosette, who actually smiled in return at ce pauvre garcon, and smiled the more for Mademoiselle Julienne's indignation. Suddenly, however, a shrill shout made him descend hastily, and the old Turk's voice might be heard in its highest key, no doubt shrieking out maledictions on all the ancestry of the son of a dog who durst defile his eyes with gazing at the shameless daughters of the Frank. Little Ulysse was, however, allowed to disport himself wherever he pleased; and after once, under Arthur's protection, ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... where worldly interest and selfish principles are allowed to predominate. There are many who possess all the requisites for the enjoyment of true happiness, who, from the prejudices of education, or the mistaken pride of ancestry, have never experienced the celestial rapture: they have never been amalgamated with society, are strangers to poverty themselves, and cannot comprehend its operation upon others; born and moving in a sphere where the chilling blasts of ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... a sextant from a nautical almanac. And when they asked if Roscoe was a navigator, I shook my head. Roscoe resented this. He had glanced at the "Epitome," bought for our voyage, knew how to use logarithm tables, had seen a sextant at some time, and, what of this and of his seafaring ancestry, he concluded that he did know navigation. But Roscoe was wrong, I still insist. When a young boy he came from Maine to California by way of the Isthmus of Panama, and that was the only time in his life that he was out of sight ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... Russell, Lord John: ancestry, 1, 2; boyhood and education, 3-9; schooldays at Sunbury and Westminster, 3-5; extracts from journal kept at Westminster, 4, 5; passion for the theatre, 4; education under Dr. Cartwright, 5; dedicates a manuscript book to Pitt, 6; schooldays and schoolfellows at Woodnesborough, ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... of those who know—di color che sanno—or try to know, is open to all who are willing to enter, to all who have a feeling for the past; an interest in the genealogy of our thoughts, and a reverence for the ancestry of our intellect, who are, in fact, historians in the true sense of the word, i.e. inquirers into that which ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... 'Leave ancestry behind, despise heraldic art, Thy father be thy mind, thy mother be thy heart. Dead names concern not thee, bid foreign titles wait; Thy deeds thy pedigree, thy hopes ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... the crop had been known, and Sir Thomas Overbury had made it the vehicle of one of his sharp witticisms against people who were forever boasting of their ancestry,—their best part being below ground. But Foster anticipates the full value of what had before been counted a novelty and a curiosity. He advises how custards, paste, puddings, and even bread, may be made from ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... representation of the clans,(18) but in the nature of aristocracy generally, in so far as statesmanly wisdom and statesmanly experience are bequeathed from the able father to the able son, and the inspiring spirit of an illustrious ancestry fans every noble spark within the human breast into speedier and more brilliant flame. In this sense the Roman aristocracy had been at all times hereditary; in fact, it had displayed its hereditary character ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... think this rascal is a Cornish or a Devonshire man; he has the twang and the nasal sing-song of that part of the island. If an American, however, we have a better right to him than the French; speaking our language and being descended from a common ancestry and having a common character, it is quite unnatural for an American to serve ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... some work into my head which has been long seething there, and will, I think, begin to take shape. It is about flowers—the ancestry of flowers; whether the flowers will tell their own family records, or what the plot will be I have not yet planned, and it will take me some time to collect my data, but the family histories of flowers which came originally ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... never seen her before. She was there. I had no thought of her ancestry, her wealth, or her position. She was there, and into my throat came something I had never felt before, into my face a suffusion of hot blood, into my lungs ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... family to which the boy belongs is the human family. His parents alone and their characteristics do not explain him, nor does contemporary environment, important as that is. His ancestry is the human race, his history is their history, his impulses and his bodily equipment from which they spring are the result of eons of strife, survival, and habit. Four generations back he has not two but sixteen parents. ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... similar to the old castles upon the Rhine. So great was the opposition to building this magnificent temple of a workhouse, and so inconsistent, beyond the progress of the age, was it viewed by the "manifest ancestry," that it caused the mayor his defeat at the following hustings. "Young Charleston" was rebuked for its daring progress, and the building is marked by the singular cognomen of "Hutchinson's Folly." What is ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... Gathering of the Clans," or Scottish picnic. So many milk-white knees were never before simultaneously exhibited in public, and, to judge by the prevalence of "Royal Stewart" and the number of eagles' feathers, we were a high-born company. I threw forward the Scottish flank of my own ancestry, and passed muster as a clansman with applause. There was, indeed, but one small cloud on this red-letter day. I had laid in a large supply of the national beverage in the shape of the "Rob Roy MacGregor O' Blend, Warranted Old ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the verse itself. The heroes are virtuous. There is none of importance who is not admirable in his way. The palaces, the arms, the horses, the sacrifices, are always excellent. The women are always stately and beautiful. The ancestry and the history of every one are honourable and good. The whole Homeric world is clean, clear, beautiful, and providential, and no small part of the perennial charm of the poet is that he thus immerses us in an atmosphere of beauty; a beauty ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... have come from the western shores of Asia, and to have pervaded the nations of Europe, both Roman and barbarian, in the first and second centuries. By a comparison of the sets of names in the two families of nations, we gain certain leading facts about the chief deities of our heathen ancestry, which all the rest of the scattered evidence tends to confirm. Thus our Tuesday, A.-S. Tywes-dg, compared with the French Mardi and its Latin original Martis dies, teaches us that the old god Tiw (who was also called Tir) was recognised as the analogue of the Roman Mars, ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... and slowly wiped the back of his neck. She measured, in fact, nineteen or twenty feet over-all, but to the eye she appeared considerably longer, having (as the Elder afterwards put it) as many lines in her as a patchwork quilt. Her ribs, rising above the unfinished top-strakes, claimed ancestry in a dozen vessels of varying sizes; and how the builder had contrived to fix them into one keelson passed all understanding or guess. For over their unequal curves he had nailed a sheath of packing-boards, eked out with patches of sheet-tin. ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... feet, and thickish tail. His colour, seldom white, but generally intermingled with small spots of brown or chocolate over the body, and more particularly over the head and ears. Such a dog is in the possession of the writer, who knows nothing of his ancestry; but is convinced from those he saw in France, that they must have ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... they were that bade him to their board; His fortunes now were over, and the sword Of his proud ancestry dishonour'd—left To moulder ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... we are led to the conclusion that a vast number of forms, certainly exhibiting specific distinctions, and according to some naturalists, differences even entitled to be regarded of generic value, have all a common ancestry." ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... mavis, I sing on the branches early, And such my love of song, I sleep but half the night-tide rarely; No raven I, of greedy maw, no kite of bloody beak, No bird of devastating claw, but a woodland songster meek. I love the apple's infant bloom; my ancestry have fared For ages on the nourishment the orchard hath prepared: Their hey-day was the summer, their joy the summer's dawn, And their dancing-floor it was the green leaf's velvet lawn; Their song was the carol that defiance bade to care, And their breath of life it ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... the priest" (Jer. xx. 1) had four hundred servants, and every one of them rose to the rank of the priesthood. One consequence was that an insolent priest hardly ever appeared in Israel but his genealogy could be traced to this base-born, low-bred ancestry. Rabbi Elazar said, "If thou seest an impudent priest, do not think evil of him, for it is said (Hos, iv. 4), 'Thy people are as they that strive with ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... incident, or accident, of sculpture, but its very essence and principle; and his jealousy of undressed images strikes the reader as a strange, vague, long-dormant heritage of his straight-laced Puritan ancestry. Whenever he talks of statues he makes a great point of the smoothness and whiteness of the marble—speaks of the surface of the marble as if it were half the beauty of the image; and when he discourses of pictures, one feels that the brightness or dinginess ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... acknowledgment the family arrogance of the man interesting me deeply. So evident was this pride of ancestry that a sudden suspicion flared into my mind that this might be all the man had ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... but a lunar glow. They read the assurance in their mother's speech, in her looks; and, moving among the Epworth folk as neighbours, yet apart, they had acquired a high pride of family which derived nothing from vulgar chatter about titled, rich and far-off relatives; but, taking ancestry for granted, found sustenance enough in the daily life at the parsonage and the letters from Westminster and Oxford. Aware of some worth in themselves, they saw themselves pinched of food, exiled from many companions, shut out from social gatherings for want ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... charming little fairy called Nymphalin. I believe she is descended from a younger branch of the house of Mab; but perhaps that may only be a genealogical fable, for your fairies are very susceptible to the pride of ancestry, and it is impossible to deny that they fall somewhat reluctantly into the liberal opinions so much in ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the town library to be opened on Sundays, though, as he never entered it on week-days, it was easy to turn the proposition into ridicule. If, therefore, Mrs. Mallet was a woman of an exquisite moral tone, it was not that she had inherited her temper from an ancestry with a turn for casuistry. Jonas Mallet, at the time of his marriage, was conducting with silent shrewdness a small, unpromising business. Both his shrewdness and his silence increased with his years, and at the close of his ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... it dispenses with pages of critical analysis, and the hundred details requisite to build up such an impression of ancestry from the soil, of the way in which the New England past had entered into the fibre of Hawthorne's nature, of the sort of historic consciousness that was latent, like clairvoyance, in his imagination. ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... eyes crinkled very pleasantly when she smiled. She wore the modern Amerind dress—a sign of pride in the ancestry which now implied such diverse occupations as interstellar steel construction and animal husbandry and llano-planet colonization. "If it were adventure, as the only girl on this ship I'd have to be in the landing party, lest the tedium of orbital ...
— Sand Doom • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... step forward was taken in The Romany Girl, which immediately followed,—a work full of fire and freedom, strongly personal in suggestion, and marked by a wild and impatient individuality which revealed in the girl the impression of a lawless ancestry, that somehow and somewhere had felt the action of a finer strain of blood. The next year Fuller reached the highest point of his inspiration and power in The Quadroon, a work which is likely to ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume I. No. VI. June, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... faithful Huguenot preacher imagine that a century after he wrote thus kindly to his own children, myriads who have been born from the same noble and holy ancestry would be animated, cheered, and profited by his useful life and example. Though dead he ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... to trace the origin of English social institutions to Celtic models. The facts seem to indicate that while the modern English nation is largely Welsh in blood, it is wholly Teutonic in form and language. Each of us probably traces back his descent to mixed Celtic and Germanic ancestry: but while the Celts have contributed the material alone, the Teutons have contributed both the material and ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... they all told me at the convention at Lake Geneva last August a year ago. And I just came back from visiting Rodale. I thought I'd see Rodale. He looks a good deal like this gentleman here (indicating Mr. Bernath), our friend here, about the size and appearance of him. But he is of the greatest ancestry in the world. He is Jewish, and he doesn't know exactly how to eat, because he has jowls and dewlaps and he is too fat, but he is a very fine man; beautiful, clear, honest eyes, he has, and I hope to have him consider the planting of nut trees on ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various
... toil that burrows like the mole, In winding graveyard pathways under- ground, For Browning's lineage! What if men have found Poor footmen or rich merchants on the roll Of his forbears? Did they beget his soul? Nay, for he came of ancestry renowned Through all the world,—the poets laurel- crowned With wreaths from which the autumn takes ...
— The White Bees • Henry Van Dyke
... unnatural tendencies, we apply, in the general way, the term "Insane Diathesis." This diathesis may be inherited or acquired. Those who are born to become insane do not necessarily spring from insane parents or from an ancestry having any apparent taint of lunacy in the blood. But they do receive from their progenitors oftentimes certain impressions upon their mental and moral, as well as upon their physical being, which impressions, like iron molds, fix and shape their ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... notion of omnipotence and malignity. The savage of the present day lives in perpetual fear of evil spirits; and the superstitious dread, which I and most others have suffered, is inherited from our savage ancestry. How much further back we must seek it may be left to the sage philosophers ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... of the fashions, and of his clothes, of the scandal of the day, and the ancestry of the persons ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... and a thousand other banes? The same benignant Providence which, according to Laurence Sterne, tempereth the wind to the shorn lamb provideth defence and protection for the bald. Had I not loved books, the soul in my midriff had not done away with those capillary vestiges of my simian ancestry which originally flourished upon my scalp; had I not become bald, the delights and profits of reading in bed might never have fallen ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... he replied. "I've lived here all my life that I haven't been away from it." They both burst out laughing at this proof of his ancestry. ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... the behaviour of the preceding one. The present John Jones was the last result to date of all the previous thinking, feeling, and doing of John Jones in earlier bodies and in other centuries. He pretended to no details, nor claimed distinguished ancestry, for he realised his past must have been utterly commonplace and insignificant to have produced his present; but he was just as sure he had been at this weary game for ages as that he breathed, and it never occurred to him to argue, to doubt, or to ask ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... looking men; notably so Augustin Shingwauk and Buhkwujjenene, both of them Chiefs, and very intelligent-looking men. Augustin was at this time about 60 years of age, and his brother Buhkwujjenene eight or ten years his junior. They could trace their ancestry back for four generations. Their father's name was Shingwaukoons (Little Pine), and he appears, from all accounts, to have been a very intelligent Chief. The father of Shingwaukoons was partly French, but his mother, Ogemahqua (Queen), ...
— Missionary Work Among The Ojebway Indians • Edward Francis Wilson
... of the following narrative was a French refugee, who entered the service of William of Orange. To find the beginning of his ancestry, we must reach far back into history. The Rapins were supposed to have been driven from the Campagna of Rome during the persecutions of Nero. They took refuge in one of the wildest and most picturesque valleys of the Alps. In 1250 we find the Rapins ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... you to know," returned Patience. "I wished you to like me for myself, and you wouldn't. You thought me pedantic and narrow-minded, and set me down as a typical New England woman of the grim, uncompromising type, who boasts of her Puritan ancestry, and goes through life ungracious and forbidding. I don't believe I am pedantic or narrow-minded or small-souled, but I have plenty of other faults, as you'll learn before the year is over. I meant what I said about your standing in your ...
— Grace Harlowe's Fourth Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... flow back into it. Mary Magdalen had brought a dog with her—a yellow dog of unknown ancestry, of shamefaced demeanor, a ropy tail, splay feet, and a rolling eye; named, she and heaven alone knew ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... successful attempt to elevate The Dunciad comes in section two of his poem. Unlike Dryden, in whose Discourse the account of the "progress" of satire is confined almost exclusively to a few Roman writers, Harte begins his account of its progress with Homer and brings it down to Pope. Deriving the ancestry of The Dunciad from Homer, the greatest epic poet, obviously enhances Pope's satire. Perhaps less obviously, by extending Dryden's account to the present, Harte makes The Dunciad not only a chronological terminus ad quem but, far more important, the fruit of centuries of ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... concerning his ancestry, see vol. i.; sensitive regarding it; his own statements; anxious to appear of respectable stock; his genealogy as established later; his reputed illegitimacy; his birth; his references to his mother; his childhood; befriended by his step-mother; his education; early reading; early attempts at humorous ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... colonel, and when the company disbanded he kept the title, and was rather proud of it, as he was of everything pertaining to himself and the Cromptons generally. It was an old English family, tracing its ancestry back to the days of William the Conqueror, and boasting of two or three titles and a coat-of-arms. The American branch was not very prolific, and so far as he knew, the Colonel was the only remaining Crompton of that line in this country, except the son of a half-brother. This brother, who ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... and among her bundle of notes for the Book, his mother has cherished the manuscript for his complete works. If at school Friday afternoon, he spoke a piece, "trippingly on the tongue," they harkened back over his ancestry to find the elder Adams of Massachusetts who was a great orator. When he drove a nail and made a creditable bobsled, they saw in him a future architect and stored the incident for the Romance that was to be biography. When he organized a baseball club, they saw in him the budding leadership ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... of HOME were borne by that lurid air to the ears of the infidels. The shout that rang through the Christian force as Ferdinand now joined it struck like a death-knell upon the last hope of Boabdil. But the blood of his fierce ancestry burned in his veins, and the cheering voice of Almamen, whom nothing daunted, inspired him with a ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the Yosemites, were all somewhat affiliated by common ancestry or by intermarriage, and were similar in their general characteristics and customs. They were all called by the early California settlers, "Digger Indians," as a term of derision, on account of their not being good fighters, and from their practice of digging the tuberous roots ...
— Indians of the Yosemite Valley and Vicinity - Their History, Customs and Traditions • Galen Clark
... but he's mine; and I like him because I like him! That's the only reason that anybody likes anybody. You think nobody's any good unless they have all sorts of aristocratic ancestry! Like that Van Reypen man who's ...
— Patty's Social Season • Carolyn Wells
... rudiment retained from their remote ancestry, I cannot tell, but any kind of suffering will wake in some a masterful impulse to burrow; and as the boys walked about in their misery, white with cold and hunger, Clare's eyes kept turning to every shallowest archway, ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... inclination toward them was accelerated. There were certain wonders of Marna's ardent soul which were for "Irish faces only"—Irish eyes were the eyes she liked best to have upon her. But she forgave Kate her Anglo-Saxon ancestry because of her talent ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... the scene in Virginia a man of middle age, not without experience in planting colonies, by name George Calvert, first Lord Baltimore. Of Flemish ancestry, born in Yorkshire, scholar at Oxford, traveler, clerk of the Privy Council, a Secretary of State under James, member of the House of Commons, member of the Virginia Company, he knew many of the ramifications of life. A man of worth and weight, he was placed by temperament and education upon the ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... A seafaring ancestry and a boyhood spent within sound of the surf doubtless had much to do with my love of the salt water. My grandfather was one of six brothers who were sea captains, and our family had clung to the North Shore of Massachusetts Bay almost since ...
— Out of the Fog • C. K. Ober
... nation, has been attempted by several Russian critics. "The peculiarities of a nation," Karamzin remarks, "may always be explained by the circumstances which have operated on it; although the grandchildren may have some of the virtues and some of the vices of their ancestry, even if they are differently situated. Perhaps the present character of the Russians may exhibit faults, which it contracted during the barbarism of the Mongolian subjugation." The pensiveness which pervades the Russian songs has also been considered as a remnant of that gloom, necessarily impressed ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... with thoughts. Every moment brings necessities which must be satisfied at once. Need was the first experience, and it was followed at once by a blundering effort to satisfy it. It is generally taken for granted that men inherited some guiding instincts from their beast ancestry, and it may be true, although it has never been proved. If there were such inheritances, they controlled and aided the first efforts to satisfy needs. Analogy makes it easy to assume that the ways of beasts had produced channels of habit ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... and canals, opening the region to the increasing stream of Middle State and New England settlement, and strengthening the opposition to slavery. A map showing the location of the men of New England ancestry in the Northwest would represent also the counties in which the Free Soil party cast its heaviest votes. The commercial connections of the Northwest likewise were reversed by the railroad. The result is stated by a writer in De Bow's Review in ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... ancestry were in his voice—an ancestry that ruled over and profited by men and women as ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... virtues, his confidence in himself, and his ready-handed use of all the means at his command—yea, even his beautiful manliness, what were they but the outcome of one thousand years of Christian faith transmitted through a royally religious ancestry? ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... Ancestry, opportunity and events all conspired to equip Charles Sumner with those implements that make man great. Like Phillips, he was a descendant of the early settlers of Boston. His father led the men who ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... was born at Blackwood, in Nithside, Dumfriesshire, on the 7th December 1784. Of his ancestry, some account has been given in the memoir of his elder brother Thomas.[6] He was the fourth son of his parents, and from both of them inherited shrewdness and strong talent.[7] Receiving an ordinary elementary education ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... awoke his fears to such a degree, that he immediately fell to uttering the most violent oaths. Calling away his troops, and retreating himself at a quick pace, he exclaimed, 'Curses be on their beards! Curse their fathers, mothers, their ancestry, and posterity! Whoever fought after this fashion? Killing, killing, as if we were so many hogs. See, see, what animals they are! They will not run away, do all you can to them. They are worse than brutes:—brutes have feeling,—they have none. O Allah, ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... population. Their accost is curt; their accent and tone of speech blunt and harsh. Something of this may, probably, be attributed to the freedom of mountain air and of isolated hill-side life; something be derived from their rough Norse ancestry. They have a quick perception of character, and a keen sense of humour; the dwellers among them must be prepared for certain uncomplimentary, though most likely true, observations, pithily expressed. Their feelings are not easily ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Imperial couple. She consulted Madame Remusat, who, in her turn, consulted her friend De Segur, who also consulted his bonne amie, Madame de Montbrune. This lady determined that if Bonaparte and his wife were desirous to be served, or waited on, by persons above them by ancestry and honour, they should pay liberally for such sacrifices. She was not therefore idle, but wishing to profit herself by the pride of upstart vanity, she had at first merely reconnoitred the ground, or made distant overtures ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... was he to know, innocent peasant lad, of an ignorant and superstitious ancestry, brought up on miraculous tales of saints and seers, that the Christ of his visit was no other than that priest whose attention Stephen had attracted by his emotion at Chartres, who with crafty keenness had chosen the peasant boy to carry out his purpose of arousing ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... original distinctness of turnips from cabbages as an article of faith? On scientific grounds may not a primordial cabbage or rape be assumed as the ancestor of all the cabbage races, on much the same ground that we assume a common ancestry for the diversified human races? If all our breeds of cattle came from one stock, why not this stock from the auroch, which has had all the time between the diluvial and the historic periods in which to set off a variation perhaps no greater than the difference ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... white (mostly Spanish and Italian) 97%, mestizo (mixed white and Amerindian ancestry), Amerindian, ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... Now that is all abolished, she needs help from the North. I doubt if we in the North would be any better had we been placed in the same environment, and our superiority may be due as much to soil, climate, and the consequent unprofitableness of slave labor, as to our Puritan ancestry. ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 50, No. 6, June 1896 • Various
... are generally opulent and respectable, and hold no community with the others. They use a different liturgy, and their language is even different. They never intermarry with the Jews of the Dutch Synagogue. They pride themselves on their ancestry, and give their children the best education which can be obtained where they reside. The Brokers upon the Exchange, of the Jewish persuasion, are all or chiefly of the Portuguese Synagogue. Their number is limited to twelve by Act of Parliament, ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... the 16th of March 1750, and was the eighth child of ten children. Her father, Isaac Herschel, traced his ancestry back to the early part of the seventeenth century, when three brothers Herschel left Moravia through religious differences, they being Protestant. The father, Isaac, was passionately fond of music, to the study of which, as a youth, he devoted himself, and, at the time of his marriage in Hanover, ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... born in Paris, of Spanish ancestry; has written works dealing with Spain, Paris, the Franco-German War, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... his daughter Mademoiselle Henriette-Delphine-Hortense-Marie-Chasse-Loup de Merode—described as a tall, fair, and extremely meagre damsel, of about thirty years of age—were known to be rigidly uncompromising in all matters having reference to ancestry, it was concluded that Jean Baptiste do Veron had been able to satisfy his noble friends, that although de facto a merchant from the sad necessities of the evil time, he was de jure entitled to take rank and precedence with the illustrious ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447 - Volume 18, New Series, July 24, 1852 • Various
... appear to thrive under the English administration. They are a peculiar people, reminding me of the Arab even more than the Italian, while a certain rudeness in their build and motions suggests their Punic ancestry. Their language is a curious compound of Arabic and Italian, the former being the basis. I find that I can understand more than half that is said, the Arabic terminations being applied to Italian words. I believe it has never been successfully ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... the city of Chicopee, one of the group of municipalities of which Springfield is the nucleus. He lived on Church Street in a house long the home of his father, a beloved Baptist clergyman of the town. His clerical ancestry is perhaps responsible for his essentially religious nature. His maternal grandfather was the Rev. Benjamin Putnam, one of the early pastors of Springfield, and among his paternal ancestors was Dr. Joseph Bellamy of Bethlehem, Connecticut, a distinguished ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... said of Lord Byron that he was prouder of being a descendant of those Byrons of Normandy, who accompanied William the Conqueror into England, than of having been the author of "Childe Harold." The remark is not altogether unfounded, for the pride of ancestry was a feature of his character; and justly so, for his line was honourably known on the fields of Cressy, Bosworth, and Marston Moor; and in the faithful royalist, Sir John Biron, afterwards Lord Biron, throughout the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... the judge; "very different. And so I fear are you and he. Yet I would like it very ill if my young friend were to misjudge his father. He has all the Roman virtues: Cato and Brutus were such; I think a son's heart might well be proud of such an ancestry of one." ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... insight she read his unspoken appeal, but a high courage dwelt in the spirit of the little Puritan of colonial ancestry, and she summoned ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... borders of the ocean, and a few thousand acres of unproductive land in the same neighbourhood. My mother, who is now a saint in heaven, was as much so as a mortal can be when on earth; and although my noble father inherited much of the true pride of ancient ancestry, he was free from the folly and vice of his predecessors, and he resolved to exert all his energies in repairing his broken fortunes, and to hand down a fair estate to ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... of some people, my misfortunes began before I was born. The rector of ***, my grandfather, was as vain of his ancestry, as a German baron: and perhaps with no less reason, being convinced that Adam himself was his great progenitor. My mother, not having the fear of her father before her eyes, forgetful of the family dignity, disgraced herself, ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... impossible supposition (une fiction, conradictoire), which no person can entertain who is familiar with the laws of comparative philology, and with the general theory of the human intellect." To one who remembers that every nation of the Indo-European race traces its descent from a barbarous ancestry, and especially that the Germans in the days of Tacitus were in precisely the same social stage as that of the Iroquois in the days of Champlain, this opinion of the brilliant French philologist and historian will seem erratic and unaccountable. ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... social purists who will disagree with us in this statement. Men and women educated in the creeds of the Old World, with the good blood of a long ancestry of quiet ladies and gentlemen, find modern American society, particularly in New York and at Newport, fast, furious, and vulgar. There are, of course, excesses committed everywhere in the name of fashion; but we cannot see that they are peculiar to America. We can only answer that the creed of ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... careless, too, about money matters. He had a habit of borrowing, right and left, small sums which might be conveniently forgotten by the borrower, and for which the lender would dislike to ask. Ellis had a strain of thrift, derived from a Scotch ancestry, and a tenacious memory for financial details. Indeed, he had never had so much money that he could lose track of it. He never saw Delamere without being distinctly conscious that Delamere owed him four dollars, which he had lent at a time when he could ill afford to spare it. It was a prerogative ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... eccentric types whose origin, entirely independent from the origin of the Negritos, was Malayan. Here the Ilocanes, or the natives of the better class, the Christians of these provinces, although of Malay origin, belong to a more cultured class of Malay ancestry. They are amenable to Christian influences, and their manners are agreeable and pleasing. They cultivate abundant quantities of sugar, cotton, indigo, rice, and tobacco, and the women weave the famous Ilocano blankets that are sold at such a premium in Manila. Vigan, ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... of this great race are those with which we have most to do in history and in literature. Our own English language is made up of the dialects of different tribes, many of whom agreed in their use of words which they had derived from our Aryan ancestry. Thus our substantive verb I AM appears in the original Sanscrit of the Aryans as ESMI, and m for ME (MOI), or the first person singular, is found in all the verbal inflections. The Greek form of the same verb was ESMI, ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... cheats and frauds, far more sinister in their mask than Gould in his carelessly open career of theft and corruption. Many of the descendants of that sordid aggregation live to-day in the luxury of inherited cumulative wealth, and boast of a certain "pride of ancestry" and "refinement of social position;" it is they from whom the sneers at the "lower classes" come; and they it is who take unto themselves the ordaining of laws and of customs and definitions of morality. [Footnote: ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... is, but their origin and history have been different. The Jews have a common ancestry and grand traditions, that have left alive their pride of race. 'We have Abraham to our father,' they said, when their necks were ...
— Minnie's Sacrifice • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... of interest to him. Study the man as he might, there always remained a profound mystery to his keen Italian mind. Every now and then nature—to prove that while she provided laws for humanity she obeyed none herself—nature produced the prodigy. Ancestry was nothing; habits, intelligence, physical appearance counted for naught. Harrigan was a fine specimen of the physical man, yes; but to be the father of a woman who was as beautiful as the legendary goddesses and who ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... of Niccolo Machiavelli consists for the most part of a record of his public services to the State of Florence. He was born on May 3, 1469, of parents who belonged to the prosperous middle class of Florentine citizens. His ancestry was noble; for the old tradition which connected his descent with the feudal house of Montespertoli has been confirmed by documentary evidence.[1] His forefathers held offices of high distinction in the Commonwealth; and though their wealth and station ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... Irish. The curly black hair of the Milesian spoke for him as clearly as the blue-gray eye. He shaved clean and he looked clean. An ancestry of hard workers left limbs that lifted him to almost six feet of strong manhood. His skin was ruddy and fresh. Two years younger than Thornton, he yet looked younger by five. And Callovan, like Thornton, was inwardly what ...
— The City and the World and Other Stories • Francis Clement Kelley
... an aristocratic and thoroughly egoistic ancestry on his father's side, and a morbidly sensitive one on his mother's; brought up by his paternal grandmother, whose every thought had been centred upon him as the only living descendant of her family; surrounded by servants who were the slaves of his grandmother's and his own whims; not even his ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... ancestry, the cavaliers of old, By watching round the shambles where human flesh is sold; Gloat o'er the new-born child, and count his market value, when The maddened mother's cry of woe ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... he looked grimly at Philip while he spoke, "a gentleman were to disgrace his ancestry by introducing into his family one whom his own sister could not receive at her house, why, he ought to sink to her level, and wealth would but make his disgrace the more notorious. If I had an only son, and that son were booby enough to ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... counsel, marry!" said a fox; "And quit our mountain-dens and rocks! But if we quit our native place, We bear the name that marks our race; And what our ancestry have done Descends to us from sire to son. Though we should feed like harmless lambs, We should regarded be as shams; The change would never be believed; A ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... from what source such a man may spring. And he need have no known pedigree at all, except an honest ancestry behind him. ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... doing it of a set purpose, under the sting of some vast injury, to inflict a great affront. A deliberately designed affront on the part of another man, it therefore remained to the end of his days. The manner in which, as time went on, he permeated the unfortunate lord's ancestry with this offence, was whimsically characteristic of Landor. The writer remembers very well when only the individual himself was held responsible in the story for the breach of good breeding; but in another ten years or so, it began to appear that his father had always ...
— Contributions to All The Year Round • Charles Dickens
... the great professions would receive their due recognition, and we should presently find so symbolical a combination just as harmonious and dignified, and as pregnant with meaning, as we do the heraldic quarterings by which the mixed blood of ancestry is so proudly displayed. We can get accustomed to anything if there is a good reason for it; but when we cease to be reasonable, beauty should be our only guide. In this case reason as well as beauty had induced King John of Jingalo to reject the ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... Toni slipped down from her perch on the balustrade and made her way down to the towing path beneath. She often walked beside the river in these quiet morning hours, alone unless her dog Jock, an Airedale terrier of unimpeachable ancestry and cheerful disposition, was at ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... educated in Moscow, traced her ancestry back to one of the Buryat tribes of southern Siberia, a location that had become eventually, through the vast vagaries of history, known as the Buryat Autonomous Soviet ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... Wiggle's ancestry and social standing were quite as much a mystery as Pepsy's; he was not an aristocrat, that is certain, and having no particular chores to do was free to devote his undivided time to mischief; he concentrated on it, as the saying is, and thereby accomplished wonders. He was Pepsy's ...
— Pee-wee Harris • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... one could ever decide on its origin. The books said that Wistons had been born in London, and that his father had been Rector of Lambeth for many years; it was also quickly discovered by penetrating Polcastrians that he had a not very distant French ancestry. Was it Cockney? "I expect," said Miss Stiles, "that he played with the little Lambeth children when he was ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... powerful influence in the recent development of American sculpture has been that great artist, Augustus Saint Gaudens. Born in 1848, at Dublin, Ireland, of a French father and an Irish mother, he was brought to this country while still an infant. Perhaps this mixed ancestry explains to some degree Saint Gaudens's peculiar genius. At the age of thirteen, he was apprenticed to a cameo-cutter in New York City, and worked for six years at this employment, which demands the utmost keenness ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... for a little more than a thousand years—a genealogist would have found delight in tracing out, link by link, and authenticating by records and documentary evidences. It would have been as difficult, however, to follow up the stream of Donatello's ancestry to its dim source, as travellers have found it to reach the mysterious fountains of the Nile. And, far beyond the region of definite and demonstrable fact, a romancer might have strayed into a region of ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... as a warrior and as an orator, as the model of every courtly grace, and as the judicious patron of arts and letters, and of another Mac Callum More distinguished by talents for business and command, and by skill in the exact sciences. Both of such an ancestry and of such a progeny Argyle was unworthy. He had even been guilty of the crime, common enough among Scottish politicians, but in him singularly disgraceful, of tampering with the agents of James while ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... carry back the Amal ancestry four hundred and fifty years, or almost precisely to the Christian Era, seem to have marked the utmost limit to which the memory of the Gothic heralds, aided by the songs of the Gothic minstrels, could reach. The forms of many of the ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... much truth that she possessed no virtues whatsoever. On the stage while the inspiration lasted she was magnificent. Off the stage she was sly, treacherous, capricious, greedy, ungrateful, ignorant, and unchaste. With such an ancestry as she had, with such an early childhood as had been hers, what else could one ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... materially, there was a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of old English birth and breeding, than in their fair descendants, separated from them by a series of six or seven generations; for, throughout that chain of ancestry, every successive mother has transmitted to her child a fainter bloom, a more delicate and briefer beauty, and a slighter physical frame, if not a character of less force and solidity, than her own. ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... produce, exulted at the sight of such great opulence, and they desired to establish themselves in a country where they could so quickly win fortunes so secure and abundant.[5] The holy Prior talked to us only of his ancestry, of his good parts, of the influence which he had with the Father Provincial, of the love which the principal ladies and the wives of the richest merchants manifested to him, of his beautiful voice, of his consummate skill in music. In fact, that ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... New England was simply a bit of Old England transplanted. We all can remember elderly people whose ideas were wholly under the influence of their English ancestry. It is hardly more than a hundred years since we were English colonies, and not independent United States, and the customs and ideas of the mother country were followed from force of habit. Now one begins to see a difference; the old traditions have had time to almost ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... Lord Time-server, my Lord Fair-speech (from whose ancestors that town first took its name), as also such well-known commoners as Mr. Smooth-man, Mr. Facing-both-ways, and Mr. Two-tongues were all sprung with Captain Anything from the same ancient and long-established ancestry. As to his religion, from a child young Anything had sat under the parson of the parish, the same Reverend Two- tongues as has been mentioned above. And our budding soldier followed the example of his minister in that he never strove ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... buy the business of a man whom he had known for a number of years and to whom he had sold many diamonds and other stones. This man—Harrison Van Doren by name—had what was termed the best jewelry trade in Colchester. The "old" families—not that any of them could trace their ancestry back very far—liked to say that "we get all ...
— The Diamond Cross Mystery - Being a Somewhat Different Detective Story • Chester K. Steele
... time to attempt the unravelling of our English ancestry as well—the Crays, and the Desmonds, the Ibbetsons, and Biddulphs, etc.—which connects us with the past history of England. The farther we got back into France, the more fascinating it became, and the easier—and the ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... forehead into a thousand wrinkles, turned and twisted that very wonderfully mobile mouth of his—with its lips so full with strength and at the same time so sensitive with all the Celtic passion of his Highland ancestry—until sometimes you almost thought it a pity he had not taken to the Lyceum and some of the great parts in which Mr. Henry Irving has made his fame. There was another occasion which dwells in my memory. It was on one of the ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... of the old school, stern, and at examination a terror to the candidates. Clad in cap and gown, he would reject his own son. Nothing will serve. Recommendations defeat their object. An unquestioned Roumanian ancestry, an extraction indisputably Japanese, find no more favor in his eyes than an assumed stammer, a sham deafness, or a convalescent pallor put on for the occasion. East and west are alike in his sight. The retired registrar, the pensioned usher ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... dollars a year would not even qualify for scrutiny by the Executive Committee. There is one club in Manhattan which reaches what is probably close to the limit on that kind of exclusiveness: Members must be white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant Americans who can trace their ancestry as white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant Americans back at least as far as the American Revolution without exception, and who are worth at least ten millions, and who can show that the fortune came into the family at least four generations back. No others need apply. It is said ...
— With No Strings Attached • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA David Gordon)
... frilled dress-shirt, and the two diamond studs, much larger and more conspicuous than Oxford taste allowed, which added to its criminality. And it was easy to see too that the youth was inordinately proud of his Polish ancestry, and inclined to rate all Englishmen as ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... other people's experiences—and surely the information thus gained cannot properly be termed knowledge—but from the sensations I myself, as a member of an old Irish clan, have experienced from the hauntings of the banshee—the banshee that down through the long links of my Celtic ancestry, through all vicissitudes, through all changes of fortune, has followed us, and will follow us, to the end of time. Because it is customary to speak of an Irish family ghost by its generic title, the banshee, it must not be supposed that every Irish ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell |
