"Tonsured" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a nuisance!" for I shared the common antipathy to his country and his creed. Nor was his appearance prepossessing—one of Froude's "tonsured peasants," as I looked down at the square shoulders, the stout, short figure and the broad beardlessness of the face of the padre. But his voice, rich and mellow, attracted me in spite of myself. His eyes were sparkling with kindly humor, and his ...
— On the Church Steps • Sarah C. Hallowell
... be quarreling upon its worn and battered head; lightning and rain and snow and wind are forever hammering and beating it turn by turn. It is the Quasimodo and the Lear and the Gray Friar of mountains, all in one. And if, on some still and perfect day, its tonsured head emerges from the clouds, the watcher in the Park has but to turn his head a moment, and look again, and lo! it wears its gray cowl as before, and stoops growling and grumbling ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... remains to all time a lasting record of human needs and human consolations; the voice of a brother who, ages ago, felt, and suffered, and renounced,—in the cloister, perhaps, with serge gown and tonsured head, with much chanting and long fasts, and with a fashion of speech different from ours,—but under the same silent, far-off heavens, and with the same passionate desires, the same strivings, the same failures, ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... tonsured, delicately combed, with an aspect most meek and hands at a pretty droop, came demurely out of the friars' door into the full light of the chancel. To the bishop he bowed, to the altar he bent a knee, to his father in religion he bent both, to the hush in the nave he cast a glance of wistful ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... room like a thunder-clap. He was peering over his last, across the open counter, at a little house adjoining the church green, with a great hatred in his face. From one of the windows of the house there was leaning forth a group of three heads; there was the tonsured head of a priest, round, pink-tinted, and the figures of two women, one youthful, with a long, sad-featured face, and the other ruddy and vigorous in outline. They were watching the priest as he scattered corn to the hens and geese in ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... repeopled towns, a realm again. So far my course, albeit not glassy-smooth, Had prosper'd in the main, but suddenly Jarr'd on this rock. A cleric violated The daughter of his host, and murder'd him. Bishops—York, London, Chichester, Westminster— Ye haled this tonsured devil into your courts; But since your canon will not let you take Life for a life, ye but degraded him Where I had hang'd him. What doth hard murder care For degradation? and that made me muse, Being bounden by my coronation oath To do men justice. ...
— Becket and other plays • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... you considering?" asked Fiacc. "Dubhtach for the crozier," said Patrick. "That will be a blemish to many, indeed," said Fiacc; "why should not I be taken in place of him?" "You will be received, indeed," said Patrick. He was tonsured, baptized, an alphabet was written for him, and he read his psalms in one day, as has been related to me. He was ordained in the grade of bishop, and the bishopric of Leinster was given to him by Patrick; and his only son, Fiachra, was also ordained. This Fiacc was, ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... was a copper or bronze plaque, black, apparently with age, which once had been nailed on something for there were the holes. It represented a tall man with a long beard and a tonsured head who held a cross in his hand; and two other men, both short, who wore round metal caps and were dressed in queer-looking garments and boots with square toes. These man carried big and heavy matchlocks, and in the hand of one of them was a smoking ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... riddle, then. Plainly, you are indispensable to us. Can I tempt you by some pension, some honour, some office? I have a benefice vacant, but should dislike to see those locks of yours tonsured. What do you say ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... the temper of the people were the riots in London. On the last day of the first Parliament a dog with a tonsured crown, a rope around its neck and a writing signifying that priests and bishops should be hung, was thrown through a window into the queen's presence chamber. At another time a cat was found tonsured, surpliced, and with a wafer in its mouth in derision of the mass. The perpetrators ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... a remarkable man. If he had not been so, he would hardly have been tolerated at the chateau, since he was not particularly beautiful, and not especially refined. He was in holy orders, as his tonsured head and clerical costume bore witness—a costume which, from its tightness and simplicity, only served to exaggerate the unusual proportions of his person. Monsieur the Preceptor, had English blood in his veins, and his northern origin betrayed itself ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... of happiness! Gloom settles upon the scene; Mephisto, the only radiant one, flits across it, and mocks the poor broken-hearted girl clinging to the church door. There is a dungeon, the chanting of the procession of tonsured priests, the passing-bell. Seldom appears the golden bridge over which the baffled and tired pass ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... d'Anjou obeyed and blew his horn; The French dismount, such was the king's command, And all their friends found slain upon the field Together in one charnel wide inter: A crowd of bishops, abbots, canons, monks And tonsured priests there gathered, in the name Of God assoil and bless; incense and myrrh Are burned in reverence and love before The dead who, buried there with honors great, Are left alone—what more was there ...
— La Chanson de Roland • Lon Gautier
... conference, he must needs muster to the quarter-deck by beat of drum, with a tipstaff, having a silver bauble of a stick, leading the way. This office fell to Godefroy, the trader, a fellow with the figure of a slat and a scalp tonsured bare as a billiard-ball by Indian hunting-knife. Spite of many a thwack from the flat of M. de Radisson's sword, Godefroy would carry the silver mace to the chant of a "diddle-dee-dee," which he ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... the doorway to adjust upon their tonsured heads the kerchief worn in womanish fashion under their hats, below which fell long curls over their foreheads. It was a relic of the ancient haick, or Arabian hood, now worn ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Bayley's thunders, there stood a golden St. Anthony, a virginal St. Margaret. And all round them, in a ruined confusion, dim sacramental scenes—that flamed into jewels as the light smote them! In one corner a priest raised the Host. His delicate gold-patterned vestments, his tonsured head, and the monstrance in his hands, tormented the curate's eyes every Sunday as he began, robed in his black Genevan gown, to read the Commandments. And in the very centre of the stone tracery, a woman lifted herself in bed to receive the Holy Oil—so ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the high offices, not only as inferiors, but also as commoner.[1423] Already, in 1766, the Marquis de Mirabeau writes: "It would be an insult to most of our pretentious ecclesiastics to offer them a curacy. Revenues and honors are for the abbes-commendatory, for tonsured beneficiaries not in orders, for the numerous chapters (of nobility)." On the contrary, "the true pastors of souls, the collaborators in the holy ministry, scarcely obtain a subsistence." The first ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... care,—such an umbrella as he had used in Spain, before ever he came to this destitute and heathen land; the size, a vara and a half across; the material, silk; the color, yellow; and as the warm spring sun smote ever more fervently upon his tonsured head, his thoughts had daily turned with yearning towards the good, ample quitasol that was to shield him from the fiery persecutions of his enemy, the prince of the ...
— The Penance of Magdalena & Other Tales of the California Missions • J. Smeaton Chase
... rose from the lines of tonsured heads which skirted the high wall—a wail which suddenly died away into a long hushed silence, broken at last by a rapturous cry of thanksgiving ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... afterwards blinded, as I have told. He was a tall, pale man, with an uncertain mouth and a little pointed chin, apparently between forty and fifty years of age, and his face was made dreadful by two red hollows where the eyes should have been. Yet, notwithstanding this disfigurement, and his tonsured crown, and the broidered priest's robes which hung upon him awkwardly, as he stumbled through the words of his office, to this poor victim there still seemed to cling some air of royal birth and bearing. ...
— The Wanderer's Necklace • H. Rider Haggard |
