"Conventual" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dwelt in a common habitation under fixed rules; and these were naturally followed by confederacies of such communities under one organization. The monastic vows were poverty, or the renunciation of property; celibacy, or abstinence from marriage; and obedience to the conventual superior. Sometimes in the early centuries great evils and abuses sprang up in connection with monastic life. For example, monks might become fanatical and violent. But they furnished numerous examples of sincere ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... Ursula, to give her for the last time her conventual name, exchanged her stole, or loose upper garment, for the more succinct cloak and hood of a horseman. She led the way through divers passages, studiously complicated, until the Lady of Berkely, with throbbing heart, stood in the pale and doubtful moonlight, ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... doing during the morning at the Abbey Mill, of the methods of bolting and the old-fashioned machinery, which he feared would not enlighten him greatly on modern improved methods, some of it seeming to have been in use ever since the days it ground for the monks in the adjoining conventual buildings—now a heap of ruins. He left the house again in the course of an hour, coming home at dusk, and occupying himself through the evening with his papers. She feared she was in the way and, when the old woman was gone, retired to the kitchen, where ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... immediate successor of St. Francis, Elias of Cortona, sprang up a branch of the order, made up of former members who wished a less strict rule, and those who wished to preserve the strict rule were persecuted. The members of the relaxed branch became known as "Conventuals" or "Minors Conventual" in contradistinction to the Friars Minor (or Minorites), who are known also as "Observants" or "Observantines." Three great branches sprang later from the Friars Minor: Reformed Minors, founded in 1419, by St. Bernardino of Siena; the Recollects, founded in 1500, by John of Guadalupe; ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XX, 1621-1624 • Various
... spiritual testament. She points out the mischievous foibles, the little meannesses, the spirit of cantankerousness and strife, which long experience of the cloister had shown her were the besetting sins of the conventual life. She places before them the loftier standard of the Cross. Her words, direct and simple, ring out true and clear, producing somewhat the solemn effect of a Commination Service.' Strong as that estimate is, The Perfection deserves every word ...
— Santa Teresa - an Appreciation: with some of the best passages of the Saint's Writings • Alexander Whyte
... great pride over an inferior "Tamburlane the Great"—and perhaps not knowing that it was inferior. Furthermore, he had not, before the storm broke on him, any realization of the existence in America of another school of portraiture, the heroic—conventual, that could not understand the romantic. If Herndon strengthened as much as possible the contrasts of his subject—such as the contrast between the sordidness of Lincoln's origin and the loftiness of his thought—he felt ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... watched for tidings from the neighbourhood of the Siebenburgs! what hours of trouble were caused by the prior of the Dominicans and his envoys, who strove to convince her that her intention of renouncing her conventual life was treason to God, and that the boldness with which she had released herself from the former guides of her spiritual life and sought her own way would lead her to heresy and perdition! How painful, too, was the feeling that she was being ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... be the case, retired to the other end of the room, to examine some artificial flowers, which the young lady told me she had learned to make at the nunnery of the Encarnacion at Popayan. She then confided to me that she had once intended to be a nun, but, after a little experience of a conventual existence before she had taken the vows, thought better of it, and had returned to her friends; adding, "And perhaps some day I may accept a husband, should a suitable one be ...
— In New Granada - Heroes and Patriots • W.H.G. Kingston
... "finding that great establishment almost entirely destitute of relics, he returned to his own cathedral, and carried off with him the flagstones immediately surrounding the sacred spot, with which he formed two altars in the conventual church of his new appointment, besides two vases of blood and part of Becket's clothing." Benedict, though a member of the house and probably within the precincts, was not actually present at the Archbishop's murder. Besides his building operations ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... daughter, sister and sister, in the convent parlour. Angela had her dear people all to herself, the Mother Superior respecting the confidences and outpourings of love, which neither father nor children would wish to be witnessed even by a kinswoman. Thus, by a rare breach of conventual discipline, Angela was allowed to receive ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... are kept in great seclusion: religion and oeconomy form a principal part of conventual acquirements, and the natural vanity of the sex is left to develope itself without the aid of authority, or instillation by precept—yet, when released from this sober tuition, manners take the ascendant here as in England, and a woman ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... to it that we have emerged or are emerging from the eighteenth-century depths of ugliness in all our surroundings—has induced the useful Dryasdusts, whose nature and function it is to burrow in corporation and conventual muniment-rooms and the like promising covers, to search out with a very considerable degree of success a mass of facts, not only as to the real authorship of the work in question, but curiously illustrative of the status these artists held and the manner in which they lived and worked. Among ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... seemed to her most worthy of imitation— only, thinks Madelon, she would have taken care not to have been caught, and brought back again. The subsequent history of the saint she found less edifying; nothing that savoured of conventual life found favour in Madelon's eyes in these days; and indeed her whole faith in saints and legends was rudely shaken one day by a broad and somewhat reckless assertion on the part of Soeur Lucie, that all the female saints had been nuns—an assertion certainly ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... weary of life's rough way, sought peace in the ascetic life. He drifted in a boat to Crowland Isle, and there lived a hermit's life till his death in 817. On the spot where he died Ethelbald founded and endowed a monastery on the island, and it flourished exceedingly. The larger part of the conventual church is now destroyed, but the north aisle is used as the Parish Church ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... or Faverches, her son, confirmed the endowments, made an additional foundation of a priory for Augustine canons, and erected a conventual church. The numerous gifts and grants to this famous religious house form one of those extensive and dull mazes of ecclesiastical record, through which the historic topographer is constrained to wade. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 493, June 11, 1831 • Various
... still domain Of vast cathedral, or conventual gloom, Their vigils kept: when tapers day and night On the dim altar burn'd continually, In token that the house was evermore Watching to God. Religious men were they, Nor would their reason, tutor'd to aspire Above this transitory world, allow That there should pass a moment of the year ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 65, January 25, 1851 • Various
... you did (and this, with no sympathy near to me—I have had to do without sympathy in the full sense—), and even in my 'Seraphim' days, my tongue clove to the roof of my mouth,—from leading so conventual recluse a life, perhaps—and all my better poems were written last year, the very best thing to come, if there should be any life or courage to come; I scarcely know. Sometimes—it is the real truth—I have haste to be done with it all. It is the real truth; however to say so may be an ungrateful ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... life of the cloister. Futile for a time were the parental arguments, unfruitful every effort! Anne Genevieve would not consort with worldlings, persisted in her distaste for mundane pleasures, and continued to cherish persistently her desire for conventual seclusion. At length the princess, in 1636, having resolved upon the adoption of more energetic measures, suddenly ordered her daughter to make preparations for appearing at a Court ball, and that, too, in three days. With what despair did ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... till mid-day, for his mother would not have him wakened. Mariotte served the spoiled child's breakfast in his bed. The inflexible and semi-conventual rules which regulated the hours for meals yielded to the caprices of the chevalier. If it became desirable to extract from Mademoiselle du Guenic her array of keys in order to obtain some necessary article of food outside of the meal hours, there was no other means of doing it than to make ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... taken degrees in Theology, as Doctors, Licentiates, or Bachelors, there are seven with the title of Master, and three with F. or Frater prefixed to their names. Of the Preaching Friars, there were four, all designed F. or Frater. The Conventual and other Orders, included Provosts of Collegiate churches, Deans, Archdeacons, Subdeacons, Rectors, Canons, and Subpriors; of whom there are fifteen with the title of M. or Magister, and only six with D. or Dominus, so usual was it to find that a regular academical course of ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... infame," says St. Simon, and scattered among other religious houses in all directions. The friends of the buried were bidden to exhume their dead, and all unclaimed bodies were flung into a neighbouring cemetery, where dogs fought for them as for carrion. The church was profaned, all the conventual buildings were razed and sold in lots, not one stone being left on another; the very ground was ploughed up and sown, "not, it is true with salt," adds St. Simon, and that was ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... laughed outright, having caught sight of some part of her dejection. As she hooked on her skirt she reflected on the necessity of not leaving bottles of scent nor too many sponges for the observation of the nuns; and the nightgown she had brought was certainly not a conventual garment. ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... simply come with our people to assist in the King's corvee; when that is done, we shall return to Tilly. I felt sure I should meet you, and thought I should know you again easily, which I hardly do. How you are changed—for the better, I should say, since you left off conventual cap and costume!" Amelie could not but look admiringly on the beauty of the radiant girl. "How handsome you have grown! but you were always that. We both took the crown of honor together, but you would alone take the ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... Shearing-barn, which on ground-plan resembled a church with transepts. It not only emulated the form of the neighbouring church of the parish, but vied with it in antiquity. Whether the barn had ever formed one of a group of conventual buildings nobody seemed to be aware; no trace of such surroundings remained. The vast porches at the sides, lofty enough to admit a waggon laden to its highest with corn in the sheaf, were spanned by heavy-pointed arches of stone, broadly ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... broad expanse of the Adriatic, endless to the eye, tranquil as the vault it reflected, and luminous with its borrowed light. Here and there a low island, reclaimed from the sea by the patient toil of a thousand years, dotted the Lagunes, burdened with the group of some conventual dwellings, or picturesque with the modest roofs of a hamlet of the fisherman. Neither oar, nor song, nor laugh, nor flap of sail, nor jest of mariner, disturbed the stillness. All in the near view was clothed in midnight loveliness, and all in the distance bespoke the ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. A new Theresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual life, any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in daring all for the sake of a brother's burial: the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is forever gone. But we insignificant people with our daily words and acts are preparing the ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... therefore able to bring forward many political considerations, which coincided with those arising out of religious doctrines, to make his measures intelligible to his people, and consequently easy to himself. Among the various plausible reasons which were urged against the continued existence of the conventual houses, one of the most likely to appeal to the practical sense of the multitude was the misuse of the resources with which they had been endowed. While it was admitted that in their earlier days they had been extremely useful in mitigating distress ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield • George Worley
... will and passion. It seemed to him that there were two men within him: the one turbulent, passionate, demented; the other vainly endeavoring by authority, reason, and conscience to bring the rebel to subjection. The discipline of conventual life, the extraordinary austerities to which he had condemned himself, the monotonous solitude of his existence, all tended to exalt the vivacity of the nervous system, which, in the Italian constitution, is at all times ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... and HE ought to know. Yet nothing could be more exemplary and fastidious than his conduct towards the few lady frequenters of the "Poodle Dog" restaurant, who, I regret to say, were not puritanically reserved or conventual in manner. ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... centre of an ancient asylum for superannuated tradesmen and decayed householders, with which was connected a school for a limited number of boys. It was founded upwards of two centuries since on an old monastic establishment, and retained somewhat of the conventual air and character. The shadowy line of old men in black mantles who had passed before me in the hall, and whom I had elevated into magi, turned out to be the pensioners returning from ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... and to whom they usually paid their devotions. Some of those benefactors, most generously, defrayed the expenses of a religious festival, from which resulted a considerable profit to the convent in which that festival was celebrated. Others repaired conventual edifices at their own expense, or enlarged them by making extensive wings or other additions, in which there was always a profuse display of marble, bronze, and other precious materials. But the principal source of the revenue ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... had ever seen in that house, so invisibly were the wheels of the domestic machine carried on) was leaning on her broom, "swallowing with open mouth a footman's news." It was as if, with the first slackening of the rigid rein, human nature broke loose from the conventual stillness in which it had ever paced its peaceful ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the pietism which hung upon the very air of that apartment in which so much of my early youth was spent. And it had, too, an odour that is peculiarly full of character, the smell which is never absent from a sacristy and rarely from conventual chambers; a smell difficult to define, faint and yet tenuously pungent, and like no other smell in all the world that I have ever known. It is a musty odour, an odour of staleness which perhaps an open window and the fresh air of heaven ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... divine call to a religious and conventual state of life, she conceived a great desire to become a nun, in the poor, austere, and edifying convent of St. Martha, of the order of St. Austin in Milan. To qualify herself for this state, being busied the whole day at ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... In the bare, conventual parlor, with high walls that echoed resoundingly and boards that smelt of soap, they met once more face to face and alone. She courtesied low, addressed him formally as "sir," and thanked him with due deference for coming; otherwise there was no change in her demeanor. The flat-frilled ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... people, honour, influence, &c., could not have the same signification at Rome, as they have, or ought to have, at Paris. How can you expect that all these youths who have been at university or conventual schools, with Livy and Quintus Curtius for their catechism, will not understand liberty like the Gracchi, virtue like Cato, patriotism like Caesar? How can you expect them not to be factious and warlike? How can you expect them to take the slightest ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat
... Verona. The amphitheatre is wonderful—beats even Greece. Of the truth of Juliet's story they seem tenacious to a degree, insisting on the fact, giving a date (1303), and showing a tomb. It is a plain, open, and partly decayed sarcophagus, with withered leaves in it, in a wild and desolate conventual garden, once a cemetery, now ruined to the very graves. The situation struck me as very appropriate to the legend, being blighted as their love.... The Gothic monuments of the Scaliger princes pleased ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... a college without common meals was hardly conceived of; and, indeed, if we trace back the history of college as they grew up at Paris, nothing is more of their essence than that students lived and ate together in a kind of conventual system. No doubt, also, when the town of New Haven was smaller, it was far more difficult to find desirable places for boarding than at present. But however necessary, the Steward's department was always ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... or other of these two fires the eastern arm and transepts of Gundulf's fabric, and Ernulf's conventual buildings, must have been much injured if not reduced to ruins, and to the date of the second the outer part of the north choir aisle possibly belongs. Probably about 1190, Gilbert de Glanvill, who was Bishop of Rochester from 1185 to 1214, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Rochester - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • G. H. Palmer
... "sisterhoods" be established without weakening the sense of personal responsibility in those Christian women who are not thus wholly set apart to charitable and spiritual work? Can they be multiplied without danger of introducing into Protestant communions the evils of the conventual life? Are there modern instances of safe and successful organizations? What good have they achieved, and what further good do they promise? In what relation should such organizations stand to the authority and fostering care of the Church? What should be their scope, ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft
... spoke she threw off her waterproof and unloosed the strings of her black bonnet. Her dark serge dress with its white turn-down collar and armlets—worn these last for the sake of her embroidery work—gave her a dedicated conventual look. She was paler than of old; the eyes, though beautiful and luminous, were no longer young, and lines were fast deepening in the cheeks and chin, with their round childish moulding. What had been naivete and tremulous sweetness at twenty, was now conscious ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... The original church and conventual buildings having been swept away by the Danes, whether AElfred restored it or not is uncertain, but it is certain that a house of secular canons was established at Wimborne by a king of the name of ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Wimborne Minster and Christchurch Priory • Thomas Perkins
... episcopal palace, or "casa parochial," by Bishop Don Bernardo de Valbuena, poet and author of a pastoral novel entitled the Golden Age, and other works of literary merit. This library, together with that of the Dominicans, and the respective episcopal and conventual archives were burned by the Hollanders during the siege of ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... de Rada, who, being a man of great imagination, in a short time laid up great riches, and made considerable gain among the natives. And, in fact, when I was in the island of Sugbu in the year 1612, as a conventual in the convent of the natives, called San Nicolas, I saw a lexicon there, compiled by father Fray Martin de Rada, which contained a great number of words. This must have been of no little aid to those who ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIII, 1629-30 • Various
... walls of the city, whilst the river Dee, flowing immediately below, secured it from annoyance on one side, and the church, with its adjacent church-yard, insulated it from the tumults of life on all the other sides, an atmosphere of conventual stillness and tranquillity brooded over it and all ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... displeasure in those days did not confine itself merely to lack of court favor. Reduced to great poverty, the composer who had been the favorite of the rich and great for so many years knew often the actual pangs of hunger, and eked out his subsistence by writing conventual psalms, as payment for the broken food ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... temples were turned into stables; the royal residences into barracks for the troops. The sanctity of the religious houses was violated. Thousands of matrons and maidens, who, however erroneous their faith, lived in chaste seclusion in the conventual establishments, were now turned inroad, and became the prey of a licentious soldiery.1 A favorite wife of the young Inca was debauched by the Castilian officers. The Inca, himself treated with contemptuous indifference, found that he was a poor ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... infancy is left by her father—an officer in India—to the care of an elderly aunt residing near Paris. The accounts of the various persons who have an after influence on the story, the school companions of Margery, the sisters of the Conventual College of Art, the professor, and the peasantry of Fontainebleau, are singularly vivid. There is a subtle attraction about the book which will make it a great favourite with ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... the same aggressive spirit as the men, but softened somewhat by Christianity, many women of high station among the German tribes founded convents and developed institutions of much renown. This provided a rather superior class of women as organizers and directors, and a conventual life continued, throughout the entire Middle Ages, to attract an excellent class of women. This will be understood when it is remembered that a conventual life offered to women of intellectual ability and scholarly ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... all this excellent work, Bishop de Rupibus built a chapel for the parishioners, the conventual church being reserved for the Prior and monks. This chapel stood in the angle between the walls of the choir and south transept, and was called St. Mary ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral • George Worley
... twenty-three articles. The first treats of the authority of general councils, and of the time and manner of convening and celebrating them. The second relates to ecclesiastical elections, which are enjoined to be made hereafter in strict accordance with the canons, by the cathedral, collegiate, and conventual chapters. Reserves, annates, and "expective graces" are abolished; the rights of patrons are to be respected, provided their nominees be graduates of the universities and otherwise well qualified. The pope retains only a veto in case of unfitness or uncanonical election, and the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... fitting seclusion, and a veritable dragon (of which a Polypheme by Poussin is somehow a fac-simile for the situation), looking over into the world shut out backwards, so that none but a "still-climbing Hercules" could hope to catch a peep at the admired Ternary of Recluses. No conventual porter could keep his keys better than this custos with the "lidless eyes." He not only sees that none do intrude into that privacy, but, as clear as daylight, that none but Hercules aut Diabolus by any manner of means can. So far all is well. We have absolute solitude here ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... were parted, and Giulia was confined in the conventual fortress, and carefully guarded. Pope Paul, it appears, did not relax the imprisonment of the unfortunate girl, as he surely ought to have done, in recognition of the Cardinal's successful advocacy of his ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... "The Veronese," says Lord Byron, in one of his letters from Verona, "are tenacious to a degree of the truth of Juliet's story, insisting on the fact, giving the date 1303, and showing a tomb. It is a plain, open, and partly decayed sarcophagus, with withered leaves in it, in a wild and desolate conventual garden—once a cemetery, now ruined, to the very graves! The situation struck me as very appropriate to the legend, being blighted as their love." He might have added, that when Verona itself, with its amphitheatre and its Paladian structures, ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... was the Bishop of a see in Spain, and he brought thence Moorish slaves to cultivate the land with which he had endowed his community of a hundred nuns. Down to the Revolution most of the daughters of the nobility in the Quercy were educated here. Little is now left of the conventual building; but the church contains architectural details of much interest, and the tombs of those irreconcilable enemies of the English, Bertrand de Cardaillac, Bishop of Cahors, and the Marquis de Cardaillac—the most famous warrior of this ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... of Quebec would have been astonished at its air of conventual decorum. Black Jesuits and scarfed officers mingled at Champlain's table. There was little conversation, but, in its place, histories and the lives of saints were read aloud, as in a monastic refectory. Prayers, masses, and confessions followed one another with an edifying regularity, ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... her out in front, she would sit all day in the cabin, in the same place, crocheting lace, her spool of thread and box of patterns in her lap, on the handkerchief spread to save her new dress. Never leaning back—oh, no! always straight and stiff, as if the conventual back board were there within call. She would eat only convent fare at first, notwithstanding the importunities of the waiters, and the jocularities of the captain, and particularly of the clerk. Every one knows the fund of humor possessed by a steamboat clerk, ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... be done by means of educational processes before men and women could lead a life together which might be of mutual advantage to all parties concerned. Still, it must not be supposed that this tendency on the part of women to affiliate themselves with conventual orders was ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... eminently perilous to his spiritual purity that an unbeliever like Mrs. Ginx should bring unconsecrated milk into the convent to be administered to this suckling of the Church! In her uneasiness she appealed to Father Certificatus, the conventual confessor. He gave his opinion ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... Hickman family, underwent great repairs, the books being sorted over by a most ignorant person, whose selection seems to have been determined by the coat. All books without covers were thrown into a great heap, and condemned to all the purposes which Leland laments in the sack of the conventual libraries by the visitors. But they found favour in the eyes of a literate gardener, who begged leave to take what he liked home. He selected a large quantity of Sermons preached before the House of Commons, local pamphlets, tracts from 1680 to 1710, opera books, etc. He made ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... of 'Manon,' or indeed any of his earlier works. The voluptuous passion of his accustomed style is exchanged for the mystic raptures of monasticism. Cupid has doffed his bow and arrows and donned the conventual cowl. 'Le Jongleur' is an operatic version of one of the prettiest stories in Anatole France's 'Etui de Nacre.' Jean the juggler is persuaded by the Prior of the Abbey of Cluny to give up his godless life and turn monk. He enters the monastery, but ere long is distressed ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... New Testament, which make up a considerable part of the Breviary used in cloisters, he was first led into Protestant views. He had been for seventeen years resident in different cloisters of his order, as sick-nurse, alms gatherer, student, and physician, and knew the conventual life out and out. As he testifies: "There was little of the fear of God, so far as I could see, little of true piety; but abundance of hypocrisy, eye-service, deception, abuse of the poor sick people in the hospitals, such love and hatred as are common among the children of this world, ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... passed under the jurisdiction of the Crown, and hence the Lord Mayor and the Aldermen could not enforce municipal ordinances there. Moreover, it was distant from the city wall not much more than half a mile. The old conventual church had been demolished, the Priory buildings had been converted into residences, and the land near the Shoreditch highway had been built up with numerous houses. The land next to the Field, however, was for the most part undeveloped. It contained some ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... at her self-possession, and they walked along with unhastening conventual steps to where the St. John's wort grew amid a tangle of ground ivy in the open spaces of a cypress grove, appearing most vividly and richly golden like sunlight breaking from black ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... The Indian neophytes were in no way bettered by the wealth they created. Their condition was one of pure slavery—the monks being their masters, and very often hard taskmasters they proved themselves—living in fine conventual style upon the sweat and labour of their brown-skinned converts. The only return made by them to the Indians was to teach the latter those trades, by the practice of which they themselves might be benefited, and ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... Italian writers, so far as we have yet followed it, was directed against two separate evils—the vicious worldliness of Rome, and the demoralization of the clergy both in their dealings with the people and in their conventual life. Contempt for false miracles and spurious reliques, and the horror of the traffic in indulgences, swelled the storm of discontent among the more enlightened. But the people continued to make saints, to adore wonder-working ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... malefactors had not committed, or were not ready to commit for a word, or even for a jest. The women, on the other hand, were in the first place the ladies and daughters of the house, and of kinsmen, brought up in almost conventual solitude, when they were not actually educated in convents; and, secondly, young girls from the Baron's estates who served for a certain length of time, and were then generally married to respectable ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... amiable Theodosius had now taken upon him the Name of Father Francis, and was so far concealed in a long Beard, a [shaven [3]] Head, and a religious Habit, that it was impossible to discover the Man of the World in the venerable Conventual. ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... to its influence, for a moment the scene around seemed unreal: an exotic, embalming air, escaped from some old Greek or Roman pleasure-place, had turned the poet's workroom into a strange kind of private sanctuary, amid these rude conventual buildings, with the March wind aloud in the chimneys. [68] Notwithstanding, what with the long day's ride, the keen evening, they had done justice to the monastic fare, the "little" wine of the country, the cream, the onions,—fine ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... first printed by Caxton in the year 1483. The 'Speculum Meditantis,' 'Vox Clamantis,' and 'Confessio Amantis,' are, properly speaking, parts of one great work, and are represented by three volumes upon Gower's curious tomb in the old conventual church of St Mary Overies already alluded to—a church, by the way, which the poet himself assisted in rebuilding in the elegant shape which it retains to ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... long disappearance from the scene, Sidonie, weary of the shady callings she had plied, and now of a nunlike austerity, retired to the gloomy shelter of a conventual kind of establishment, holding the purse-strings of the Oeuvre du Sacrament, an institution founded with the object of assisting seduced girls, who had become mothers, to secure husbands." Le ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... effect of four bottles of "Jones's Freckle Eradicator," and in a pleasant and unobtrusive way revived the memory of the saint. Still, she felt weary and was growing despondent, and had a longing for the good Sisters and the blameless lethargy of conventual life, and then— ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... Camaldolese rule in its original strictness and perfection. At the convent itself it is, or has become, much relaxed in many respects. The Camaldolese, like other Carthusians, are properly hermits, that is to say, their life is not conventual, but eremitical. Each brother at the Sagro Eremo inhabits his own separately built cell, consisting of sleeping chamber, study, wood-room, and garden, all of microscopical dimensions. His food, exclusively vegetable, is passed in to him by a little ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... his own material welfare prevented him from making a scandal; yet, while swearing fidelity, he was concocting plans for getting rid of the pretty Malay girl in a more or less distant future. She, however, had retained enough of conventual teaching to understand well that according to white men's laws she was going to be Almayer's companion and not his slave, and promised to herself to ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... interred the body, without allowing any of the clergy, religious, or people to enter. In consequence of this event, an impenetrable veil of secrecy long hung over the place where the body had been laid. In 1818, Pope Pius VII gave permission to the General of the Conventual Minors to make researches under the high altar. Many previous researches had been made; they grew to such gigantic proportions that the foundations of the massive structure were partly undermined. To prevent the ruin of the basilica at Assisi, the Holy See finally forbade all further researches ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... of the ingenious system of conventual prayers: after the prayers purely vocal like these, came mental prayer, personal petitions, stimulated and set a-going by the very machine ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... which he durst not open for fear of attracting attention, Francis observed but little to indicate the manners of the inhabitants, and that little argued no more than a close reserve and a taste for solitude. The garden was conventual, the house had the air of a prison. The green blinds were all drawn down upon the outside; the door into the verandah was closed; the garden, as far as he could see it, was left entirely to itself in the evening sunshine. A modest curl of smoke from a single chimney ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... altogether congenial to Maria, who was of a retiring disposition, ceased in her twentieth year, and it is even said that she had at that age a strong desire to enter a convent. Though the wish was not gratified, she lived from that time in a retirement almost conventual, avoiding all society and devoting herself entirely to the study of mathematics. The most valuable result of her labours was the Instituzioni analitiche ad uso della gioventu italiana, a work of great merit, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... standing before him in the black robes and conventual coif which his tyranny had imposed upon her. When he had done, a faint smile swept over the face that had grown so hard in these last twelve years since that day when her boy had been slain almost under her ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... the tumult of his feelings; but he mastered them, and entered. There was a long interval. I pictured to myself the scene passing within: the poor novice despoiled of her transient finery, and clothed in the conventual garb; the bridal chaplet taken from her brow, and her beautiful head shorn of its long silken tresses. I heard her murmur the irrevocable vow. I saw her extended on a bier; the death-pall spread over her; the funeral service performed that proclaimed her dead to the world; ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... in Scotland, inventing, some say, the national lilt, the rapidly rising and falling strain which is so full of pathos yet so adaptable to mirth—"and other honest solaces of grete pleasance and disport," the sound of trampling feet and angry voices broke upon the conventual stillness outside and the cheerful talk of the friendly group within. The King was taken at a disadvantage, apparently without even a gentleman of his Court near him, nothing but his wife and her ladies lingering for a last moment of pleasant conversation before they went to ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... nearly inseparable from the conventual state. Set apart from the rest of the world, they, from their little world, are too apt to look down with contempt which may be mingled with envy, or modified by pity, but must be unsuited to ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... state of physical and mental well-being such as can be bought only by an early rising, an inconsiderable breakfast, a long ride in the warmth of Tuscan mid-May, an abundant and repairing repast, taken, amid sweet conventual coolness, in company which leaves nothing to wish for beyond it, they went forth to spend the time that must be granted the horses for rest ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... In the nunneries and conventual schools in the United States there is a sort of fairy land, talked about by the nuns to the elder girls. It is called the "Nuns' Island." That country is always described as an earthly paradise; and to girls who are manifestly fascinated by the witcheries of the ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... a brother of this Dominican house, has filled nearly the whole monastery with the works of his hand. Considering the date of his birth, 1387, and his conventual life, he was hardly less wonderful than his wonderful epoch. Here is the same convent, the same city; while instead merely of the works of Cimabue, Giotto, and Orgagna, there are masterpieces by all the painters who ever lived to study;—yet imagine the snuffy old monk ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... from its original intention,—is proved by (p. 036) evidence most painfully conclusive. Indeed, the enormities which had grown up, and which were defended and cherished by the agents of Rome, far exceed both in number and magnitude the present general opinion with regard to those times. The Conventual system[34] had well nigh destroyed the efficiency of parochial ministrations: what was intended for the support of the pastor, was withdrawn to uphold the dignity and luxury of the monastery; parsonage houses were left to fall to decay, and hirelings of a very inferior class were employed on a miserable ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... touching candour as to his own predilection for a monastic life. "The worldly avocations that open useful and honourable careers for others have no charm for me. I care not for riches nor power, nor honours nor fame. The austerities of the conventual life have no terror for me; on the contrary, they have a charm, for with them are abstraction from earth and meditation on heaven. In earlier years I might, like other men, have cherished dreams of human love, and felicity ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... present). He was always called Bolter for a nickname, so it was jolly convene. For once he did the right thing. Mostly he is an utter ass. How is the polligamous pirate getting on with wives &c.? That comes from a Greek word polis, a city, so I suppose in the country they are too conventual. I like him awfully. He's my sort (not Father's though). Well, the term is waring away. Five days crost off on new diery. Where shall we go this time three months? Easter I mean. Wycross I hope, but suppose dreery Brighton, hope not. I must swot now Kings of Isereel and such-like so goodby ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... stands the Nuns' House: a venerable brick edifice, whose present appellation is doubtless derived from the legend of its conventual uses. On the trim gate enclosing its old courtyard is a resplendent brass plate flashing forth the legend: 'Seminary for Young Ladies. Miss Twinkleton.' The house- front is so old and worn, and the brass plate is so shining and staring, that the general result has reminded ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... Saint Barbara's, as the convent was called. It had originally been a religious house, as the term is, and was encircled by a high wall, which enclosed the garden and outhouses. It was a dark, red brick, sombre pile, and the additions lately made to it had given it a thoroughly conventual appearance. The carriage drove under an archway in front of the entrance, closed on the outside, Mr Lerew got out and tugged at a large iron bell-pull, when a slide in the door was pulled back, and the face of a female, who narrowly scrutinised the visitors, appeared ...
— Clara Maynard - The True and the False - A Tale of the Times • W.H.G. Kingston
... two or three mud-stains on the laces of her sleeve and underskirt that were obtrusively incongruous. Her voice, which had, however, a ring of honest intention in it, was somewhat over-strained, and evidently had not yet adjusted itself to the low-ceilinged, conventual-like building. ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... disposition of parts, claims to be an artist pure and simple, and, leaving practical matters entirely out of the question, goes in heavily for the picturesque and pure mediaeval, Queen Anne, or Jacobean, as the case may be. Let us follow him as he conducts a friend over a church and conventual establishment in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... prehistoric implements have been found in great quantities in the neighbourhood, and there are traces of a prehistoric lake bed, to the S.E. The Priory, immediately S. (R. H. J. Delme-Radcliffe, Esq., J.P.), occupies the site of a Carmelite monastery and Conventual church founded in the reign of Edward II.; and the Biggin Almshouses, close to the church, still preserve some of the old fabric of the Gilbertine Nunnery, founded in the reign of Edward III. The Church ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... the learner of a language begins with the common words. She had a taste for old servants, old anecdotes, old furniture, faded household colours and sweetly stale odours—musty treasures in which the Chateau de Mauves abounded. She made a dozen sketches in water-colours after her conventual pattern; but sentimentally, as one may say, she was for ever sketching ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... upon her chair, breathless and in tears, because she felt sure that she could not chant holy songs if she were being burned at the stake. She had been vowed to the Virgin in her babyhood, and was always dressed in white and blue, but her little dress was a small conventual robe, straight and narrow cut, of white woollen stuff, and banded plainly with blue at the waist. She did not look like other children, but she was very sweet and gentle, and her pure little pale face and large, dark eyes had a lovely dreamy look. When she was old enough ...
— Little Saint Elizabeth and Other Stories • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... tells the story with perfect frankness and with hardly more than formal expressions of compunction, and thereafter follows the narrative of their separation, he to a monastery, she to a convent, and of his care for her during her conventual life, or at least for that part of it that had passed before the "History" was written. Through the whole story it is Heloise who shines brightly as a curiously beautiful personality, unselfish, self sacrificing, and almost virginal in her purity ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... an occasional neighbour or so for visiters, and used to sit up late in our friars' dresses, drinking burgundy, claret, champagne, and what not, out of the skull-cup, and all sorts of glasses, and buffooning all round the house, in our conventual garments. Matthews always denominated me 'the Abbot,' and never called me by any other name in his good humours, to the day of his death. The harmony of these our symposia was somewhat interrupted, a few days after our assembling, by Matthews's threatening to throw —— out ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... possesses no attractive features, and only the memories of its past history remain. The earlier excavations brought to light a great number of skulls, bones, and fragments of sculpture; while during the later building operations, especially those conducted on the site of the conventual church, a large number of carved stones were unearthed which had evidently formed part of the Dominican house. Some of these fragments were richly ornamented with painting and gilding. Another discovery was the life-size stone head of an effigy with a hood of closely set ring mail. ...
— Exeter • Sidney Heath
... champion of Protestantism as it is reflected in the Church of England, and who has made such earnest but as yet fruitless endeavors to have a bill passed for the periodical visitation and inspection of the monastic and conventual institutions of Great Britain. Her brother, Isaac P. Evans, still occupies that responsible position, and resides in the old homestead. The country around Mrs. Lewes's early home is rich in historic associations. Not far away is Bosworth Field, and in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... Let the clergy marry in France, laicize all schools, alike for rich and poor, and what may be called the aesthetic side of domestic economy, to say nothing of hygiene, would soon spread to the remotest corners of the country. Will it be believed, at Nant, in that conventual establishment I have before described, there was absolutely no lavatory for the children at all? They were just taken to a fountain in the courtyard, there to be washed after the ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... solitary lives in the woods and those who moved about in bands, frequenting rest houses. In the time of the Buddha the wandering life was a reality but later most monks became residents in monasteries. Already in the Vinaya we seem to breathe the atmosphere of large conventual establishments where busy superintendents see to the lodging and discipline of crowds of monks, and to the distribution of the gifts made by pious laymen. But the Buddha himself knew the value of forests and plant life for calming and quickening ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... since. But, at all events, he thus led the professors of architecture to study with accuracy the principles of the art, which has occasioned the restoration and preservation in such an admirable manner of so many of our finest cathedrals. colleges, and ancient Gothic and conventual buildings. This, it must be at least allowed, was the fortunate result of the rage for Gothic, which succeeded the building of Strawberry Hill. For a good many years after that event, every new building was pinnacled and turreted on all sides, however ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... thither were bidden Francesco and Gonzaga. The company was waited upon by the two pages, whilst Fra Domenico, with a snow-white apron girt about his portentous waist, brought up the steaming viands from the kitchen where he had prepared them; for, like a true conventual, he was something of a master in the confection—and a very glutton in the consumption—of delectable comestibles. The kitchen was to him as the shrine of some minor cult, and if his breviary and beads commanded from him the half of the ecstatic fervour of his devotions to pot and pan, to cauldron ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... to lips.) Hold your little tongues, children; it's very late, and you'll make me forget what I've to say. Fancy yourselves in pews, for five minutes. There's one point of possible good in the conventual system, which is always attractive to young girls; and the idea is a very dangerous one;— 0the notion of a merit, or exalting virtue, consisting in a habit of meditation on the "things above," or things of the next world. Now it is quite true, that a person ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... debt to the deserted cause: how much of the heroism, or other high quality, of their rejection has really been the growth of what they reject? Bruno, the escaped monk, is still a monk: his philosophy, impious as it might seem to some, a new religion. He came forth well fitted by conventual influences to play upon men as he was played upon. A challenge, a war-cry, an alarum; everywhere he seemed to be the creature of some subtly materialized spiritual force, like that of the old Greek prophets, like the primitive "enthusiasm" ...
— Giordano Bruno • Walter Horatio Pater
... conceals, and throwing her mantle over the martyrs' graves to keep them from sacrilege,—but she is driven away by the builders of the papal court, and all precious old associations are incongruous with those of modern Roman architecture and Roman conventual discipline. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... from garden to garden until we came to a large terrace full of flowers, which surrounded the conventual buildings and commanded a magnificent ...
— A Queen's Error • Henry Curties
... well out of cry; on all other sides, open fields stretched upward to the woods of Corstorphine Hill, or backward to the dells of Ravelston, or downward toward the valley of the Leith. The effect of seclusion was aided by the great height of the garden walls, which were, indeed, conventual, and, as John had tested in former days, defied the climbing schoolboy. The lamp of the cab threw a gleam upon the door and the not brilliant ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not with love, but with lascivious and sensual worship, by Christian knights and troubadours, and who, like criminals to the halter, were forced, rarely with their own consent, into the arms of men they disliked or had never seen, or were placed in conventual houses against their wills. Of the lower-grade women, I need only offer one example—and that is sufficient to show their awful degradation; the French and German feudal lord had the right of cuissage, ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... also an antagonism to common sense. The church authorities wanted to bring the order into practical use, and suspected it of the heresies of Florus. It therefore split into "conventuals," who conformed to the methods of conventual life, and the "spirituals," who clung to the doctrines and rules of the founder. The latter became "observantines" (1368) and "recollects" (1487).[453] The two branches hated each other and fought on all occasions. In 1275 the spirituals were treated as heretics, imprisoned ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... In the conventual buildings attached to this church are the state archives of Venice. We did not see them, but they are said to number millions of documents. "They are the records of centuries of the most watchful, observant and suspicious government that ever existed—in which ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... monastic and conventual life of the severer orders there was an approximation to a punctual observance of the hours as they successively arrived. Possibly the modern mind fails to do full justice to the conception of worship on which this system was based. Those principles of devotion ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... dead. The enslaving, enervating, and retarding effects of Roman Catholicism are nowhere better seen than in Lower Canada, where the priests exercise despotic authority. They have numerous and wealthy conventual establishments, both at Quebec and Montreal, and several Jesuit and other seminaries. The Irish emigrants constitute the great body of Romanists in Upper Canada; in the Lower Province there are more than ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... There were a few people in England who had some inkling on 18 July that it might prove a turning-point in history. Foch's simple piety had led him into what was almost an indiscretion; he had asked for the special prayers of the faithful, the request had spread to conventual schools in England, and by the 16th it was guessed by those who knew the fact that a special effort was in contemplation. But his great counter-attack owed its importance to what had gone before and what was to follow; and victory was due to more complex and comprehensive causes than the ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... religious, monastic, cenobite, anchoret, friar, abbe, fakir. Associated Words: monkish, monastic, monastery, monasticism, conventual. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... Recuperatione Sancte Terre), has several most interesting and refreshing chapters on the education of women. His bias is always against religious orders, and, consequently, he favours the suppression of almost every conventual establishment. Still, as these were at his own date the only places where education could be considered to exist at all, he had to elaborate for himself a plan for the proper instruction of girls. First, ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... took refuge in my room, and sat long hours there in my dressing-gown and slippers, hearing the hubbub that was going on in the rest of the house, but taking as little part in it as possible. In this semi-conventual silence and solitude, the excitement which had swept me along for ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... reckless that he took this step even without the consent of his parents. "He knew little about the ways of God, and was not well informed of the gravity and responsibilities of the step he was taking." "He was not called by God to conventual life; . . . he was driven by despair, rather than the love of higher perfection, into a religious career." Catholics feel so sure that they have a case against Luther that in all seriousness they ask Protestants the question: Did he act honestly when he knelt before the prior ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... two of her oldest ladies, make their appearance before the conqueror. Conqueror as he is, they heard him in their sacred halls. They have heard of his violent behaviour in conventual establishments before. That hammer, which he always carries in action, has smashed many sacred images in religious houses. Pounds and pounds of convent plate is he known to have melted, the sacrilegious plunderer! No wonder the Abbess-Princess of St. ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... wealthy a country as ours, a similar digest of our historians should not be undertaken, under the patronage of the noble and the learned, in rivalry of that which the Benedictines of Paris executed at the expense of their own conventual funds. ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... country tastes, softened and elevated by the trials of life, till devotion to their kind became the one intention of their being; for it is as Sisters of Charity we introduce our heroines to our readers, one of a wide class in our reformed church, who, unshackled by vows, under no bondage of conventual forms, with small means, and by their own exertions and self-sacrifices, do more good in their generation than can be easily reckoned—treading in the footsteps of their Master, bearing healing as they move. Every frugal meal was shared with some ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various
... to its craggy sides on either hand. On the right there is only room for a road to pass between the transept and the limestone rock which rears on high the trees rooted in its crannies, whose branches almost brush the abbey's stately tower. On the other side is the little river, with the conventual buildings carried across it in more than one place, the water flowing through a vaulted tunnel. These buildings extend to the bases of the opposite crags. The ruins are of great size, and it does not take much imagination to restore the glen to its aspect when ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... herself, Martha began seriously to reflect on the unpleasantness of her situation; the threat of a conventual seclusion sounded harshly to her ear. She fancied it would be more advantageous to society that her good offices should continue in requisition, than that they should be for ever lost by an untimely ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... something more than the art or science which he had gathered at Cordova or Bagdad; he brought with him the new power of wealth. The erection of stately castles, of yet statelier abbeys, which followed the Conquest, the rebuilding of almost every cathedral or conventual church, marks the advent of the Jewish capitalist. No one can study the earlier history of our great monastic houses without finding the secret of that sudden outburst of industrial activity to which we owe the noblest ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... gifted artists, labouring rapidly at the many works on hand for the final embellishment of the cathedral of St. Etienne, made those conventual buildings just then cheerful enough to lighten a melancholy, heavy even as that of our friend Denys. He took his place among the workmen, a conventual novice; a novice also as to whatever concerns any actual handicraft. He could but ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... fruit. Castle and convent crown their nobler heights, and flat-roofed villages nestle amid groves of mulberry trees. Among these mountains we find several human races, several forms of government, and several schemes of religion, yet everywhere liberty: a proud, feudal aristocracy; a conventual establishment, which in its ramifications recalls the middle ages; a free and armed peasantry, whatever their creed, Emirs on Arabian steeds, bishops worthy of the Apostles, the Maronite monk, the horned head-gear of ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... definite plan. They are of one, two, and, in rare instances, of three stories, and now and then consist of a series of parallel galleries communicating with each other, lined with masonry, and with their stone walls and vaulted roofs resembling the crypt of some conventual building. Others of ancient date are less regular in their form, being merely so many narrow low winding corridors, varied, perhaps, by recesses hewn roughly out of the chalk, and resembling the brigands' cave of the melodrama, while a certain number of the larger cellars at Reims ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... Egyptian hermit, the founder of conventual monachism, who established the first institution of the kind at Tabenna, an island in the Nile; he also established the first nunnery under his sister (292-348). ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... as her new faith grew confirmed, Leila now inclined herself earnestly to those pictures of the sanctity and calm of the conventual life which Inez delighted to draw. In the reaction of her thoughts, and her despondency of all worldly happiness, there seemed, to the young maiden, an inexpressible charm in a solitude which was to release her for ever from human love, and render her entirely up to sacred visions and imperishable ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Syr. abba, father), a monastery, or conventual establishment, under the government of an ABBOT or an ABBESS. A priory only differed from an abbey in that the superior bore the name of prior instead of abbot. This was the case in all the English conventual ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... could not write it. Mary Benedicta would think that Stella's trouble came from the fictitious French father. There was little or no communication between the nun and Mrs. Comerford, who had quarrelled with her over her choice of a conventual life ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... electricians set, and after two days of business and sight-seeing in London, went down to Bexley. In the third-class carriage in which they travelled they were struck by the sight of a tall lady in mourning—a sort of compromise between a conventual and a secular bonnet over short fair hair, and holding on her lap a tiny little girl of about six years old, with a small, pinched, delicate face and slightly red hair, to whom she pointed out by name each spot they passed, ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... with indignation and grief. But as soon as I could get out of her sight I used to snatch it from my head, fling it on the ground, and trample it under foot. That was the way, and none other, in which I was veiled." Anselm at once declared her free from conventual bonds, and the shout of the English multitude when he set the crown on Matilda's brow drowned the murmur of Churchman or of baron. The mockery of the Norman nobles, who nicknamed the king and his spouse Godric ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... many of the religious houses, influenced to some extent by the general spirit of laxity peculiar to the age, fell far short of the standard of severity and discipline that had been set in better days. While on the one hand it should be admitted freely that some of the monastic and conventual establishments stood in urgent need of reform, there is, on the other side, no sufficient evidence to support the wild charges of wholesale corruption and immorality levelled against the monks and nuns of England by those who thirsted ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... morals far superior to his Tibet and Bhotan neighbours, polyandry being unknown, and polygamy rare. This is no doubt greatly due to the conventual system not being carried to such an excess as in Bhotan, where the ties of relationship even ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... penny-a-lining account is, that there were exercises and disputations in Greek, Latin, and other languages! The official records, however, show that the College at that very time had sunk into a convent and conventual school. ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... held her half-sister by the arm, towering above her. She was quite as thin as Kitty, but much taller and more largely built; and, beside the elaborate elegance of Kitty's mourning, Alice's black veil and dress had a severe, conventual air. They were almost the dress ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... that his fortune was encumbered not only with settlements for his, children by previous marriages, but by debts contracted in the cause of his oppressed country. A convention of doctors and bishops of France; summoned by the Duc de Montpensier, afterwards confirmed the opinion that the conventual vows of the Princess Charlotte had been conformable neither to the laws of France nor to the canons of the Trent Council. She was conducted to Brill by Saint Aldegonde, where she was received by her bridegroom, to whom she was united on the 12th of June. The wedding festival was held at Dort ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... of a modern department store, which enveloped one in the quiet gloom of Brandywine & Plummer's. In the first place, one could be perfectly sure that one would be waited on by a lady—for Brandywine & Plummer's, with a distinguished Confederate soldier at its head and front, provided an almost conventual shelter for distressed feminine gentility. There was, for instance, Miss Marye of the black silk counter, whose father had belonged to Stuart's cavalry and had fallen at Yellow Tavern; there was Miss ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... certainly come of the Setons of Windygoul. I wish you could have seen how prettily she blushed at her own ignorance. Amidst her noble and elegant manners, there is now and then a little touch of bashfulness and conventual rusticity, if I may call it so, that makes her quite enchanting. You see at once the rose that had bloomed untouched amid the chaste precincts of ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... delicate mullions runs round the nave and choir, and the extent and arrangement of the exterior would induce a stranger, unacquainted with the history of the building, to suppose that he was entering a conventual or cathedral church. The parts long most generally admired by the French, though they have always been miserable judges of gothic architecture, were the vaulted roof, and the pendants of the Lady-Chapel. The latter were originally ornamented with female figures, representing the Sibyls, ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... tower, with the grated door, and porter's lodge beneath it; the retired ambulatory; the separate cells; the common refectory; the venerable church; the black flowing dress and the silver cross worn by the members; the conventual appellation of brother, with which they salute each other; in short, the silence, the order, and the neatness, that here reign, seem to recall the idea of a monastery to those who have seen one, and will give no imperfect idea of such an ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 569 - Volume XX., No. 569. Saturday, October 6, 1832 • Various
... nobility of character, her lofty spirituality of life, fitly crowned and perfected her intellectual force and brilliant gifts. Although from the customs of the time the Marchesa lived much in convents, she never, in any sense, save that of her fervent piety, lived the conventual life. Her noble gifts linked her always to the larger activities, and her gifts and rank invested her with certain demands and responsibilities that she could not evade. She was one of the messengers of life, and her place as a brilliant and distinguished figure in the contemporary ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... a British community, first established in the French capital in Cromwell's time. It has now been removed, and its site, the Rue St. Victor, has undergone complete transformation. In 1817, however, it was in high repute among conventual educational establishments. To this retreat Aurore was consigned and there spent more than two years, an untroubled time she has spoken of as in many respects the happiest of her life. There is certainly nothing more delightful in her memoirs than the vivid picture there drawn of ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... though Agnes' face was round and rosy, her waist was slender, and her hands, and hips, and bosom; and Mrs. Lahens was unconsciously affected by the contrast that her own regular and painted features, and her long life of social adventure, presented to this pretty, dovelike girl, this pale conventual rose, without instinct of the world, and into whose guileless mind no knowledge of the world would ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... the little soul went on condemning herself in those exaggerated terms which the religious vocabulary of conventual life furnished ready-made for the use of penitents of every degree, till by the time she arrived at the Convent she could scarcely have been more oppressed with a sense of sin, if she had murdered her grandmother ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... be favourable; but should the efforts of those estimable ladies prove unsuccessful, and Cachita persist in following the inclinations of her heart, the term of her incarceration will be protracted another six months, when, in accordance with conventual discipline, she will be required to commence her ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... conveniently be given the rough draft of the settlement of the see by King Henry VIII. at the Reformation. Although departed from in many instances, it throws a curious light on the king's intentions to keep up some semblance of a conventual institution with ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Durham - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • J. E. Bygate
... have obliterated the scene of this ancient drama acted by the clerks of London, but some traces of the association of the fraternity with the neighbourhood can still be found. The two famous conventual houses, for which Clerkenwell was famous, the nunnery of St. Mary and the priory of St. John of Jerusalem, founded in 1100, have long since disappeared. Clerks' Close is mentioned in numerous documents, ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... the Roman Catholic Church for the unique fact that mass is celebrated at midnight. I say, advisably, is celebrated, because, although Cardinal Manning abolished public mass at that hour within the diocese of Westminster about 1867, yet in conventual establishments it is still kept up, and in every church three masses are celebrated. The ancient, and, in fact, the modern use, until interrupted by Cardinal Manning, was to celebrate mass at midnight, at daybreak, and at the third hour (9 a.m.) ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... a tall, meagre, yellow, conventual image in black, with a close white cap, bandaged under the chin like a nun's head-gear; whereas, there stood by me a little and roundly formed woman, who might indeed be older than I, but was still young; she ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... a hundred feet or more above the ground, dwarfing the petty, storied dwellings. This is but one great church. In brilliant contrast in another quarter, adjoining the city, is the great abbey church of St. Mary, crowned by a lofty and magnificent spire rising above the equally fine conventual buildings. All over the city are seen the churches and buildings of other monastic and religious houses. The background of dwellings and shops, built in a similar style, is cut by a few winding streets, and studded with the towers, spires, ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson
... them. Four of the ancient backs were found in a corner of the sacristy, and eight carried to Siena and found superfluous were returned, as well as one which a neighbouring villager had taken. Some of them show the conventual buildings as they were at the beginning of the 16th century. The frames resemble friezes, and are decorated with flowers, fruit, birds, musical instruments, arms, and ornament. Each back is separated from the next by a colonnette ...
— Intarsia and Marquetry • F. Hamilton Jackson
... preceptress at the Washington finishing school had held as to what constitutes a perfect lady. Occasionally her activities shocked Manuel, who held to the ancient view that maidens should come to matrimony with the innocence born of conventual ignorance. He would have preferred his wife to be a clinging vine, but in the case of ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine |
