"Mendicant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... royalty; a crowned queen; a bishop wearing his mitre, and carrying his crosier; an abbot, likewise in his mitre, and bearing a crosier; a duke in his robes of state; a grave canon of the church; a knight sheathed in armour; a judge, an advocate, and a magistrate, all in their robes; a mendicant friar and a nun; and the list was completed by a physician, an astrologer, a miser, a merchant, a duchess, a pedler, a soldier, a gamester, an idiot, a robber, a blind man, and a beggar—each distinguishable by ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... a character of their own. One of the earliest, for example, is that of Melchior Lotter, who issued a large number of books from 1491 to 1536. The word "Lotter" is equivalent to "vagabond" in English, and the Mark herewith consists of an emblem of a mendicant in a half-suppliant posture. Melchior Lotter junior was printing at Wittenberg from 1520 to 1524, where he printed anonymously the first edition of Luther's Bible, with illustrations by Lucas Cranach, 1522, which an enthusiastic bibliopole has described as "one of the great works of the world." ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts
... beggar of his house; his eyes alight with wine, he strikes his little harp, trolls out funny songs and love-ditties. Anon, his frolic over, he preaches to the collected crowd violent denunciations of the parish priest, within the very limits of his parish. The very principles upon which these mendicant orders were established seem to be elements of evil. That they might be better than the monks, they had no cloisters and magnificent gardens, with little to do but enjoy them. Like our Lord, they were ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... description, Chaucer's best quality is his humor, a humor which is hard to phrase, since it runs from the keenest wit to the broadest farce, yet is always kindly and human. A mendicant friar comes in out of the cold, glances about the snug kitchen for the ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... interest in religion. A frequent phrase in the Buddha's discourses speaks of the "highest goal of the holy life for the sake of which clansmen leave their homes and go forth into homelessness." The religious mendicant seemed the proper incarnation of this ideal to which Kshatriyas as well as Brahmans aspired, and we are justified in supposing that the future Buddha's thoughts would naturally turn towards the wandering ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... pope more especially, and of the king of France; to excite their pity by the view of his innocence and distress; and to obtain some supplies of men or money for the relief of the sinking empire. He thrice repeated these mendicant visits, in which he seemed to prolong his stay and postpone his return; of the five-and-twenty years of his reign, a greater number were spent abroad than at home; and in no place did the emperor deem himself less free and secure ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... to be cruel to-night. She held out the keys to him, in a disinterested fashion, and dropped them daintily into his outstretched palm, just as she might have given a coin to an unusually grimy mendicant. But the tips of her fingers ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... who continue to hold one or both arms outstretched is very large in India. The following description of one of them is given by a traveler: "He was a goussain—a religious mendicant—who had dishevelled hair and beard, and horrible tattooings upon his face, and, what was most hideous, was his left arm, which, withered and anchylosed, stuck up perpendicularly from the shoulder. His closed hand, surrounded by straps, had been traversed by the nails, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 446, July 19, 1884 • Various
... infant who was suffering evidently with whooping-cough. Mrs. Fry offered to go to the woman's house with the intention of investigating and relieving whatever real misery may have existed. To her surprise the mendicant slunk away as if unwilling to be visited; but Mrs. Fry was determined to track her, and at last brought her to earth. The room—a filthy, dirty, poverty-cursed one—contained a number of infants in every conceivable stage of illness and misery. Horror-stricken, Mrs. Fry requested ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... seat of Satan. He was not at all discouraged by a letter sent at this time by Erasmus from Holland to Wittenberg, saying that no hopes could be placed in the Emperor Charles, as he was in the hands of the Mendicant Friars. As for the bull, so extraordinary were its contents, that he wished to consider ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... Let us show our faith in it. When the lazy whine of the mendicant jars on your ears, think of his unaided, unschooled childhood; think that his lean cheeks never knew the baby-roundness of content that ours have worn; that his eye knew no youth of fire—no manhood of expectancy. Pity, help, teach him. ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... villainous straggler may be induced to examine it to see whether he can get to the depot in time for the next train, you issue forth ingloriously, your head down in consciousness that you are cutting a sorry figure before the world. Barefoot as a mendicant, your hair disheveled in the wind, the stripes of your clothes strongly suggestive of Sing Sing, your appearance a caricature of humankind, you wander up and down the beach a creature that the land is evidently trying to shake off and the sea ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... Magloire began the whole story afresh, exaggerating it a little without being aware of the fact. It appeared that a Bohemian, a bare-footed vagabond, a sort of dangerous mendicant, was at that moment in the town. He had presented himself at Jacquin Labarre's to obtain lodgings, but the latter had not been willing to take him in. He had been seen to arrive by the way of the boulevard Gassendi and roam ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... my bundle, I slipped into some dense undergrowth by the entrance to the cave, and crouched there, waiting and watching. I had not waited very long before a yellow-robed mendicant passed by, carrying a bundle not unlike my own, whereby I concluded that he had come some distance. There was nothing remarkable in his appearance except the fact of his travelling during the hottest part of the day. Therefore I did not doubt that he was one of the members of the secret organization ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... benefit by the charity themselves, but were to minister to lepers and blind priests born within the Liberty of Ripon, a certain number of whom were received into the Hospital. Lepers from outside the Liberty were entitled to a night's lodging: so also apparently were any other strangers or mendicant clergy who might be passing through the town. On St. Mary Magdalene's day there was a dole of food to the poor. A second chaplain was subsequently added by the benefaction of one William de Homelyn. At some period, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ripon - A Short History of the Church and a Description of Its Fabric • Cecil Walter Charles Hallett
... instruct their flocks. It ought to be remembered also that in these days there were no special seminaries for the education of the clergy. Candidates for the priesthood received whatever training they got from some member of the cathedral chapter, or in the schools of the Mendicant Friars, or possibly from some of those learned ecclesiastics, whose deaths are recorded specially in our Annals. Before ordination they were subjected to an examination, but the severity of the test depended ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... mendicant showed the effects of deprivation." Deprivation refers to the act of depriving, taking away from; privation is the state of destitution, of ...
— Write It Right - A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults • Ambrose Bierce
... all types, city and country both, and of the Southern dark as well as the Northern fair complexion, with so thick a sprinkling of South Americans that the Spanish gutturals made themselves almost as much heard as the Yankee nasals. Among them moved two nuns of some mendicant order, receiving charity from the fair gamblers, who gave for luck without distinction of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... misconduct of the subordinates, stimulate them to still further violence,[9] and stop at nothing which can forward their objects; because the opinions of the people are formed on the statements and advice of mendicant agitators who have but one object in view, their own pecuniary aggrandizement; because a rabid and revolutionary press, concealing its ultimate designs under the praiseworthy and proper motive of affording protection to the weak, seeks to overturn all law and order, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... Stuart Lewis, the mendicant bard, was the eldest son of an innkeeper at Ecclefechan in Annandale, where he was born about the year 1756. A zealous Jacobite, his father gave him the name of Stuart, in honour of Prince Charles Edward. At the parish school, taught by one Irving, an ingenious ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... have benefitted me greatly, sir, and I thank you,' said she, inclining her head towards me with an air almost condescending. 'I assure you, you have not bestowed your assistance (she didn't say charity, observe!) upon a habitual mendicant or common person. I am by birth a lady; you will pardon me for declining to state the causes of my present condition. ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... the track branched, a man in the guise of a mendicant was sitting. He begged for alms, and Cuthbert ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty
... precepts? Can we suppose, that that Supreme and awful Being can feel Himself honoured, in having his creatures made to believe, that He was once nine months in the womb of a woman; that God, the Great and Holy, went through all the nastiness of infancy; that be lived a mendicant in a corner of the earth, and was finally scourged, and hanged on a gibbet by his own creatures? If these things be, in truth, all mistakes, can we suppose, that God is pleased in having them believed of Him? On the contrary, can they, together with the doctrine ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... horribly. Now his brother-in-law led him one morning at this season a great distance along the highroad in order that he might solicit alms. The blind man was left there all day, and, when night came on, the brother-in-law told the people of his house that he could find no trace of the mendicant. Then ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... appearance of a city of the dead: not an inhabitant was walking in the streets, not a head was seen at the windows. The mendicants themselves (and he who has not seen the Sicilian mendicant, knows not what wretchedness is,) lay in the corners of the streets, stretched out, doubled up, panting, without strength to stretch out their hand for charity, or voice to ask an alms. Pompeii, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... he may take, Section 21st of the new Tariff Bill meets every just demand of the ship owner whose rights have never been considered at all, and of the ship builder who has always been a mendicant in ...
— Free Ships: The Restoration of the American Carrying Trade • John Codman
... their coffins by the Count, long ere the morning broke, and on their desecrated graves he poured forth a flood of repentant tears. With the dawn of day he quitted the castle of Rheineck. It is said that he traversed the land in the garb of a lowly mendicant, subsisting on the alms of the charitable, and it is likewise told that he did penance at every holy shrine from Cologne to Rome, whither he was bound to obtain absolution for his sins. Years afterwards he was found dead at the foot of ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous
... airs that he hated and despised for the larrikins whom he hated and feared, a nightly butt and target for their coarse jests. Then he preferred starvation, and found himself in the gutter with the clothes he stood up in and his fiddle. He had joined the army of mendicant musicians, who scrape a tune in front of hotels and shops, ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... noodle, the Khoja Nasr-ed-Din, and there exist German, Saxon, and Lithuanian variants of the same story. It is also known in Ceylon, and the following is a version from a Hindu work entitled Bharataka Dwatrinsati, Thirty-two Tales of Mendicant Monks: ...
— The Book of Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston
... nothing. This was in some respects a striking picture of a great and little mind; for greatness sympathises with greatness, and littleness shrinks into itself. The one might have become a Wolsey; the other was only fit to become a Mendicant Friar—or there might have been court reasons for making him a bishop. The French have to me a character of littleness in all about them; but they have produced three great men that belong to every country, Moliere, Rabelais, ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... lot of extended years and mature guilt. He lived to see his father sent to the scaffold—to be torn from his mother and family—to drudge in the service of brutality and insolence—and to want those cares and necessaries which are not refused even to the infant mendicant, whose wretchedness contributes to the support of ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... Cervantes, "let him seek the church, the sea (i.e., go as an adventurer to America) or the king's palace." Under Philip III., there were in Spain nine hundred and eighty-eight nunneries, and thirty-two thousand mendicant friars. The number of monasteries trebled between 1574 and 1624, and the number of monks increased in a yet greater ratio. A great many of its manufactories, much of its commerce, and not a few of ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... he saw in them the likeness of the wanton nymphs. He got back to his cell at the moment when the bells were sounding the Ave Maria. It was a small, white chamber, furnished simply with a bed, a stool, and one of the high desks writers use. On the wall a mendicant friar had painted years ago, in the manner of Giotto, a representation of the holy Marys at the foot of the Cross. Below this painting, a shelf of wood, as black and polished as the beams of an ancient oil-press, was covered with books. Of these, some were ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... vulgar, but for which he made no secret of his contempt; and lastly, the eloquence of his sermons had drawn to his church the greater part of the regular congregations of the other religious communities, especially of the mendicant orders, who had till then, in what concerned preaching, borne away the palm at Loudun. As we have said, all this was more than enough to excite, first jealousy, and then hatred. And both were excited in ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - URBAIN GRANDIER—1634 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... expect (he cries,) when strong in might We rise terrific to the task of fight. But thou, when morn salutes the aerial plain, The court revisit and the lawless train: Me thither in disguise Eumaeus leads, An aged mendicant in tatter'd weeds. There, if base scorn insult my reverend age, Bear it, my son! repress thy rising rage. If outraged, cease that outrage to repel; Bear it, my son! howe'er thy heart rebel. Yet strive by prayer and ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... thought he had before been too burthensome to him. He was offered by some of his friends that a collection should be made for his enlargement; but he "treated the proposal," and declared "he should again treat it, with disdain. As to writing any mendicant letters, he had too high a spirit, and determined only to write to some ministers of state, to try to regain ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... great distress; the bard reckons up, with true poetical spirit, the free enjoyment of the beauties of nature, which might counterbalance the hardship and uncertainty of the life, even of a mendicant. In one of his prose letters, to which I have lost the reference, he details this idea yet more seriously, and dwells upon it, as not ill adapted to ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... we served were poor, and, of course, we were a trifle poorer. The circuit rider is not only a priest to his people, but he is a good deal of a mendicant besides. William rarely returned from an appointment or from visiting among his flock that he did not bring with him some largess of their kindness. This made pastoral visiting an amiable form of foraging and had its effect on character. We were continually struggling against the beggar instinct ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... Anglesey, on the shores of the Menai. The friar brought a higher ideal than that of the monk; his aim was salvation, not by prayer in the solitude of a mountain glen, but by service where men were thickest together—even in streets made foul by vice, and haunted by leprosy. Of the Mendicant Orders, the Franciscans were the best known in Wales; and, of all Orders of that day, it was they who sympathised most deeply with the sorrows of men. And it was this which, a little later on, brought them so much ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards
... their places on the stone steps of the barrier, or gateway, of the Basse Ville reaped an unusual harvest of the smallest coin—Max Grimau, an old, disabled soldier, in ragged uniform, which he had worn at the defence of Prague under the Marshal de Belleisle, and blind Bartemy, a mendicant born—the former, loud-tongued and importunate, the latter, silent and only holding out a shaking hand for charity. No Finance Minister or Royal Intendant studied more earnestly the problem how to tax the kingdom than Max and Blind ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... combats—the frivolous ignoramuses who have no soul for anything but debauchery; the sophistical theologian to whom Helicon, the Castalian fountain, and the grove of Apollo were foolishness; the greedy lawyers, to whom poetry was a superfluity, since no money was to be made by it; finally the mendicant friars, described periphrastically, but clearly enough, who made free with their charges of paganism and immorality. Then follow the defence of poetry, the proof that the poetry of the ancients and of their modern followers ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... a long-past class of Popes were possessed of; inflicting moral censure; imparting moral encouragement, consolation, edification; in all ways diligently "administering the discipline of the Church." It may be said, too, that in private disposition the new preachers somewhat resemble the mendicant Friars of old times; outwardly, full of holy zeal; inwardly, not without stratagem, and hunger ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... overflowing the borders of France into all the adjacent countries; that Alexander III was a younger contemporary of St. Bernard, and that the death-grapple between Empire and Papacy followed hard upon the foundation of the mendicant fraternities by St. Francis and St. Dominic. The monks and the friars were the militia of the Church. Not that the medieval orders devoted themselves to a political propaganda with the zeal and system of the Jesuits in the sixteenth century. The serviceswhich the Cluniacs and the ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... crime and ignorance are never absent; and in it men and women grown old in sin and crime spend their last evil days. The whining voice of the professional mendicant is ever heard in its streets, for its poverty-stricken inhabitants readily respond to every appeal ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... hapless mendicant shuffling along the white, heated road of a narrow street, is a blind negro, with the imposing nickname of Carrapatam Bunga. He is attired in a clean suit of brown holland, and he wears a broad-brimmed panama. His flat, splay feet ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... their missionary work. Yet all conscientious men agreed with the Waldensians that the world was in a sad plight owing to the negligence and the misdeeds of the clergy. St. Francis and St. Dominic strove to meet the needs of their time by inventing a new kind of clergyman, the begging brother, or mendicant friar (Latin, frater, brother). He was to do just what the bishops and parish priests ordinarily failed to do,—namely, lead a holy life of self-sacrifice, defend the orthodox beliefs against the reproaches and attacks of the heretics, ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... stooping, he penetrated to the humblest wants. He not simply stepped aside to look at the most ignominious sorrows, but went directly to them, and lived wholly in them; scattered glorious miracles and sacred truths along the hidden by-paths and in the mean recesses of existence; serving the mendicant and the widow, blessing the child, healing the leprosy of body and of soul, and kneeling to wash even the traitor's feet.' Here is a strange and marvelous and beautiful law! The loftiest for the lowliest! The greatest grace ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... answered that they had met a person who had brought tidings from the city. "Let me hear his report," said the rajah; and a man, looking more like a wild beast than a human being, advanced from among the horsemen. He was a byraghee, or religious mendicant. His body was naked, with the exception of a narrow piece of cloth passed between the legs, and fastened before and behind to a string tied round the waist. His hair was long and matted, its bulk increased by plaits of other hair mixed ...
— The Young Rajah • W.H.G. Kingston
... was very numerous; in the thirteenth century its ranks were swelled by the arrival of the mendicant friars: Franciscans and Dominicans, the latter representing more especially doctrine, and the former practice. The Dominicans expound dogmas, fight heresy, and furnish the papacy with its Grand Inquisitors[223]; the Franciscans do charitable works, ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... him." The judge replied, "At your instance I cannot relax the extreme sentence of the law." He said: "In what you ordered you spoke justly. Nevertheless, whoever steals a portion of any property dedicated to alms must not suffer the forfeiture of his hand, for a religious mendicant is not the proprietor of anything; and whatever appertains to dervishes is devoted to the necessitous." The judge withdrew his hand from punishing him, and by way of reprimand asked, "Had the world become so circumscribed that ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... he said, "the thousand pounds of silver—that is, I will pay it with the help of my brethren, for I must beg as a mendicant at the door of our synagogue ere I make up so unheard-of a sum. When and where must it be delivered?" he ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... statue of stone, and scutcheon of brass, Slumbers a great lord of the village. All his life was riot and pillage, But at length, to escape the threatened doom Of the everlasting, penal fire, He died in the dress of a mendicant friar, And bartered his wealth for a daily mass. But all that afterward came to pass, And whether he finds it dull or pleasant, Is kept a secret for the present, ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... his company of knights, darkness was coming on—when, as he spurred his tired steed with little mercy for its exhausted condition, he passed by the roadside a beggar who cried out to him for charity. But the charity asked for was not alms, but only the withdrawal from the mendicant's foot of a thorn which ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... All ridiculous, irrational crying up of one class, whether the same be aristocrat or democrat—all howling down of another class, whether clerical or military—all exacting injustice to individuals, whether monarch or mendicant—is really sickening to me; all arraying of ranks against ranks, all party hatreds, all tyrannies disguised as liberties, I reject and wash my hands of. You think you are a philanthropist; you think you are an advocate of liberty; but I will tell you this—Mr. Hall, the parson of Nunnely, is ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... wrongdoing in proportion to the purity of our conscience; the deed which is scarcely a fault in some hearts, takes the proportions of a crime in certain unsullied souls. The slightest stain on the white garment of a virgin makes it a thing ignoble as the rags of a mendicant. Between the two the difference lies in the misfortune of the one, the wrong-doing of the other. God never measures repentance; he never apportions it. As much is needed to efface a spot as to obliterate the crimes of a lifetime. ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... Father Hilarion gave me the bag, saying, as he put it into my hand, 'Now upon coming to the port where the ship awaits thee, be sure to exchange the money with the merchants there for Byzantine gold; else, unless God come to thy aid, thou wilt be turned into a mendicant.' And so I fully meant to do; but when I reached the port, I found it a city large, and full of people and sights wonderful to me, demanding to be seen. I forgot the injunction. Indeed I never thought of it until ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... A mendicant, child, Haggard, morose, and unaffable—wild! See how he glares through the bars of his cell! With Citizen Mendicant all ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... probably, as in the following passage from Harrison's "Description of Britain," 1577: "Among Roges and idle persons we finde to be comprised all Proctors that go up and down with counterfeit licences, cosiners, and such as go about the countrey using unlawful games," etc. It was used also of mendicant lepers, the "Proctors to some spittal house," and of men who carried dispensations about the country. Watts's will was proved on the 20th of ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Rochester - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • G. H. Palmer
... mendicant, Whom no one comes to meet, I stood alone;— I murmured—but, remembering Him who feeds The pelican and ostrich of the desert, From my own threshold I looked up to Heaven And did not want glimmerings of quiet hope. So, from the court ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... unwilling to merit the imputation of committing myself by too flagrant a liberty in retaining your glove, which you charitably sent at my head yesterday, as you would have extended an eleemosynary sixpence to the supplicating hat of a mendicant, I restore it to you. And, allow me to assure you, that I have too much regard and respect for you, and too little practical vanity myself, (whatever appearances may be against me,) to have entertained, for one treacherous instant, the impertinent intention ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... My next familiar mendicant was a vender of printed ballads. These effusions were so stale, atrocious, and unsalable in their character, that it was easy to detect that hypocrisy, which—in imitation of more ambitious beggary—veiled the real eleemosynary appeal under the thin pretext of offering an equivalent. This beggar—an ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... aroused himself from this meditation the afternoon was waning. He would fulfill his destiny! He could live only on the heights, although it might be as a proud mendicant. All descending paths he found barred. Farewell to happiness which might be found by retrocession to a natural and primitive life! Since the dead did not wish him to be a man, ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... mean?" thought our mendicant. "Is yon eavesdropper one of death's unlicensed ministers? Has he received the retaining fee of some impatient heir, who pants to possess the wealth of the unlucky knave who comes strolling along yonder, so careless and unconscious? ...
— The Bravo of Venice - A Romance • M. G. Lewis
... rejoiced to behold. At the top of the table stood a superb brown loaf. The centre dish presented a pile of the true coss lettuces, and at the bottom appeared an empty plate, where the "stout piece of cheese" ought to have stood! (cruel mendicant!) and though the brandy was "clean gone," yet its place was well, if not better supplied by an abundance of fine sparkling Castalian champagne! A happy thought at this time started into one of our minds, that some condiment would render the lettuces a little more palatable, when an individual ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... preached, and in which no book is ever printed, except for fun; a dialect "familiar, but by no means vulgar." Besides, even if our Englishwoman could by any possibility bring herself to say to a mendicant, "Excuse me, dear; I, too, am a poor devil," she would still not have the opportunity of putting the last word punctually into the feminine, which does so complete ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... and absurdly false plea of poverty has incessantly been used by this class, and used successfully, to get further concessions and privileges from a Government which reflected, and represented, its interests. Curiously, enough, however, if a mendicant used the same plea in begging a mite of alms on the streets, the law has invariably regarded him as a vagrant to be committed ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... its rateable proportion of evil. Even an admitted nuisance of ancient standing should not be abated without some caution. The zeal of our worthy friend now involved in great distress sundry personages whose idle and mendicant habits his own lachesse had contributed to foster, until these habits had become irreclaimable, or whose real incapacity for exertion rendered them fit objects, in their own phrase, for the charity of all well-disposed Christians. The 'long-remembered beggar,' who ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... before, and when The Rebel handed him his share of the winnings, he tucked it away in the watch pocket of his trousers without counting. But he had arranged a fiddling match between a darky cook of one of the returning outfits and a locoed white man, a mendicant of the place, and invited us to be present. Straw knew the foreman of the outfit to which the darky belonged, and the two had fixed it up to pit the two in a contest, under the pretense that a large wager had been made on which was the better fiddler. The contest ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... and admired of men, What boundless jealousies environ you! When for this rule, which to my hand the State Committed unsolicited and free, Creon, my first of friends, trusted and sure, Would undermine and hurl me from my throne, Meanly suborning such a mendicant Botcher of lies, this crafty wizard rogue, Blind in his art, and seeing but for gain. Where are the proofs of thy prophetic power? How came it, when the minstrel-hound was here, This folk had no deliverance through thy word? Her snare ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... that if I know any thing good about either I ought to say it. I have heard of many things that redound to the credit of the priesthood, but the most notable matter that occurs to me now is the devotion one of the mendicant orders showed during the prevalence of the cholera last year. I speak of the Dominican friars—men who wear a coarse, heavy brown robe and a cowl, in this hot climate, and go barefoot. They live on alms altogether, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... appointment never came to him. In March he called upon Vanderlyn, the historical painter, and took with him a portfolio of his drawings in hopes of getting a recommendation. Vanderlyn at first treated him as a mendicant and ordered him to leave his portfolio in the entry. After some delay, in company with a government official, he consented ...
— John James Audubon • John Burroughs
... "she now resides upon mount Sriparvata. She has now arrived at supernatural power by religious austerities. I have learnt the news about her from Kapala Kundala, the female pupil of a tremendous magician Aghorghanta, a seer and a wandering mendicant, but now residing amidst the neighbouring forest, who frequents the temple of the dreadful goddess Chamunda near the city cemetry." Avalokita remarks, "Madhava would be highly pleased if his early friend Makaranda is united in wedlock with Madayantika, ...
— Tales from the Hindu Dramatists • R. N. Dutta
... cane came against the stonework, the head of it flew off, and from the hollow cavity within that was then disclosed there rolled out, if you please, a string of gold pieces some twenty at least in number—the result, probably, of this respectable mendicant's very industrious beggary since he had taken to the trade, the old rascal carrying his horde about with ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... person who is to decide your destiny." After they had explained to me the road I was to travel, I departed from them, with mournful heart and weeping eye, and, God having decreed me a safe journey hither, I arrived at Bagdad, after I had shaved my beard, and become a mendicant. Praise be to God, whose name be exalted, and whose purposes concerning me are as yet ...
— The Arabian Nights - Their Best-known Tales • Unknown
... the other side are eighty secular doctors, and some forty mendicant friars, who have condemned M. Arnauld’s proposition, without choosing to examine whether he has spoken truly or falsely—who, in fact, have declared that they have nothing to do with the veracity of his proposition, but simply ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... only, when passing through Kasi upon his way to China,—to the vast empire of souls that thirsted after the refreshment of Buddha's law, as sun-parched fields thirst for the life-giving rain. When she called him, and dropped her little gift into his mendicant's bowl, he had indeed lifted his fan before his face, yet not quickly enough; and the penally of that fault had followed him a thousand leagues,—pursued after him even into the strange land to which he had come to hear the words of the Universal Teacher. Accursed beauty! ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... casting the woman's hand away; "don't call me sister; I have nothing in common with such low brutes as you." And the great lady doubtless thought she was formed of finer clay than this suffering mendicant; but when a few days afterward she was brought to a sick bed by the smallpox, contracted by touching the hand of that poor wretch, she felt the evidence that they belonged to the same great family, and were subject to ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... gift, and surprised the poor suppliant with that rarest and sweetest of charities, the charity not merely of the hand, but of the heart. Indeed, his liberality seemed to have something in it of self-abasement and expiation. He humbled himself, in a manner, before the mendicant. "What right have I to ease and affluence," would he murmur to himself, "when innocence wanders in misery ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... always barks at sic a troop o' mendicants," remarked Cousin Ronald quietly. "I ken mendicant's the word, lads and lasses, and ye hae acted it out wi' commendable ingenuity ...
— Christmas with Grandma Elsie • Martha Finley
... and his keen, far-seeing eyes, above which, exactly in the middle, his bristly eyebrows grew strangely long and thick, shone and sparkled with clear intelligence, firm self-reliance, and a repellent severity which would no more have become an intending mendicant than the resolute and often scornful expression which played about his lips. There was nothing amiable, nothing prepossessing, nothing soft in this man's face; and those who knew what his life had been could not wonder that the years had failed to sweeten his abrupt and contradictory ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... evidence, that the beggar is introduced to mark the identity of the boundlessly charitable Bishop of Tours. But I venture to suggest still another reason: this is, that in the uplifted, pleading face of the mendicant, whose expression of appeal and humility is a striking bit of realism in these ideal surroundings, we may have the actual portrait of the donor, Hans Gerster himself. That this should be so would be in strict accord with the methods of the period. There is a striking parallel ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... of France. They travel about from village to village, filling their bags with pieces of bread that are given them, and selling afterwards what they cannot eat as food for pigs. As they rarely receive charity in the form of money, they do not expect it. This kind of mendicant is distinctly rural, ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... Again, speaking generally, one may say that while the Benedictine priory is found under the shadow of a castle, and the Cistercian abbey in the heart of the country, the friaries were built in the slums of the towns. As there were few towns in Wales, the houses of the Mendicant Orders were not numerous or important. The Dominicans (or Black Friars) had houses at Bangor, Rhuddlan, Brecon, Haverfordwest, and Cardiff; the Franciscans (or Grey Friars) at Cardiff, Carmarthen, and Llanfaes; the Carmelites ...
— Mediaeval Wales - Chiefly in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Six Popular Lectures • A. G. Little
... three great Mendicant Orders, Franciscans, Dominicans, and Carmelites. These were the popular Orders. The monks remained in their Houses alone, separated from the world. The friars went about among the people. By their vows they were to possess nothing of their own: ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... cloth. There were Stoic teachers who practised all manner of secret vices, and whose behaviour was in outrageous contradiction to their creed of the "absence of emotions." There were not only many Honeymans, there were many Stigginses. There were idlers and vagabonds on a level with the mendicant friars and pardon-sellers of the time of Chaucer. There were pompous hypocrites. Also side by side with the serious and earnest philosopher, as deeply learned in the books of his sect as a modern divine, there were charlatans and dabblers. ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... him. It was wrong and mean in him to accept gifts of money from the people of Boston; it was wrong in them to submit to his merciless exactions. What need was there that their Senator should sometimes be a mendicant and sometimes a pauper? If he chose to maintain baronial state without a baron's income; if he chose to have two fancy farms of more than a thousand acres each; if he chose to keep two hundred prize cattle and seven ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... France by encumbering myself with a host of needy relatives.' He had the moral fortitude to incur unpopularity with the clergy by persisting in his slow, cautious, and regular distribution of benefices; with the monks by his rigid reforms. He hated the monks, and even the Mendicant Orders. He showed his hatred, as they said, by the few promotions which he bestowed upon ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... steam-engine, and thereby bring my ideals of beauty up to date. Will you modify your conception of what is fair in conduct? Will you admire something more adapted to modern needs than those intemperate Hebrew doctrines; something with more delicately adjusted mechanism? The mendicant friar, that flower of Oriental ethics—he is not up to date. He resembles all Semites. He lacks self-respect. He apologizes for being alive. It is not pretty—to apologize for ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... good of his soul, to confess the nature of the intentions of the rioters, which were to use the king's person as a stalking horse for drawing people to their side, and eventually to kill him and all in authority throughout the kingdom. The mendicant friars, who were believed to be at the bottom of the insurrection,(641) were alone to be spared. Wat Tyler was to be made king of Kent, whilst others were to be placed in similar positions over the rest of ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... could be easily detached, but the seventh leaf—directly connected with the stem. "Mendicants," he said, "there are seven Buddhas in every Buddha, and there are six Bikshus and but one Buddha in each mendicant. What are the seven? The seven branches of complete knowledge. What are the six? The six organs of sense. What are the five? The five elements of illusive being. And the ONE which is also ten? He is a true Buddha who develops in him the ten forms of holiness ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... merchant becomes to-day!" Bossuet wrote of him, long afterward. "Oh man worthy of being written in the book of the evangelical poor, and henceforward living on the capital of Providence!" From that time Francis wore mendicant's garb and begged his food ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... honesty, as an abstract principle—being, perhaps the conscientious reader will think, more of a professor than a practicer herein. But the truth is, in the present mendicant state of the word 'Professor,' I conceived I had a perfect right and title to it, by virtue of my poverty, and so appropriated it for the behoof and advantage of Number One. Which explanation, it ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... would that from his realm, in want and woe, King Agramant a mendicant should wend; That through his means the monarch, brought thus low, His fathers' ancient seat might reascend: And thus he might the fruit of fealty show, And make his sovereign see, a real friend Was aye to ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... favour it, he would rather see it done by death, then any Civil Authority; for then he might look out again for a new Beloved, and by that means get another new Portion; though it might lightly happen to be some mendicant hous-divel, for ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... do not pass silently when a beggar demands alms, but pray his mercy for God's love to excuse you: 'Perdone Usted por el amor de Dios!' Or else you beseech God to protect him: 'Dios le ampare!' And the mendicant, coming to your gate, sometimes ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... Viceroy of Western India. It owes its birth to the gods themselves. When Uma wedded Shiva her father slighted him, not knowing who he was, for the mighty god had wooed and won her under the disguise of a mere ascetic mendicant, and she made atonement by casting herself into the sacrificial fire, which consumed her—the prototype of all pious Hindu widows who perform Sati—in the presence of gods and Brahmans. Shiva, maddened with grief, gathered up the bones of his unfortunate consort ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... calumniating my opponents; but this I know, I am labouring at my post like a faithful subject, and had all men done the same, our good King would not now have been seen snatching his meal under a hedge like a common mendicant, nor would the great seal of England have had to be secretly carried to him like ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... willing hands I take. I beg for nothing more." "Yes, yes, I know you, modest mendicant, you ask for all ...
— The Gardener • Rabindranath Tagore
... car around to the garage, Andrews," said the young man. He nodded to the dummy-chucker. In a daze, the mendicant followed his rescuer. He entered a gorgeously mirrored and gilded hall. He stepped into an elevator chauffeured by a West Indian of the haughtiest blood. The dummy-chucker was suddenly conscious of his tattered garb, his ill-fitting, run-down shoes. He stepped, when they alighted ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the supposed mendicant, with an inexplicable smile. "Keep it,—keep all your wealth,—until I demand it all, or none! My message had no such end in view. You are beautiful, they tell me; and I desired ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Tully-Veolan, and whose venerable gardens, with their massive hedges of yew and holly, he always considered as the ideal of the art. The lady, whose letter I have now before me, says she distinctly remembers the sickly boy sitting at the gate of the house with his attendant, when a poor mendicant approached, old and woe-begone, to claim the charity which none asked for in vain at Ravelston. When the man was retiring, the servant remarked to Walter that he ought to be thankful to Providence for having placed him above the want and misery he had ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... these epistles of the "obscure men" were eagerly read: by their supposed associates, the Obscurantists. Here were men who felt as they felt, and who were not afraid to speak. The mendicant friars in England had a day of rejoicing, and a Dominican friar in Flanders bought all the copies of the letters he could find to present ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Both the Houses had unanimously resolved that England should not be governed by a Papist. It might well be, therefore, that, from generation to generation, Regents would continue to administer the government in the name of vagrant and mendicant Kings. There was no doubt that the Regents must be appointed by Parliament. The effect, therefore, of this contrivance, a contrivance intended to preserve unimpaired the sacred principle of hereditary monarchy, would be that the monarchy would ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... up tall and stern in a darkened chamber. His eyes stared intently at the figure of Rita. Her face, pale and alive, smiled imploring in the mendicant's place. He talked, but the beggar, still patient, heard ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... declaration of love? Did I express myself in my imprudent impetuosity so incorrectly as to make you believe I was anxious even now to gain your love, and that I was complaining of not having obtained it? Do you believe me to be an humble mendicant, to whom in your generosity you want to throw the morsel of a declaration of love? I thank you, sir, I am not hungry, and do not want this morsel. Let us at least be truthful and sincere toward each other, and the truth is, we do not ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... the barbarous project of diverting the Nile to the Red Sea. Their descendants are beggars from the cradle; but they beg with a good grace, and not with a curse or an insult like the European 'asker' when refused: moreover, the mendicant pest is not now over-prevalent. In the towns they cheat and pilfer; they gamble in the streets; they drink hard on Saturdays and Sundays, and at times they murder one another. Liquor is cheap; a bottle of aguardente ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... by this constrained homage to poverty, Pope finds himself unable to resettle the equilibrium in his nervous system until he has taken out his revenge by an extra kicking administered to some old mendicant or ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... Mahaut d'Artois was an elderly lady remarkable for her charities, and was by consequence always surrounded by large crowds of poor folk during her residence at the Chatelaine, the ruins of which lie a mile or two from Arbois. On the occasion of a severe famine in Burgundy, she collected a band of her mendicant friends in a stable, and burned them all, saying that 'par pitie elle hauoit faict cela, considerant les peines que ces pauvres debuoient endurer en temps de si ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... any certainty when so cruel a separation would be likely to end; to take up new functions which the circumstances of the time rendered excessively difficult; while the petty importance of the power he represented, and its mendicant attitude in Europe, robbed his position of that public distinction and dignity which may richly console a man for the severest private sacrifice. It is a kind destiny which veils their future from mortal men. Fifteen years passed before De ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... its court, and the court hath its moon-calves: unto all, however, that cometh from the court do the mendicant people pray, and all appointable ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche |
