"Maypole" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... however doubtful, that will not fight for it?) Young Frank was ready to fight without much thinking, he was a Jacobite as his father before him was; all the Esmonds were Royalists. Give him but the word, he would cry, "God save King James!" before the palace guard, or at the Maypole in the Strand; and with respect to the women, as is usual with them, 'twas not a question of party but of faith; their belief was a passion; either Esmond's mistress or her daughter would have died for it cheerfully. I have laughed often, talking of King William's reign, and said ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Champion" and "Endicott and the Red Cross," Hawthorne paints the stern courage of the Puritan, but never his gentle or humane qualities. His typical tale presents the Puritan in the most unlovely guise. In "The Maypole of Merrymount," for example, Morton and his men are represented as inoffensive, art-loving people who were terrorized by the "dismal wretches" of a near-by colony of Puritans. Nothing could be farther ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... borders of Epping Forest, at a distance of about twelve miles from London—measuring from the Standard in Cornhill,' or rather from the spot on or near to which the Standard used to be in days of yore—a house of public entertainment called the Maypole; which fact was demonstrated to all such travellers as could neither read nor write (and at that time a vast number both of travellers and stay-at-homes were in this condition) by the emblem reared on the roadside over against the house, which, if not of those goodly ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... not move to let Sister Agatha pass through. On the way home they went into a house built of glass. It felt very hot, and there were ever so many bunches of grapes hanging from the roof. And in the afternoon there was the Maypole. Mary stood in front of the house a little way from Evangeline and the prince and the other people, but they all seemed to be laughing and talking too ...
— The Bountiful Lady - or, How Mary was changed from a very Miserable Little Girl - to a very Happy One • Thomas Cobb
... jesting with the men, or with some of his school friends whom he brings up here, it seems to me that I see myself again in him; and that he is a merry young fellow, full of life and fun, and able to hold his own at singlestick, or to foot it round the maypole with any lad in Kent of his age. Then again, when he is talking with his mother, or giving directions in her name to the French labourers, I see a different lad, altogether: grave and quiet, with a gentle, courteous way, fit for a young noble ten years his senior. I don't know but that ...
— Saint Bartholomew's Eve - A Tale of the Huguenot WarS • G. A. Henty
... a party of merry little aspens who were in a circle around a grand old pine, as though using the pine for a maypole to dance around. It was in autumn, and each little aspen wore its gayest colors. Some were in gowns of new-made cloth-of-gold. The grizzled old pine, like an old man in the autumn of his life, looked down as though honored ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... females, and chains enow to moor a whole navy in dock, is but a scurvy fellow at the best. Thou wilt find trouble in purveying these necessaries; and then must come the gim-cracks for the second course,—gods, goddesses, fates, furies, battles, marriages, music, and the maypole. Hast ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... towns. What right have these anarchists to attack your busy and prosperous countrysides? Have they not thriven under your management? Are not the English villages always growing larger and gayer under the enthusiastic leadership of their encouraging squires? Have you not the Maypole? Have you not ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... wreathing it with the painted garlands of autumn foliage. They crowned the King of Christmas and bent the knee to the Lord of Misrule! Such fantastic foolery is inconceivable in a Puritan community, and the Maypole which was its emblem was the most inconceivable of all. This "flower-decked abomination," ornamented with white birch bark, banners, and blossoms, was the center of the tipsy jollity of Merrymount. As Morton explains: ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... gent airs. I sawr him out of the winder while you was in the shop, and there he spoke law-de-daw to a brat of a boy as ought to be in gaol, seeing he smoked a cigar stump an' him but a ten-year-old guttersnipe. Ses I, oh, a painted maypole you is, I ses, with a face as hard as bath bricks. A bad un ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... contemporary testimony, once upon a time it "swore terribly." His Parliamentary services, supplemented by the Chairmanship of Committee controlling disposition of National Relief Fund, might seem sufficient to keep him at home. But valour, like murder, will out. So, as old John Willett, landlord of the Maypole Inn, Chigwell, used to say when asked of the whereabouts of his son, "he has gone to the Salwanners, where the war is," carrying with him the good wishes of all sections of House and an exceptionally full knowledge of the intricacies ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 25, 1914 • Various
... it must have come from a determination as fixed as Mark Tapley's, to be jolly under any and all circumstances, and certainly circumstances have done their best to favor such resolution. The peasant of the past, usually represented as dancing heavily about a Maypole, or gazing contentedly at some procession of his lords and masters as it swept by, has no counterpart to-day, nor will his like come again. For here about the old Borough, where every stone means history and the "making of the English people," there ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... interest. The whole town is en fete, the ships in the harbour decked with flags, the people adorned with flowers. The feature of the day's celebrations is the Hobby Horse Dance, or procession, to two very old tunes. Until comparatively recent times the Maypole was still erected each year in ...
— Legend Land, Volume 2 • Various
... every one tied one of the long rawhide thongs depending from the top of the pole to the loop of cord that hung from his breast. When all were ready they formed a great circle, somewhat after the fashion of the dancers around a Maypole, and outside of those formed another and greater ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... powers, such as that of commanding rain, or that of causing fertility in plants or in animals. From the tree-spirit, again, the tree-god was further formed, a being who was able to quit the sacred tree or who presided over many trees. Of these beliefs the fast-decaying usages of the Maypole and the Harvest May ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... without taking away that open candour that had first attracted Diane when he was a rosy lad. His frame had strengthened at the same time, and assumed the proportions of manhood; so that, instead of being the overgrown maypole that Narcisse used to sneer at, he was now broad-shouldered and robust, exceedingly powerful, and so well made that his height, upwards of six feet, was scarcely observed, except by comparison with the rest ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... After this, a little clear well and a black stream pleased me the most; and multiplied by fifty, and coloured ad libitum, might be well enough to read of in a novel or poem. We returned, and now before the inn, on the green plat around the Maypole, the villagers were celebrating Whit-Tuesday. This Maypole is hung as usual with garlands on the top, and, in these garlands, spoons, and other little valuables, are placed. The high smooth round pole is then well greased; and now ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... we shall," she answered in her brightest manner. "Try not to look wretched, John: you are as happy as a Maypole." ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... was practised only in certain places and among certain classes of the community. In other places the ancient ritual was either adopted into, or tolerated by, the Church; and the Maypole dances and other rustic festivities remained as survivals of the rites ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray
... peace, and in hoisting a brand-new tricolored flag on the tree of liberty—a poplar planted, during the glorious days of July, close to the gate of the marquis's chateau, but which had long since withered into a dry and unsightly maypole. A number of bad characters mingle in the crowd, and the demonstration assumes a more turbulent and criminal aspect than its original promoters had contemplated. The outer gate of the chateau is forced, and stones are thrown, one of which grazes the cheek of the Viscount ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... windows. The lawn has been in bad condition for nearly two years, on account of the building of the Morgan memorial, but has now been planted again. One May-day we had an old English festival around a Maypole on the green, with Robin Hood, Maid Marian, Friar Tuck, Will Scarlett, the hobby- horse, the dragon and all the rest, including Jack in the Green and an elephant. This was such a success that we were asked to repeat it across the river on the East Hartford Library green, ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... distance of the print is the celebrated Strand maypole, although its situation there does not coincide with that marked out in more recent prints. The original of our Engraving is a scarce print, by Hollar, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various
... as tall as a Maypole. And then after he had done this cowardly trick, why he durst not stand up to Mr. Trevor, like a man. And so, madam, finding as you have been told a parcel of trumpery tales, I hope in God you will be ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... East Grimstead, five miles south-east from Salisbury, on Maypole Farm near Churchway Copse[5], a bath-house has been dug out and planned by Mr. Heywood Sumner, to whom I owe the following details. The building (fig. 12) measures only 14 x 28 feet and contains only four rooms, (1) a tile-paved apartment which probably served as entrance and dressing-room, ...
— Roman Britain in 1914 • F. Haverfield
... margin of the wood, among three or four houses, a pole as tall as the mainmast of a ship had been erected, and from its summit hung wreaths and fluttering ribbons: this was called a maypole. Men and maids danced round the tree, and sang as loudly as they could, to the violin of the fiddler. There were merry doings at sundown and in the moonlight, but I took no part in them—what has a little mouse to do with a May dance? I sat in the soft moss and held my sausage-peg ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... her to-day; a more comely maid, As she danced in her muslin bowed with blue, Round a Hintock maypole never gayed." - "Aye, aye; I watched her this day, too, As it happens," ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy |
