"Mediaeval" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... strife of the rival factions grew more and more bitter: canes and sticks played an active part in it, and now and then we hear of drawn swords. One is reminded at times of the intestine feuds of some mediaeval city, as, for example, in the following incident, which will explain the charge of Frontenac against the intendant of barricading his house and arming ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... to stir in his heart a desire for something beyond that quasi-mediaeval worship, something weaker and yet infinitely stronger, something more earthy and ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... we have had about a war to end war is to bear any fruit. What is now with each week of the present struggle becoming more practicable is the setting up of a new assembly that will take the place of the various embassies and diplomatic organizations, of a mediaeval pattern and tradition, which have hitherto ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... of the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences" [1] is the full title of the document commonly called "The Ninety-five Theses." The form of the document was determined by the academic practice of the Middle Ages. In all the Mediaeval Universities the "disputation" was a well-established institution. It was a debate, conducted according to accepted rules, on any subject which the chief disputant might elect, and no student's education was thought to be complete ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... memorable sieges during ancient and mediaeval times, than has the city of Syracuse. Athenian, Carthaginian, Roman, Vandal, Byzantine, Saracen, and Norman, have in turns beleaguered her walls; and the resistance which she successfully opposed to some of her early assailants was of the deepest importance, not ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... are either to use as much of the correct diction of the period as is intelligible, employing modern terms where it is not, or else to write in ordinary modern English. Tastes no doubt differ on this point. I prefer the former; since I extremely dislike to read a mediaeval story where modern expressions alone are used in the dialogue. The reader, if himself acquainted with the true language, finds it impossible to realise or enter into the story, being constantly reminded that he is reading a modern fiction. What ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... old lady, leaning back and folding her hands like a mediaeval saint of worldly tendencies, "tell me aboot your faither." "He is very robust and strong in health ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... confesses, a vague notion that all savages ate human beings, and—though this obviously was intended as a touch of grisly humour,—had half a notion to procure a human head and have it served up in state after the mediaeval fashion of serving boars' heads ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... of the true faith. In their own belief there appeared to be a purgatory and a paradise, but no hell or devil; and, as beliefs reveal the character of the people who hold them, it speaks well for the Cubans that the grewsome images invoked by certain mediaeval theologians had never been created in their more generous imaginations. When a soul left the body it had two journeys before it: one to a dismal place, where the cruel and unjust awaited; the other to a fair land, like the best of earth, where all was pleasant and peaceful; ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... marching host rose dozens of the tall conical head-dresses of mediaeval France with their dependent veils. A great Parisian painter had just been exhibiting some mural decorations in the galleries of the Academy, and half the girls, from the life class down, wore candle-extinguishers ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... long speech by Werner and were continued by a Dutch journalist, who took the contrary side but was listened to with exemplary patience. He was controverted by Domela Niewenhuis, the leader of the Dutch, who looks a mediaeval saint but speaks with great vigour ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... hardly say that many of the etymologies given in Irish sources are pure invention, stories being often made up to account for the names, the real meaning of which was unknown to the mediaeval story-teller or scribe. ...
— The Cattle-Raid of Cualnge (Tain Bo Cualnge) • Unknown
... anticipate their successors of this later century. To gain an accurate, really specific knowledge of the properties of elementary bodies was reserved for the chemists of a recent epoch. The vague Greek questionings as to organic evolution were world-wide from the precise inductions of a Darwin. If the mediaeval Arabian endeavored to dull the knife of the surgeon with the use of drugs, his results hardly merit to be termed even an anticipation of modern anaesthesia. And when we speak of preventive medicine—of bacteriology in all its phases—we have to do with a marvellous field of ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... grows weary of enchanted forests, haunted by giants, dragons, and other impossible monsters, of deserts where despairing lovers roam haggard and forlorn, of dwarfs, goblins, wizards, and all the wild and grotesque creations of the mediaeval fancy. ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... is quite famous among virtuosi, though I was unaware of it when I came upon the monument in the quiet of a workaday afternoon; but its beauty at once claimed my eye, presenting something so different from the average mediaeval tomb, of interest chiefly for its age. These figures are slightly defaced, the sharp edges worn smooth by time, and scores of initials have been scratched roughly on the surface of his armour or her mantle; ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... the most glittering restaurant in the Palais Royal. If one add the background of exquisite mountains, the middle distance of flowery slopes, where herds of long-haired goats, sheep, and gray oxen are feeding among the skeletons of broken aqueducts, ruined tombs, and shattered mediaeval towers, and the foreground made up of picturesque groups of peasants, who lounge about the door, and come and go, and men from the Campagna, on horseback, with their dark, capacious cloak and long ironed staff, who have ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... old Haskel van Manderpootz, shutting the book, "is my classical authority in this experiment. This story, overlaid as it is with mediaeval myth and legend, proves that Roger Bacon himself attempted the experiment—and failed." He shook a long finger at me. "Yet do not get the impression, Dixon, that Friar Bacon was not a great man. He was—extremely great, in fact; he lighted the torch that his ...
— The Ideal • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... is curiously indisposed to conversion by cannon, and has retorted in a still louder roar of high-explosive arguments. God, as a politico-philosophical ally, is certainly cheaper than Herr Krupp; and, divested of his mediaeval sword and tinder-box, he is decidedly humaner. But is the glamour of his name quite what it once was? Or can it be restored ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... adventure!" I said to myself, as I stepped along in the spring morning air; for, being a pilgrim, I was involuntarily in a mediaeval frame of mind, and "Marry! an odd adventure!" came to my lips as though I had been one of that famous company that once started from the Tabard ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... from the fashionable bathing resort, that he went in his difficulty. He spent nearly the whole day in these narrow streets; indeed, he lunched at the Swan in company of a seafaring gentleman clad in soft blue flannel, and addicted to the mediaeval coiffure still affected in certain parts ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... the male. Two babies stared solemnly. A little girl with a beautiful, oval face, large mischievous gray eyes behind long black lashes, a mischievously quirked mouth to match the eyes, and black hair banged straight, both front and behind, in almost mediaeval fashion, twirked a pair of brown bare legs all about us. Another light-haired, curly little girl, surmounted by an old yachting-cap, spread apart sturdy shoes in an attitude at ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... Klingsor's mountain castle in the arms of the beautiful Orgeluse, queen of the night, from whose embraces the longing for light drives him again at dawn. We must, however, also here confine ourselves to the particular mediaeval form of the legend, as ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... as we proceed. But now, for the moment, we must turn our eyes in the other direction and give attention to certain phases of Greek and of Oriental thought which were destined to play a most important part in the development of the Western mind—a more important part, indeed, in the early mediaeval period than that played by those important inductions of science which have chiefly claimed our attention in recent chapters. The subject in question is the old familiar one of false inductions or pseudoscience. In dealing with the early development ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... which so many thousands of Americans have entered Quebec since Arnold's excursionists failed to do so, is demolished, there is nothing left so picturesque and characteristic as Hope Gate, and I doubt if anywhere in Europe there is a more mediaeval-looking bit of military architecture. The heavy stone gateway is black with age, and the gate, which has probably never been closed in our century, is of massive frame set thick with mighty bolts and spikes. The wall here sweeps along the brow of the crag on which the city ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... away to be destroyed, appealing, as it does to the strongest of human instincts, is the theme of many popular fictions from India to Iceland. With a malignant mother-in-law in place of the two sisters, it is the basis of a mediaeval European romance entitled "The Knight of the Swan," and of a similar tale which occurs in "Dolopathus," the oldest version of the "Seven Wise Masters," written in Latin prose about the year 1180: ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... calculated to stir the knightly spirit of a lad. The king himself was known as El Rey Cavalleiro or the Chivalrous King; his one delight was in war, and he was never tired of reading the romances of mediaeval chivalry and trying to follow the example of its heroes. King Affonso V had also a great taste for literature: he founded the famous library at Evora, and his answer to the chronicler, Acenheiro, who asked how he should write the chronicle of ...
— Rulers of India: Albuquerque • Henry Morse Stephens
... light of romance is shed upon his page, and it is his habit to borrow mediaeval and Catholic imagery from his favorite Middle Ages, even when writing of American subjects. To him the clouds are hooded friars, that "tell their beads in drops of rain;" the midnight winds blowing through woods and mountain ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... we see through a picturesque medium," said Julius; "but who could not have been pleasant to the mediaeval clergyman. I have hopes of poor Fanny yet. She will drift home one of these days, and we shall get ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Witchcraft is, indeed, in its full development and most fearful results, modern still more than mediaeval, Christian still more than Pagan, and ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... fingers, a mass of rotten mortar threatening each moment to break below his grasp, and he realised with a spasm of the diaphragm that now there was no retreat. What—this was his thought—what if this was the mouth of a well? Or a mediaeval trap for fools? He had seen such things in French castles. In the pitch darkness he could not guess whether he hung above an abyss or had the ground within an inch ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... which the Princess had imported from America, and which Jennie thought were the only really comfortable pieces of furniture the old stronghold possessed, much as she admired the artistic excellence of the mediaeval chairs, tables, and cabinets which for centuries had served the needs of the ancient line that had lived in the Schloss. The rocking-chair was as modern as this morning's daily paper; its woodwork painted a bright scarlet, its arms ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... disenthralled religion from bondage to temporal power, that her worship might be worship only in spirit and in truth. The wisdom which had passed from India through Greece, with what Greece had added of her own; the jurisprudence of Rome; the mediaeval municipalities; the Teutonic method of representation; the political experience of England; the benignant wisdom of the expositors of the law of nature and of nations in France and Holland, all shed on her their selectest influence. She washed the gold of political wisdom from the sands ...
— Memorial Address on the Life and Character of Abraham Lincoln - Delivered at the request of both Houses of Congress of America • George Bancroft
... close to a cold-air ventilator, stealthily, in the pin-drop silences of the night, with frightful risks of detection, was all the difference in the world. One was a disagreeable, thoroughly unsympathetic exercise; the other was a romantic, mediaeval adventure. ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... in the Trevisan, is a very picturesque mediaeval fortified town, the ancient Acelum. It lies at the foot of a hill which is surrounded by the ruins of an old castle; before it stretches the great plain of the rivers Brenta and Piave, where Treviso, Vicenza, and Padua may be clearly ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... Continent brought the Cinque Ports into importance; and, as premier Cinque Port, Hastings grew to be one of the chief towns in Sussex. The constant French wars made them prominent in mediaeval history. As trade grew up, other commercial harbours gave rise to considerable mercantile towns. Rye and Winchelsea, at the mouth of the Rother, were great ports of entry from France as late as the days of Elizabeth. Seaford, at the mouth of the Ouse, was also an important ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... vegetable fashion must excite your languid spleen, An attachment E LA Plato for a bashful young potato, or a not-too- French French bean. Though the Philistines may jostle, you will rank as an apostle in the high aesthetic band, If you walk down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily in your mediaeval hand. And every one will say, As you walk your flowery way, "If he's content with a vegetable love which would certainly not suit ME, Why, what a most particularly pure young man this pure young ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... old mediaeval knight Gazed at the arms he could no longer wield— The sword two-handed and the shining shield Suspended in the hall and full in sight, While secret longings for the lost delight Of tourney or adventure in the field Came over him, and tears but half ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... were forgotten. It seemed as though the genius of the Renaissance had migrated across the Alps. All the powers of the Papacy were directed to the suppression of heresies and to the re-establishment of spiritual supremacy over the intellect of Europe. Meanwhile society in Rome returned to mediaeval barbarism. The veneer of classical refinement and humanistic urbanity, which for a time had hidden the natural savagery of the Roman nobles, wore away. The Holy City became a den of bandits; the territory of the Church supplied a battle-ground for senseless party strife, which ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... differ as to the site of this city, so celebrated in the mediaeval history of Al-Islam: most probably it stood where Hyderabad of Sind now is. The question has been ably treated by Sir Henry M. Elliot in his "History of India," edited from his posthumous papers by ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... that can be charged against the Letters, there rises the substantial merit of an honest effort to exalt the gentle in woman and man—above the merely genteel. "He that is gentil doeth gentil deeds," runs the mediaeval saying which marks the distinction between the genuine and the sham in behavior. A later age had it thus: "Handsome is as handsome does," and in this larger sense we have agreed to accept the motto of ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... of ballades it was unnecessary to deceive; it was the flight of beauty alone, not that of honesty or honour, that he lamented in his song; and the nameless mediaeval vagabond has the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the adroit diplomacy of her relatives. She had been hunted and caught like a wild animal; and she was soon to find that the walls of her enclosure, which at first seemed so wide that she perceived them not, were closing in upon her day by day as in a mediaeval torture chamber, forcing her step by step towards the unfathomable pit of ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... a mediaeval town surrounded by its ancient walls and towers, possesses relics of yet earlier fortifications within the present ones. One of these relics is the so-called Weissthurm, still dominating the narrow streets that lead to it and the old houses that have attached ...
— Pictorial Photography in America 1921 • Pictorial Photographers of America
... finished epic. But its originally heathen Teutonic character is overlaid there with admixtures of Christian chivalry. In the Edda and other Scandinavian sources, the tale appears in fragmentary and lyrical shape, but in a purer version, without additions from the new faith or from mediaeval chivalry. It is in the Sigurd-, Fafnir-, Brynhild-, Gudrun-, Oddrun-, Atli-, and Hamdir Lays of the Norse Scripture that the original nature of the older German songs, which must have preceded the epic, can ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... Sweden, under the shelter of its fringe of jagged rocky islets. Towards noon we left the Baltic, and steamed up the long, narrow Bay of Soderkoping, passing, on the way, the magnificent ruins of Stegeborg Castle, the first mediaeval relic I had seen in Sweden. Its square massive walls, and tall round tower of grey stone, differed in no respect from those of ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... influence, and would become transformed into municipal ceremonies. This process would be slow, centuries being required for its completion; but it would be aided by the gradual development of the tribe first into a settled village community, and thence into a mediaeval township. With the loss of sanctity the reason for prohibiting the attendance of men would vanish; but the tradition of it would be preserved in the incident of the story which ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... again, was never really interested in the Castellani collection. It grudged the additional entrance-fee of twenty-five cents levied by the trustees of the Metropolitan Museum. No leader arose to open its eyes to the true value of a complete collection of majolica and mediaeval jewelry. The only known authority upon the subject of ceramics proved to be a blind leader of the blind, and the only result of Mr. Clarence Cook's interference was to leave the aforesaid gentleman in the melancholy plight of a plucked crow. The collection was reshipped to Europe while ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... The mediaeval Irish scholars catalogued their native literature under several heads, probably as an aid to the memory of the professional poets or story-tellers whose stock-in-trade it was, and to one of these divisions they gave the name Tainte, ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... upon as a moral and religious duty. Stealing was accounted virtuous for the young Spartan, and among the Indian caste of Thugs. In the ancient world, piracy, that is, robbery and murder, was a respectable profession. To the mediaeval Christian, religious persecution was the highest of ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... these rents, by promoting the organization of employments in any way that will not hamper progress in economic production. And if we can persuade the Trade Unions—and there is every sign that the old mediaeval guild conception of water-tight trade limitations is losing its hold upon those organizations—to facilitate the movement of workers from trade to trade under the shifting stress of changing employment and of changing economy of production, ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... Italians. 'The Swiss were only peasants, and if they were all killed, that would be no satisfaction for the Burgundian nobles who might fall in the war. If the Duke got possession of all Switzerland without a struggle, his income would not be 5,000 ducats the greater.' The mediaeval features in the character of Charles, his chivalrous aspirations and ideals, had long become unintelligible to the Italians. The diplomatists of the South. when they saw him strike his officers and yet keep them in his service, ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... here, as often in mediaeval Latin, for quod. The meaning is, Be content to know that the thing is, seek not to know WHY or HOW—propter quid—it is as ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 2, Purgatory [Purgatorio] • Dante Alighieri
... a place in Quedlinburg. I still remember with pleasure Steuerwald's beautiful winter landscapes, into which he so cleverly introduced the mediaeval ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of a world-unity first consciously envisaged in the Greco-Roman world. Greece gives unity in thought, Rome in practice. Order with a solid intellectual foundation established with the Roman Empire. In the mediaeval world a unity mainly spiritual is reached in the same framework. The position of Germany in this development. The break-up of the fourteenth and fifteenth century. The enlargement of the known world and the growth of wealth and knowledge. This crisis still continues ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... commanded—or rather had been in years past—by the guns of a half-moon battery that stood planted on a sort of third-story terrace. It was all towers and donjons and ramparts, and might, in its mediaeval perfection, have been taken bodily out of one of Sir Walter Scott's novels. Verna and I had lunch together in a perfectly gorgeous old hall, with beams and carved panelling and antlers, and a fireplace you could have roasted an ox in, and rows of glistening suits ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... long thin Arabic characters. Few rooms in the Kasbah were decorated in this manner, and it had instantly occurred to me that, concealed somewhere, was one of those secret ways which, whether in the Oriental palace, or the mediaeval European castle, are so suggestive ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... streets of its suburbs a character of antiquity unexampled elsewhere, except in Rome itself. But it contains, in the next place, what Rome does not contain—perfect examples of the great twelfth-century Lombardic architecture, which was the root of all the mediaeval art of Italy, without which no Giottos, no Angelicos, no Raphaels would have been possible: it contains that architecture, not in rude forms, but in the most perfect and loveliest types it ever attained—contains those, not ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... setting out on a long table a variety of sandwiches and cups of steaming bouillon. Sylvia had never encountered before a real man-servant in livery. She looked at him with the curiosity she might have shown at seeing a mediaeval knight in full armor. Jerry brought her a cup of the bouillon, which was deliciously hot and strong. Experienced as she was in the prudent provisioning of the Marshall kitchen she was staggered to think how many chickens had gone into filling with that clear liquor the big silver tureen which ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... your head, sir," said Felix to his uncle one evening, before them all—Mr. Brand and Robert Acton being also present. "I think I should make a very fine thing of it. It 's an interesting head; it 's very mediaeval." ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... escaped through fallen roof and shattered wall, leaving only the foliated and sun-pierced screen of front, with its rose-window and pinnacle of cross behind. Pilgrims from all lands had come to see it; fierce Republicans had crossed the seas to gaze at its mediaeval outlines, and copy them in wood and stucco on their younger soil. Politicians had equally pointed to it as a convincing evidence of their own principles and in refutation of each other; and it had survived both. For ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... Where they came from, how long they had been in travelling, how many they were, what was their rank, whither they went,—all these questions are left unsolved. They glide into the story, present their silent adoration, and as silently steal away.' The tasteless mediaeval tradition knows all about them: they were three; they were kings. It knows their names; and, if we choose to pay the fee, we can see their bones to-day in the shrine behind the high altar in Cologne Cathedral. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... own day, seen so nearly at the hither extremity of the vista through which we look back, from the epoch of railways to that of the oldest Egyptian obelisk. The house (it was then occupied by the Cardinal Barberini) looks as if it might have been built within the present century; for mediaeval houses in Rome do not assume the aspect of antiquity; perhaps because the Italian style of architecture, or something similar, is the one more generally in vogue in ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... The Dumb Oracle.—Appeared in the University Magazine for June, 1878. The legend on which it is founded, a mediaeval myth here transferred to classical times, is also the groundwork of Browning's ballad, "The Boy ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... they might, the just pride of race in the "unhyphenated" American boy. Long before Columbus set sail from Palos, American history was a-making in the shire-moots of Saxon England, at Hastings, and Runnymead, and Bannockburn. In all the mediaeval achievements of England, in peace and war—in her cathedrals, her castles, her universities, in Cressy, Poictiers, and Agincourt—Americans may without paradox claim their ancestral part. Why should the sons of the English who emigrated leave to the sons of those who stayed ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... range of mountains. They recall primitive feelings of fear before the great unknown, they tower above the human form with a colossal imperturbability which withers our importance and confuses our standards of value. Victor Hugo never quite freed himself from the mediaeval dread of the mountains or the mediaeval speculation on their meaning. His letters to his wife from the Alps and Pyrenees record his impressions with a painstaking and detailed accuracy which does not forget the black-and-yellow ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... were matters of freest discussion. The periods of austerity and restraint, on the other hand, were always characterized also by an unwillingness to talk about sexual relations and to show them in their animal nakedness. Antiquity knew those ups and downs, mediaeval times knew them, and in modern centuries the fluctuations have been still more rapid. As soon as a moral age with its policy of silence is succeeded by an immoral age, it is certainly a very easy historical misconstruction to say ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... face gets more and more deeply wrinkled, his broken angular back bends into sharper angles and corners, his pointed elbows dig beds for themselves in the oak table, his skinny fingers bury themselves in his cheeks, his piggish grey eyes get redder over manuscripts, Latin, Greek, or mediaeval. He falls into raptures, he smacks his lips, he licks his chops like a cat over a dainty dish, and then he throws himself upon that dirty litter, with his knees up to his chin, and he thinks he has had a delightful day! Oh, ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... he burn the poems? Far better that they should burn and he should save his soul from burning. A sudden vision of hell, a realistic mediaeval hell full of black devils and ovens came upon him, and he saw himself thrust into flame. It seemed to him certain that his soul was lost—so certain, that the source of prayer died within him and he fell prostrate. He cursed, with curses that seared ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... minutes' walk of that aristocratic Eden, Kensington Gardens! Mr. Sheldon's small domain was called The Lawn, and consisted of something over half an acre of flower-garden and shrubbery, a two-stall stable and coach-house, a conservatory and fernery, and a moderate-sized house in the gothic or mediaeval style, with mullioned windows in the dining-room and oriels in the best bedroom, and with a great deal of unnecessary stone-work and wooden excrescence in ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... Mr. E.K. Chambers (The Mediaeval Stage, I, 383, note 2; II, 190, note 4) calls attention to a "theatre" belonging to the city of Essex as early as 1548. Possibly the Latin document he cites referred to an amphitheatre of some sort near the city which was used for dramatic performances; at any rate "in theatro" does not necessarily ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... not been done, the djemmaa of the man who has suffered from such neglect may lodge a complaint, and the djemmaa of the selfish man will at once make good the loss. We thus come across a custom which is familiar to the students of the mediaeval merchant guilds. Every stranger who enters a Kabyle village has right to housing in the winter, and his horses can always graze on the communal lands for twenty-four hours. But in case of need he can reckon upon ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... Mediaeval Family.—The Roman family seemed in danger of disintegrating, for the matron claimed rights that ran counter to the rights of the man, when two new forces entered Roman society and checked this tendency ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... the general body of modern European youth have their minds occupied more seriously by the sculpture and painting of the bowls of their tobacco-pipes, than by all the divinest workmanship and passionate imagination of Greece, Rome, and Mediaeval Christendom. ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... Latin praestigiae (-arum)—though it is found in the forms praestigia (-ae) and praestigium (-ii) too: the juggler himself (dice-player, rope-walker, "strong man," etc.) was called praestigiator (-oris). Latin authors and mediaeval writers of glossaries took the word to mean "deceptive juggling tricks," and, as far as we know, did not use it in its present signification. The praestigiator threw dice or put coins on a table, then passed them into a small vessel or box, moved the ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... or drinking-bowl turned out of some kind of wood, by preference of maple, and especially the spotted or speckled variety called "bird's-eye maple" (see W. H. St. John Hope's paper, "On the English Mediaeval Drinking-bowls called Mazers," ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... said Philip, rather sadly; "but I think of too many things,—sow all sorts of seeds, and get no great harvest from any one of them. I'm cursed with susceptibility in every direction, and effective faculty in none. I care for painting and music; I care for classic literature, and mediaeval literature, and modern literature; I flutter all ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... one of the principal members of the society. If the accounts given by these ladies of the character of the planters in this part of the south may be believed, they must be as idle, arrogant, ignorant, dissolute, and ferocious as that mediaeval chivalry to which they are fond of comparing themselves; and these are southern women, and should know the people among whom ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... Clos des Limes. It is here translated for the first time. I believe that I am doing a service to my fellow-countrymen in making them acquainted with these pages, though doubtless they are far from forming a unique example of this class of mediaeval Latin literature. Among the fictions that may be compared with them we may mention "The Voyage of St. Brendan," "The Vision of Albericus," and "St. Patrick's Purgatory," imaginary descriptions, like Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy," of ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... oxygen and hydrogen, he causes amusement or ridicule. But if he denies doctrines which cannot be demonstrated, such as the existence of a personal God or the immortality of the soul, he incurs serious disapprobation and at one time he might have been put to death. Our mediaeval friend would have only been called a fool if he doubted the existence of Constantinople, but if he had questioned the significance ...
— A History of Freedom of Thought • John Bagnell Bury
... Dante, discovered by Mr. Kirkup, on the wall of the Bargello, at Florence,—convey impressions far beyond the mere lines and hues they exhibit; each is a drama, a destiny. And the hard but true lineaments of Holbein, the aerial grace of Malbone's "Hours," Albert Durer's mediaeval sanctities, Overbeck's conservative self-devotion, a market-place by Ostade, Reynolds's "Strawberry Girl," one of Copley's colonial grandees in a New England farmer's parlor, a cabinet gem by Greuze, a dog or ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... no mountaineer's yard without that announcing cry. It was mediaeval, the Blight said, positively—two lorn damsels, a benighted knight partially stripped of his armor by bush and sharp-edged rock, a gray palfrey (she didn't mention the impatient asses that had turned homeward) ...
— A Knight of the Cumberland • John Fox Jr.
... congestion in warrens, and excavations beyond the power and knowledge of government. Her vice, her crime, her law alike were inspired by a fierce and terrible energy, and like the great cities of mediaeval Italy, her ways were dark and adventurous with ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... looking fixedly toward heaven their eyes fell upon the earth, and they began to see much on its surface that was pleasant. Their own faces and figures must have struck them as surprisingly interesting, and, considering how little St. Bernard and other mediaeval saints and doctors had led them to expect, singularly beautiful. A new feeling arose that mere living was a big part of life, and with it came a new passion, the passion for beauty, ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... themselves. Impulsive and inconstant, sociable and amorous, voluble, dilatory, and negligent, but robust, amiable, obedient and contented, they have been the world's premium slaves. Prehistoric Pharaohs, mediaeval Pashas and the grandees of Elizabethan England esteemed them as such; and so great a connoisseur in household service as the Czar Alexander added to his palace corps in 1810 two free negroes, one a steward on an American merchant ship and the other a body-servant whom John ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... those women if her lover had run away from her outstretched arms,—and such a toilet,—only it was not on record that the lover of any one of them had ever run away. The lovers had been only too faithful; they had remained to be hacked to pieces with a mediaeval knife sparkling with jewels, or to swallow some curious poison out of a Byzantine goblet. She would have a word or two to say to Herbert Courtland when he returned. She would create the part of the woman whose lover ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... 'Majolica' Room, specimens of pottery, as revived in Europe in the fifteenth century by Luca Della Rubbia, who was born in 1388. He discovered the art of glazing earthenware. In the former of these rooms, all sorts of weapons and defensive apparatus are met with—modern, mediaeval, and antique; some are highly finished, others very rude. In the Majolica Room, there is much matter for study, and those will fail to appreciate the value of the collection who have not learned something ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various
... absurdity of any such assumption of right now. When the States surrendered their power to make war, did they make the single exception of the United States, and reserve the privilege of declaring war against them at any moment? If we are a congeries of mediaeval Italian republics, why should the General Government have expended immense sums in fortifying points whose strategic position is of continental rather than local consequence? Florida, after having cost ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... came with his Mongol fleet, but was repulsed with loss, and branded as a felon. A second and stronger attempt from the same quarter met with absolute defeat. Marco Polo, compelled to wait through the rainy season in Sumatra for a favourable wind, came hither in the palmy days of mediaeval Portugal, but returned discomfited. Goths from the Northern bounds of Thuringian pine forests followed in their turn, but the power and prestige of Hindu Java remained invincible until destroyed by the wayward fickleness of her own children. ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... classical and mediaeval epochs may be found in the fact that the former produced, whereas the latter failed to produce, a few great thinkers in each generation who were imbued with that scepticism which is the foundation of the investigating spirit; who ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... text), consoles the captive with 'the very best wine,' secretly stored, for his private enjoyment, by the cruel and hypocritical Mussulman. She confesses the state of her heart, and inquires as to Lord Bateman's real property, which is 'half Northumberland.' To what period in the complicated mediaeval history of the earldom of Northumberland the affair belongs ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... had been long-lived, and Cardinal Beaufort was almost a marvel in the family at seventy. Much evil has been said and written of him, and there is no doubt that he was one of those mediaeval prelates who ought to have been warriors or statesmen, and that he had been no model for the Episcopacy in his youth. But though far from having been a saint, it would seem that his unpopularity in his old age was chiefly incurred by his desire to put an end to the long and miserable ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sitting in the shadow, and addressed me in good English—a small, slim personage, clad in a sort of black velvet tunic (as it seemed), and with a mass of auburn hair, which gleamed in the moonlight, escaping from a little mediaeval birretta. In a tone of the most insinuating deference he asked me for my "impressions." He seemed picturesque, fantastic, slightly unreal. Hovering there in this consecrated neighbourhood, he might have passed for the genius of aesthetic ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... that open air look men get who continually set their faces to the winds and waves. David was different altogether. He was exceedingly tall, and until years filled in his huge framework of bone and muscle, would very likely be called "gawky." But he had the face of a mediaeval ecclesiastic; spare, and sallow, and pointed at the chin. His hair, black and exceeding fine, hung naturally in long, straggling masses; his mouth was straight and perhaps a little cruel; his black, deep set eyes had the glow in them ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... Abbey House were beautiful, but nature had done more for them than the Squire's old gardeners. The same rose-trees budded and bloomed year after year; the same rhododendrons and azaleas opened their big bunches of bloom. Eden could have hardly owed less to culture. The noble old cedars, the mediaeval yews, needed no gardener's hand. There was a good deal of weeding, and mowing, and rolling done from week's end to week's end; and the borders were beautified by banks of geranium and golden calceolaria, and a few other old-fashioned flowers; ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... speak of the charm which our old mother country has for them, of the delight with which they wander through the streets of ancient towns, or climb the battlements of mediaeval strongholds, the names of which are indissolubly associated with the great epochs of that noble literature which is our common inheritance; or with the blood-stained steps of that secular progress, by which the descendants of the savage Britons and of the ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... upland plateau, and yet its area lies wholly within the walls of what may be designated as one building. It is a long-violated retreat; all its corner-stones, plinths, and architraves were carried away to build neighbouring villages even before mediaeval or modern history began. Many a block which once may have helped to form a bastion here rests now in broken and diminished shape as part of the chimney-corner of some shepherd's cottage within the distant horizon, and the corner-stones of this heathen altar may form the base-course ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... apocryphal, but which, even if genuine, could not have been of universal application.... The law of ancient Rome, though admitting their testimony in general, refused it in certain cases. The civil canon laws of mediaeval Europe seem to have carried the exclusion much further. Mascardus says: 'Feminis plerumque omnino non creditur, et id dumtaxat, quod sunt feminae qua ut plurimum solent esse fraudulentre fallaces, et dolosae' [Generally speaking, no credence at all is given to women, ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... in Egypt, and Syria, and India, is just good or great for the same reasons as the buildings on our side of the Bosphorus. We Europeans, then, have had three great religions: the Greek, which was the worship of the God of Wisdom and Power; the Mediaeval, which was the Worship of the God of Judgment and Consolation; the Renaissance, which was the worship of the God of Pride and Beauty; these three we have had—they are past,—and now, at last, we English have got a fourth religion, and a God of our own, about which ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... imagination. No other Italian city could have been more interesting to an observer fond of reconstructing obsolete manners. This was a taste of Bernard Longueville's, who had a relish for serious literature, and at one time had made several lively excursions into mediaeval history. His friends thought him very clever, and at the same time had an easy feeling about him which was a tribute to his freedom from pedantry. He was clever indeed, and an excellent companion; but the real measure of his brilliancy ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... Iranian invasion had been chief of the Pasargadae, one of the Persian clans. Achaemenes is a mythical hero rather than a real person; he was, we are told, fed during infancy by an eagle—that mighty eagle whose shadow, according to a Persian belief in mediaeval times, assured the sovereignty to him on whom it chanced to fall. Achaemenes would seem to have been followed by a certain Chaispi—or Teispes—a less fabulous personage, described in the legends as his son. It was, doubtless, during his reign that Assur-bani-pal, in hot pursuit of ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... me sure That one man might have lived; and he was jealous. I would have driven these hands into a cage That held a thousand scorpions, and crushed them, If only by so poisonous a trial I could have crushed his doubt. I would have wrung My living blood with mediaeval engines Out of my screaming flesh, if only that Would have made one man sure. I would have paid For him the tiresome price of body and soul, And let the lash of a tongue-weary town Fall as it might upon my blistered name; And while it fell I could ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... which begins four hundred years ago, which is marked off by an evident and intelligible line from the time immediately preceding, and displays in its course specific and distinctive characteristics of its own.[10] The modern age did not proceed from the mediaeval by normal succession, with outward tokens of legitimate descent. Unheralded, it founded a new order of things, under a law of innovation, sapping the ancient reign of continuity. In those days Columbus subverted the notions of the world, and reversed the conditions of production, wealth and power; ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... cucumber, or to breathe but a mumble-toothed and terrible old hag. The ruin stands above a desolate marsh, its vast Italian buildings of Palladian splendour looking more forlorn in their decay than the older and austerer mediaeval towers, which rise up proud and patient and defiantly erect beneath the curse of time. When at length what used to be the castle town of Les Baux is reached, you find a naked mountain of yellow sandstone, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... the Graces in the centre of the main hall. The glory and beauty of ancient sculpture refresh and satisfy beyond expression a sense wholly wearied and well-nigh nauseated with contemplation of endless sanctities and agonies attempted by mediaeval art, while yet as handless as accident or barbarism ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... reached that point in our narrative where the history of modern Sweden takes its start. With the close of the war of independence those features which mark the face of mediaeval Sweden disappear, and a wholly new countenance gradually settles upon the land. Nor is this transformation peculiar in any way to Sweden. Early in the sixteenth century all Europe was passing from mediaeval into modern history. In the Middle Ages there was but one criterion for every question ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... majority of visitors, was an object resembling a stuffed bird more than any other production of art or nature, but very unlike any bird previously observed by the wondering spectators in either museum or menagerie, or even on the painted panels that emblazon the crude and extravagant conceptions of mediaeval heraldry. In the catalogue, the really ingenious piece of workmanship was entitled a 'Life-size model of the dodo'—a name, our readers know, appertaining to a now extinct bird, the very existence ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... two occurrences of "Paestum" in the main text, all "ae" ligatures have been maintained: "aedile" (and "aedile"), "archaeologist" (and "archaeologist"), "aesthetic", "Cannae", "Mediaeval" (in a quotation, otherwise "medieval"), ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... every day in the Nineteenth century that one comes in contact with a human being who has had to submit to the "ordeal by fire" in this literal mediaeval fashion; who has endured perils, insults, physical privations and torments, coupled with intense and ceaseless anxiety for years; and this in extreme youth before the troubles and difficulties of life have more gradually and ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... and growth is bearing the population gradually away from that dark mediaeval Madrid of the Catholic kings through the Puerta del Sol to the airy heights beyond, and the new, fresh quarter built by the philosopher Bourbon Charles III. is becoming the most important part of the city. I think we may be permitted to hope that the ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... 'Lenain, vois-tu? It's that little devil Perinot. He's been painting churches down near Toulouse, his own country. Saints by the dozen, like this,' and Alphonse drooped his eyes and crossed his limp hands, taking off the frescoed mediaeval saint for an instant, as only the Parisian gamin can do such things. 'You should see him with a cure. However, the cures don't follow him here, more's the pity. Ah! tres ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of the present century there began to be a disposition to grant to mediaeval times their proper place in the history of the preservation and dissemination of books, and Merryweather's Bibliomania in the Middle Ages was one of the earliest works in English devoted to the subject. Previous to that time, those ten centuries lying between the fall of the Roman Empire and ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... is a modern institution. The mediaeval university permitted some freedom of choice. The English and German universities. Early education in the United States. The common, or public, schools. Knowledge, intelligence, and training necessary ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... to its close. London lay sweltering under a heat-wave which had robbed the trees in the Park of their fresh June greenness and converted the progress of foot-passengers along its sultry pavements into something which called to mind the mediaeval ordeal ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... very difficult to present the socionomist's view of the child in the home so that it may appeal to the two extremes of opinion. There are those who still apply mediaeval rules to twentieth century living; those who believe, honestly, that the ideal life was found in the days when the mother was the manufacturer in her own home and the children were her helpers in all the varied processes. "There ...
— Euthenics, the science of controllable environment • Ellen H. Richards
... main body, those who were left of them, a huddled rout of men and horses. So the French must have fled before the terrible longbows of the English at Crecy and Poitiers, for, in fact, we were taking part in just such a mediaeval battle. ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... resplendent sea, and saw below me the monastery of Novy Afon and all its buildings, looking like children's toys. That tower was a stronghold of Christianity in the third century, and it was strange to think that Crusaders and mediaeval warriors had looked out from the same tower, over the same glorious sea. Assuredly from the watch-tower of ancient Time all buildings and man's dwellings are but toys. I thought of that when I rowed across the river Phasis, and drank coffee ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... then how well Angelico communicates the feeling with which it inspired him! Yet simple though he was as a person, simple and one-sided as was his message, as a product he was singularly complex. He was the typical painter of the transition from Mediaeval to Renaissance. The sources of his feeling are in the Middle Ages, but he enjoys his feelings in a way which is almost modern; and almost modern also are his means of expression. We are too apt to forget this transitional character of his, and, ranking him with the moderns, we count against him ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... long before the date of the travesty known to us, and most popular amongst our mediaeval ancestors, it might be shown that some rude notion of Homer's fable and personages had crept into ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... by which a religious corporation holds lands on condition of praying for the soul of the donor. In mediaeval times many of the wealthiest fraternities obtained their estates in this simple and cheap manner, and once when Henry VIII of England sent an officer to confiscate certain vast possessions which a fraternity of monks held by frankalmoigne, ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... as late a writer as Macchiavelli was so decidedly imbued with the earlier or mediaeval conception of the position of a prince that he treats it as a matter which is self-evident: he never discusses it, but tacitly takes it as the presupposition and basis of his advice. It may be said generally that his book is merely ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... cross-roads the brooding crucifixes hang. The British mind does not like this constant reiteration of mishandling and defeat in the death of Christ. It does not seem to it to be the final message of the Cross. Indeed, it is the product of the mediaeval, monkish mind. It was not until the tenth century that the representations of the Crucifixion showed Our Lord as dead; it was much later before the emphasis was laid on agony and despair. Once from among the debris of the convent in Voormezeele I rescued such a representation of the ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan
... of the old doctrines, deterred no one from expressing radical opinions. Only persons of conservative and law-abiding temperament, the natural defenders of things existing, were restrained by legal and ecclesiastical terrors. The champions of the old modes of thought stood like mediaeval men at arms before a discharge of artillery, prevented from rushing on the guns of the enemy by the weight of the armor that protected them no longer. The new philosophy, stimulated and hardly impeded by feeble attempts at ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... strange if Prussia, which Napoleon wittily described as "hatched from a cannon-ball," should be found really resembling Judaea, whose national greeting was "Peace"; whose prophet Ezekiel proclaimed in words of flame and thunder God's judgment upon the great military empires of antiquity; whose mediaeval poet Kalir has left in our New Year liturgy what might be almost a contemporary picture of a brazen autocracy "that planned in secret, performed in daring." And, as a matter of fact, some of these passages are torn from their context. ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... old as the human family. It antedates the Bible; it was eloquent in the days of our Saviour; it preached the Gospel of Humanity in the palaces of the Caesars and Antonies; its arguments shook the thrones of Europe during the Mediaeval ages. And when the doctrine of property in man was driven out of Europe as an exile, and found a home in this New World in the West, the ancient and time-honored anti-slavery sentiment combined all that was good in brain, ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... scheme of standing on the ancient ways, and raising a new France on the substructure of the old, brought out the fact that whatever growth of institutions there once had been had been stunted and stood still. If the mediaeval polity had been fitted to prosper, its fruit must be gathered from other countries, where the early notions had been pursued far ahead. The first thing to do was to cultivate the foreign example; ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... was gathering. In a distant province of Russia at first, then on the banks of the Volga, and finally in Moscow itself, the old cry was raised, the hideous mediaeval charge revived, and the standard of persecution unfurled against the Jews. Province after province took it up. In Bulgaria, Servia, and, above all, Roumania, where, we were told, the sword of the Czar had been drawn to protect the ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... objects were as various as their demands. They were going to raise new buildings, they were going to pay off debts on old buildings, they were going to establish in a picturesque building (engraving of proposed west elevation attached) the Sisterhood of Mediaeval Marys, they were going to give a testimonial to Mrs. Jellyby, they were going to have their secretary's portrait painted and presented to his mother-in-law, whose deep devotion to him was well known, ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... now as he walked up the silent road he still bewailed, the fate that had called him to such an uneventful life as a pedagogue's. What a prosaic existence he led, so stagnant, so colourless! Secure, methodical, year in year out, what call was there for bravery? He thought enviously of those roving, mediaeval days, so near and so remote, of quests and spies and condottieri and many a risky blade-drawing business. And suddenly came a doubt, a strange doubt, springing out of some chance thought of tortures, and destructive altogether of the position he had ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... Oudenarde, and fifteen and a quarter kilometres south-east of Bruges, in the heart of Flanders. The Vaar, a small tributary of the Scheldt, passes beneath its three bridges, which are still covered with a quaint mediaeval roof, like that at Tournay. An old chateau is to be seen there, the first stone of which was laid so long ago as 1197, by Count Baldwin, afterwards Emperor of Constantinople; and there is a Town ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... phenomena connected with the distribution of epidemics and their sudden outbreaks in unexpected quarters. I have seen it stated that in former outbreaks of pestilence flies were remarkably numerous, and although mediaeval observations on Entomology are not to be taken without a grain of salt, the tradition is suggestive. Perhaps the Diptera have their seasons of unusual multiplication and emigration. A wave of the common flea appears to have passed over Maidstone in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 303 - October 22, 1881 • Various
... right. I haven't obtained your full confidence as yet, Natalia Victorovna, but that will come. All in good time. The sister of Viktor Haldin cannot be without importance.... It's simply impossible. And no woman can remain sitting on the steps. Flowers, tears, applause—that has had its time; it's a mediaeval conception. The arena, the arena itself is the ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... the censors and critics began to spy out heresy, or laxity of morals, and the fools were dealt with according to their folly. There used to be special houses of correction in those days, mad- houses built upon an approved system, for the special treatment of cases of this kind; mediaeval dungeons, an occasional application of the rack, and other gentle instruments of torture of an inventive age, were wonderfully efficacious in curing a man of his folly. Nor was there any special limit to the time during which the treatment lasted. ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... been a hatter instead of a decorator, we should have become gradually and painfully conscious of an improvement in our hats. If he had been a tailor, we should have suddenly found our frock-coats trailing on the ground with the grandeur of mediaeval raiment. If he had been a shoemaker, we should have found, with no little consternation, our shoes gradually approximating to the antique sandal. As a hairdresser, he would have invented some massing of the hair worthy to be the crown of Venus; as an ironmonger, his nails would ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton |
