"Century" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Irresistible authority seemed to go with the word that sent him forth, and rightly so, for behind that word lay the full weight of Great Britain's mighty empire. It was Cameron's first experience of the North West Mounted Police, that famous corps of frontier riders who for more than a quarter of a century have ridden the marches of Great Britain's territories in the far northwest land, keeping intact the Pax Britannica amid the wild turmoil of pioneer days. To the North West Mounted Police and to the pioneer missionary it is due that Canada has never had within her borders ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... In certain regions which devoted themselves to baby-farming the mortality among the nurslings was fifty per cent; in the best of them it was forty, and seventy in the worst. It was calculated that in one century seventeen millions of nurslings had died. Over a long period the mortality had remained at from one hundred to one hundred and twenty thousand per annum. The most deadly reigns, the greatest butcheries of the most terrible conquerors, had never resulted in such massacre. ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... title their sycophancy could bestow and his own fatuity accept—Le Roi Soleil, the Sun-King—makes him what indeed he is: a king of opera bouffe. There is about him at times something almost reminiscent of the Court buffoons of a century before, who puffed themselves out with mock pride, and aped a sort of sovereignty to excite laughter; with this difference, however, that in his own case it was not intended to ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... fame, happiness, and ease was upon the entire group, but in an instant everything was to be changed with the blinding swiftness of enchantment. Quick death was to come on the central figure of that company—the central figure, we believe, of the great and good men of the century. Over all the rest the blackest fates hovered menacingly— fates from which a mother might pray that kindly death would save her children in their infancy. One was to wander with the stain of murder on his soul, with the curses of a world upon ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... had the case of the United States improved, when winter put an end to most operations on the northern frontier. As in the Civil War a half century later, so in 1812, the power of the water over the issues of the land not only was not comprehended by the average official, but was incomprehensible to him. Armstrong in January, and Hull in March, had insisted upon a condition that should ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... suffers in relation to the stagnancy of its population, are well known, and that their continuance—if continuance there be—will mean the downfall of the country from its position as one of the world's great powers before the close of the twentieth century, is a mathematical certainty. That M. Zola, in order to combat those evils, and to do his duty as a good citizen anxious to prevent the decline of his country, should have dealt with his subject with the greatest frankness and outspokenness, was only natural. Moreover, ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... 300 teachers, 4000 students, and a magnificent library; the centre of an important transit trade, Prague is the chief commercial city of Bohemia; has manufactures of machinery, chemicals, leather, and textile goods; four-fifths of the population are Czechs; founded in the 12th century, it has suffered in many wars; was captured by the Hussites 1424, fell frequently during the Thirty Years' War, capitulated to Frederick the Great 1757, and in 1848 was bombarded for two days by the Austrian Government in quelling the democratic demonstrations ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... a forgotten perfume and associations webby with age stir through the lethargy of years. Memories faded as flowers lift their heads. The frail scent of mignonette roused with the dust of letters half a century old, and eyes too dim and watery to show the glaze of tears turn backward fifty years upon the mignonette-bowered scene of love's young dream. A steel drawing-room car rolling through the clean and heavy stench of cow pasture, and a steady-eyed, white-haired capitalist, ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... projected on her cheeks; and they reached their boldest development in her jaws. In the cavernous eyes of this unfortunate person rigid obstinacy and rigid goodness looked out together, with equal severity, on all her fellow-creatures alike. Her mistress (whom she had served for a quarter of a century and more) called her "Bony." She accepted this cruelly appropriate nick-name as a mark of affectionate familiarity which honored a servant. No other person was allowed to take liberties with her: to every one but her mistress she was known as ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... ago, conversing at the Club Which Londoners with 'GARRICK'S' title dub, We both confessed, and each with equal grief, That poor Melpomene was past relief; So many symptoms of her dotage shows This nineteenth century of steam and prose. Nor in herself, said you, entirely lies Th' incurable complaint whereof she dies; 'Tis not alone that play-wrights are too poor For gods or men or columns to endure;[4] Nor that all players in a mould ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... indexed and filed away in the archives of the profession. To those who wish to look it up it will be spoken of as one of the great unsolved mysteries of the century. A crime that leads two ways, one into murder—sordid, cold and calculating; and the other into the nebulous screen that thwarts ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... Chief Justices, 85, note. There are, indeed, several circumstances to remind us of the ecclesiastical origin of our profession in England. The terms—on the festival of St. Hilary (Bishop of Poictiers, in France, who flourished in the fourth century); Easter; the Holy Trinity; and of the blessed Michael, the Archangel;—the habits of the judges, their appearance in court in scarlet, purple, or black, at particular seasons—the use of the word brother to denote serjeant, and laity to ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... parlor, led George the Third into many and grave errors, which finally resulted in the loss of the fairest portion of his American possessions. Had Pitt been allowed to guide the public policy and direct the honest but stubborn mind of the king at the beginning of his long reign of half a century, these United States might have remained a part of the British Empire fifty years longer. But that great man, whose genius as a statesman, eloquence and wisdom as a legislator, and whose thorough knowledge of human ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... of the twentieth century is bought by her husband like a piece of furniture or a cooking utensil, so the child bride of ancient Rome used to take a formal farewell of her dolls and playthings, making a solemn offering of them to ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... was a strange scene. We all moved into the long, over-decorated drawing-room. We sat about, admired the pictures (a beautiful one by Somoff I especially remember—an autumn scene with eighteenth-century figures and colours so soft and deep that the effect was inexpressibly delicate and mysterious), talked and then fell into one of those Russian silences that haunt every Russian party. I call those silences "Russian," because ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... of the popular knowledge of one of the profoundest thinkers of the early part of the eighteenth century,—the time of Shaftesbury and Locke, of Addison and Steele, of Butler, Pope, and Swift,—one of the most fascinating men of his day, and one of the best of any age. Beside, or rather above, Byron's line should ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... time that Walter Ardworth, who was then striving to eke out his means by political lectures (which in the earlier part of the century found ready audience) in our great towns, came to Liverpool. Braddell and Ardworth had been schoolfellows, and even at school embryo politicians of congenial notions; and the conversion of the former to one of the sects which ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Grey; Mary Queen of Scots; and Queen Elizabeth, all excelled in this delightful art. At the Reformation, or soon after that event, needlework began sensibly to decline, and continued to do so, until the commencement of the present century. At that time, a new and elevated development of mind began to appear, which was accompanied by a very visible advancement in every department of arts and sciences. This revival of the fine arts, like the mental and ...
— The Ladies' Work-Table Book • Anonymous
... with respect to the fixed stars, but that it rotates exceedingly slowly in the plane of the orbit and in the sense of the orbital motion. The value obtained for this rotary movement of the orbital ellipse was 43 seconds of arc per century, an amount ensured to be correct to within a few seconds of arc. This effect can be explained by means of classical mechanics only on the assumption of hypotheses which have little probability, and which were devised solely for ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein
... almost the last of that band of strong men who cast such lustre over the beginning of this century. Coleridge had gone before, and Wordsworth, Byron, and Campbell, Shelley, and Canning, and Peel, and Jeffrey, and Moore, and he lingered on in a solitude made greater by that last stroke of calamity which deprived him of motion for a time that was weary and heart-breaking to him, ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... part of the seventeenth century, there was a young blacksmith in our part of the country named Josiah Spencer. He had a quick eye, a quick hand ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... the Semitic race took refuge in a district of Syria, and retained their primitive faith without further development, under the name of Nazarenes or Ebionites. In the fourth century, Epiphanius and Jerome found these primitive Christians constant to the old dogma, while Aryan Christianity had made gigantic strides, both in its ideas and social organization. Among the Semites, even when they have partially accepted the dogma, ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... neck of Frederick Barbarossa? Was it, long after the sorrows of Avignon, Julius II, who wore the cuirass and once more strengthened the political power of the papacy? Was it Leo X, the pompous, glorious patron of the Renascence, of a whole great century of art, whose mind, however, was possessed of so little penetration and foresight that he looked on Luther as a mere rebellious monk? Was it Pius V, who personified dark and avenging reaction, the fire of the stakes that punished the heretic world? Was it some other of the popes who ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... by Mr. HORACE HUTCHINSON, MACMILLAN publishes in two volumes, was one of the most honourable men who figured in public life during the last half-century. He was also one of the most widely honoured. Under his name on the title-page of the book appears a prodigious paragraph in small type enumerating the high distinctions bestowed upon him by British and foreign literary and scientific bodies. Forestalling ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 30, 1914 • Various
... that they speak almost the same language, and that their national spirit, history and traditions bear a close resemblance. The history of Poland offers many strange parallels to that of Bohemia. It is specially interesting to note that in the fifteenth century, as to-day, the Poles and Czechs together resisted the German "Drang nach Osten." The Czech with their famous leader Zizka participated in the splendid Polish victory over the Teutonic knights at Grnwald ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... Indian government has bestowed upon the people a wonderfully large meed of power and privilege. Political progress in the land is one of the marvels of the past century. Before the British entered India that land had never enjoyed the first taste of representative institutions. Today the query which arises in the mind of disinterested persons who know and love India is, whether political rights and liberties have not, of late years, ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... squirrels. The epoch-making announcement of his fellow-physician Harvey he quickly appreciates at its true value: "his piece 'De Circul. Sang.,' which discovery I prefer to that of Columbus." And here again a truly surprising suggestion of the great results achieved a century and two centuries later by Jenner and Pasteur—concerning canine madness, "whether it holdeth not better at second than at first hand, so that if a dog bite a horse, and that horse a man, the evil proves less considerable." He is the first to observe and describe that curious product ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... and biographical essays contributed to periodicals and encyclopædias, a romance (‘Aylwin’), a sheaf of poems (‘The Coming of Love’), two of the most stimulating critical pronouncements that his century produced (‘Poetry’ and ‘The Renascence of Wonder’), a handful of introductions ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... state. As the service of the altar was not incompatible with the command of armies, the Romans, after their consulships and triumphs, aspired to the place of pontiff, or of augur; the seats of Cicero [5] and Pompey were filled, in the fourth century, by the most illustrious members of the senate; and the dignity of their birth reflected additional splendor on their sacerdotal character. The fifteen priests, who composed the college of pontiffs, enjoyed a more distinguished ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... the Stamp Act Congress, or when Princess Anne was not half a century old, the old church had taken its stand, backed up to the town, recluse from its gossip. Between its tall round doors, with little window-panes like spectacles let into their panels, the ivy vine arose in form like the print of The ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... of Monarchy were the great subjects of apprehension and redress, in the last century; in this, the distempers of Parliament. It is not in Parliament alone that the remedy for Parliamentary disorders can be completed; hardly, indeed, can it begin there. Until a confidence in Government is re-established, ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... story as the Balhara (Ballaba Rais, who founded the Ballabhi era; or the Zamorin of Camoens, the Samdry Rajah of Malabar). For Mahrage, or Mihrage, see Renaudot's "Two Mohammedan Travellers of the Ninth Century." In the account of Ceylon by Wolf (English Transl. p. 168) it adjoins the "Ilhas de Cavalos" (of wild horses) to which the Dutch merchants sent their brood- mares. Sir W. Jones (Description of Asia, chapt. ii.) makes the Arabian ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... eleventh century this happy condition of affairs was disturbed by the appearance of certain Spanish crusading knights, who, issuing from the mountainous parts of the country adjacent to their own, began to war against the Moorish authorities. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... for the other two.[18] For it is extremely likely that the young Giorgione was inspired by his master's example, and that he may have produced his companion pieces as early as 1493. With this deduction Morelli is in accord: "In character they belong to the fifteenth century, and may have been painted by Giorgione in his sixteenth ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... the Brownie. He stood as if he did not mean to budge again in a century. At first going in, Ellen saw nobody in the post-office; presently, at an opening in a kind of boxed-up place in one corner, a face looked out and asked ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... and without waiting for her answer he went to the door and opened it. The gesture revealed the fur-coated back of a gentleman who stood at the opposite end of the hall examining the bust of a seventeenth century field-marshal. ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... was prepared the horses were ready, and a short hour's riding brought them to the present habitation of Lord Sussex, an ancient house, called Sayes Court, near Deptford, which had long pertained to a family of that name, but had for upwards of a century been possessed by the ancient and honourable family of Evelyn. The present representative of that ancient house took a deep interest in the Earl of Sussex, and had willingly accommodated both him and his numerous retinue in his hospitable mansion. ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... as it did an undeniable element of truth, is much harped upon by certain of the reviewers, and one can easily conceive of its popularity in the London Clubs.... The 'American,' so familiar to British readers, during the first half of the century, through the eyes of such travellers as Mrs. Trollope, now becomes the 'Yankee,' and is located north of Mason and ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... persist in introducing those latent principles of conflagration, which, if they should once burst forth, might annihilate the industry of a hundred years? which might throw the planters back a whole century in their profits, in their cultivation, and in their progress towards the emancipation of their slaves? It was our duty to vote that the abolition of the Slave Trade should be immediate, and not to leave it to he knew not what future time ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... but only cousins or nephews—who were still prosperous people in the scene of the boy-general's exploits; and one farmer had seen the bones of old combatants dug up into the air of an afternoon in the nineteenth century, in a field where the ancestors had fought, and the great-grandchildren ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... obtained a grant of land opposite the new city, extending several miles along the margin of the Delaware and the tributary stream which has since borne the name of Cooper's Creek. The branch of the family to which the novelist belongs removed more than a century since into Pennsylvania, in which state his father was born. He married early, and while a young man established himself at a hamlet in Burlington county, New Jersey, which continues to be known by his name, and afterward in the city of Burlington. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... him that our unromantic century attaches no value to armorial bearings, unless their possessor is rich enough to display them upon ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... of modern converts is as good as was that of Paul's. The gospel in this century produces everywhere fruits like those which it brought forth in Asia and Europe in the first century. The success has been in every field. None has been abandoned as hopeless. The Moravians in Greenland. The Hottentots. The Patagonians (Darwin's testimony). Christianity has constantly ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... there are a dozen explanations of the paradoxes of time travel. Every writer in the field worth his salt has explained them away. But to get on. It's my contention that within a century or so man will have solved the problems of immortality and eternal youth, and it's also my suspicion that he will eventually be able to travel in time. So convinced am I of these possibilities that I am willing to gamble a portion of my fortune to investigate ...
— Unborn Tomorrow • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... This peculiarity was known in the middle ages, and PHILE, writing in the fourteenth century, says, that such is his preference, for muddy water that the elephant stirs it ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... have been but for a few minutes, though when he awoke it seemed a century had passed, he had dreamed of so much. But something had happened! What was it? The fire was blazing as before, but he was chilled to the marrow! A wind seemed blowing upon him, cold as if it issued from the jaws of the sepulcher! His imagination ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... One has the inscription, "Live well, die never; die well and live ever. A.D. 1644 W.G." The other has the appropriate legend, "Hee that gives too the poore lends unto thee LORD." A third bears the Tudor rose in the centre. In an Inventory made about the early part of the 17th century, are mentioned "one Bason given by Mr. Bridges, of brasse." (The donor was a butcher in the parish.) "Item, one bason, given by Mr. Brugg, of brasse." On the second basin are the arms and crest of the Brewers' Company. ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 4, Saturday, November 24, 1849 • Various
... alkali? (Sec. 27, letter c.) What is the reason that this liquefied nitre permits its volatile acid to escape immediately, when rubbed or mixed with the vegetable acids?... If the chemists of the preceding century had thought worthy of a more particular examination, the elastic fluids resembling air which manifest themselves in so many operations, how advanced should we now be! They desired to see everything in ...
— Discovery of Oxygen, Part 2 • Carl Wilhelm Scheele
... of his profession, looked back over the year that had passed since his reception at the guest-house, he scarcely knew whether it seemed like a week or a century. At times it appeared as if the old life in the world were a kind of far-away picture in which he saw himself as one detached from his present personality, moving among curious scenes in which now he had no part; at other times the familiar past rushed on him fiercely, ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... when the waters are high, they must overflow?' and of that other which says that 'if you ascend high, heavy must be your fall.' Our family has now enjoyed splendour and prosperity for already well-nigh a century, but a day comes when at the height of good fortune, calamity arises; and if the proverb that 'when the tree falls, the monkeys scatter,' be fulfilled, will not futile have been the reputation of culture and old standing of ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... century," said Victor Hugo, "I have been writing my thoughts in prose and verse, history, philosophy, drama, romance, tradition, satire, ode, song. But I feel that I have not said a thousandth part of what is in me. When I ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... war-chief. Not only was the bubble burst, but the bursting was so feeble that Coronado was disgusted. He beheaded the guide with his own hands as a small measure of vengeance. With his followers he retraced his weary road to Tiguex. The lesson lasted for half a century, when the myth, brighter, more alluring than ever, arose and led others on to thirsty deaths in the bad lands and deserts ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... or another has undoubtedly been practised for many centuries, but directing by gestures of the hand has not been traced farther back than the fourteenth century, at which time Heinrich von Meissen, a Minnesinger, is represented in an old manuscript directing a group of musicians with stick in hand. In the fifteenth century the leader of the Sistine Choir at Rome directed the singers with a roll of paper (called a "sol-fa"), held in his hand. ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... he abuses, do not abuse him in turn. He is evidently conscious that there is some slight foundation for what I had said, for he says that if Steinthal thought he was angry, because "he (Mr.William Dwight Whitney) and his school" had not been refuted, instead of philosophers of the last century, he was mistaken. Yet what can be the meaning of this sentence, that "Professor Steinthal ought to have confronted the living and aggressive views of others," i.e., of Mr. William Dwight Whitney and ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... attorneys for each county. The king granted the petition, adding a clause which left it subject to the approval of the judges. Time works mighty contrasts. If those peaceable old commoners could have seen a picture of the nineteenth century, with its judiciary dotted upon the surface, they would certainly have put the world down as a very unhappy place. The people of Charleston might now inquire why they have so much ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... is now but a murky fissure, from which the groping wayfarer sees, flung against the sky, the tangled filigree of Moorish iron balconies. The old houses of monsieur stand yet, indomitable against the century, but their essence is gone. The street is one of ghosts to whosoever can ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... was taken up systematically in Great Britain in the eighth century by King Offa, to whom is credited the maxim, "He who would be secure on land must be supreme at sea"; but it must have dropped to a low ebb by 1066, for William of Normandy landed in England unopposed. Since that time Great Britain's naval defense, committed to her navy, has increased ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... arrived. Some antique bronzes and utensils, discovered by a peasant, excited universal attention. Excavations were begun, and Pompeii, shaking off as it were her musty grave clothes, stared from the classic and poetical age of the first into the prosaic modern world of the nineteenth century. The world was startled, and looked with wondering interest to see this ancient stranger arising from her tomb—to behold the awakening of the remote past from the womb of the earth which had ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... been ignorant, that this clause was not inserted into the Apostle's Creed till the sixth century after Christ? I believe the original intention of the clause was no more than 'vere mortuus est'—in contradiction to the hypothesis of a trance or state ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... to the understanding of all the miseries and woes of Irishmen during the whole of the eighteenth century. We now turn to contemplate the commencement of the workings of this fanatic intolerance which ushered ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... 32.—Answered the Cabalist. 'Simeon ben Jochai, who flourished in the second century, and was a disciple of Akibha, is called by the Jews the Prince of the Cabalists. After the suppression of the sedition in which his master had been so unsuccessful, he concealed himself in a cave, where, according to the Jewish historians, ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... much truth, "Satan finds some mischief still, for busy hands to do." The busy people achieve their full share of mischief in the world, you may rely upon it. What have the people been about, who have been the busiest in getting money, and in getting power, this century ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... to be taken. Stealing was reprehended in the Ten Commandments, and so was covetousness. Theft was always punishable at common law; but, soon after company promotion became a feature of our commercial life in the latter part of the nineteenth century, firm action had to be taken by the Legislature to protect the public from the effects of a misleading ...
— Report of the Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents - The Mazengarb Report (1954) • Oswald Chettle Mazengarb et al.
... of our own time and country, and as there is not a swashbuckler of the seventeenth century, or a sentimentalist of this, or a princess of an imaginary kingdom, in any of them, they will possibly not reach half a million readers in six months, but in twelve months possibly more readers will remember them than if they had reached ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... vain did the scout of half a century ago drive back the savage Indian from the plains; not in vain did Funston and his "Fighting Twentieth" wade the Tulijan and swim the Marilao; not in vain did Chaffee's army burst the gates of Peking, nor Calvin Titus fling out Old ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... Shiahs. Its remains may be deeply interesting to the archaeologist, but to me a neighbouring ziarat, wooden, with its grassy roof one blaze of scarlet tulips, was far more attractive. Moving homeward, we floated under a lovely old bridge, whose three rose-toned arches date from the sixteenth century—the age of the Great Moguls. The extreme solidity of its piers contrasts strongly with the exceedingly sketchy (and sketchable) bridges manufactured by ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... instance of the old and widespread legend of the man who sold his soul to the devil. The historical Dr. Faust seems to have been a self-called philosopher who traveled about Germany in the first half of the sixteenth century, making money by the practise of magic, fortune-telling, and pretended cures. He died mysteriously about 1540, and a legend soon sprang up that the devil, by whose aid he wrought his wonders, had finally carried him ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... especial occasions; as she well might, the cost being only a paul, or ten cents for near half a gallon; "Eccellenza, a million times welcome. This is an honor that don't befall the Santa Maria degli Venti more than once in a century; and you, too, Signor Podesta, once before only have you ever had leisure ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... elevated situation. Its interior is rather capacious: but it has no very grand effect-arising from simplicity or breadth of architecture. The pillars to the right of the nave, on entering from the western extremity, are doubtless old; perhaps of the beginning of the thirteenth century. The arches are a flattened semicircle; while those on the opposite side are comparatively sharp, and of a considerably later period. The ornaments of the capitals of these older pillars are, some of them, sufficiently capricious ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... of the claims provided for by the bill it is proposed to appropriate $5,000,000. I can perceive no legal or equitable ground upon which this large appropriation can rest. A portion of the claims have been more than half a century before the Government in its executive or legislative departments, and all of them had their origin in events which occurred prior to the year 1800. Since 1802 they have been from time to time before Congress. No greater necessity or propriety exists for providing for these claims at ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... exhausted by a series of successful efforts, after having undergone tortures, and enfeebled by the streams of blood poured out. The Occidental Jews, after centuries of existence in abject fear, wandering through fire and blood, passed such a moment in the sixteenth century. The time was still far distant which gave birth to famous doctors of secular sciences beloved of the people, esteemed by Kings. The high ideas of Majmonides who, giving deserved credit to the legislation of Israel, admired also the Greek scholars, were also far from ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... indeed, a sufficiently long time elapsed before even Exegesis recognised with certainty and unanimity that it was Cyrus who was meant. Doubts and differences of opinion on this point meet us even down to last century. The Medes and Persians are not at all mentioned as the conquerors of Babylon, and all which refers to the person of Cyrus has an altogether ideal character; while the Messiah is, especially in chap. ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... fitted to record the customs and traditions of the Yosemite Indians, but it was only after much persuasion that his friends succeeded in inducing him to write the history of these interesting people, with whom he has been in close communication for half a century. ...
— Indians of the Yosemite Valley and Vicinity - Their History, Customs and Traditions • Galen Clark
... London, which were pulled down at the beginning of the present century, have been associated with the name of Whittington, but there is no evidence that he really dwelt in either of them. One ruinous building in Sweedon's Passage, Grub Street, engravings of which will be found in J.T. Smith's Topography of London, was pulled down in 1805, and five ...
— The History of Sir Richard Whittington • T. H.
... this is a crisis," he began as he gloomily shook my hand. "Where is our boasted twentieth-century culture if outrages like this are permitted? For the first time I understand how these Western communities have in the past resorted to mob violence. Public feeling is already running high against the ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... sculpture, of architecture, of music, of exquisite fashions in dress, in furniture, in domestic decoration. We can contemplate these treasures. We can reproduce many of them. We can buy a few inimitable originals. We can shut out the nineteenth century— ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... youthful blush. "But I've had a peaceful life if rather a monotonous one, and I've nothing to complain of. It is very good of you to have remembered me, and I'm more glad than I can say to see you again. It's a quarter of a century since we met!" ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... attended their development and progress. Take the watch for instance. Examine the beautiful structure of the little animal, watch the intelligent play of the minute members which compose it; yet this little creature is but a development of the cumbrous clocks of the thirteenth century— it is no deterioration from them. The day may come when clocks, which certainly at the present day are not diminishing in bulk, may be entirely superseded by the universal use of watches, in which case clocks will become extinct like the earlier ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... entertainment still more recollections of the days when they and hope and Mariposa were young. My pulses beat fast with the excitement of that dead life which their stories called into being again and I forgot that they and the century too had grown old since the times of which they spoke—until the Newspaper Man came along, and the sight of him brought me back to the present with a sudden jerk. I had seen him last in San Francisco, only a week previous, but he had been in out-of-the-way, ghost-of-the-past Mariposa, he told ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... edition from which this e-text has been produced retains the spelling and abbreviations of Hakluyt's 16th-century original. In this version, the spelling has been retained, but the following manuscript abbreviations have ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, v. 7 - England's Naval Exploits Against Spain • Richard Hakluyt
... overlooked, but keep still in your hearts some desires which might enter Paradise. Keep in your souls some images of magnificence so that hereafter the halls of heaven and the divine folk may not seem altogether alien to the spirit. These legends have passed the test of generations for century after century, and they were treasured and passed on to those who followed, and that was because there was something in them akin to the immortal spirit. Humanity cannot carry with it through time the ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... the rise of feux-de-joie, or fireworks, given merely for amusing spectacles to delight the eye, to the epocha of the invention of powder and cannon, at the close of the thirteenth century. It was these two inventions, doubtless, whose effects furnished the ideas of all those machines and artifices which form the charms of ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... perturbation and at almost unfeeling length to tell me that Count Tarnowsy had unearthed the supposedly mythical Rothhoefen treasure chests and was reputed to have found gold and precious jewels worth at least a million dollars. The accumulated products of a century's thievery! The hoard of ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... spite of the recognized evils of that doctrine in its practical application. Beneath the banner of the democracies of the world was the same sinister idea which had found expression in the Congress of Vienna with its purpose of protecting the monarchical institutions of a century ago. It proclaimed in fact that mankind must look to might rather than right, to force rather than law, in the regulation of international affairs ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... is also negatived by the fact that the name Maharatta was known in the third century B.C., or long ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... Life of "Queen Anne Boleigne." Vide Appendix to Cavendish's "Life of Wolsey," by Singer, vol. ii. p. 200. This interesting memoir was written at the close of the sixteenth century, (with the view of subverting the calumnies of Sanders,) by George Wyatt, Esq, grandson of the poet of the same name, and sixth son and heir of Sir Thomas Wyatt, who was decapitated in the reign of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 358 - Vol. XIII, No. 358., Saturday, February 28, 1829 • Various
... not linger on the literary output of those early times. Joseph Bouchette, surveyor-general, had made in the first part of the century a notable contribution to the geography and cartography of Lower Canada. Major Richardson, who had served in the war of 1812 and in the Spanish peninsula, wrote in 1833 "Wacousta or the Prophecy," a spirited romance of Indian life. In Nova Scotia the ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... for the trained anthropologist and the craniologist rather than for the casual observer of men and manners. The Japanese people are now much more highly civilized—according to western notions—than they were half a century ago, but it would be ludicrously erroneous to say that they are now a higher race, from the evolutionary point of view, than they were then. Evolution does not work quite so rapidly as that even in these ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... of record that the American continents were discovered because ice-boxes were unknown in the fifteenth century. There being no refrigeration, meat did not keep. But meat was not too easy to come by, so it had to be eaten, even when it stank. Therefore it was a noble enterprise, and to the glory of the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, to put up the financial backing for even a crackpot who might ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... Holy Spirit within the Church is ever cleansing and sanctifying it, witnesses against these errors began to be raised up. The way to print books, instead of writing them out, had been discovered in the fifteenth century; and as this art made them much more cheap and common, many more people began to read and to think. In the year 1517, a German monk, named Martin Luther, began to declare how far the selling of indulgences was from the doctrine of the Apostles; ...
— The Chosen People - A Compendium Of Sacred And Church History For School-Children • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... the slaveholders had fastened on the helm of the State had been tightening for nearly half a century, till the government of the nation had become literally theirs, and the idea of their relinquishing it was one which the North did not contemplate, and they would ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... twentieth century," he said, "I should have had to reverse that proportion—in fact, my entire list would then have been top-heavy, and I should have been forced to give half of all the places to agriculture. But thanks to our scientific ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... the same Christian root with the other great voluntary organizations for religious and moral purposes which distinguished the century just passed. All helped to widen the consciousness of the world, and to prepare the way for reformations ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... superfluous husband, whose death had been reported, most unseasonably reappeared. He had been ransomed by the Mathurins, a religious order, who believed it to be the duty of Christians to deliver their fellow-men from bondage,—Abolitionists of the seventeenth century, who, strange as some of us may think it, were honored by their countrymen and the Christian world. Regnard yielded gracefully the right he had acquired by purchase to the prior claim of the husband, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... many thousands of years ago, right after the Great Horror, the whole continent of the west had slowly sunk beneath the West Water, and that once every century it arose during a full moon. Still, Captain Hinrik clung to the hope that the legend would not be borne out by truth. Perhaps the west continent still existed; perhaps, dare he hope, with civilization. ...
— Longevity • Therese Windser
... being produced in the soil surrounding the district, which was then covered by this forest. He believed then that the forest acted as a protective rampart, and he prevented its being cut down. But toward the middle of the present century the Caetani had the woods cleared off from the entire belt of land surrounding Cistema. Twenty years later I was able to show that Cistema had gained greatly in salubrity. I published my observation in 1879, and, naturally, was taken to task rather sharply in the name ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various
... man believes the bible to be infallible, that is his master. The civilization of this century is not the child of faith, but of unbelief—the result ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... of her deserts, like the sorceress on the heath, or the conspirator in his den, hatching plots against the world. Rome is the pandemonium of the earth, and the Pope is the Lucifer of the world's drama. Fallen he is from the heaven of power and grandeur which he occupied in the twelfth century; and he and his compeers lie sunk in a very gulph of anarchy and barbarism. Lifting up his eyes, he beholds afar off the happy nations of Protestantism, reaping the reward of a free Bible and a free Government, in the riches of their ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... of the chapel, which must have been of the fourteenth century or earlier, was delightfully grotesque, and all the queerer for its contrast with the Protestant, the Calvinistic, whitewash which one of our fellow-boarders found here in the chapel and elsewhere in the castle un peu vulgaire—as if he were a Boston man. But the whole place was very ...
— A Little Swiss Sojourn • W. D. Howells
... sitting upright in his wheel-chair; and for years it had been impossible to carry on an articulate conversation with him. But his immense age lent a certain cachet to his nephew, the chief of the sixth battery. If the mummy were really to attain his century, or were to die on some marked day—a royal birthday or funeral—the services of a Wegstetten to the reigning family would show in a dazzling light, the reflection of which could not be disregarded by ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... a Christian father of the second century, whom we quoted before, supplies us with some suggestions. One would almost think, for some reasons, that he had been one of St. James's immediate disciples, for he is fond of using that same word double-minded ...
— Memoranda Sacra • J. Rendel Harris
... Here they are," and Roberto drew from his pocket a folded paper. "This is the genealogical tree of my family. This red circle is Don Fermin Nunez de Latona, priest of Labraz, who goes to Venezuela at the end of the seventeenth century, and returns to Spain during the Trafalgar epoch. On his journey home an English vessel captures the Spanish ship on which the priest is sailing and takes him and the other passengers prisoner, transporting them to England. Don Fermin reclaims his fortune of the English government, ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... by none of that feeling of rebellion which had urged Sir Orlando on to his destruction. It was difficult to find a cause for resignation. And yet the Duke of St. Bungay, who had watched the House of Commons closely for nearly half a century, was aware that the Coalition which he had created had done its work, and was almost convinced that it would not be permitted to remain very much longer in power. He had seen symptoms of impatience in Mr. Daubeny, and Mr. Gresham had snorted once ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... the reason of their appearances. In old books of voyages we find many more wonders than in those of later date, not because the course of nature is at all changed, but because nature was not then so well understood. A thousand things were prodigious a century ago, which are not now at all strange. Thus the storms at the Cape of Good Hope, which make so great a figure in the histories of the Portuguese discoveries, are now known to have been merely the effect of endeavouring ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... every gust made a noise like the rattling of dry bones in the stiff toddy palms outside. The khansamah completely lost his head on my arrival. He had served a Sahib once. Did I know that Sahib? He gave me the name of a well-known man who has been buried for more than a quarter of a century, and showed me an ancient daguerreotype of that man in his prehistoric youth. I had seen a steel engraving of him at the head of a double volume of Memoirs a month before, and ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... this kind, but as time wore on and the merchant navy increased, as it did in the last reign with extraordinary rapidity, a feeling of jealousy grew up on the part of shipowners who were not members of one or other of these chartered companies. By the beginning of the seventeenth century dissatisfaction with the privileges of these trading companies had become so general that appeals were made to the Privy Council. These being without effect, the whole matter was referred to a parliamentary committee. No pains were spared to get ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe
... and deeply recessed bow-window. The whole room was lighter and more feminine than Milly would have made it, but at bottom the taste that reigned there was more severe than her own. The only pictures on the panels were a few eighteenth century colored prints, already charming, soon to be valuable, and one or two framed pieces of needlework ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... not resented this foul deed, which seemed to me deserving of the title of the crime of the century, would be paltering with the truth. I had resented it profoundly, chafing not a little at the time and continuing to chafe for ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... elements are everlasting. Electricity is the discovery of yesterday, and yet it has been at play in man's environment from the foundation of the world. The continuity of life, from the lowest forms of it up to man, has been a fact from the first; but not until this century has the fact meant anything. Few things impress the imagination more powerfully than the sense of the forces that have surrounded man from his first appearance on the earth, and that have been noted and utilized only in recent times. There stands the ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... States, it never would have been adopted by the people; and if it is assumed, or if it is considered as constitutionally existing by virtue of some power not before known, the Government will not last half a century. I have not time to read from the writings of Mr. Madison and Mr. Hamilton and the decisions of the Supreme Court on ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... only too glad of the excitement, was at his heels. The unhappy Colonial Produce merchant ran as he had not run for a quarter of a century, faster even than he had on his first experience of Coggs' and Coker's society on that memorable Monday night. But in spite of his efforts the chase was a short one. Chawner and Tipping very soon had him by the collar, and brought him back, struggling and kicking out viciously, to Mr. ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... continued the Captain, "the Royal George also foundered in the last century, with over nine hundred hands, there being a lot of shore folk in the ship beside her crew. Her Admiral, Kempenfeldt, was also on ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... the exercise of human energies, and the ship is the true vehicle of civilization. Think, my friends, if the globe had been only an immense continent, the thousandth part of it would still be unknown to us, even in this nineteenth century. See how it is in the interior of great countries. In the steppes of Siberia, in the plains of Central Asia, in the deserts of Africa, in the prairies of America, in the immense wilds of Australia, in the icy solitudes of the Poles, man scarcely dares to venture; the most ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... England. In this felicitous characteristic it stands out in remarkable prominence and in striking contrast with nearly all the other baronial halls of the country. It is the parlor pier-glass of the present century. It reflects the two images in vivid apposition—the brilliant civilization of this last, unfinished age in which we live and the life of bygone centuries; that is, if Haddon Hall shows its face in it, or if you have the features of that antiquity ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... ties that bind us to our mother state. We have every reason to love and be proud of her. If American citizenship be a patent of nobility, it adds to the honor to have been born of that state which, almost in the forenoon of the first century of her existence, has shed such luster on the republic; which has given to it so long a roll of President, chief justices, judges of the Supreme Court and statesmen in the cabinet and in Congress—among whom is found not one dishonored name, but many that will shine illustrious ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... long period elapsed without any addition to the information he left us. Rome and the Middle Ages gave us nothing, and even Pliny added hardly a fact to those that Aristotle recorded. And though the great naturalists of the sixteenth century gave a new impulse to this study, their investigations were chiefly directed towards a minute acquaintance with the animals they had an opportunity of observing, mingled with commentaries upon the ancients. Systematic Zooelogy was but little ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... and Venables landed in Jamaica, in 1655, there was not a remnant left of the sixty thousand natives whom the Spaniards had found there a century and a half before. Their pitiful tale is told only by those caves, still known among the mountains, where thousands of human skeletons strew the ground. In their place dwelt two foreign races,—an effeminate, ignorant, indolent white community of fifteen ...
— Black Rebellion - Five Slave Revolts • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... without the beautiful body. Seven years have passed. She has enjoyed seven years of peace and rest; we have endured seven years of fret and worry. Life of course was never worth living, but the common stupidity of the nineteenth century renders existence for those who may see into the heart of things almost unbearable. I confess that every day man's stupidity seems to me more and more miraculous. Indeed it may be said to be divine, so inherent and so unalterable is it; and to understand it we need not stray from ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... that of the three notable writers whom the eighteenth century had produced, in the North American colonies, one was "the author (whoever he was) of the American Farmer's Letters." Crevecoeur was that unknown author; and Hazlitt said further of him that he rendered, ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... we are great enough not to deceive ourselves. We work for truth: whether this truth will be accepted by the many this year, or next, or the next century, we can not say, but that should not deter us from ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... Forsdyke, the Latin teacher was acting as chaperone that afternoon and Miss Forsdyke was alive just exactly two thousand years after her time. She should have lived about 55 B.C., for in reality she was living in that period right in the Twentieth Century A.D. and was so lost to all things modern, and so buried in all things ancient, that she was never quite fully alive to those happening all around her. As a chaperone she was "just dead easy" Sally said. ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... the present—this one moment, that seemed to burst into bud and blossom, the fruition of a lifetime. The sky lifted away and poured down fuller floods of light; the air vibrated with strange, audible throbs. When he released her, she did not move away. Never again, though they lived out a century, could the past be quite what it had been before; through it they had come to this, the crowning perfection of their lives. Through the future would run the memory of a caress in which—she was not a woman who measured her gifts—she ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... The files of the Century Magazine, old newspaper files, Bancroft's colossal history of the West and the works of Samuel L. Clemens have also been of value ...
— The Story of the Pony Express • Glenn D. Bradley
... essentially of the nineteenth century—these two. At a previous dance he had asked her to marry him; she had deferred her answer, and now she had given it. These little matters are all a question of taste. We do not kneel nowadays, either physically or morally. If we are a trifle ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... the bombardment of the Venetian churches is a blunder for which the Austrians will pay dearly in loss of international good-will. A century hence these shattered churches will be pointed out to visitors as the work of the modern Vandals, and lovers of art and beauty throughout the world will execrate the nation which permitted the sacrilege. They have destroyed glass and paintings ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... temptation to use antiquated or obsolete language should be resisted. It is after all an affectation, and one for which there is no warrant or excuse. Spanish has probably undergone less change since the seventeenth century than any language in Europe, and by far the greater and certainly the best part of "Don Quixote" differs but little in language from the colloquial Spanish of the present day. Except in the tales and Don Quixote's speeches, ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... ancient constitution, before the beginning of the seventeenth century, the meetings of parliament were precarious, and were not frequent. The sessions were short, and the members had no leisure either to get acquainted with each other, or with public business. The ignorance of the age made men more submissive to that authority which governed ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... at a cost of three dollars. Now, if this gives us an increase of five bushels of wheat per acre, worth six dollars, we think it pays. It often does far better than this. Last year the wheat crop of Western New York was the best in a third of a century, which is as far back as I have had anything to do with farming here. From all I can learn, it is doubtful if the wheat crop of Western New York has ever averaged a larger yield per acre since the land was first cultivated after the removal of the original forest. Something ...
— Talks on Manures • Joseph Harris
... similar traditional phenomena, to be identical with the Inner Light, or voice of the Spirit—but rather in the recognition of the universality of something which had heretofore been regarded as exceptional and extraordinary. In the Seventeenth Century there was a general revolt of the oppressed against oppression, declaring itself in all phases of the outer and inner life; of these, there must needs be one interior to all the rest, and Quakerism seems to have been it. It was a revolution within revolutions; ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... she had been educated, joined to a fine natural indolence, was of course partly the reason of it, for she had been educated as the majority of well-to-do girls in the last part of the nineteenth century were educated. Kindly doctors and gentle old professors had taught her the rudiments of about ten different branches of knowledge, but they would as soon have forced her to go through one piece of drudgery thoroughly as they would have told her that her hands were dirty. The one hour ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... Hen. VIII. cap. II. The change in the prices of such articles commenced in the beginning of the reign of Edward VI., and continued till the close of the century. A discussion upon the subject, written in 1581 by Mr. Edward Stafford, and containing the clearest detailed account of the alteration, is printed in the Harleian Miscellany, vol. ix. ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... means a hopeless way. Yet, throughout, Smollett regarded himself as a moralist, a writer of improving tendencies; one who "lashed the vices of the age." He was by no means wholly mistaken, but we should probably wrong the eighteenth century if we accepted all Smollett's censures as entirely deserved. The vices which he lashed are those which he detected, or fancied that he detected, in people who regarded a modest and meritorious Scottish orphan ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... in our hope of the life to come. It is enough to know what Scripture states. Why then argue? But a century and a half after St. Ambrose, opinion was still troubled, on this occasion by the problem of the antipodes. A monk named Cosmas, famous for his scientific attainments, was therefore deputed to write a Christian Topography, or "Christian ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... over-emphasis of certain contemporary writers on the socialization of man's life is a valuable corrective to the equal over-emphasis on individualism which was current among so many thinkers during the nineteenth century. The insistence with which present-day psychologists call our attention to the power of instinct, though it may possibly be over-emphasized, counterbalances that tendency exhibited by such earlier authors as Bentham to picture man as a purely ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... in Tony's skill that Squire Bean trusted his father's violin to him, one that had been bought in Berlin seventy years before. It had been hanging on the attic wall for a half-century, so that the back was split in twain, the sound-post lost, the neck and the tailpiece cracked. The lad took it home, and studied it for two whole evenings before the open fire. The problem of restoring it was quite beyond his abilities. He finally ...
— A Village Stradivarius • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the agent said. "Documents show it. It happened off the coast of Suffolk, England. About the end of the twelfth century, I think. Some fishermen caught a creature which they described as being like an old man with long gray hair, but which had a fish's tail. It could live out of the water just as well as in it. They brought it to the Earl of Orforde. In spite of all their efforts ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... policy of Lycurgus at Sparta, who swept away all that he found existing and constructed the social edifice afresh from foundation to roof.[167] It is true that there was an unmistakable decay of Greek literary studies in France from the beginning of the eighteenth century, and Rousseau seems to have read Plato only through Ficinus's translation. But his example and its influence, along with that of Mably and others, warrant the historian in saying that at no time did Greek ideas ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... Grimm, Jakob and Wilhelm, were very learned German scholars who lived during the first half of the nineteenth century. They were both professors at the University of Gottingen, and published many important works, among them a famous dictionary. In their own country it is, of course, these learned works which have given them much of their fame, but ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... and universal collapse of the financial and scientific civilisation with which the twentieth century opened followed each other very swiftly, so swiftly that upon the foreshortened page of history—they seem altogether to overlap. To begin with, one sees the world nearly at a maximum wealth and prosperity. To its inhabitants indeed it seemed also ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... more than a century, men seem to have had a presentiment of something new. Mesmer and some others have put us on an unexpected track, and especially within the last two or three years, we have arrived at really ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... and construction, cannot eternally resist the relentless tooth of Time. Full of interest as is everything in Venice, I do not remember to have detected there the effectual working of a single idea of the last century, save in the Railroad, which barely touches without enlivening her, the solitary steamboat belonging to Trieste, and two or three larger gondolas marked "Omnibus" this or that, which appeared to be conveying good loads of passengers from one end of the city to the other for one-sixth ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... was yet in embryo, and gave such early notice of it as enabled the king of Great Britain to take effectual measures for defeating the design. All the pretender's interest in France expired with Louis XIV., that ostentatious tyrant, who had for above half a century sacrificed the repose of Christendom to his insatiate vanity and ambition. At his death, which happened on the first day of September, the regency of the kingdom devolved to the duke of Orleans, who adopted a new system ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... new law of color, fact of astronomy, or atmospheric influence which observation or analysis lay open. A perception of this mystery inspires the muse of George Herbert, the beautiful psalmist of the seventeenth century. The following lines are part of ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... civilized city, lies a tract fifty miles square of primitive forest, inhabited by savages. That tract of land is as beautiful as a dream of heaven. Virgin pines tower to the heavens. Little lakes lie hid like jewels on its bosoms. Its soil is black. Fur bearing animals frequent it now as they did a century ago. ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... pushed up the price of the famous snuff-box, which was finally knocked down to her for a thousand francs. The portrait of the Princess Goritza was alone worth that sum. Two years later, a young dandy, who was making a collection of the fine snuff-boxes of the last century, obtained from Madame du Val-Noble the chevalier's treasure. The charming confidant of many a love and the pleasure of an old age is now on exhibition in a species of private museum. If the dead could know what happens after ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... little narrative of mine may have is due to the social influences under which I was reared, and particularly to the prominent place held by both work and religion in New England half a century ago. The period of my growing-up had peculiarities which our future history can never repeat, although something far better is undoubtedly already resulting thence. Those peculiarities were the natural development of the seed sown by our sturdy Puritan ancestry. The religion of our fathers overhung ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... day. In the morning we passed Petrovski Zavod, a place historical in Russian annals as being the penal settlement of the conspirators who early in the nineteenth century tried to overthrow the ruling dynasty, and where numbers of the Russian aristocracy died in exile. It is now a large village of log houses, with wide, mud streets. Hills surround this spot, so that it could be easily ...
— Through Siberia and Manchuria By Rail • Oliver George Ready
... to exist a century ago by the Hon. Daines Barrington, who, in the article already quoted (see p. 220), after alluding to the fact that singing birds are all small, and suggesting (but I think erroneously) that this may have arisen from the difficulty larger ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... century's gladness And half of a century's tears, Lost in the mighty silence Of the ...
— Said the Observer • Louis J. Stellman
... imaginary, and not the essence of law; it is quite self-contained, it is law and nothing more. He who will examine its motive will find it so feeble and so trifling that if he be not accustomed to contemplate the wonders of human imagination, he will marvel that one century has gained for it so much pomp and reverence. The art of opposition and of revolution is to unsettle established customs, sounding them even to their source, to point out their want of authority and justice. We must, it is said, get back to the natural ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... manor-house to which Lavretsky had come and in which two years before Glafira Petrovna had breathed her last, had been built in the preceding century of solid pine-wood; it looked ancient, but it was still strong enough to stand another fifty years or more. Lavretsky made the tour of all the rooms, and to the great discomfiture of the aged languid flies, settled under the lintels and ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... and in few other places thereabouts. And, above all, his neighbours owned the influence of one who, with a reputation gained at the sword's point, stood resolutely, unflinchingly, abroad as at home, at fairs and cockfights as on his own hearth, for peace. More than a century was to elapse before private war ceased to be the amusement of the Irish gentry. But in that part of Kerry, and during a score of years, the name and weight of Colonel Sullivan of Morristown availed to quiet many a brawl and avert many ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... authority for the events of the celebrated Ballad on which this Tragedy is founded, I have fixed upon the thirteenth century for the period of their occurrence. At that time the kingdom of Castille had recently obtained that supremacy in Spain which led, in a subsequent age, to the political integrity of the country. Burgos, its capital, was a magnificent ...
— Count Alarcos - A Tragedy • Benjamin Disraeli
... our history is recorded an odder phase of curious fortune than that by which Bishop Berkeley, of Cloyne, was enabled early in the eighteenth century to sail o'erseas to Newport, Rhode Island, there to build (in 1729) the beautiful old place, Whitehall, which is still standing. Hundreds of interested visitors drive every summer to the old house, to take a cup of tea, to muse on the strange story with ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... write down in a day. Many curious anecdotes and circumstances are called to remembrance by us, and I must say we talk of old times with a regretful yet pleasant feeling. I know I often startle some of my young friends by telling them of scenes I have witnessed in the last century, and I have often noticed them in their minds putting one year and another together, or subtracting one from another so that they might ascertain whether I was telling ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian |
