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Ancestor   /ˈænsˌɛstər/   Listen
Ancestor

noun
1.
Someone from whom you are descended (but usually more remote than a grandparent).  Synonyms: antecedent, ascendant, ascendent, root.



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"Ancestor" Quotes from Famous Books



... creation. He will strive to estimate it as it is, of course, but also as a contribution to the evolution of its species made by a given people at a given period. He will endeavor to keep himself free from lip-service and from ancestor-worship, holding himself derelict to his duty if he should fail to admit frankly that in every masterpiece of the past, however transcendent its merits, there must needs be much that is temporary admixt with more that is permanent,—many things which pleased its author's countrymen ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews

... was transplanted. He was identified with Ra through the intervention of the older Horus, Haroeris-Harmakhis, and the Minor Ennead, like the Great Ennead, began with a sun-god. This assimilation was not pushed so far as to invest the younger Horus with the same powers as his fictitious ancestor: he was the sun of earth, the everyday sun, while Atumu-Ra was still the sun pre-mundane and eternal. Our knowledge of the eight other deities of the Minor ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... coming back again 'in peace,' so he adds these. A true 'Jew,'—great at a bargain, and determined to get all he can, and to have no mistake about what he must get before he gives anything! Was Jesus thinking at all of the ancestor when He warned the descendants, in words which sound curiously like an echo of Jacob's, not to be anxious 'what ye shall eat,' nor 'what ye shall put on'? As the vow stands in the Authorised Version, it is farther open to the charge of suspending his worship ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren

... James I., and ancestor to Sophia of Hanover. These lines are a fine specimen of gallant and ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various

... been found allied to the gibbons, one of them, dryopithecus, nearly as large as a man, and believed by M. Lartet to have approached man in its dentition more than the existing apes. We seem hardly, therefore, to have reached in the Upper Miocene the epoch of the common ancestor of man and the anthropoids." (Darwinism, p. 455, London, 1889.) Mr. Wallace goes on to answer the objection of Professor Boyd Dawkins, "that man did not probably exist in Pliocene times, because almost all the known mammalia of that epoch ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske

... next male heir of the first baronet, as that is the usual mode of limiting titles. In the Heralds' College there is a pedigree of Sir Isaac Newton, signed by himself, in which he traces his descent to the brother of the ancestor of the second baronet. It should seem, therefore, that Sir Isaac was himself descended from the Chief Justice. It would confer a great obligation on the writer if any of your readers could afford any assistance to clear up the pedigree ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 190, June 18, 1853 • Various

... descended to earth; in fact, when one places it on the hearth, it springs up as if it would ascend toward heaven. Agni dissipates darkness, warms mankind, and cooks his food; it is the benefactor and the protector of the house. It is also "the internal fire," the soul of the world; even the ancestor of the human race is the "son of lightning." Thus, heat and light, sources of all life, are ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos

... to the ladies. It is as if our author nets Mars with Venus, and presents the shamefaced god as an offering of flattery to the Queen and her Court. Campaspe is, in fact, the first romantic drama, not only the forerunner of Shakespeare, but a remote ancestor of Hernani and the 19th century French theatre. "The play's defect," says Mr Bond, "is one of passion"—a criticism which is applicable to all Lyly's dramas; and yet we must not forget that Lyly was the earliest to deal with passion dramatically. The love of Alexander is certainly unemotional, ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson

... engaged in proving, or in endeavoring to prove, to Miss Stewart that she was the only person for whom he cared at all, and consequently was avowing to her an affection similar to that which his ancestor Henry IV. had entertained for Gabrielle. Unfortunately for Charles II., he had hit upon an unlucky day, the very day Miss Stewart had taken it into her head to make him jealous, and therefore, instead of being ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... the verses quoted above, left the plains of Shinar in order to found Nineveh in the upper country.[32] So, too, it was from Ur of the Chaldees that Terah, another descendant of Shem, and, through Abraham, the ancestor of the Jewish people, came ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot

... catalogue of the University for the names of graduates who have been seventy years out of college and remain still unstarred. He is curious about the biographies of centenarians. Such escapades as those of that terrible old sinner and ancestor of great men, the Reverend Stephen Bachelder, interest him as they never did before. But he cannot deceive himself much longer. See him walking on a level surface, and he steps off almost as well as ever; but watch him coming down a flight of ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... country, made of sunshine and of laughter, To raise upon the high seat of thy glory A child of night, misfortune, and the Escurial! What if, when I were seated there, the past, Plunging its yellow hands into my soul, With hideous claws unearthed some ancestor: Some Rudolph or some Philip? Ah! I dread Lest at the humming of Imperial bees The monster ...
— L'Aiglon • Edmond Rostand

... with your Graceful Effigies. Nor can he fail of Custom who has hung out a Sign so Alluring to all true Dumpling-Eaters. Many a time and oft have I gaz'd with Pleasure on your Features, and trac'd in them the exact Lineaments of your glorious Ancestor Sir JOHN BRAND, vulgarly ...
— A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling (1726) • Anonymous

... in the Senate-house, and by the intercession of Venus, his ancestor, he is changed into a star. The Poet concludes his work with a compliment to Augustus, and a promise of immortality ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso

... connection with Brian Boru, or Malichi, of the crown of gold, a gentleman who, notwithstanding the poetical authority of Tom Moore, we have some reason to believe during his long and illustrious reign was never master of a crown sterling. My ancestor was Colonel Hamilton, as stout a Cromwellian as ever led a squadron of Noll's Ironsides to a charge. If my education was not of the first order, it was for no lack of instructors. My father, a half-pay dragoon, ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various

... "Snarl. Honorable ancestor Confusion doesn't even need to tell me what to do now. My toy is safe. I am going to bed. I have worked without stopping for two days and now the flare has ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond

... the fact as being just as glorious a one as would have been that of having in his veins "all the blood of all the Howards." The Joels were Hebrews; the Rudds supposed to belong to the same race through some remote ancestor; the Mosenthals, Abrahams, Phillipps, and other notabilities of the Rand and Kimberley, were Jews, and one among the so-called Reformers, associated with the Jameson Raid, was an American engineer, ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill

... boomerang, to the sword, to the cross-bow, to the blunderbuss, to the flint-lock, to the cap-lock, to the needle-gun, up to the cannon cast by Krupp, capable of hurling a ball of 2,000 pounds through eighteen inches of solid steel. I saw, too, the armor from the turtle-shell that our ancestor lashed upon his skin when he went out to fight for his country, to the skin of the porcupine, with the quills all bristling, which he pulled over his orthodox head to defend himself from his enemies—I mean, of course, the orthodox head of that day—up to the shirts of mail ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll

... scarcely be said that the Eastern and Spanish ancestor of Bach's Chaconne was terpsichorean, and was unconnected with any kind ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart

... in these degenerate days of building. And the aesthetic spirit, moving hand in hand with his Forsyte sense of possessive continuity, dwelt with pride and pleasure on his ownership thereof. There was the smack of reverence and ancestor-worship (if only for one ancestor) in his desire to hand this house down to his son and his son's son. His father had loved the house, had loved the view, the grounds, that tree; his last years had been happy there, and no one had lived there before him. These last eleven years at ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... And what if my ancestor at that date was some Damoetas—feeding flocks, not his own, upon the hills of Lincoln—did I in less earnest vindicate to myself the family trappings of this once proud AEgon?—repaying by a backward triumph the insults he might possibly have heaped ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... of it. It convinced me, after months of study, that when the Ten Tribes were carried away into captivity by the Assyrians they sent their records secretly to Jerusalem. Ever since the secession the Israelites and Jews had been jealous enemies. But they were relatives after all, boasting a common ancestor, proud of the same history, more or less observing the same religion. And Schechem was only about thirty miles from Jerusalem, which was considered an impregnable fortress until the Babylonians took it later on. So they sent their records ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy

... England, the pendulum has swung from one extreme to the other. In Canada it has remained stationary. There, in the country where they settled, the United Empire Loyalists are still regarded with an uncritical veneration which has in it something of the spirit of primitive ancestor-worship. The interest which Canadians have taken in the Loyalists has been either patriotic or genealogical; and few attempts have been made to tell their story in the cold light of impartial history, or to estimate the results which have flowed from ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace

... as he touched a quaint dagger, "belonged to thine ancestor, Marco Giustiniani, Ambassador to the Scaglieri; there were other envoys of our name in other Italian provinces, in England and the Papal Court, for we have been great in statescraft as well as in war. But I wrong thee in seeming to think thou ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull

... and other snakelike characteristics, bridging the gap between modern birds and reptiles. The line of descent of the horse, the camel, the hippopotamus and other mammals has been traced to a single ancestor, the result being the proof of ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson

... fatal to any one not, like thy father, fortified by a course of antidotes. Now hear the reason. I bear a deadly grudge to the king of this land. He indeed hath not injured me; but his father slew my father, wherefore it is meet that I should slay that ancestor's son's son. I have therefore nurtured thee from thy infancy on the deadliest poisons, until thou art a walking vial of pestilence. The young prince shall unseal thee, to his destruction and thy unspeakable advantage. Go to the great city; thou art beautiful as the ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett

... the street of cottages beside the burn, in one of which he first saw the light. His father had a right to bear the arms of the Earls of Home, with a brisure, being the natural son of Alexander, tenth Earl of Home.[17] The Medium's ancestor had fought, or, according to other accounts, had shirked fighting, at Flodden Field, as is popularly known from the ballad The Sutors of Selkirk. The maiden name of Home's mother was Macneil. He was adopted by an aunt, who, about 1842, carried the wondrous child to America. He ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang

... this too far. A man is something more than the mere chemical product of his ancestor's blood and brains! Every one has a new and original endowment of his own. He must live and ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss

... minister to his old age, was flat and stale; used up to the very dregs: every shilling in the national purse had been squeezed out, by Pompadour and Du Barri and such brilliant ministers of state. He had found out the vanity of pleasure, as his ancestor had discovered the vanity of glory: indeed it was high time that he should die. And die he did; and round his tomb, as round that of his grandfather before him, the starving people sang a dreadful chorus of curses, which were ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... to the story of the triumph of the head of the family, Robert Turold. Most families have some common source of interest and pride. It may be a famous son, a renowned ancestor, a faded heirloom, even a musical daughter. The pride of the Turold family rested on the belief that they were of noble blood—the lineal inheritors of a great English title which had fallen into abeyance ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees

... allow the poor celestial to go out or have civilized men to enter the happy country. On account of their ignorance of Christ, unhappy, miserable, wretched. Some of them think good deal of their improvement, national, naval, but if the Government will not adopt the Christianity and put behind their ancestor and evil ways and the wicked custom, they will not be very flourishing what they look for." For himself he says, "I hope I will have a good opportunity while I am working for the Lord and looking for some souls to bring to the Lord, as His will ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 1, January, 1889 • Various

... common ancestor of the rival houses, performed his ascetic austerities there. Since Kuru's time, many ascetics took up their ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... divine favor, the success of their arms was destined to achieve the deliverance or the triumph of the church. If the judges of Israel were occasional and temporary magistrates, the kings of Judah derived from the royal unction of their great ancestor an hereditary and indefeasible right, which could not be forfeited by their own vices, nor recalled by the caprice of their subjects. The same extraordinary providence, which was no longer confined ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon

... quick sensibility and joyous vivacity of youth. At worst, the reigning Count of Monte Beni, as his hair grew white, was still a jolly old fellow over his flask of wine, the wine that Bacchus himself was fabled to have taught his sylvan ancestor how to express, and from what choicest grapes, which would ripen only in a certain divinely favored portion of the Monte ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... "But I do not understand how you seem to imply that I am your ancestor, while Onan seemed to mean the opposite, that ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn

... His other son, Peregrine, also married, and had a son Hugolin, who, after the restoration of Charles II. was replaced by the Court of Claims in as much of the lands as could be found to have been his ancestor's. Hugolin attached himself to the cause of James II. and after the revolution, was outlawed for treason and rebellion. Some time after his cousin William, son of Sylvanus, became a suitor for the forfeited property, and recovered it by ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 17, No. 483., Saturday, April 2, 1831 • Various

... take heart, And in the bosom of that whirling cloud Plunge fearlessly. O brave! O mighty! Thus Appeared thine ancestor through smoke and fire Of battle, when his country's trembling gods His sword avenged, and shattered the fierce foe And put to flight. But he, his visage stained, With dust and smoke, and smirched with gore and sweat, His hair torn and tossed ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells

... to kill anyone," said Virginia, who at times had a sweet puritan gravity, caught from some old New England ancestor. ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough

... —Shakespeare, Byron, Goethe, and Dante. Sainte-Beuve, who brought out a Ronsard anthology with a critical essay in 1828, showed them where to look. After that, it was as though French literature had begun with Ronsard. He was the "ideal ancestor." He was, as it were, a re-discovered fatherland. But his praise since then has been no mere task of patriotism. It has been a deep enthusiasm for literature. "You cannot imagine," wrote Flaubert, ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd

... strides over the black and white squares. Sometimes an uncle or aunt lives over again in a nephew or niece, as if the knight's move were repeated on the squares of human individuality. It is not impossible, then, that some of the qualities we mark in Emerson may have come from the remote ancestor whose name figures with distinction in the early history of ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... as a custom established by unwritten law. Its origination would be put far back in the past and sometimes ascribed to supernatural personages—the Central Australians refer it to the mythical ancestors, the later Jews to the command of the national deity issued to the legendary or mythical ancestor Abram.[316] Under certain circumstances it might become a tribal mark; the Hebrews thus distinguished themselves from their neighbors the Philistines, and "uncircumcised" ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy

... born at Groton, Massachusetts, on the 22d of April, 1786. His ancestor came of a good English family, and was one of the company which sailed from England for the New World under Governor Winthrop, in 1630, and which, according to Grahame, contained "several wealthy and high-born persons, both men and women, who expressed their determination ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.

... worlds, Margot," he said slowly. He watched her for a reaction, knowing that strange fact about hyper-space—perfectly true and never understood—dovetailed with her father's letter about proto-man, an unknown pre-human ancestor of all the humanoid races in the galaxy, who had discovered hyper-space, bred variations to colonize all the inhabitable worlds, found or created the three thousand crossover points in space, and ...
— Equation of Doom • Gerald Vance

... ancestor, Abraham, has come to life again. Like Abraham, when Jehovah commanded him to go in quest of the promised land, the Jewish Nationalists make themselves and others believe that they long for the moment, when with wife and child and all possessions, they will migrate to that ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various

... sl. 6. The Commentator excludes from the operation of the harsh rule in this 20th sloka, an heir, who is supposed to deny his ancestor's debt or liability through ignorance; but he attempts to justify the rule itself ...
— Hindu Law and Judicature - from the Dharma-Sastra of Yajnavalkya • Yajnavalkya

... thy first ancestor, most noble Dator," replied the man. "It shall be done even as thou sayest," and raising both hands, palms backward, above his head after the manner of salute which is common to all races of Barsoom, he disappeared once more into the entrails ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... Sarah married Dempsey Burgess, of Camden, and Matilda married a young German, John Christopher Ehringhaus. Many of the descendants of this brave Revolutionary officer are living in the Albemarle region to-day, and claim with pride this ancestor, who, as Captain Ashe in his History of North Carolina says, "was one of the few who won honor at Camden, and whose good fame was never tarnished by ...
— In Ancient Albemarle • Catherine Albertson

... and daughter to the king Olorus, as appears from the poems of Melanthius and Archelaus, written in praise of Cimon. By this means the historian Thucydides was his kinsman by the mother's side; for his father's name also, in remembrance of this common ancestor, was Olorus, and he was the owner of the gold mines in Thrace, and met his death, it is said, by violence, in Scapte Hyle, a district of Thrace; and his remains having afterwards been brought into Attica, a monument is shown as his among ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough

... evolutionist, gives this imaginary picture of our supposed ancestor: "We may not unjustifiably picture him to ourselves as a tall and hairy creature, more or less erect, but with a slouching gait, black faced and whiskered, with prominent, prognathous muzza, and large, pointed canine teeth, those of each jaw fitted into ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 363, December 16, 1882 • Various

... and tenant of any customary lands of the said manor may sell his inheritance during the life of the widow of his ancestor, who enjoys such ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge

... of desolation for ever. One—a mere boy of sixteen—was the only son of his house. Beside him, lance in hand, fought his widowed mother and girl wife; and in death they were not divided. The other, Jaimul of Bednore, was a far-away ancestor of his own mother. How often she had told him the tale—adding proudly that, while Rajasthan endured, the names of those two would shine clear in the firmament of time, as stars in the ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver

... the most distinguished of New England transcendentalists, came from a family of clergy. Peter Bulkeley, his ancestor, was the first pastor of Concord in 1635. William Emerson, his grandfather, was pastor in Concord at the opening of the Revolutionary War and witnessed the fight of Concord Bridge from the window of the Old ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck

... and countrymen, both by divers procurements, and sundry rumours of the city, and by many bills also, did openly call and procure him to do that he did. For, under the image of his ancestor Junius Brutus, that drave the kings out of Rome,[99] they wrote: Oh that it pleased the gods thou wert now alive, Brutus: and again, that thou wert here among us now. His tribunal (or chair) where ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various

... lions and tigers. Species, Felis domesticus. I start taking notes: "'The first civilized people to keep cats were the Egyptians, thirteen centuries before Christ.... Fifty million years earlier the ancestor of the cat family roamed the earth, and he is the ancestor of all present-day carnivores. The Oligocene cats, thirty million years ago, were already highly specialized, and the habits and physical characteristics of cats have been fixed since then. This may explain ...
— It's like this, cat • Emily Neville

... freehold is given to an ancestor, and if in the same deed directly or indirectly the gift is made to the heir or heirs of the body of the said ancestor, these last words have the force of ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb

... in the Mediterranean. That nothing might be wanting which could excite the martial ardour of a nation eminently highspirited, he instituted, a few days before he left his palace for the camp, a new military order of knighthood, and placed it under the protection of his own sainted ancestor and patron. The new cross of Saint Lewis shone on the breasts of the gentlemen who had been conspicuous in the trenches before Mons and Namur, and on the fields of Fleurus and Steinkirk; and the sight raised a generous emulation among those who had still to win ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... fingers thoughtfully over his hairy cheeks. "I expect I do look like a prehistoric ancestor. I'll see what I can do about it. I set my own leg; I guess I can shave myself. You're a great doctor, Wilhemina. You knocked that cold up to a peak, all right. But—I don't believe you'd better tackle barbering, my ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower

... enclosure, then a goodly-sized audience room, and next the temple proper. The three walls of this room (as I remember them) were fitted up like an immense cabinet, with rows of drawers, each supposed to contain some document relating to that particular ancestor. There was one upright vacant space which the guide said would be filled when that ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck

... which had been hurled at him. He considered himself as at least the social equal of any member of the Government, for he claimed descent from the old Irish kings, and on one or two occasions when more than ordinarily exhilarated he had even been known to refer to his ancestor, Brian Boru. Yet, for all this mendacious and vainglorious boasting, Collins was a man of unquestionable ability, and when fully aroused could write a paragraph well calculated to make the ears of his enemies ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent

... descriptive of what 'the son of Jesse' had been made by the grace of God, in that he had been raised on high from his low condition of a shepherd boy, and anointed as ruler, not only by Samuel and the people, but by the God of their great ancestor, whose career had presented so many points of resemblance to his own, the God who still wrought among the nation which bore the patriarch's name, as He had wrought of old; and that, besides his royalty, he had been taught to sing the sweet songs which already were the heritage of the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... that the difficulty may be explained as follows: Moral qualities, as we know, are heritable, and an isolated tribe, such as is described, might take its rise in some one family, and ultimately in a single ancestor who happened to be a good man, and then maintain its purity. Is it not the case, for instance, that on many unpleasant occasions, such as repudiation of public debts, filibustering raids and so on, the English have often reminded the North Americans of their ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer

... for his posterity a standing covenant with God, Who then and once for all set His bow in the heavens; that is to indicate, somewhere, in the dim backward and abysm of time, an historical event. The rainbow is suffered as the skirt of the robe of Noah, who was an ancestor of Israel. So the Judith poem may be a decorated event, or it may be the barest history in a splendid epical setting: the point to remember is that it cannot be, as legend, a subject for creative art. The artist, in the language of Neo-Platonism, ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett

... the left was another door, matching those by the fireplace—that leading into the botanist's bed-chamber; and wherever a space was left on the panelling, there was a portrait, in an old tarnished gilt frame, of some ancestor, each—dimly seen though it was—as the sergeant made the light play round the walls—bearing a striking resemblance to ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn

... Ulysses was the worthy ancestor of many a pirate hanged at Malta, more ferocious enemies of man than the Red Indian. Some somnambulists should be perhaps protected from exploitation. Mrs. Piper's trance is presumably feigned, as ...
— Inferences from Haunted Houses and Haunted Men • John Harris

... the young man who speaks of his father as "the governor," the "squire," or the "old chap." Look out for the young woman who calls her mother her "maternal ancestor," or the "old woman." "The eye that mocketh at his father, and refuseth to obey his mother, the ravens of the valley shall pick it out, and the young ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage

... into the Chapel of Henry VII., the grand mausoleum of a race of kings, who looked back (as Stanley points out) not to Saxon Edward, but to British Arthur, as their great ancestor. A gloomy porch conducts us into a blaze of splendour. Walls, ceilings, and arches are richly decorated; the "stone seems by the cunning labours of the chisel (says Washington Irving) to have been robbed of its weight and density, suspended ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various

... Verona garbed in a gown of innocence, singing hymns and weaving chaplets of lilies, was to go unnoticed by the ruling power. Can Grande II. was lord of Verona, a most atrocious rascal, and one of many; but, like his famous ancestor and namesake, he had a gibing tongue, which was evidence of a scrutiny tolerably cool of the shifts of human nature. Human nature, he had observed, must needs account to itself for itself. If it met with what it did not understand, it was prompt to state the problem in a phrase which ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett

... reason of their silence, was the difficulty, at all events till quite lately, of getting materials with which to compose a narrative. The result is that the real character of the great mutinies has been altogether misunderstood. Lord Camperdown's recently published life of his great ancestor, Lord Duncan, has done something to put them in their right light. As regards defence against the enemy, the mutinies affected the security of the country very little. The seamen always expressed their determination to do their duty if the enemy put to sea. Even at the Nore they ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge

... "King David was my ancestor, and in the presence of a king I must stand motionless until ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa

... All novelists have had occasion at some time or other to wish with Falstaff, that they knew where a commodity of good names was to be had. On such an occasion the author chanced to call to memory a rhyme recording three names of the manors forfeited by the ancestor of the celebrated Hampden, for striking the Black Prince a blow with his racket, when they ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott

... from instruments where other girls drew discords—who would sit all day at the piano, and not find the time long; and who spent her leisure in dawdling over sofas, or playing practical jokes on every one about her. She was a long-limbed, fair-haired girl, with a touch of wit from some remote ancestor who must have had O' tacked to his name, and a great inaptitude toward books. She could play. Exeter had never before boasted such skill as hers. Her fame had spread over the state. ...
— Elizabeth Hobart at Exeter Hall • Jean K. Baird

... had come, etc. Scott says: "A presage of the kind alluded to in the text, is still believed to announce death to the ancient Highland family of M'Lean of Lochbuy. The spirit of an ancestor slain in battle is heard to gallop along a stony bank, and then to ride thrice around the family residence, ringing his fairy bridle, and thus intimating the approaching calamity. How easily the eye as well as the ear may be deceived upon such occasions, is evident from the stories of armies ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott

... hard. It was all a matter of heredity and influence. One's vices as well as one's virtues are handed down to us ready made. He had no doubt that in the Jeffries family somewhere in the unsavory past there had been a weak, vicious ancestor from whom he had inherited all the traits which barred ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow

... the gradual and insensible transformation of tribes into castes. The stages of this operation are in themselves difficult to trace.... They usually set up as Rajputs, their first step being to start a Brahman priest, who invents for them a mythical ancestor, supplies them with a family miracle connected with the locality where their tribes are settled, and discovers that they belong to some hitherto unheard-of clan of the great Rajput community." (Census 1901, Vol. II, p. 519.) It is precisely the same process which brought the many Dravidian ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones

... to the better opinion of Mr Brass, and more particularly to the authority of his Great Ancestor, it may be doubted, with humility, whether the elevating principle laid down by the latter gentleman, and acted upon by his descendant, is always a prudent one, or attended in practice with the desired results. ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens

... durable form of recognition which could be appreciated, used, displayed, and enjoyed by the recipient. Many of these silver pieces became for succeeding generations the cherished evidence of recognition accorded to an ancestor, and they were preserved long after the more customary family silver had worn ...
— Presentation Pieces in the Museum of History and Technology • Margaret Brown Klapthor

... high priests of Science, not like the priests of Indra in older tines, answered the prophet disdainfully and without shame, that they knew nothing of any spiritual utilities, because they believed in evolution and held man to be only a developed ape, with no more soul than his ancestor, the stranger responded that he too was an Evolutionist, but that he understood the doctrine quite differently from them, and more after the fashion of the old teachers,—Pythagoras, Plato, Hermes, and Buddha. And that the living and incorruptible Spirit of God was in all things, whether ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford

... demandedst of me this dower?" "Allah advance in honour the Commander of the Faithful," answered she; "verily thy hand-maid is of the seed of Kisra Anushirwan; but the shifts of time and tide brought me down and low down." Replied he, "They relate that thine ancestor, the Chosroe, wronged his lieges with mighty sore wronging;"[FN98] and she rejoined, "Wherefor and because of such tyranny over the folk hath his seed come to beg their bread at the highway-heads." Quoth he, "They also make mention of him that in after-times ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... some explosion of the force of evolution has burst from the to us familiar and apparently inert stage into these Things that hold us. And is there any greater difference between the forms with which we are familiar and them than there is between us and the crawling amphibian which is our remote ancestor? Or between that and the amoeba—the little swimming stomach from which it evolved? Or the amoeba and the ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt

... side Cooper was of Quaker descent. The original emigrant ancestor had come over in 1679, and had made extensive purchases of land in the province of New Jersey. In that colony or in Pennsylvania his descendants for a long time remained. Cooper himself was the first one, of the direct line ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury

... followed the death of Draco the Great. That prince's successors have often been accused of weakness, and it is true that none of them followed, even from afar, the example of their valiant ancestor. ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France

... Treaty of Bigelow, John, managing editor of the Evening Post Biglow Papers, edited by Thomas Hughes Bilek Binney, Dr. Amos Binney, Mrs. Amos Bismarck, Herbert Black, Rev. William Blair, Mr., engineer Blanc, Baron Bliss, Elder, ancestor of W.J. Stillman anecdotes of his family Bodichon, Barbara Borthwick, Colonel Boston Boutakoff, Captain Boyce, Mr., artist, visits Stillman Boyle, Mr., artist Brett, Mr., artist, Rossetti's aversion for Brigandage in Rome Briggs, C.F. Brin, Sig., Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman

... after showers, Nor grateful Evening mild, nor silent Night With this her solemn Bird, nor walk by Moon, Or glittering Starr-light without thee is sweet. But wherfore all night long shine these, for whom This glorious sight, when sleep hath shut all eyes? To whom our general Ancestor repli'd. Daughter of God and Man, accomplisht Eve, 660 Those have thir course to finish, round the Earth, By morrow Eevning, and from Land to Land In order, though to Nations yet unborn, Ministring light prepar'd, they set and rise; Least total darkness should by Night ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton

... of earth's historians has left on record statements which set forth the fact beyond reasonable doubt that an ancestor of the Negro race was the first of the earth's great monarchs; and that that race ruled the world for a long period; and the statements of Moses are confirmed by the testimonies of the earliest secular historians, whose writings have come down to our time. Ethiopia and Egypt ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various

... banished, declared that no authority in the world would compel him to go to sea with them. As another ship could not be procured, the prisoners were set at liberty, as Peden predicted. Fortunately for the discharged persons, they were befriended by Lord Shaftesbury, an ancestor of the present Lord Shaftesbury, who, along with other friends, provided ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant

... Murray, with his weak garrison of two British and Hanoverian regiments, retired into Fort St. Philip, the principal defence of the island. Crillon commenced operations by an act which would have made the blood of his brave ancestor boil within his veins: he offered General Murray a bribe of L100,000 sterling, and rank and employment in the French or Spanish service, if he would surrender and save him the trouble of a siege or blockade! This offer was indignantly refused, and Crillon then laid siege to Fort St. Philip. Yet, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... she laid flowers or a round cake on the altar that stood beside her seat, and which her ancestor had erected to the nymph of the spring—but today she ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... received from their ancestors, not reduced to any system, nor supported by political institutions, like that of the Druids, it seems to have made little impression on its votaries, and to have easily resigned its place to the new doctrine promulgated to them. Woden, whom they deemed the ancestor of all their princes, was regarded as the god of war, and, by a natural consequence, became their supreme deity, and the chief object of their religious worship. They believed that, if they obtained ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume

... torn English flags hang as trophies in the armoury of Madrid, but one likes to remember that in the only battle where our colours were lost, the Spanish troops were commanded by an Englishman, James Stuart, Duke of Berwick, the direct ancestor of the present Duque de Berwick y Alva, and the English by one of French birth. In every case where foreign foes have invaded Spain, sooner or later they have been driven out. Santiago! y Cierra Espana! was the war-cry which roused every child of Spain to close his beloved ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street

... compare Sir Conolly, commonly called, for short, amongst his friends, Sir Condy Rackrent, was ever my great favourite, and, indeed, the most universally beloved man I had ever seen or heard of, not excepting his great ancestor Sir Patrick, to whose memory he, amongst other instances of generosity, erected a handsome marble stone in the church of Castle Rackrent, setting forth in large letters his age, birth, parentage, and many other virtues, concluding with the compliment so justly ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth

... Palladium Order with the Ancient and Accepted Scotch Rite. For the rest, the legend of the fourth degree is the first part of what is termed a blasphemous life of Jesus, representing Baal-Zeboub as his ancestor, Joseph as his father, according to physical generation, and Mirzam as his mother, who is highly honoured as the parent of many other children. Adonai is the principle of evil, and Eblis, otherwise Lucifer, the good God. But the ritual of the fourth grade is innocent in its character ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite

... Judah. This tribe, again, like all the others, was divided into several families; the term being used here not in its ordinary acceptation, to signify a mere household, but rather in the heraldic sense, to denote a lineage or kindred descended from a common ancestor, and constituting the main branches of an original stock. In this respect the Israelites were guided by the same principle which regulates precedency among the Arabs, as well as among our own countrymen ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell

... are quite unknown; no one can say why a peculiarity in different individuals of the same species, or in individuals of different species, is sometimes inherited and sometimes not so; why the child often reverts in certain characters to its grandfather or grandmother or other more remote ancestor; why a peculiarity is often transmitted from one sex to both sexes, or to one sex alone, more commonly but not exclusively to the like sex. It is a fact of some little importance to us, that peculiarities appearing ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin

... supreme Deity, but had associated with him many objects of idolatrous worship. The great doctrine with which Mahomet set out was the strict and exclusive unity of God. Abraham, he told them, their illustrous ancestor; Ishmael, the father of their nation; Moses, the lawgiver of the Jews; and Jesus, the author of Christianity—had all asserted the same thing; that their followers had universally corrupted the truth, and that he was now commissioned to restore it to the ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley

... slightly different ways. In ancient Rome, the wife was not mistress of the hearth. She did not represent the ancestral gods, the lares and penates, since she was not descended from them. In death as in life she counted only as a part of her husband. Greek, Roman and Hindu law, all derived from ancestor worship, agreed in considering ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard

... nothing. You can tell them for me that I don't give a hang whether they want to claim kin with me or not. They did not have the making of me and I am what I am regardless of them. I know perfectly well that I am descended from the same original Bucknors but I'm glad my ancestor mislaid part of the name and I wouldn't have the last syllable back for ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson

... machine of great local repute for excellence of construction, and one which won for itself a reputation that lasted long after it had ceased to be manufactured. The name of the machine was that of an ancestor of the brothers, Catherine Van Cleve, who was one of the first settlers at Dayton, landing there from the River Miami on April 1st, 1796, when the country ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian

... of the equal rights of man. She proudly proclaims them now; but the world is involved in such a complicated muddle, that the utterances of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln (to say nothing of their intellectual and political ancestor Jean Jacques Rousseau) require amplification. The political thought of the older nations of Europe is tired out. It is for the fresher genius of America to lead them towards the solution of the greatest problem which has ever faced mankind:—the final, constructive and all-satisfying definition of ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy

... reign, found himself at its close involved in certain complications, both political and private. For this reason Mr. Esmond thought best to establish himself in Virginia, where he took possession of a large estate conferred by King Charles I. upon his ancestor. Mr. Esmond previously to this had married Rachel, widow of the late Francis Castlewood, Baronet, by whom he had one daughter, afterwards Madame Warrington, whose twin sons, George and Henry Warrington, ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser

... before you depart, stand still a little, as Evangelist said to Christian, that I may show you the words of God. And first, watch yourselves well, for you all have a large piece of this worldly-wise man in yourselves. You all take something of some ancestor, remote or immediate, who was wise only for this world. Yes, to be sure, for you still decline as they did, and desert as they did, those you deem to be the weakest, and stand with those that you suppose to be the strongest side. The Architect of Fortune is perhaps ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte

... whose most highly-prized shooter it is. At this season of the year, too, there is much serious talk as to the exceeding sinfulness of "playing for keeps." The little boys, in whose thumbs lingers the weakness of the arboreal ape, their ancestor, and who "poke" their marbles, drink in eagerly the doctrine that when you win a marble you ought to give it back, but the hard-eyed fellows, who can plunk it every time, sit there and let it go in one ear and out the other, there being a hole drilled through expressly for ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood

... replied the doctor. "I should say it belonged to a fiercer, more savage race of man, who might have been an ancestor of the present Indians ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn

... interesting of the latter is the "Urus" or Wild Bull (Bos primigenius, fig. 265), which, though much larger than any of the existing fossils, is believed to be specifically undistinguishable from the domestic Ox (Bos taurus), and to be possibly the ancestor of some of the larger European varieties of oxen. In the earlier part of its existence the Urus ranged over Europe and Britain in company with the Woolly Rhinoceros and the Mammoth; but it long survived these, and ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson

... could freely dive far down under the surface of myself and swim at ease. Birds in the hand had no brightness of plumage for me. They were always moulting. I coveted the ones that sang farthest away in the bush. "Why have a mad desire to become an ancestor for people you don't know and may dislike?" I think I remember inquiring of you, as you sagely dilated—at ancient Smithtown—on the notable achievements of a certain Bull Rider Smith for the benefits of his posterity. He was doubtless a smart business ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)

... descendants of Noel le Gardeur who claim Radisson as their ancestor, and also descendants of Claude Volant, apparently through Nicholas. Among these descendants of the Volant family is the Rt. Rev. Joseph Thomas Duhamel, who was consecrated Bishop of Ottawa, Canada, October ...
— Voyages of Peter Esprit Radisson • Peter Esprit Radisson



Words linked to "Ancestor" :   forbear, descendant, forefather, primogenitor, ascendent, ancestress, father, sire, relative, forebear, ancestral, foremother, relation, progenitor, root



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