"Old English" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which I am now writing was Lynde, Livingstone & Co. Mr. David Lynde lived in a set of chambers up town, and dined at his club, where he usually passed the evenings at chess with some brother antediluvian. A visit to the theatre, when some old English comedy or some new English ballet happened to be on the boards, was the periphery of his dissipation. What is called society saw nothing of him. He was a rough, breezy, thickset old gentleman, betrothed from his birth to apoplexy, enjoying ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... poetry see, besides Skene, Professor Rhys, op. cit. Gildas and Nennius (but not the Vita Gildae) will be found conveniently translated, with Geoffrey himself, in a volume of Bohn's Historical Library, Six Old English Chronicles. The E.E.T.S. edition of Merlin contains a very long excursus by Mr Stuart-Glennie on the ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... Saturday we see markets at the towns we go through; at Habwood and Flatonia especially was this noticeable. The population seemed almost altogether negro. I observed a negro and his wife, well dressed, riding on horseback in the old English pillion style; another negro and his wife, and about twelve children, in a capacious kind of wagon-buggy, and many negroes and negresses, the latter dressed in white and gay colours, standing at their ...
— A start in life • C. F. Dowsett
... colonial women had is rather difficult to discover from the writings of the day; for each section had its own peculiar rules, and courts and decisions in the various colonies, and sometimes in one colony, contradicted one another. Until the adoption of the Constitution the old English law prevailed, and while unmarried women could make deeds, wills, and other business transactions, the wife's identity was largely merged into that of her husband. The colonial husband seems to have had considerable confidence in his help-meet's ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... use to be." [325] The influence of the moon upon vegetation is an opinion hoary with age. In the Zend-Avesta we read, "And when the light of the moon waxes warmer, golden-hued plants grow on from the earth during the spring." [326] An old English author writes:— ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... the state," said Louis Quatorze in the arrogance of his power; and it is thus easy to understand that there could be no such free government or representative institutions in Canada as were enjoyed from the very commencement of their history by the old English colonies. ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... Bible, or those parts which held my attention, I began to explore the glass-doored bookcase which I have already mentioned. I found there Pilgrim's Progress, Peter Parley's History of the United States, Grimm's Household Stories, Tales of a Grandfather, a bound volume of an old English publication (I think it was called The Mirror), a little volume called Familiar Science, and somebody's Natural Theology, which last, of course, I could not read, but which, nevertheless, I tackled, with the result of gaining a permanent ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... Pontifical High Mass in their chapel. In one strictly cloistered convent there was a high wooden trellis across the chapel, so that though the nuns could see the priest at the altar through the trellis-work, he was unable to see them. In the Convent of the Grey Sisters at Ottawa we found an old English nun who, in spite of having spent thirty-five years in a French-Canadian convent, still retained the strong Cockney accent of her native London. She was a cheery old soul, and, with another old English nun, had charge of the wardrobe, which they ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... filled with shrubs and flowers, among which we recognised a rare variety of the floral family in full bloom. Every thing around—the extent of the buildings, the garden, the park, with deer browsing amid the tangled shrubbery—all bespoke the old English style ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... good old English moons," cried out Natty. "You forget the harvest moon; and, though it is not quite like this, it is a very beautiful object to gaze at, and useful to those who have to carry home the full-loaded ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... sentiments were exhaling, which presently condensed and reacted in a volume on the coldest persons present, and excited them. At the most animated moment of this intoxicating party, in a corner of a gilded salon where certain bankers, ambassadors, and the immoral old English earl, Lord Dudley, were playing cards, Madame Felix de Vandenesse was irresistibly drawn to converse with Raoul Nathan. Possibly she yielded to that ball-intoxication which sometimes wrings avowals from ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... the window side the book-lined wall was, as it were, replaced by the wooded face of a hill, clothed in dark lines of trimmed yews, which rose abruptly about a hundred yards from the house and overshadowed the whole library wing. Between the window and the hill, however, was a small old English garden, closely hedged round with yew hedges, and blazing now with every flower that an English August knows—with sun-flowers, tiger-lilies, and dahlias white and red. The window was low, so that the ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... which, after a prolonged search, was found in London and duly installed as a presiding deity to defy the dampness that pervades all those ivy-covered habitations, as well as the neuralgia that wrings their possessors. What a blessing it proved, more than any one thing making the old English house seem like an American home! The delightful summer heat we, in America, enjoy in the coldest seasons, is quite unknown to our Saxon cousins. Although many came to see our stove in full working order, yet we could not persuade them to adopt the American ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... Beowulf MS. suffered at this time, its edges being scorched and its pages shriveled. As a result, the edges have chipped away, and some of the readings have been lost. It does not appear, however, that these losses are of so great importance as the remarks of some prominent Old English scholars might lead us to suspect. Their remarks give the impression that the injury which the MS. received in the fire accounts for practically all of the illegible lines. That this is not so may ...
— The Translations of Beowulf - A Critical Biography • Chauncey Brewster Tinker
... every instructor, having the gramophone to repeat to us untiringly the true Spanish "manana" and the French "ennui." And the study of phonetics, so much developed within the last few years, makes it unpardonable for teachers of modern languages to let the old English faults prevail. ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... hinted at by Colonel Elliot), and it retains clear traces of being contaminated with a version of The Huntiss of Chevet, popular in 1459, as we read in The Complaynte of Scotland of that date. There is also an old English version of The Hunting of the Cheviot (1550 or later, Bodleian Library). The UNEDITED text of Scott's Otterburne then contained traces of The Huntiss of Chevet; the two were mixed in popular memory. ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... by Saunders of these barbarities. The English officers now endeavoured to rival each other in acts of cruelty to obtain official commendation and royal favour. Sir Walter Raleigh was especially active in Cork, and brought a charge of treason against the Barrys and Roches, old English settlers; but Barry set fire to his castle, and took to the woods, where he joined Lord Desmond. Lord Roche was taken prisoner, but eventually escaped from his persecutors. Pretended plots were rumoured in all directions, and numbers of innocent persons were ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... to be called 'Name it Yourself,' when out comes a 'Name it Yourself,' in England, and out comes too a 'Smiles and Tears,' with a widow, an Irishman, and almost all my dramat. pers. I wrote the 'Indian Princess,' and an 'Indian Princess' appears in England. Looking over the old English dramatists, I am struck with the 'Damon and Pythias' of Edwards as a subject, but am scarcely set down to it, when lo, the modern play in London; and what is worse, with the fine part of Pythias absolutely transformed ...
— The Indian Princess - La Belle Sauvage • James Nelson Barker
... her acquainted with Chaucer, with Ben Jonson, with Herbert, Chapman, Ford, Beaumont and Fletcher, with Bacon, and Sir Thomas Browne. I was seven years her senior, and had the habit of idle reading in old English books, and, though riot much versed, yet quite enough to give me the right to lead her. She fancied that her sympathy and taste had led her to an exclusive culture of ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... himself as the showman who brought out their peculiarities. There is some ground for this criticism, if one regards the art of the novelist as centered wholly in realism; but such a hard and fast rule would condemn all old English novelists ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... became lightly satirical. "Well we may wonder," said he; "search the wide world over! But reely and truly you've come to the wrong 'ouse this time. Here, stand to one side!" he commanded, as a lady in the costume of La Pompadour, followed by an Old English Gentleman with an anachronistic Hebrew nose, swept past me into the hall. He bowed deferentially while he mastered their names, "Mr. and Mrs. Levi-Levy!" he cried, and a second footman came forward to escort them up the stairs. To convince ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... worshippers; in the same way the bread and the wine are offered to God in the Eucharist, and he is prayed to accept "our alms and oblations." The Easter Cakes presented by the clergyman to his parishioners—an old English custom, now rarely met with—are the cakes of Ishtar, oval in form, symbolising the yoni. We have already dealt fully with the apparent similarity between the Christian Agapae, and the Bacchanalian mysteries (ante, pp. ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... presenting the controversy between the soul and the body very quaintly and at length. The same thing was done by Henry Nicholson in a "Conference between the Soul and Body concerning the Present and Future State." William Crashaw, an old English poet, translated from the Latin a poem entitled "The Complaint: a Dialogue between the Body and the Soul of a Damned Man."17 But any one who will peruse with intelligent heed the works that have been written on this whole subject must be amazed ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... his bedroom when he goes into the garden and putting the key into the pocket of his cassock, same as in the old Pope's days. I go in whenever I like, and he lets me take whatever I please. At Christmas some rich Americans wanted a skull-cap to save a dying man, and I got it for the asking. Now an old English lady wants a stocking to cure her rheumatism, and I'll get that too. I've saved a little hair from the last cutting, and if ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... these to be immediately followed, should the exuberance of the occasion warrant, by a ringing tiger. This I recall was the invariable habit of the playfellows described in such works as "Sanford and Merton" and "Thomas Brown's Schooldays." I also urged on them the substitution of the fine old English game of cricket for baseball, to which I found them generally addicted. It is true I had never found either opportunity or inclination for perfecting myself in one or both of these games; but the pictured representations ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... of Wales had sent them a piano, and many fine pictures ornamented the walls from famous persons. An old English lady who spends her summers up there seemed much amused at the prank of the girls, and evidently wondered ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... them. Dunois then passed into Guienne, and in a few-months Bayonne, the last stronghold of the English, fell into his hands (1451). When Talbot was sent over to Bordeaux with five thousand men to recover the south, the old English feeling revived, for England was their best customer, and they had little in common with France. It was, however, but a last flicker of the flame; in July, 1453, at the siege of Castillon, the aged Talbot was slain and the war at once came to an end; the south ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... man. Sunrise in a glorious English summer and a grand old English garden, on the day after the Day of Days. He trod on air as he lived over again every second of that wonderful over-night scene, and scarcely realized the ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... the remote little Chatteris theatre may be accounted for in this manner. In spite of all his exertions, and the perpetual blazes of triumph, coruscations of talent, victories of good old English comedy, which his play-bills advertised, his theatre (which, if you please, and to injure no present susceptibilities and vested interests, we shall call the Museum Theatre) by no means prospered, and the famous Impresario ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... surroundings. A log-house is the appropriate dwelling of the lumberer in the woods; but transplant it to a suburban lawn and it becomes an absurdity, and a double absurdity. It is not in harmony with the place, nor fit for the use of the citizen. Nothing more satisfactory in their place than the old English parish-churches; but transfer one of them from its natural atmosphere and surroundings to the midst of one of our raw villages or bustling cities, exposed to the sudden and violent changes of our climate,—the open timber roof admitting the heat and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... Orleanists had again gained the preponderance in France: they unfurled the Oriflamme against the Duke of Burgundy, who was now in fact hard pressed. Henry negociated with them both. But while the Orleanists made difficulties about granting him the independent possession of the old English provinces, Burgundy declared himself ready to acknowledge him as King.[67] The common interests moreover of home politics allied him with ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... Mail I saw once an interview with an inferior American black-and-white draughtsman at Berlin. He was asked his opinion about a splendid exhibition of old English pictures being held there, and took occasion to say 'what the pictures demonstrate is not that the English women of the eighteenth century were conspicuously lovely, but the artists who painted them possessed secrets ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... works, I have thought it worth while to quote two passages from it. The author is Bartholomaeus Anglicus, and the quaint English in which it is couched is quoted from "Medical Lore" (London, 1893). The book is all the more interesting because in a dear old English version, issued about 1540, the spellings of which are among the great curiosities of English orthography, it was often read and consulted by Shakespeare, who evidently quotes from it frequently, for not a little of the quaint scientific ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... of the Franciscans at Coventry are particularly celebrated for their ingenuity in performing these pageants on Corpus Christi day; a copy of this play or miracle is preserved in the Cottonian Collection, written in old English rhyme. It embraces the transactions of the Old and New Testament, and is entitled ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... seventeenth century the quatrain was a favorite tool of the old English writers who wished to embody a stinging epigram or epitaph in verse. The works of Robert Herrick contain several, most of them, unfortunately, not fit for print. Nor was he the only unblushing exponent of ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow
... old and new bed coverlets woven in those fanciful geometric designs, which are just as the ancient Gauls wove them in the Bronze Age, and which formed a favorite bed-covering of our ancestors, and of country folk to-day. These coverlets the weaver calls by the good old English name of hap-harlot, a name now obsolete in England, which I have never seen used in text of later date than Holinshead's Survey of London, written four hundred years ago. His manuscript pattern-book is over a hundred years old, and has the rules for setting the harnesses. They bear many pretty ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... one farthing in current coin of the realm); spirit-flasks, leather bottles, jet ornaments; woollen jerseys and comforters knitted for him by their wives and daughters; fossil ammonites and coprolites; a couple of young sea-gulls to add to his menagerie; and many old English marine ditties, which he had to sing to M. Bonzig with his now cracked voice, and then translate into French. Indeed, Bonzig and Barty became inseparable companions during the Thursday promenade, on the strength of their common interest in ships and the ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... pansies moved by wagon-loads over the streets and soared to the windows of the sewing-girls. Overhead, in the steaming and cloud-marbled blue, stood the April sun. "Apelles of the flowers," as an old English writer has styled him, he was coloring the garden-beds with his rarest enamels, and spreading a sheet of varied tints over the steps of the Madeleine, where they hold the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... the rawest sort of dog to carry a brace of names in your card holster; that it gave you the drop on the swells every time, and that they just had to throw up both hands and pass you the pot when you showed down. Said that Bottes was old English for Botts, and that Smythe was new American for Smith; the Augustus was just a fancy touch, a ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... think of the intellect which could busy itself with fancies seemingly so childish, the monks were true to their vows, and true to their duty as far as they comprehended what duty meant. Among many good, the prior John Haughton was the best. He was of an old English family, and had been educated at Cambridge, where he must have been the contemporary of Latimer. At the age of twenty-eight he took the vows as a monk, and had been twenty years a Carthusian at the opening of the troubles ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... but neither the Old English nor the northern dialect could be understood by the writer or the reader, and ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... convent life, and the inimitable gambling scene in the convent of San Francis, I have not dared to present on my own responsibility, nor even that of the old English black-letter edition of Friar Thomas, but I have reproduced it from the expurgated Spanish edition, which has passed the censors, and ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... data, slender as they may seem, I arrive at my conclusion, thus:—First, None but abbots were interred in the high choir; secondly, The characters cannot be later than the latter end of Edward the Third, when the old English black letter was substituted in its place. From the foundation to this time three Johns had been Abbots of Whalley; Belfield, Topeliffe, and Lindley. The termination of the surname must have immediately preceded the word hujus, but the letters AJ can only have formed the termination of Lindelai, ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... pleasure rather than from any idea that they would ever be called into service. He was at first captain, then he rose to the rank of 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. ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... back your—those little books of Old English Poetry," she said, with a sudden constriction in her throat, and a quick burning flush that suffused brow, cheek ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... gentlemen of that age, under the protection of queen Elizabeth; for which reason it was then named Virginia, being begun on that part called Ronoak Island, where the ruins of a fort are to be seen at this day, as well as some old English coins which have been lately found; and a brass gun, a powder horn, and one small quarter-deck gun, made of iron staves, and hooped with the same metal; which method of making guns might very probably be made use of in those ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... unpleasant effect to those who are not habituated to it." (p. xxv. We again underscore the un-Saxon words.) Now if there be any short cut to the Anglo-Saxon, it is through the German; and how far the Bostonians deserve the reproach of a neglect of old English masterpieces we do not pretend to say, but the first modern reprint of the best works of Latimer, More, Sidney, Fuller, Selden, Browne, and Feltham was made in Boston, under the care of the late Dr. Alexander Young. We have no wish to defend Boston; we mean only ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... unfurled the Bolivian flag. This had been made expressly for the expedition by the hands of Seora Quijarro, wife of the Bolivian minister residing in Buenos Ayres. As the sun for the first time shone upon the brilliant colors of the flag, nature's stillness was broken by a good old English hurrah, while the hunter and several others discharged their arms in the air, until the parrots and monkeys in the neighborhood must have wondered (or is wondering only reserved for civilized man?) what new thing had come to ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... had come over it even since our visit! From a happy little family, if I may use the expression, it had grown into a populous colony, in which all the passions, the rivalries, the loves and the hates of the mother country were in some sort represented. And yet there remained still much of that old English hospitality, which rendered our first stay so pleasant, and which almost made us desire to prolong our last. The alteration that had taken place was rather to be referred to the increasing number ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... in Australia, but perhaps it will be objected that 30 or 40 years has not been a sufficient period to test this power of struggling and overcoming the aborigines. We know the European mouse is driving before it that of New Zealand, like the Norway rat has driven before it the old English species in England. Scarcely an island can be named, where casually introduced plants have not supplanted some of the native species: in La Plata the Cardoon covers square leagues of country on which some S. American ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... over whites; fold and cut with a spoon. Do not beat. Pour in saucepan, loosen with a knife around edges, cook until it sets. Sprinkle grated cheese on top and put in oven for two or three minutes. Serve very hot. Old English ...
— The Community Cook Book • Anonymous
... Folgers and harpooneers —all kith and kin to noble Benjamin —this day darting the barbed iron from one side of the world to the other. Good again; but then all confess that somehow whaling is not respectable. Whaling not respectable? Whaling is imperial! By old English statutory law, the whale is declared a royal fish. .. Oh, that's only nominal! The whale himself has never figured in any grand imposing way. The whale never figured in any grand imposing way? In one of the mighty triumphs given to a Roman ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... the doorway in the hall, on a pair of splendid antlers—his first trophy of the chase,—rested his deer gun, a clean piece of Damascus steel and old English walnut, imported years before. The barrels were forty inches and choked. The small bright hammers rested on the yellow brass caps deep sunk on steel nippers. They shone through the hammer slit fresh and ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... patient printer, who will rejoice to get a little "reprint copy" in place of my perplexing manuscript.) For where else shall I find such a dictionariful command of the hights and depths—to say nothing of the lengths and breadths—of the good old English tongue? This young man must indeed have been a marvel of eloquent verbosity at that period of his career. The article in question has the very flavor of the golden age of Indian contracts, corner-lots, six per cent a month, and mortgages with waiver clauses. There, is also ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... reader of the drama, and I do not know that I have ever greatly relished any plays but those of Shakespeare and Goldoni, and two or three of Beaumont and Fletcher, and one or so of Marlow's, and all of Ibsen's and Maeterlinck's. The taste for the old English dramatists I ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Institute! And hail the patient Prince promoter! The man who's neither cynic brute, Nor phrase-led sycophantic doter, May echo that. Our patriot tap Is old, well-kept and genuine stingo; Not the chill quidnunc's cold cat-lap, Nor crude fire-water of the Jingo, But sound as good old English ale, Full-bodied, fragrant, mild, and mellow. To try that tap Punch will not fail, Nor any other right good fellow. A bumper of that draught to-day Is "Welcome ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 13, 1893 • Various
... straitened his clean-shaven mouth. "A kind of expiation or amercement by fine, known to the Mosaic, Roman, and old English law. Gad, sir, the Jews might have made you MARRY his widow or sister. An old custom, and I think superseded—sir, properly superseded—by the alternative of ordeal by battle in the mediaeval times. I don't myself ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... her. There is nothing in any one of these so numerous love-songs to indicate who or what the lady was. Was she dark or fair, passionate or gentle like himself, witty or simple? Was it always one woman? or are there a dozen here immortalised in cold indistinction? The old English translator mentions gray eyes in his version of one of the amorous rondels; so far as I remember, he was driven by some emergency of the verse; but in the absence of all sharp lines of character and anything specific, ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in the sense of "person" occurs in the Book of Common Prayer, More's "Utopia," Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Fuller, and other old English writers. ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... is lost we may be sure that the old English version of the Bible will survive. "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... answered aloud, "I have the best of reasons for what I have said. My son, who lives in New Hampshire, occasionally sends me the Gazette, and in one number, which came nearly a year ago, appeared this very article, taken originally from an old English paper." ...
— Rosamond - or, The Youthful Error • Mary J. Holmes
... in the commemoration of the tercentennial celebration of Shakespeare's death has been awakened by the "Drama League of America" that there will be many old English gardens planted in 1916,—gardens containing as many as possible of those flowers mentioned ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... which their runes were chiefly written: and the verb "write," which is derived from a Teutonic root, signifying to scratch or tear, is one of the testimonies of the usage. Their poems were graven upon small staves or rods, one line upon each face of the rod; and the Old English word "stave," as applied to a stanza, is probably a relic of the practice, which, in the early ages, prevailed in the West. Vellum or parchment afterwards supplied the place of these materials. Real paper, manufactured ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... when things reached the lowest ebb he was summoned by a postal from an acquaintance, made during one of his night prowls, an old English cabman. When he arrived at the address indicated he found the old man sick in bed with rheumatism. He wanted Jarvis to drive his hansom for a week, on a percentage, until he could get about again. There was no choice. It was that ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... about fifteen miles from London. This was a village containing perhaps thirty dwellings, and two hundred inhabitants; a court-house and jail all under one roof, built of stone and plastered; small doors and windows in the style of some of the old English castles. London was built in the forks, or between the east and west branches of the river Thames; hence, you would hear people speak of "going to the forks," instead of the village; it is about two hundred miles from Buffalo, and the nearest ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... in some families," Rebecca continued. "You can't think what a difference there is though. We are not so wealthy in Hampshire as you lucky folks of the City. But then I am in a gentleman's family—good old English stock. I suppose you know Sir Pitt's father refused a peerage. And you see how I am treated. I am pretty comfortable. Indeed it is rather a good place. But how very ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... being utilized to the utmost. France and Belgium have long made the most of all their land. Now England has made it compulsory to leave no ground uncultivated. Golf-courses are now potato-patches. Parks and every bit of back yard all grow their quota of vegetables. The boys in the old English public schools work with the hoe ...
— Food Guide for War Service at Home • Katharine Blunt, Frances L. Swain, and Florence Powdermaker
... of the three men at Wiltstoken on the day in question. Words had arisen between Byron and Paradise on the subject of the Islington affair; and they had at last agreed to settle the dispute in the old English fashion. They had adjourned to a field, and fought fairly and determinedly until interrupted by the police, who were misled by appearances into the belief that the affair was ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... 'squire Burdock, who married a first cousin of my father, an heiress, who brought him an estate of a thousand a-year. This gentleman is a declared opponent of the ministry in parliament; and having an opulent fortune, piques himself upon living in the country, and maintaining old English hospitality — By the bye, this is a phrase very much used by the English themselves both in words and writing; but I never heard of it out of the island, except by way of irony and sarcasm. What the hospitality of our forefathers has been I should be ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... "The Relief of Lucknow," "Barbara Frietchie" and others. Nothing is more rare than a fine ballad. Coleridge's ballad of the "Ancient Mariner" is probably the greatest English poem written since Milton's time, and there are many old English ballads which are nearly equal to it. The ballad of "Mary Garvin," simply as a work of art, takes the first place among Longfellow's poems. Tennyson and Whittier both tried their hands on the siege of Lucknow, and Whittier carried ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... incursions of a venomous rabble, bent on destroying the upper class, the landed system, the aristocracy, the Church, the Crown. Woman as she was, she would fight revolution to the last; they should find her body by the wall, when and if the fortress of the old English life went down. ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of Ossory, and preserved in the archives of that see, is contained a collection of Latin religious poetry, written in a good bold hand of the 14th century; prefixed to several of the hymns, in a contemporary and identical hand, are sometimes one sometimes more lines of a song in old English or Norman French, which as ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 54, November 9, 1850 • Various
... part I greatly prefer the Jingoism of Rule Britannia to the Imperialism of The Recessional. I have no objection to Britannia ruling the waves. I draw the line when she begins to rule the dry land—and such damnably dry land too—as in Africa. And there was a real old English sincerity in the vulgar chorus that "Britons never shall be slaves." We had no equality and hardly any justice; but freedom we were really fond of. And I think just now it is worth while to draw attention to the old optimistic prophecy that "Britons ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... said John Peter, selecting an inscription and tracing over the flourishes with his thumb-nail. "'William Penwarne, b. 1837—' that's the year the Queen came to the throne. It's easier to read, you see, than old English, and far easier than what we call Gothic, or Ecclesiastical—which is another variety—though, of course, not so easy as Plain. Here you have Plain—" He indicated an inscription—'Samuel Bosenna, of Rilla, ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... memory and tradition of Amadis to her heart and soul. He was HER ancestor,— hers, she had always said;—she had almost learned her letters from the inscriptions he had carved, and through these she could read old English and a considerable amount of old French besides. When she was about twelve years old she and Robin Clifford, playing about together in this room, happened to knock against one panel that gave forth a hollow reverberant sound, and moved by curiosity they tried ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... and perhaps even commendable in those who stay at home, and also very natural, since it is a part of our unreasonable nature to distrust and dislike the things that are far removed and unfamiliar. Let me at last divest myself of these old English spectacles, framed in oak and with lenses of horn, to bury them for ever in this mountain, which for half a century and upwards has looked down on the struggles of a young and feeble people against ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... have an overall repousse floral and strapwork pattern with the monogram "MTL" on one side and an engraved crest on the other. The crest seems to be an adaptation of the Todd family crest. The pieces are marked with a lion, an anchor, and an old English "G," which are the early marks of the Gorham Silver Company. It is assumed that this silver service was a presentation gift to Mrs. Lincoln during the time she was First Lady of the White House, as a letter dated July 19, 1876, from her to her son Robert Todd Lincoln calls his attention ...
— Presentation Pieces in the Museum of History and Technology • Margaret Brown Klapthor
... He now presented the historian with two or three notices, (in his own hand-writing, copied, as he declared, faithfully from the originals,) of some of the ancient Bristol churches; of course, wholly above suspicion, for they were in the true old English style. These communications were regarded as of inestimable value, and the lucky finder promised to increase his vigilance, in ransacking the whole mass of antique documents for fresh disclosures. It was not long before ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... number. Addison has, however, gained himself immortal honour by his manner of filling up this last character. Who is there that can forget, or be insensible to, the inimitable nameless graces and varied traits of nature and of old English character in it—to his unpretending virtues and amiable weaknesses—to his modesty, generosity, hospitality, and eccentric whims—to the respect of his neighbours, and the affection of his domestics—to his wayward, hopeless, secret passion for his fair ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... of Tripoli, and I am greatly indebted to the Vice-Consul for his assistance in my researches. I must acknowledge likewise the kind attentions of the Doctor and the Turkish officers. I bade Mr. Gagliuffi an affectionate farewell, who answered with the plain earnest old English of "God bless you!" I left the Consul in but indifferent health. Three times has he had the fever, yet he is determined to keep up to the last. When Mr. Gagliuffi first went to Mourzuk, he expected that Abd-El-Geleel, whose agent he was, as well as having ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... taint the air and brutalize life elsewhere, were in this quaint old settlement unknown. Sweet thought, pure speech, went hand in hand, clad in nervous, pithy old English, or a "patois" of the French, mellowed and enlarged by their constant use of the liquid Indian tongues, flowing like soft-sounding waters about them, their daily talk came ever ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... had mentioned it in a poem, and the other as stoutly denying it. At last a reverend gentleman, whose remarks respecting the intelligence of the children of Ham had been particularly disparaging, asserted that nowhere in Chaucer, Spencer, nor any of the old English poets could anything relating to it be found. At this, the little waiter became so excited that he could no longer contain himself, and, despite the frowns and nods of our hostess, exclaimed, 'Yes it can, it's in Chaucer; here,' he continued, taking out a book ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... slope; mighty trees also adorn it, giant elms, the nearest of which, when the sun is nigh its meridian, fling a broad shadow upon the face of the pool; through yon vista you catch a glimpse of the ancient brick of an old English hall. It has a stately look, that old building, indistinctly seen, as it is, among those umbrageous trees; you might almost suppose it an earl's home; and such it was, or rather upon its site stood an earl's home, in days of old, for there some old Kemp, some Sigurd, ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... to teach the children how to tell time on the dial-plate of an old English clock, "Presented by Sir Isaac Coffin, Bart.," as its face informs you—one of ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... German prisoners!' cried the squire. 'Good old English bull-dog! But how did he do ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... is to give an accurate and readable modern English prose rendering of the Old English poetry. The translation of Richard Francis Weymouth, entitled A Literal Translation of Cynewulf's Elene, has been at hand, but I owe it practically nothing in this work. While I trust that my rendering has not departed so far from the text that ...
— The Elene of Cynewulf • Cynewulf
... An old English form of this game substitutes the words "Fire, air, and water," for "Beast, bird, and fish," the players being required to name some animal that lives in the air or water when those elements are named, but to keep silence when fire is named. In this form the ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... I hate corruption. It is undoing us all, It will undo the nation! The influence of the crown is monstrous. The aristocracy is degraded by annual batches of mundungus and parchment lords; and the constitution is tumbling about our ears. The old English spirit is dead. The nation has lost all sense and feeling. The people are so vile and selfish that they are bought and sold like swine; to which, for my part, I think they have been very properly compared. ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... dated November 2, 1862, he expresses himself very warmly about his disappointment in the attitude of many of his old English friends with reference to our civil conflict. He had recently heard the details of the death of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... popular sovereignty, an appeal to a higher law—the law of nature and Nature's God, the replacement of virtual representation with direct representation, and the substitution of a balance of interests within the Virginia society for the old English theory of a balanced government comprising crown, nobility, and commons ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... of separating the city from the rest of the world, making it sequestered. He knew that a fence wouldn't be the right sort of thing. So he conceived the idea of having a high, thick wall, modeled after an old English wall, overgrown with moss and ivy. As those walls were generations in growing, he saw that to produce one in a few months or even a few years required some ingenuity. He set to work on the problem and he devised a scheme for making an imitation hedge by planting ivy ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... slavery,— slavery to a people who were coming across the western sea, hard-headed, hard-hearted, caring nothing for art, or science, whose pleasures were coarse and cruel, but with a certain rough honesty, reverence for country, for law, and for the ties of a family—men of a somewhat old English type, who had over and above, like the English, the inspiring belief that they could conquer the whole world, and who very nearly succeeded in that—as we have, to our great blessing, not succeeded—I ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... imagine how her Portia could endure to hear the old English Prayer-book droned out. For her part, she liked one thing or the other, either a rousing Nonconformist sermon in a meeting-house or a ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... enmities of one's own family, or country, or religious sect. In forms how afflicting must that necessity have sometimes occurred during the Parliamentary war! And, in after years, amongst our beautiful old English metrical romances, I found the same impassioned complaint uttered by a knight, Sir Ywain, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... collection of old English Ballads there is an ancient ditty which I am told bears some remote and distant resemblance to the following Epic Poem. I beg to quote the emphatic language of my estimable friend (if he will allow me to call him so), the Black Bear in Piccadilly, and to assure all to whom ...
— The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman • Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray
... falling beneath the "Indian Emperor." They have neither the stately march of the heroic dialogue, nor, what we would be more pleased to have found in them, the truth of passion, and natural colouring, which characterised the old English drama. But the credit of the piece was redeemed by the comic part, which is a more light and airy representation of the fashionable and licentious manners of the time than Dryden could afterwards attain, excepting in "Marriage a la Mode." The ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... scholar, had sufficed to identify the ballad with one printed in Miss Brooke's Reliques of Irish Poetry, a characteristic production of the latter days of the eighteenth century, when Macpherson, with his adaptation of the Ossianic poems, and Bishop Percy, with his gathering of old English ballads, had set a fashion soon to ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... the beautiful old china which Martha handled so lovingly that there was no good excuse for keeping it hidden on closet shelves. Every year when the old cherry-trees were in fruit, Martha carried the round white old English dish with a fretwork edge, full of pointed green leaves and scarlet cherries, to the minister, and his wife never quite understood why every year he blushed and looked so conscious of the pleasure, and thanked Martha as if he had received a very particular attention. There was ...
— The Queen's Twin and Other Stories • Sarah Orne Jewett
... Tom said, after a few minutes' silence, "but it shall be in the old English style, stand up and knock down. I'll have no pistols, 'cos I never used 'em, and don't think I could hit a ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... once a book collector, and turned my attention to our old English Bibles, and, among other editions, perfected, almost sheet by sheet, our first English Coverdale Bible of 1535. It is a sad specimen of time, attention, and money mis-spent and mis-applied, and as I look upon you as the receiver of cast off idols, whether ...
— A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself, Fourth Part • George Mueller
... he reached the harp, and entertained his guest with the following characteristic song, to a sort of derry-down chorus, appropriate to an old English ditty. [24] ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... of a Virginia clergyman throws light on the old English law requiring that marriages should be celebrated before noon. A colored couple appeared before him, asking to be married, the man in a considerably muddled state. The minister said to the woman, ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... face, but for all that, looking the jolly, good sort of fellow that everyone acknowledged him to be, with a tender heart and a ready hand for the unfortunate, always honest and upright, yet thoroughly practical and business-like in all his undertakings. Henry Rayne was descended from a good old English family, whose name he bore proudly and honorably, and many an interesting anecdote he was wont to tell at his dinner table of the "Stephens," "Edwards," and "Henrys," of the ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... An old English sailor, who had farmed a little in the mountains, was on one occasion left alone at our headquarters to take charge of it during our absence on the work. Two men came along and demanded something which the old man would not give and they deliberately ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... word, Surry. It is the old English term, and England is best of all, I think. So Nighthawk came to live with me, and take care of my interests. You know that he has continued to be faithful, and to serve me, and love ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... moving across to the window, stood looking out. Below, the pleasant, happy-go-lucky garden rambled desultorily away to the corner where stood the ancient oak supporting Ann's hammock—a garden of odd, unexpected nooks and lawns, with borders of old English flowers, without definite form and looking as if it had grown of its own sweet will into its present comeliness. But the garden conjured up before Cara's mental vision was a very different one—a stately, formal garden entered through an arch of jessamine, ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... Court of legal and of equitable actions. They are brought in different form, tried in a different way, and disposed of by different rules, though by the same judges and at the same term of court. As to equity cases, the rules of the old English chancery practice are substantially followed. In cases of a common law nature, the practice existing at the time in regard to those of a similar kind in the courts of the State within which the federal court may be held is to be followed, as nearly as may be.[Footnote: ...
— The American Judiciary • Simeon E. Baldwin, LLD
... conclusion that the act is unconstitutional. So far as the language of the prohibition is decisive of anything, it must be taken to include all sorts of property, real as well as personal—the term forfeiture certainly having that extent of application in the old English law and practice, from which the framers of our Constitution took it, and there is nothing elsewhere in the Constitution or in its history to warrant any other construction. So the Congress of 1790 understood it in the act ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... uncommon, under these circumstances: nevertheless, I resolved to try it, and that very evening Biddy entered on our special agreement, by imparting some information from her little catalogue of Prices, under the head of moist sugar, and lending me, to copy at home, a large old English D which she had imitated from the heading of some newspaper, and which I supposed, until she told me what it was, to be a design ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens |
