"Old English" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... went to the coast from Jamaica, or other West India Islands, where mosquitoes are quite as abundant, have had any such reason either. At Bluefields where the writer has resided, which was one of the first places on the Mosquito coast frequented by English, and which derives its name from an old English buccaneer, there are no mosquitoes at all. At Grey Town, at the mouth of the river San Juan, there are plenty; but not more than in Jamaica, or in the towns of the interior state of Nicaragua. However names are not always given so as ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 27. Saturday, May 4, 1850 • Various
... such persons as were known to have no private food supply, and when the door opened they surged in, getting brass tickets at the threshold which each one exchanged in the far end of the room for a large square piece of Russian chorny khleb—black bread—and a steaming bowl of good old English porridge served to them by the bustling ladies of the British Colony. Only enough were admitted at a time to fill the double row of board tables, yet every day from 1,000 to 1,400 ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... ago, was so determined to uphold their privileges on this score that he had this ensign worked into the ornamentation of his entrance gates at Beaufort, near Battle Abbey, Sussex; but he met with small encouragement in such notions from his brother-baronets. An old English gentleman was wont to declare that more of disagreeable eccentricity is to be found amongst members of the baronetage than amongst those of any other order of men. He chanced to be thrown early in life amongst several eccentric beings of the class, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... marks are nothing but black marks more or less regular in appearance. Modern English type and script are rather simple to the eye. Old English and German are less so; less so still, Hebrew and Chinese. But all alphabets present to the eye pretty obvious traces of regularity; in a written or printed page the same mark will occur over and over again. This ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... Lothian. For the really old references in Welsh poetry see, besides Skene, Professor Rhys, op. cit. Gildas and Nennius (but not the Vita Gildae) will be found conveniently translated, with Geoffrey himself, in a volume of Bohn's Historical Library, Six Old English Chronicles. The E.E.T.S. edition of Merlin contains a very long excursus by Mr Stuart-Glennie on the ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... between them. He had brought him to Tretton Park when Florence was there, and Harry had since made his own way to Cheltenham, and had endeavored to plead his own cause after his own fashion. This he had done after the good old English plan, which is said to be somewhat loutish, but is not without its efficacy. He had looked at her, and danced with her, and done the best with his gloves and his cravat, and had let her see by twenty unmistakable signs that in order to be perfectly happy he must be near her. Her ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... into the service as his accomplice, his enemy, or his love, with a due accompaniment of curses, caresses, or kicks, as the course of his declamation required. One play in particular, Marlowe's Tragedy of Dr. Faustus, excited my admiration in this way; and a liking for the old English drama, which I still retain, was created and strengthened by such recitations.' But Beddoes' dramatic performances were not limited to the works of others; when the occasion arose he was able to supply the necessary ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... the growing interest was in trade and manufacture. The social distinctions were equally marked. The northern colonists were middle-class traders and small farmers, with democratic town governments, and with an intense pride in education. In the South, gentlemen of good old English families lived like feudal lords among their slaves and cultivated manners quite as assiduously as morals. Of forms of the Christian religion, the Atlantic coast presented a bizarre mixture. In the main, New England was emphatically Calvinistic and sternly Puritanical; ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... to death on them. They are only Spanish or Portuguee trout, and not half so good as roach and dace out of a good old English pond." ...
— !Tention - A Story of Boy-Life during the Peninsular War • George Manville Fenn
... books of theology, I will confess to you that, although I have read rather widely the divinity of the Greek Fathers, Gregory, Chrysostom, and so forth, and have of course informed myself in the works generally of our old English divines, Hooker, Jeremy Taylor, and so forth, I am not by any means a frequent reader of books of theology as such, and as the men of our times have made them. I have looked into the 'Tracts' from curiosity and to hear what the world was talking of, and ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... the numerals are engrossed in the old English style, and show eight less than 1800, or 1792, and the date October 12th. The shaft towers among the boughs of a great oak tree which, like itself, has stood the storms and winds of nearly a hundred years. It has seen Baltimore develop from a little ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... is a descendant of an old English family that has had representatives in America for two hundred and fifty years. His great grandfather was a soldier in Washington's army when Cornwallis surrendered, and his father, George H. Goodsell, spent many adventurous ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... have the merit of ingenuity, but in connection with it Webster makes a sounder observation when he compares New England perpetuating old English idioms because of her isolation, to an internal village contrasted with a city. "New England has been in the situation of an island; during one hundred and sixty years, the people, except in a few commercial towns, have not been exposed to any of the causes which effect ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... came of an old English family, which traced its descent back to the year of our Lord 61, the days of the heroic Boadicea, down through the brilliant circle of the Knights of the Round Table, to Francis Peabody, who in 1635 went from ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... of the only terms upon which Elizabeth of England could be persuaded to grant them actual support. As the indispensable condition to her interference, she demanded that the cities of Havre and Dieppe should be placed in her hands. These would be a pledge for the restoration of Calais, that old English stronghold which had fallen into the power of the French during the last war, and for whose restoration within eight years there had been an express stipulation in the treaties Cateau-Cambresis. This humiliating concession the Huguenots reluctantly ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... a broad road ahead. I was passing untenanted trenches. I heard voices ahead presently and sprang into the bushes at the side. Then I went ahead slowly, with ears keen. The voices grew more distinct; I caught syllables and—it was English, good old English! ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... opportunity to make an intimate acquaintance with either of them. I owed to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes an introduction to John Bellows, a Quaker, a most delightful gentleman, the first authority in his time on the Roman antiquities of Great Britain, a fine classical scholar and learned in old English literature and in the languages from which came the roots of our English tongue. I formed with him a close friendship which ended only with his death, in 1902. A year before he died he visited me in my home at Worcester, ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... Mr. and Mrs. Jackson, of Coleraine. He was the principal personage in that town, and was, by his mother, a near relative of Sir Tristram. His wife was the daughter of Robert Gorges, LL.D. (a gentleman of good old English family, and possessed of a considerable estate in the county Meath), by Jane Loftus, daughter of Sir Adam Loftus, of Rathfarnham, and sister of Lord Lisburn. They had an only son, Richard Gorges, who was in the army, and became a general officer very early ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... received it in its present form. Yet there are accredited professors of English who do not know these facts, and who, if called upon, could neither prove them nor disprove them. They have not worked in the Bodleian, in the British Museum, or in other foreign libraries, on Old English texts and authorities. They think themselves well up in Old English if they can translate the text of Beowulf fairly well, remember its most difficult vocabulary, and can tell a tale or two ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... passing so rapidly even as he writes into 'a new England which tries so hard to be unlike the old.' A deeper and richer note of thankfulness, mixed as it must be with anxiety, for the good old ways of English life (as lamented by Mr. Poorgrass and Mark Clark[25]), old English simplicity, and old English fare—the fine prodigality of the English platter, has never been raised. God grant that the leaven may work! And thirdly there is a deeply brooding strain of saddening yet softened autobiographical reminiscence, over which ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... have a hall-stove, which, after a prolonged search, was found in London and duly installed as a presiding deity to defy the dampness that pervades all those ivy-covered habitations, as well as the neuralgia that wrings their possessors. What a blessing it proved, more than any one thing making the old English house seem like an American home! The delightful summer heat we, in America, enjoy in the coldest seasons, is quite unknown to our Saxon cousins. Although many came to see our stove in full working order, yet we could not persuade them to adopt the American system ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... said, laying it before her, "there's the book to suit you, my little lady." It was a square book in a gaily-coloured parchment cover, somewhat faded, but still showing attractive devices of shields, swords, and dragons. On it was emblazoned in old English letters the title, ...
— Penelope and the Others - Story of Five Country Children • Amy Walton
... that the King had forgotten how to read and write. So not a few of the Amirs of Sind were analphabetic and seemed rather proud of it: "a Baloch cannot write, but he always carries a signet-ring." I heard of an old English lady of the past generation in Northern Africa who openly declared "A Warrington shall never learn to read ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... observed by examining the alphabet, which is on the table in the engraving, he used many of the letters of the English alphabet, also numerals. The fact was, that he came across an old English spelling-book during his labors, and borrowed a great many of the symbols. Some he reversed, or placed upside down; others he modified, or added to. He had no idea of either their meaning or sound, in English, which is abundantly evident from the use he made of them. As was ...
— Se-Quo-Yah; from Harper's New Monthly, V. 41, 1870 • Unknown
... historians finds just sympathy in his vigorous insistance on our true ancestry, on our being the strongly marked heritors in language and genius of those old English seamen who, beholding a rich country with a most convenient seaboard, came, doubtless with a sense of divine warrant, and settled themselves on this or the other side of fertilising streams, gradually conquering ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... the TREE OF THE SUN that is prominent in the legendary History of Alexander, a fact sufficient in itself to rule the reading. A character in an old English play says:— ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... will think that Talbot Reed's boys' books are his best bequest to literature, he considered them of less importance in the work of his life than his book entitled "A History of the Old English Letter Foundries; with Notes Historical and Bibliographical on the Rise and Progress of English Typography" (Elliot Stock, 1887), the preparation of which cost him ten years of research and labour. His boys' books were the spontaneous utterance of his joyous nature, ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... by our publishers; it does not lie even in the dusty corners of our bookcases; nay, the pious English scholar must actually send to Germany for Grein's Bibliothek in order to get a compact reproduction of the body of Old English poetry. ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... cards while I waited. I had them done in the Old English character. I suggested some little decoration to give them a tone,—an ivy leaf in the corner, or a little flourish under the name,—but Amrod was opposed to this. He seemed to think it was not essential, and it would have been charged extra, and also he had nothing of the ...
— Eliza • Barry Pain
... certain reasons why she should," he said. "I cannot answer for the part of her which comes from her father, Maurice Grey, a very old English family, I believe, but on her mother's side she could have the passions of an artist and the pride of a Caesar: she is a very ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... "Don't sweat; just get by; extra work means short life; you're better off if they don't notice you." This chant can be heard by anyone who cares to listen; it's the old American invitation to mediocrity. But while mediocre, as commonly used, means "indifferent, ordinary," it also has in old English the odd meaning "a young monk who was excused from performing part of a monk's duties." And that, too, fits. It is always worthwhile to ask a few very senior officers what they think of these jokers who refuse ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... in his head for the book, which entirely hit Mr. Fairfax's fancy. It was to make a volume of verse celebrating each of the various departments of the great store, in metres parodying the styles of the old English ballads and various poets, ancient and modern, and was to ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... on which a young man ends his College course is called, by an apparent misnomer, "Commencement" day; that is, the day of commencing, or beginning. I understand very well that the name has a definite historical origin,—that in the old English Colleges, from which our American Colleges were modelled, the young man, on this day, begins his career as a Bachelor of Arts. His academical rank "commences" and dates from this point. But there would be a beautiful appropriateness in the term, even if it had no such special historical ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... language is Latin, and consists of words either borrowed directly or taken from "learned" French forms. The every-day vocabulary of the less educated is of Old English, commonly called Anglo-Saxon, origin; and from the same source comes what we may call the machinery of the language, i.e., its inflexions, numerals, pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions. Along ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... tenant holds over after the expiration of a lease for years, either by express consent, or under circumstances implying consent, it is held to be evidence of a new contract without any definite period, and is construed to be a tenancy from year to year: and in those states where the old English rule prevails, six months' notice must be given the ...
— The Government Class Book • Andrew W. Young
... modern equivalent, I must strive to invent a new one, in the meantime let me think. True it is that Swinburne was before me with the "Romantiques." The hymn to Proserpine and Dolores are wonderful lyrical versions of Mdlle. de Maupin. In form the Leper is old English, the colouring is Baudelaire, but the rude industry of the dustmen and the comestible glories of the market-place shall be mine. A bas "Les ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... They gave me a title in Poland, a barren honor, but all they had to offer, poor souls, in return for a little blood. Will you be Countess Zytomar and get laughed at for your pains, or plain Mrs. Power, with a good old English name?" ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... supernatural appearance D'Orsay, Count His 'Journal' Lord Byron's letter to Dorset (George-John Frederick), fourth Duke of 'LINES occasioned by the death of' Dorville, Mr Dovedale, Lord Byron's eulogy of the scenery of Dramatists, old English, 'full of gross faults' 'Not good as models' 'DREAM,' The The most mournful and picturesque story that ever came from the pen and heart of man 'One of the most interesting' of Lord Byron's poems Dreams Drummond, Sir William His 'OEdipus ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... Book ii. c. 3, p. 161. This is a singular work, where the writer has contrived to turn the barren subjects of heraldry into an entertaining Encyclopaedia, containing much curious knowledge on almost every subject; but this folio more particularly exhibits the most copious vocabulary of old English terms. It has been said that there are not more than twelve copies extant of this very rare work, which is probably not true. [It is certainly not correct; the work is, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... the valuable papers were removed, and of the rest, as perquisites of the sexton, some fell into the hands of Chatterton's father. The boy, who had been, upon leaving school, articled to an attorney, and had thus become familiar with the old English text, caught sight of these, and seemed then to have first formed the plan of turning them to account, as The ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... Beowulf MS. suffered at this time, its edges being scorched and its pages shriveled. As a result, the edges have chipped away, and some of the readings have been lost. It does not appear, however, that these losses are of so great importance as the remarks of some prominent Old English scholars might lead us to suspect. Their remarks give the impression that the injury which the MS. received in the fire accounts for practically all of the illegible lines. That this is not so may be seen by comparing the Wanley ...
— The Translations of Beowulf - A Critical Biography • Chauncey Brewster Tinker
... Leghorn; and as far as the speculator is concerned, it makes no difference whether his ticket is drawn for in Rome or in Tuscany, though the gains and losses of each branch are, I understand, kept separate. These lotteries are not of the plain, good old English stamp, in which there were, say, ten thousand tickets, and ten prizes of different value allotted to the holders of the ten first numbers drawn, while the remaining nine thousand nine hundred and ninety ticket-holders drew blanks. The system of speculation in vogue here is far ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... English.—From the very beginning there was a quiet jealousy between the Dutch Settlement on the Hudson and the English Settlers in Massachusetts. To quote from an old English history, "it was the original purpose of the Pilgrims to locate near Nova Scotia, but, upon better consideration, they decided to seat themselves more to the southward on the bank of Hudson's River which falls into ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... the jurist. The jurist wrote a very fine book. Let me quote a passage from it. 'It is the present and perfect consent the which alone maketh matrimony, without either solemnisation or'—here, Dunwoodie, skipping the frank old English, substituted—'or anything else, for neither the one nor the other is the essence of matrimony, but consent only. Consensus non concubitus facit matrimoniam.' Hum! Ha! In other words, whether marriage is or is not contracted in facie ecclesiae, ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... arriving at Mr Booby's house, were all received by him in the most courteous and entertained in the most splendid manner, after the custom of the old English hospitality, which is still preserved in some very few families in the remote parts of England. They all passed that day with the utmost satisfaction; it being perhaps impossible to find any set of people more solidly and sincerely happy. Joseph and Fanny found means to be alone upwards of two ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... to the graceful fantasies of "Undine," or the mighty mockeries of "Gulliver's Travels" down to such comparatively commonplace elements of wonder as yet preserve from oblivion "The Castle of Otranto" and "The Old English Baron." ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the dunes, the Hills and the Light, I have not attempted any character drawing, although on the easterly shore of Long Island there are many people who have retained, together with the plain old English names which they brought with them by way of Connecticut and Rhode Island, a simplicity and sturdiness of character not to be found elsewhere, I believe, so near the great cosmopolis, and which is worthy a place ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... to his answers. "Ah, yes. Well done. Bravo," she said at intervals, as he told her about their wedding-trip and how he and Karen had enjoyed this or that. When Barker brought in the tea-tray and set it on a little table before Karen, she took up one of the cups—they were of an old English ware with a wreath of roses inside and lines of half obliterated gilt—and said—it was her first comment on the background—"Tiens, c'est joli. Is this one ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... thirty German prisoners!' cried the squire. 'Good old English bull-dog! But how did he ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... execution point blanc:—ay, ay, none of your pimping acorn glasses for me, but your manly, old English half-pint bumpers, my dear: they try a fellow's stamina at once:—but, ...
— The Man Of The World (1792) • Charles Macklin
... Hall was thrown open, and hundreds of people strolled through its quaint rooms and noble galleries. The formal gardens were noisy with unaccustomed merriment. From the terrace one looked upon preparations for amusements, and old English games of all descriptions. Platforms for dancing, and pavilions for musicians, stood here and there. Beyond, in the valley, a long range of poles and skeleton forms showed where the fireworks were in preparation. Down ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... their dealings. Are we? They were true to their word; no men on earth more true. Are we? They hated covetousness and overreaching. Do we? They were generous, open-handed, hospitable. Are we? My friends, this was the old English spirit, which God accepted in our forefathers. Is it in us now? We must not pride ourselves on it, unless we have it. Nay, more, what is it but a shame to us, if, while our forefathers were good heathens, we are bad Christians? They had but a small spark, a dim ray, as it were, ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... Bible in the vulgar tongue. Nor were they entirely unfamiliar with the work of these remote predecessors. Foxe, the martyrologist, published in 1571 an edition of the four gospels in Anglo-Saxon under the patronage of Archbishop Parker. Parker's well-known interest in Old English centered particularly around the early versions of the Scriptures. Secretary Cecil sends the Archbishop "a very ancient Bible written in Latin and old English or Saxon," and Parker in reply comments on "the fair antique writing with the Saxon interpretation."[173] ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... incident worthy of oblivion, had not much influence with the laity. Nine Englishmen in ten were quite prepared to glorify the reformers, and were by no means sorry to find how much evidence there was for the good old English view of a Parliamentary Church. The Statutes of Supremacy and of Praemunire, even the execution of More and Fisher, reminded them that the Bishop of Rome neither had nor ought to have any jurisdiction within this realm of England. That "gospel light first dawned ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... he seemed to be asking of me. "Oh! say it all over again, the dear old English oaths and curses that in this God- forsaken land I never hoped to ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... garouchexousiuallaeuautilabeiuamacheiaemiudeesti gaepollaekaieuuaesoiskaikataepeiroumegagar totesthalassaeskratos. The last part of this extract, though often translated 'command of the sea,' or 'dominion of the sea,' really has the wider meaning of sea-power, the 'power of the sea' of the old English poet above quoted. This wider meaning should be attached to certain passages in Herodotus,[13] which have been generally interpreted 'commanding the sea,' or by the mere titular and honorific 'having the dominion of the sea.' One editor of Herodotus, Ch. F. Baehr, did, however, see exactly ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... simple impromptu plays, Cinderella, Blue Beard, Beauty and the beast, on the lawn outside the long windows. The lawn has been in bad condition for nearly two years, on account of the building of the Morgan memorial, but has now been planted again. One May-day we had an old English festival around a Maypole on the green, with Robin Hood, Maid Marian, Friar Tuck, Will Scarlett, the hobby- horse, the dragon and all the rest, including Jack in the Green and an elephant. This was such a success that ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... putting the key into the pocket of his cassock, same as in the old Pope's days. I go in whenever I like, and he lets me take whatever I please. At Christmas some rich Americans wanted a skull-cap to save a dying man, and I got it for the asking. Now an old English lady wants a stocking to cure her rheumatism, and I'll get that too. I've saved a little hair from the last cutting, and if ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... That old English gentleman, whom I just remember, when Ingham first went to sea, as the model of mild, kind old men, at Ingham's mother's house,—then he went to sea once himself for the first time,—and he had a mother himself,—and as he went off, she gave him ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... to Flintshire), a church-tower comes in to complete the scene. Here the Dee winds about a good deal, and receives its beautiful, dashing tributary, the Alyn, which runs through the Vale of Gresford and waters the park of Trevallyn Old Hall, one of the loveliest of old English homes. Its pointed gables and great clustering stacks of chimneys, its mullioned and diamond-paned windows, its finely-wooded park, all realize the stranger's ideal of the antique manor-house. This neighborhood is studded with country-houses in all styles of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... narrow street of an old English town, A roving tinker lived; one who would often drown Of Virtue every trace, by drinking much strong beer; Oft mixing in a fight, a ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... of a country when they're only getting a sick-headache; and when they go home again, they can never remember whether Mont Blanc was a picture they saw in Paris or a London chop-house where they had old English fare at modern English prices. If you want to know St. Paul's Cathedral, don't go there with a guide-book in your hand. Go as one ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... closed upon Mr. Ware, the priest turned to the man. "You have come about those frames," he said. "If you will come upstairs, I will show you the prints, and you can give me a notion of what can be done with them. I rather fancy the idea of a triptych in carved old English, if you can ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... An earnest is a pledge given in advance as an evidence of good faith. We are familiar with the usage of paying down a small part of the price agreed upon to make a business transaction binding. In old English it is called caution money. My mother has told me of seeing her mother many a time pay a shilling in the Belfast market-house to insure the delivery of a bag of potatoes, paying the remainder on ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... de haro is the English system of 'hue and cry.' The old English exclamation Harrow! our national vernacular Hurrah! being only a variation thereof, is identical with the supposed invocation of the Norman chieftain; and the usage, suggested by common sense, prevailed under various modifications throughout the greater part of the Pays ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... the young women, plainly of the serving-class, bore down upon him with abashed smiles. He noticed for the first time that one of them was carrying a very small child in her arms; as she came alongside, grinning sheepishly, she extended the small one toward the astounded Brock, and said in excellent old English: ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon
... belief, it is small wonder that two of Bunce's plays had characteristics in them to suit a member of the Wallack family. And being such a lover of old English Comedy accounts for some of the spirit ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Love in '76 - An Incident of the Revolution • Oliver Bell Bunce
... distinguishing outward signs of ultra-liberalism. He was, of course, a Parliamentary Reformer in the year '30; and he has been a social reformer, and a most useful one, ever since. Still is there something about this brave old English worthy that approaches the fossil type. His droll dislike to the French—a hearty, good-humored disfavor, differing widely from the polished malevolence of Mr. John Leech, who never missed an opportunity to represent ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... titled, tawdry cousin there? What are his pretensions, that he shall presume to brand me as a poor dependent!—What are his claims to independence? How does he spend the income Fortune has allotted to him? Does he rejoice to revive in the mansion of his ancestors the spirit of old English hospitality? Do the eyes of aged tenants twinkle with joy when they hope his coming? do the poor bless his arrival? I say no. He is the lord of land—and is also, what he seems still more proud of, a lord of parliament; ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... too is Anglo-Indian, and, pace Mr. Brander Matthews, there are such things as Americanisms, which were not part of the Elizabethan heritage, though it is perfectly true that many of the American phrases most railed at are pure old English, preserved in the States, though obsolete in Modern England; for the Americans, as Lowell says, "could not take with them any better language than that of Shakspeare." When we hear railing at slang phrases, at Americanisms, some of which are admirably ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... was, as it were, replaced by the wooded face of a hill, clothed in dark lines of trimmed yews, which rose abruptly about a hundred yards from the house and overshadowed the whole library wing. Between the window and the hill, however, was a small old English garden, closely hedged round with yew hedges, and blazing now with every flower that an English August knows—with sun-flowers, tiger-lilies, and dahlias white and red. The window was low, so that the flowers seemed to ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... plates and dishes displayed in this kitchen would afford an opportunity for a dissertation on the rise and progress of the fine arts in this country, as they present most curious and important specimens of early drawing, painting, and poetry. The old English plate was a square piece of wood, which indeed is not quite obsolete at the present hour. The improvement upon this primitive plate was a circular platter, with a raised edge; but there were also thin, circular, ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... colonial women had is rather difficult to discover from the writings of the day; for each section had its own peculiar rules, and courts and decisions in the various colonies, and sometimes in one colony, contradicted one another. Until the adoption of the Constitution the old English law prevailed, and while unmarried women could make deeds, wills, and other business transactions, the wife's identity was largely merged into that of her husband. The colonial husband seems to have had considerable confidence in his help-meet's business ability, and not infrequently left all his ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... dogs attached, now lying resting on the dry snow. They were a mixed team, four of them unmistakable huskies, one with collie characteristics, one having Newfoundland blood (through many crosses), and one, the leader, having the look of something midway between a big powerful Airedale and an old English sheep-dog, including the bobtail. This leader, Bill, as he was called, had the air of a master-worker, and was the only member of the pack (except the wheeler) who did not snarl as Jan was ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... behalf of the young Earl went on with their work. Public sympathy as a matter of course went with the young Earl. As against the Italian woman he had with him every English man and woman. It was horrible to the minds of English men and English women that an old English Earldom should be starved in order that an Italian harlot might revel in untold riches. It was felt by most men and protested by all women that any sign of madness, be it what it might,—however insignificant,—should be held to be ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... a memorable dinner, with so much leisure for it that they could form a life-long friendship for the old English-speaking waiter who served them, and would not suffer them to hurry themselves. The hills had already fallen away, and they ran along through a cheerful country, with tracts of forest under white ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... a neatly kept hall. There had been no careful study of colour in the arrangement of things—hats and caps were flung carelessly on the old oak chairs—there was a licentious mixture of styles in the furniture—half Old English, half Indian, and all the worse for wear: but Ida Palliser thought the house had a friendly look, which made it better than any house she ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... filled with shrubs and flowers, among which we recognised a rare variety of the floral family in full bloom. Every thing around—the extent of the buildings, the garden, the park, with deer browsing amid the tangled shrubbery—all bespoke the old English style and dignity. ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... religious, which no theory of king-worship could bring them to overpass. But even if we make these reserves, the character of the monarchy from the days of Edward the Fourth to the days of Elizabeth remains something strange and isolated in our history. It is hard to connect the kingship of the old English, the Norman, the Angevin, or the Plantagenet kings with the kingship of the House of York or of ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... neither the Old English nor the northern dialect could be understood by the writer or the reader, and must ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... held two wooden grooves into which the type could be clamped by means of end screws. The mechanism was worked by a small square lever at the back. Bobby opened a red pasteboard box to discover a miniature font of Old English type; a round tin box to uncover sticky but delicious-smelling printer's ink; a package to reveal the ink-roller and a parcel to complete the outfit with a pack of ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... the phaeton with the abandon of those who think themselves alone, and sang a snatch from an old English hymn that Van Berg remembered as one his mother had crooned over him when a child. This melody, doubly sacred to him from its associations, would have grated harshly on his ear if it had been sung by Ida Mayhew a week before; but, strange to say, the girlish voice that floated up to him was ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... great talents at 'cataloguizing' were unrivalled: he compiled those of James West, P.R.S. (whose library he sold at Langford's), 1773, the sale lasting twenty-four days, and including a fine series of books printed by Caxton, Wynkyn de Worde, and on Old English literature and history, voyages and travels (see p. 179); the Rev. Thomas Crofts, forty-three days, in 1783; Topham Beauclerk, April 8, 1781, and following forty-nine days (the collection was dispersed by Sam himself 'opposite Beaufort Buildings, ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... in crewel-stitch. Embroidered in green, blue, and brown wools upon white cotton. Old English. (Coll. of ...
— Art in Needlework - A Book about Embroidery • Lewis F. Day
... once in eighty fathoms off Monhegan," Spurling remarked, "and pulled up an odd-patterned, blue cup of old English ware. The hook caught in a 'blister,' a brown, soft, toadstool thing, that had grown over the cup. He's got it ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... Lathom House is an old English castle. When the war broke out between King Charles I and his people, the Earl of Derby, who was the master of this castle, went away to fight for the king. He left the Countess at home with her children, with a small band of armed men to guard ...
— True Stories of Wonderful Deeds - Pictures and Stories for Little Folk • Anonymous
... corruptible body presseth down the soul, and the earthy tabernacle weigheth down the mind that museth on many things." Of this class was old Randle Cotgrave, the curious collector of the most copious dictionary of old French and old English words and phrases. The work is the only treasury of our genuine idiom. Even this labour of the lexicographer, so copious and so elaborate, must have been projected with rapture, and pursued with pleasure, till, in the progress, "the mind was musing on many things." Then came the melancholy doubt, ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... position in the passage between the bar-room and parlor. A yellow-haired Saxon child, with bare legs and fair face, crawls out from some inner hollow to the door, and impends dangerous on the sill, throwing numerous scared backward glances over his shoulder. The parlor is taken bodily out of old English novels, a direct descendant, slightly furbished up and modernized, of the Village inn parlor of Goldsmith,—homely, clean, and comfortless. A cotton tidy over the rocking-chair bewrays, wrought into its crocheted gorgeousness, ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... shrunk from such a glaring "biological necessity." A pair of puling pious sentimentalists if you like. But Supermen! Nonsense. O, my brother journalists, if you revile the Prussians, call them sheep led by snobs, call them beggars on horseback, call them sausage eaters, depict them in the good old English fashion in spectacles and comforter, seedy overcoat buttoned over paunchy figure, playing the contrabass tuba in a street band; but do not flatter them with the heroic title of Superman, and hold up as ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... imagination had wider reach than Irving's. There is nowhere, as there is in Harte, the suspicion either of insincerity or of artificiality. Irving's humor was the humor of Sir Roger de Coverley and the Vicar of Wakefield. It is old English. Mark Twain's is his own—American through and through to the bone. I am not unmindful of Cooper and Hawthorne, of Longfellow, of Lowell and of Poe, but speak of Irving as the pioneer American man of letters, and of Mark Twain and Bret Harte as American literature's ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... be done without concentration and self-sacrifice and toil and doubt. It is nonsense to imagine that our great novelists have just forged ahead or ambled along, reaching their goal, in the good old English fashion, by sheer divination of the way to it. A fine book, with all that goes to the making of it, is as fine a theme as a novelist can have. But it is a part of English hypocrisy—or, let it be more politely said, English reserve—that, whilst ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... "was formerly much used at our colleges instead of the old English verb approve. The students used to speak of having their performances approbated by the instructors. It is also now in common use with our clergy as a sort of technical term, to denote a person who is licensed to preach; they would say, such a one is approbated, that is, licensed to preach. ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... near the river. I am all excitement when I think of going there for ten days. There are to be fifty guests and the other forty-nine are invited as a means of getting Annabel under his roof. Won't I feel like a little girl in an old English novel! The best of it is that nobody will bother ME—I'm too poor to be looked at a second time, I mean, what THEY call poor. Sometimes I laugh when I'm alone, for I feel like I'm a gold mine filled with rich ore that nobody has discovered. ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... earthly possessions to begin life anew in the backwoods of the Great Lakes country. The French came pursuing an ideal of religion. The English came pursuing an ideal of government. We may smile at the excesses of both devotees—French nuns, who swooned in religious ecstasy; old English aristocrats, who referred to democracy as "the black rot plague of the age"; but the fact remains—these colonists came in unselfish pursuit of ideals; and they gave of their blood and their brawn and all earthly possessions for those ideals; and it is of such stuff that the spirit of dauntless ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... designated by a great variety of names, such as tyes, bobs, majors, spencers, foxtails, twists, tetes, scratches, full-bottomed dress bobs, cues, and perukes. The people of Philadelphia dressed as the actors of our theatres now dress in old English comedy. They walked the streets in bright-colored and highly decorated coats, three-cornered hats, ruffled shirts and wristbands, knee-breeches, silk stockings, low shoes, and silver buckles." [footnote: Mrs. M. J. Lamb, ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... are fragments of the ancient pavement, and north and south of the shrine lie two Saxon queens whose bodies were removed here from the Confessor's church, when it was pulled down by Henry III. Both were called by the old English name of Editha. The elder is connected with the first historic foundation of the Abbey, for she, the Confessor's wife, was present at the consecration (Innocents' Day, 1066) of the choir and transepts, when her husband lay helpless on his deathbed. Her niece changed the Saxon ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith
... and iron; jade and other stones were cut and polished for ornaments. The written language was already highly developed, being much the same as we now find it. Indeed, the chief difference lies in the form of the characters, just as an old English text differs in form from a text of the present day. What we may call the syntax of the language has remained very much the same; and phrases from the old ballads of three thousand years ago, which have passed into the colloquial, are still ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... straw," and would beat him to death with the family club.[101] Mr. Elton, who quotes this passage, adds in a note that one of the family clubs is still preserved at a farm in East Gothland.[102] Aubrey has preserved an old English "countrie story" of "the holy mawle, which (they fancy) hung behind the church dore, which, when the father was seaventie, the sonne might fetch to knock his father in the head, as effoete, & of no more use."[103] That Aubrey preserved a true tradition is proved by what we learn of ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... AN OLD ENGLISH HUNTER next addressed the meeting, and was listened to with deep attention. He impressed upon the young delegates the good old adage of "Look before you leap," and cautioned them against the delusive hope that their condition would be improved by change of measures. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... a man who, in his youthful days, had been a diligent patron of the London music halls, and in consequence had become himself an amateur entertainer of very considerable ability. His sailor's hornpipes, Irish jigs, his old English North-country ballads and his coster songs were an unending joy to his comrades. Their gratitude and admiration took forms that proved poor Harry's undoing, and besides some of them took an unholy joy in sending the chaplain's batman to his officer ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... night, in the old English phrase, "at the sign of the Oak and Star." Wishing, not, indeed, like the ancient magicians, to gather magic berry and bud before sunrise, but at least to see these treasures of the lake in their morning hour, we camped last night ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... [1] Most old English poems are preserved in unique manuscripts, sometimes not complete, but in fragments; two fragments, for example, were found in the bindings of other books.—Warton, ii. 7. In 1248, only four books in English were at Glastonbury, and they ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... original of Scott's version of 1806 (an original MS. never hinted at by Colonel Elliot), and it retains clear traces of being contaminated with a version of The Huntiss of Chevet, popular in 1459, as we read in The Complaynte of Scotland of that date. There is also an old English version of The Hunting of the Cheviot (1550 or later, Bodleian Library). The UNEDITED text of Scott's Otterburne then contained traces of The Huntiss of Chevet; the two were mixed in popular memory. In short, Scott's ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... of the century, as they rolled around, have in a great measure smoothed away the animosities which marked those days that tried men's souls, when the sons of those who had played around the same old English hearths fought to the death for liberty or loyalty. That the angry strifes are forgotten, leaving only the memory of the bravery which distinguished the star actors in the great drama, needs no further proof than can be found on a green hill ...
— Famous Firesides of French Canada • Mary Wilson Alloway
... it be otherwise with Philip and Mary on a shilling?" And then she showed him the old English shilling which she wore on her watch-fob, the charm which she had drawn from Eugenia's wedding cake. To Phil's unbounded amusement she told the story of dropping it into the contribution plate that Christmas service, and getting lost in the streets of New York ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... which still keeps undisputed, undivided possession of it. The name was changed the other day to George Street as a more genteel appellation, which, I should think, is an indirect forfeiture of the estate. This Sir Thomas Dyot I should be disposed to put upon the list of old English worthies—as humane, liberal, and no flincher from what he took in his head. He was no common-place man in his line. He was the best commentator on that old-fashioned text—'The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.' ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... of 1874 Mr. Barnum married the daughter of his old English friend, John Fish. The wedding took place in the Church of the Divine Paternity, Fifth Avenue, New York, and after a brief bridal tour, ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... shillings! trousers ten-and-six a pair! Summer waistcoats, three a sov'reign, light and comfortable wear! Taglionis, black or coloured, Chesterfield and velveteen! The old English shooting-jacket—doeskins such as ne'er were seen! Army cloaks and riding-habits, Alberts at a trifling cost! Do you want an annual contract? Write to DOUDNEYS' by the post. DOUDNEY BROTHERS! DOUDNEY BROTHERS! Not the men that drive the van, Plastered ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... separation of classes consequent on twenty years of buying cheap and selling dear, and its accompanying overwork; or because our sons and daughters have their hearts in London club-life, or so-called "society," instead of in the old English home-duties; because farmers' sons are apeing fine gentlemen, and farmers' daughters caring more to make bad foreign music than good English cheeses. Good, perhaps, if it be that the time for the ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... and shook his head as he noted the windows of the old English basement tightly barred. The parlor floor, bearing the gilded sign, "Parisian Millinery Repository," was darkened, and, above, the three upper floors presented only an array of undraped windows solidly ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... earliest, measures of length are those based on various parts of the body. Some of our Indian tribes, for instance, employed the double arm's length, the single arm's length, the hand width, and the finger width. Old English standards, such as the span, the ell, and the hand, go back to this very obvious method of measuring ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... to our friends, and our loyal duty to our sovereign; and, without meaning to put any force upon the inclination of those who believe otherwise, I cannot see how I can deny my guests and friends the privilege of drinking a health to the King, or to my husband, after the old English fashion." ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... And he let the scribbled parchment fall On his holiness' bald head. Now the Pope was very sore perplex'd, At the words the dove had scrawl'd, For he could not read the pig-squeak tongue, Which is now old English call'd. He questioned the French ambassador, The news of that scroll to speak. Who bowing observed, "it was not French, He never had learn'd the Greek." He ask'd a monk from Byzantium, A monk as fat ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 556., Saturday, July 7, 1832 • Various
... Horse stands for something that year by year we are forgetting, those quaint old English feasts that have done so much to make England merry, and have made history into a beautiful legend that bears the name of Alfred. Yet the White Horse is falling into neglect. The author of 'Tom Brown's Schooldays' lamented the fact that people flew past the White Horse in stuffy first ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... picture in Old English life—the great event of the day—was Noon-meat, or dinner in the great hall. A little before three, the chief and all his household, with any stray guests who might have dropped in, met in the hall, which stood in the centre ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... should disown—the enmities of one's own family, or country, or religious sect. In forms how afflicting must that necessity have sometimes occurred during the Parliamentary war! And, in after years, amongst our beautiful old English metrical romances, I found the same impassioned complaint uttered by a knight, Sir Ywain, as early ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... it; the sweet little village church; even the appearance of the rustics;—it is all impressively old English. I suppose ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... due to a remark of Swift's that 'a Newgate pastoral might be made a pretty thing.' Gay borrowed the idea, and constructed 'The Beggar's Opera' round a cut-throat highwayman of the name of Macheath, while Dr. Pepusch arranged the music from old English and Scotch melodies, together with some of the most popular tunes of the day. The success of the work was very remarkable. It was performed sixty-two times during the first season, and even now is still to be heard occasionally. It was the foundation of that exceedingly simple ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... the whole literature of Europe. "Among ourselves, for instance, within the last thirty years, who has not lifted up his voice with double vigour in praise of Shakespeare and nature, and vituperation of French taste and French philosophy? Who has not heard of the glories of old English literature; the wealth of Queen Elizabeth's age; the penury of Queen Anne's; and the inquiry whether Pope was a poet? A similar temper is breaking out in France itself, hermetically sealed as that country seemed to be against all foreign influences; and doubts are beginning ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... instruments best of old English character; worked with Nathaniel Cross; follower of Maggini model ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... Spenser."[23] Moreover, as to the hardness of the language—inasmuch as the subject matter of the poem will be familiar to all who may take up the present volume, the difficulty on the word-point will not be such as to deter the reader from understanding and appreciating the production of an old English poet, who—though his very name, unfortunately, has yet to be discovered—may claim to stand in the foremost rank ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various
... is our old English ensign, St. George's red cross on white field; Round which, from Richard to Roberts, Britons conquer or ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: History • Ontario Ministry of Education
... wild flowers and of the naturalised garden plants of the adjoining shrubbery; the Arbor-tristis, with Hibiscus, Abutilon, etc., and above all, the little yellow-flowered Linaria ramosissima, crawling over every ruined wall, as we see the walls of our old English castles clothed with ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... daughter of a refined man, the scion of an old English family and a vulgar woman who marries him to escape from poverty. After his death, the daughter begins her career of rising in the social scale, using a wealthy school-fellow as the first step, a well-born husband as the last. The emptiness and vanity of what she gained ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... poor kind of a heroine who didn't wear a red velvet by Worth. But that has been largely abandoned in these days of commissions. Still, when the heroine goes out on the terrace to spoon after dinner (a quaint old English custom for the origin of which see any novel by the "Duchess," page 179) the average reader wants to know what sort of a filmy wrap she snatches up on the way out. He demands a description, with as ...
— Buttered Side Down • Edna Ferber
... sovereignty, an appeal to a higher law—the law of nature and Nature's God, the replacement of virtual representation with direct representation, and the substitution of a balance of interests within the Virginia society for the old English theory of a balanced government comprising crown, nobility, and commons in ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... beautifully-grown pansies on one of the lawns. She picked a great bunch, and arranged them by themselves in a flat bowl; and when the table was laid, her floral decorations made a brave show amidst the glittering plate and old English cut-glass. ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... [Footnote 54: The old English charters put forward as possessors of the "jura et libertates" now the "homines in regno nostro", now the regnum itself. The Petition of Right speaks of the "rights and liberties" of the subjects, but they are also ...
— The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens • Georg Jellinek
... negotiations for the new Town Hall, and in the Corinthian facade of the Wesleyan Chapel; it narrated the anecdote of his courageous speech from the portico of the Shambles during the riots of 1848, and it did not omit a eulogy of his steady adherence to the wise old English maxims of commerce and his avoidance of dangerous modern methods. Even in the sixties the modern had reared its shameless head. The panegyric closed with an appreciation of the dead man's fortitude in the terrible affliction with ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... time the men now employed in laboriously learning the trade of war, which they are seldom or never called upon to exercise, could be given something useful to do. In the meanwhile Exfodiation must wait until what an old English writer called "the essential oil of democracy" is poured over the stormy waves of human society. You doubt whether that oil will calm the waves? But if your essential oil of democracy fails to possess that elementary ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... garden, that observer ventured on a very strong measure. He had learned from Strutt that he could play the fiddle; what does he do but runs and fetches his own violin into the garden, tunes it, and plays some most inspiriting, rollicking old English tunes to him! A spark came into the fishy eye of Strutt. At the third tune the old fellow's fingers began to work impatiently. Mr. Eden broke off directly, put fiddle and bow into Strutt's hand, and ran off to the prison again ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... the romances of past ages, Shakespeare undoubtedly built many of his dramas. The story of Shylock in the Merchant of Venice is found in an old English ballad. I will quote a few stanzas to indicate the identity of Shylock and "Germutus, the Jew ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... line 913, of Part I, Canto I. As both of these extracts, however, are somewhat too broad for our pages, we content ourselves with simply referring thereto. In the same category, also, is the definition, in Bailey's Old English Dictionary, of the term free bench, as prevailing in the manors of East and West Embourn, Chaddleworth in the county of Berks, Tor in Devonshire, and ...
— Bundling; Its Origin, Progress and Decline in America • Henry Reed Stiles
... Oxford MSS., viz., No. 270. of the Douce Collection, and No. 86. of the Digby Collection in the Bodleian: and to add to the interest of the present work, especially in the eyes of English readers, Dr. Delius has appended to it the old English metrical life of Saint Nicolas the Bischop, from the curious series of Lives and Legends which Mr. Black has recently shown to have been composed ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 42, Saturday, August 17, 1850 • Various
... An old English form of this game substitutes the words "Fire, air, and water," for "Beast, bird, and fish," the players being required to name some animal that lives in the air or water when those elements are named, but to keep silence ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... A very "fine old English gentleman," was my grand-uncle Rumgudgeon, but unlike him of the song, he had his weak points. He was a little, pursy, pompous, passionate semicircular somebody, with a red nose, a thick scull, (sic) a long purse, and a strong sense of his own consequence. With the best heart in the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... "Your brain is dull. What say the words of the law? 'This Indenture Witnesseth!' Now what is an 'indenture'? The old Romans and the old English knew. They wrote a contract on parchment, and cut it in two with an indented line, and they gave each party a half. When the court saw that these two halves fitted—as no other portions could—then indeed the indenture witnessed. ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... Sir Horace and his poor handful of English; of whose grim posture "in Frankendale" [Frankenthal, a little Town in the Palatinate, N.W. from Mannheim a short way.] and other Strongholds, for months long, there is talk enough in the old English History-Books. ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... nearly extinct in England. I use this rural title, partly because it is his universal appellation throughout the neighbourhood, and partly because it saves me the frequent repetition of his name, which is one of those rough old English names at which ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... Good Old Code, like Argus, had a hundred watchful eyes, And each old English peasant had his Good Old English spies To tempt his starving discontent with Good Old English lies, Then call the British Yeomanry to ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... getting too highly civilised," said the Honourable John Ruffin in a melancholy tone. "The fine old English spirit is dying out; and they're afraid of getting into the papers. But evidently what is needed is the giving of lessons; and the proper person to give them is a fierce small boy—Irish for choice—one who is always and nobly ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... we were lodged in the big hut that went by the name of hotel, with the old English half-caste woman. What a hotel it was! The walls were of clay, with a little wood, and the wood was eaten through by the white ants that crawled about everywhere. I lived in a room next the main parlor, with a green glass window looking on ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... commanded the inn-yard. Many horses were being liberated from the traces, hot and weary, and others fresh from the stables being put to. A great many vehicles—some private carriages, others, like mine, of that public class which is equivalent to our old English post-chaise, were standing on the pavement, waiting their turn for relays. Fussy servants were to-ing and fro-ing, and idle ones lounging or laughing, and the scene, on the whole, ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... "Yes, an old English book—one that you like; and I will choose a part of it that is toned quite in harmony with something in you. It shall waken your nature, fill your mind with music; it shall pass like a skilful hand over your ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... [533] Runcinus, the Old English rouncy (Chaucer, Prol. 390). From this incident the inference is clear that during the whole journey to Rome and back most of Malachy's companions were always on foot, and that the party went at a ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor
... whom I have gathered for the defence of our House and the Church. My orders to them were to seize him living, but the old English bull would not yield, and fought so fiercely that it ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... Is it a distinct race which will not continue an oppressive alliance? No! it is a number of colonies, established on the territory of the Union by American hands. Take a map of the United States. Except Virginia, the two Carolinas and Georgia, which are old English colonies, all the rest of the South is situated on lands purchased and paid for by the Union. This proves that the North has sustained the greatest part of the expense. Ancient Louisiana was sold to the Americans, in 1804, by the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... gleaming allotments. The effect gained is for me one of great charm—the charm of a vivid, exquisitely ordered, green silence, with a touch of monastic, or Quakerish, decorum. I would not have it otherwise, and I speak of it only to suggest by contrast the different, desultory charm of an old English village, where beauty has not been so much ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... if you like, that you came from an almshouse; but remember, too,—what your friend Doctor Grim is ready to affirm and make oath of,—that he can trace your kindred and race through that sordid experience, and back, back, for a hundred and fifty years, into an old English line. Come, little Ned, and ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... recognized, and the old idea that "husband and wife are one, and that one the husband," received its death-blow. From that hour the statutes of the several States have been steadily diverging from the old English codes. Most of the Western States copied the advance legislation of New York, and some ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... and I cannot help saying that if you were to ask me candidly (taking the question in an all-round way) who was the best back you ever saw, I should have no hesitation in answering that it was Walter Arnott. In the words of the old English ballad, "he feared no foe," and never in the history of football of the present time has such a brilliant man arisen. He has so many remarkable points that I cannot tell them in a brief notice, but as he is still playing well, spectators are at one in admitting ...
— Scottish Football Reminiscences and Sketches • David Drummond Bone
... horse broken, a pointer trained, or who has visited a menagerie, or the exhibition of the Industrious Fleas, will not deny the validity of education. "A boy," says Plato, "is the most vicious of all wild beasts"; and, in the same spirit, the old English poet Gascoigne says, "A boy is better unborn than untaught." The city breeds one kind of speech and manners; the back-country a different style; the sea another; the army a fourth. We know that an army which can be confided in may be formed by discipline,—that by systematic discipline ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... Taylor alone—one of the highest that ever soared from earth to heaven; sacred as they are, they have not been desecrated by the fictions—so to call them—of John Milton; majestic as are the heavens, their majesty has not been lowered by the ornaments that the rich genius of the old English divines has so profusely hung around them, like dewdrops glistening on the fruitage of the Tree of Life. Tropes and figures are nowhere more numerous and refulgent than in the Scriptures themselves, from Isaiah ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... constantly advancing in price. Although many have gone up, many others have gone down, and at no time probably were good and useful books to be bought so cheap as now. If we look at old sale catalogues we shall find early printed books, specimens of old English poetry and the drama, fetching merely a fraction of what would have to be given for them now; but, on the other hand, we shall find pounds then given for standard books which would not now realize the same number of shillings; this is ...
— How to Form a Library, 2nd ed • H. B. Wheatley
... breadth of England there could hardly have been found a more lovely little property than Maze Court. There were larger houses in the neighbourhood, with more extensive grounds; but as Brenda Dixon stood on the terrace and gazed down towards the good old English park she felt a real glow of pride and pleasure in belonging to such a place. It was the sort of feeling she had whenever she brought a new school ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield
... 1575 granted him a monthly pension of 100 golden crowns, and, as the number of students had now risen to one hundred and twenty, summoned him to Rome to undertake the establishing of a similar college in the papal city. By Allen's advice, the old English hospice was turned into a seminary and Jesuits were placed there to help Dr Maurice Clennock, the rector. The pope appointed Allen to a canonry in Courtrai and sent him back to Douai (July 1576); but here he had to face ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... "we call the Oak Parlour. It is the only room on this floor worth showing you. My father brought the wainscoting from an old English country-house in Dorsetshire. My father's people were Torries, sir, and kept up their ...
— The Inn at the Red Oak • Latta Griswold
... we see nothing but incongruous combination: we have pinnacles without height, windows without light, columns with nothing to sustain, and buttresses with nothing to support. We have parish paupers smoking their pipes and drinking their beer under Gothic arches and sculptured niches; and quiet old English gentlemen reclining on crocodile stools, and peeping out of the ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... famous house when I emigrate," said Lionel; "a regular model of an old English farm-house it shall be,—stout, and strong, and handsome,—just to put the people in mind that they do belong to ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... sense, according no doubt to its Saxon origin, means a sponsor, one who answers for a child in baptism, a godfather. Its modern acceptation all know to be widely different. Can any of your correspondents quote a passage or two from old English authors, wherein its obsolete ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 235, April 29, 1854 • Various
... the most interesting expeditions of this epoch—though I cannot fix the exact date—was to an old English country-seat, built in the time of Henry VIII., or earlier, and added to from age to age since then, until now it presented an irregularity and incongruousness of plan which rendered it an interminable maze of delight to us children wandering through it. We were taken in charge by the children ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... was of true scholarly desire to vindicate English Literature from the charge of being 'too easy,' that—as their studies advanced—they laid more and more stress on Middle-English and Old English writings than on what our nations of England and Scotland have written since they learned to write. I dare to think also that we may attribute to this dread of 'easiness' their practice of cumbering simple texts with philological ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... the one large tree that formed the pride of the lawn, over which it cast its shadow broad and far, he perceived his guardian poring idly over an oft-read book, one of those books of which literary dreamers are apt to grow fanatically fond—books by the old English writers, full of phrases and conceits half quaint and half sublime, interspersed with praises of the country, imbued with a poetical rather than orthodox religion, and adorned with a strange mixture of monastic learning ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 4 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... of the deity they served. See Selden, De Dis Syris, Synt. 1. c. 2. It is a curious coincidence, that as the Witch of Endor is called "Oub," and the African sorceress "Obi," from the serpent-deity Oub, so the old English name of a witch, "hag," bears apparent relationship to the word hak, the ancient British name of a species of snake. In Yorkshire, according to Stukeley, they call snakes "hags" ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 77, April 19, 1851 • Various
... time, when the revival of true Heraldry is in the act of being accomplished with complete success, it appears to be peculiarly desirable that Badges should be brought into general use. It is not enough for us to revive our old English Heraldry as once in the olden time it flourished in England, and to rest content with such a revival: but we must go on to adapt our revived Heraldry, in its own spirit and in full sympathy with its genuine feeling, to conditions of our age and ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell |
