Free TranslationFree Translation
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Past times   /pæst taɪmz/   Listen
Past times

noun
1.
The time that has elapsed.  Synonyms: past, yesteryear.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Past times" Quotes from Famous Books



... also His offspring. Forasmuch, then, as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by the art and device of man. Howbeit, those past times of ignorance God hath overlooked; but now He commandeth all men everywhere to repent, because He hath appointed a day wherein He will judge the world in righteousness by that Man whom He hath ordained; whereof He hath given assurance unto all, in that He hath raised ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... writing his "Life of Jackson," I gave him, at his request, my impressions as a child, of the great man, with whom we were daily and intimately associated, and now transfer those impressions from that great work, "Parton's Life of Jackson," to the pages of this unpretentious record of past times. ...
— 'Three Score Years and Ten' - Life-Long Memories of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and Other - Parts of the West • Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve

... accurate measurement, each limb proved to be precisely three inches and a quarter in length. It had been intended, there could be no doubt, as an ornamental article of dress; but how it was to be worn, or what rank, honour, and dignity, in by-past times, were signified by it, was a riddle which (so evanescent are the fashions of the world in these particulars) I saw little hope of solving. And yet it strangely interested me. My eyes fastened themselves ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... pronounced on the unleavened bread and the roasted lamb, and they sat down to eat, in a state of contentment and with harmless talk. The old Eleazar spoke of past times, and contrasted them with them the present: "Man born of a woman lives but a short time, and is full of trouble; he cometh up like a flower, and is cut down; he fleeth hence like a shadow, and continueth not. A stranger and a sojourner is he upon ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg

... the woman began to chatter something about an oracle of Apollo. There was, she said, a hole in the rock, from which in past times, perhaps more than a hundred years ago, the oracle used to speak forth ...
— The Chateau of Prince Polignac • Anthony Trollope

... ladyship, than to accuse either you or others, in respect that I am sensible it becomes our frail nature better to confess our own imperfections, than to complain of those of others. Neither do I mean to speak of past times, particularly in respect of your worthy ladyship, being sensible that if I have served you in that period when our Israel might be called triumphant, you have more than requited me, in giving to my arms a child, redeemed, as it were, from ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott

... that changes us, Mr Clennam; thoughts is free!—As I was saying, I was thinking of one thing and thinking of another, and thinking very much of the family. Not of the family in the present times only, but in the past times too. For when a person does begin thinking of one thing and thinking of another in that manner, as it's getting dark, what I say is, that all times seem to be present, and a person must get out of that state and consider before they can say which ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens

... fortune, but happier, perhaps, on the whole, than many men who have got both the one and the other. So, at least, I try to think now, though I started in my youth with as high an ambition as the best of them. Thank God, it is not my business here to speak of past times and their disappointments. A twinge of the old hopeless heartache comes over me sometimes still, when I think of ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various

... wise and beneficent arrangement of government, the Indian tribes have nearly all removed to the Territory specially allotted for their occupancy west of Missouri and Arkansas. The grand error committed in past times in relation to the Indians, and which has been the source of incalculable evils to both races, has been the want of definite, fixed and permanent lines of demarcation betwixt them. It will be seen under the ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck

... individuality in the objects of sense, may, in fact, be profitably extended to all the great political actions of mankind. Many pass, in a popular sense, for pure transcripts or duplicates of similar cases in past times; but, accurately speaking, none are such truly and substantially. Neither are the differences, by which they are severally marked and featured, interesting only to the curiosity or to the spirit of minute research. All public acts in the degree in which they ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey

... question, however, seemed to present no difficulties. It was answered out of hand by the application of an old idea. All down the centuries, whatever their varying phases of cosmogonic thought, there had been ever present the idea that past times were not as recent times; that in remote epochs the earth had been the scene of awful catastrophes that have no parallel in "these degenerate days." Naturally enough, this thought, embalmed in every cosmogonic speculation of whatever origin, was ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... century began with the historical novelist, Sir Walter Scott, full of lore and knowledge, reconstructor and astonishing reviver of past times, more especially the Middle Ages, imbuing all his characters with life, and even in some measure vitalising the objects he evoked. None more than he, not even Byron, has enjoyed such continuous appreciation with both French romantic poets and also the French reading ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet

... following answer: "Do you think I have nothing better to do than to give Bourrienne an audience? that would indeed furnish gossip for Paris and Hamburg. He has always sided with the emigrants; he would be talking to me of past times; he was for Josephine! My wife, Duroc, is near her confinement; I shall have a son, I am sure!... Bourrienne is not a man of the day; I have made giant strides since he left France; in short, I do not want to see him. He is a grumbler by nature; and you know, ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne

... extension of a temple, he was required to perform the ceremony of laying a stone with his own hand. But he always found time to hunt in the desert, to manage the affairs of state, and to visit the most interesting monuments of past times, and at Memphis especially, the city of the dead, with the Pyramids, the great Sphinx, the Serapeum and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... next twenty years my married life was a scene of happiness and prosperity, on which I now look back with a grateful tenderness that no words of mine can express. The memory of my wife is busy at my heart while I think of those past times. The forgotten tears rise in my eyes again, and trouble the course of my pen while it ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins

... anything, save that they thought such and such forms beautiful. So strong is the bond between history and decoration, that in the practice of the latter we cannot, if we would, wholly shake off the influence of past times over what we do at present. I do not think it is too much to say that no man, however original he may be, can sit down to-day and draw the ornament of a cloth, or the form of an ordinary vessel or piece of furniture, that will be other than a development ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris

... into the philosophy of the Upani@sads it may be worth while to say a few words as to the reason why diverse and even contradictory explanations as to the real import of the Upani@sads had been offered by the great Indian scholars of past times. The Upani@sads, as we have seen, formed the concluding portion of the revealed Vedic literature, and were thus called the Vedanta. It was almost universally believed by the Hindus that the highest truths could only be found in ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta

... for a moment, Mr. Dexter, to past times at Gleninch," I said. "You agree with me in believing Eustace to be absolutely innocent of the crime for which he was tried. Your evidence at ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins

... to which it was appropriated. Sequestered, surrounded by pleasing objects, and dignified by the not uncertain evidences of history, it offers to the thinking mind all those interesting sensations which a review of past times, important events, and manners now no ...
— A Walk through Leicester - being a Guide to Strangers • Susanna Watts

... rose up somewhere in the shadowy background of memory—compared with these queens, she looked like an old woman. He saw women whose names will appear in the history of the nineteenth century, women no less famous than the queens of past times for their wit, their beauty, or their lovers; one who passed was the heroine Mlle. des Touches, so well known as Camille Maupin, the great woman of letters, great by her intellect, great no less by her beauty. He overheard the name pronounced ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac

... another detail, we are reminded, of course, of the difference between our own and past times in mimic as in real life. For Prynne one of the great horrors of the stage was the introduction of actresses from France by Henrietta Maria, to take the place of young [84] male actors of whom Dr. Doran has some interesting notices. Who the lady was who first ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater

... saying how she could not be beholden for shawls to any gentleman. I left her there to consult with my shister, did she think there was any thing in it, and my shister thought I was blind to be asking her the question, and I thought my shister must see more into it than I did; and recollecting all past times and every thing, I changed my mind, and came over to her way of thinking, and we settled it that Judy was very like to be my Lady Rackrent after all, if a vacancy should ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth

... are we to impute these disorders, and to what cause assign the decay of a State so powerful and flourishing in past times? The reason is plain. The servant is now become the master. The magistrate was then subservient to the people: all honors, dignities, and preferments, were disposed by the voice and favor of the people; but the magistrate, now, has usurped the right ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... mind of our Moslem friend, from the popular belief current in India that the Feringhis are men of no caste, without religious faith or ceremonies—a belief which the conduct and demeanour of the Anglo-Indians in past times tended, in too many instances, to confirm. Off the southern extremity of Ceylon, the ship was again becalmed for several days; but the tedium of this interval was relieved, not only by the ordinary sea incidents of the capture of a shark and the appearance of a whale, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various

... upon them, which have hitherto depressed their energies, and left them the sport and passive creatures of circumstance. If they have sunk into a state of listlessness, in the first place, from the oppression which their ancestors endured in past times—and if they have continued in that state, from a variety of causes, some of which are faintly shadowed forth in the preceding pages, I yet hope, and most devoutly hope, that the hour and the day are arrived for the first step towards regeneration to be taken. ...
— Suggestions to the Jews - for improvement in reference to their charities, education, - and general government • Unknown

... Morton, the widow of a horse-dealing farmer in the late Mr. Marshall's parish. On discovering the identity of the English governess with the little girl who had admired the foals, lambs, and chickens in past times, Mrs. Morton gave invitations to tea. She was ladylike, the sons unexceptionable, and no objection could reasonably be made by the Misses Lang, though the acquaintance ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge

... of the fifth November his thoughts of Eustacia were intense. Echoes from those past times when they had exchanged tender words all the day long came like the diffused murmur of a seashore left miles behind. "Surely," he said, "she might have brought herself to communicate with me before now, and confess honestly what ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy

... down the next day and writes a leader on the great shipwrecks of past times, the raft scene ...
— David Lockwin—The People's Idol • John McGovern

... with places with Sanskrit names. Not to speak of Singha-pura, there are the islands of Langka-wi and Lingga and the towns of Indragiri and Indrapura, &c. Sumeru (in Java), Madura, Ayuthia (in Siam), and many other names, show how great Indian influences have been in past times in the far East. May it not be, therefore, that Malaya or Malayu[46] was the name by which the earliest Sanskrit-speaking adventurers from India denominated the rude tribes of Sumatra and the peninsula with whom they came in contact, just as Jawi ...
— A Manual of the Malay language - With an Introductory Sketch of the Sanskrit Element in Malay • William Edward Maxwell

... Allah. They call themselves by the same name as the Christians of the North, yet there is as much difference between their Christianity and that of Wesley or of Channing, as between creeds that in past times have vowed mutual extermination. Still we must not call them barbarians because they cherish an institution hostile to civilization. Their highest culture stands out all the more brilliantly from the dark background of ignorance against which it is seen; but it would be injustice to deny that they ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... was followed at once by the family—with the solitary exception of Norah, whose incurable formality and reserve expressed themselves, not too graciously, in her distant manner toward the visitor. The rest, led by Magdalen (who had been Frank's favorite playfellow in past times) glided back into their old easy habits with him without an effort. He was "Frank" with all of them but Norah, who persisted in addressing him as "Mr. Clare." Even the account he was now encouraged to give of the reception accorded to him by his father, on the previous night, failed to disturb ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins

... moments. I was moved a great deal by that sentence in the speech of the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in which he said that the one bright spot in the situation was the changed feeling in Ireland. In past times, when this empire has been engaged in these terrible enterprises it is true—it would be the utmost affectation and folly on my part to deny it—the sympathy of the Nationalists of Ireland, for reasons to be found deep down in centuries of history, has been estranged from this country. But allow ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various

... for example; to Ost-Friesland, as to Holland, they are the first condition of existence; and, in the past times, of extreme Parliamentary vitality, have been slipping a good deal out of repair. Ems River, in those flat rainy countries, has ploughed out for itself a very wide embouchure, as boundary between Groningen and Ost-Friesland. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle

... varying with civilisation, education, race, religion, traditions, customs, and if it be, indeed, the voice of God in man, he cannot but see—in a sense quite different from that intended by the writer—that God "in divers manners spoke in past times". Moreover he observes, as an historical fact, that some of the worst crimes which have disgraced humanity have been done in obedience to the voice of conscience. It is quite clear that Cromwell at Drogheda was obeying conscience, ...
— The Basis of Morality • Annie Besant

... spacious apartments always makes itself to be felt; I at least feel it, and I listen for the sound of my footsteps as I have done at midnight to the ticking of the death- watch, encouraging a kind of fanciful superstition. Every object carried me back to past times, and impressed the manners of the age forcibly on my mind. In this point of view the preservation of old palaces and their tarnished furniture is useful, for they may be considered as ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft

... speak for themselves and afford an incontestable proof of the value of punishment as a remedial measure when other remedies have failed.[33] In the re-action which is now in full force, and rightly so, against the excessive punishments of past times, there is a marked tendency among some minds to go to the opposite extreme, and an attempt is being made to show that imprisonment has hardly any curative effect at all. Its evils, and from the very nature of things they are not a few, are ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison

... reflects not on these past times, so full of innocence and happiness. Instead, wild with rage, and wretched as he is angry, he stays not to reflect at all; but hastily, and little better than half-dressed, he rushes forth from his toldo, calling ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid

... this peculiarity attached to it, that a slight state of intoxication very often enhances the remembrance of past times and scenes, whereby all the circumstances connected with them are recalled more distinctly than they could be in a state of sobriety; on the other hand, the recollection of what one said or did while in a state of intoxication is less clear than usual, nay, ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer

... pointed out that the grant of the greatest part of his Civil List revenues had now run out, and that it would be necessary for the House of Commons to make a new provision for the support of him and of his family. "I am persuaded," said the King, "that the experience of past times and a due regard to the honor and dignity of the Crown will prevail upon you to give me this first proof of your zeal and affection in a manner answerable to the necessities of my Government." Then the King withdrew, and Lord Chesterfield ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy

... arrangements, meagrely planned and uncertainly handled, for commemorating past times and past events, there can scarcely have existed at this epoch any other records immediately serviceable for Roman history. Of private chronicles we find no trace. The leading houses, however, were careful to draw up genealogical ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... Roman power, and among all these races, there existed, and in some part of them there yet exists, that excellence which alone is to be desired and justly to be praised. Wherefore, if any man being born in one of these countries should exalt past times over present, he might be mistaken; but any who, living at the present day in Italy or Greece, has not in Italy become an ultramontane or in Greece a Turk, has reason to complain of his own times, and to commend those others, in which ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli

... measure of Revelation, as if no part of theological teaching were true which cannot bring its express text, as it is called, from Scripture, and authorities from the Fathers or profane writers,—whereas there are numberless facts in past times which we cannot deny, for they are indisputable, though history is silent about them. I suppose, on this score, we ought to deny that the round towers of this country had any origin, because history does not disclose it; or that any individual came from Adam who cannot produce the table of ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman

... of the Spanish Main. That segment of continent washed by the tempestuous Caribbean, and presenting to the sea a formidable border of tropical jungle topped by the overweening Cordilleras, is still begirt by mystery and romance. In past times buccaneers and revolutionists roused the echoes of its cliffs, and the condor wheeled perpetually above where, in the green groves, they made food for him with their matchlocks and toledos. Taken and retaken ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry

... closing passage of the "Introduction" referred to in the above letter Lord Russell gives a modest estimate of his own career: "My capacity I always felt was very inferior to that of the men who have attained in past times the foremost place in our Parliament, and in the Councils of our Sovereign. I have committed many errors, some of them very gross blunders. But the generous people of England are always forbearing and forgiving to those statesmen who have the good of their country at heart; like my betters, ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell

... Fakenham, a real knight and chevalier of those past times, would not let her mount the downs to have her farewell view of the big ships unaccompanied by him; and partly and largely in pure chivalry, no doubt; but her young idea of England's grandeur, as shown in her great vessels of war, thrilled him, too, and restored ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... definite testimony respecting the canon is given by Josephus towards the end of the first century A.D. "For we have not an innumerable multitude of books among us, ... but only twenty-two books, which contain the records of all the past times; which are justly believed to be divine. And of them five belong to Moses.... But as to the time from the death of Moses till the reign of Artaxerxes, king of Persia, the prophets who were after Moses wrote down ...
— The Canon of the Bible • Samuel Davidson

... we may imagine how they have sunk below the ancient standard; in past times it was a national institution that the land-owner should furnish troopers from his own estate, and men were bound to go on active service, while the garrison troops in the country received regular pay; but now the Persian grandees have manufactured a new type of cavalry, who earn their ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon

... and Balue have hearts as hardened as the nether millstone; and my life is embittered by remorse and penances for the crimes they make me commit. Thou, Sir Philip, possessed of the wisdom of present and past times, canst teach how to become great without ceasing to ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott

... the roads once more available for travelling, the Fair of the locality was looked forward to with interest. Fairs were among the most important institutions of past times, and were rendered necessary by the imperfect road communications. The right of holding them was regarded as a valuable privilege, conceded by the sovereign to the lords of the manors, who adopted all manner of devices to draw crowds to their markets. They were usually held ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles

... where our political athletes contend, and where, by daily observation of their faces, daily hearing of their voices, daily notice of their manners, one becomes familiar as if by personal acquaintance with the heroes of the day. In past times the heroes were such as Webster, Calhoun and Clay. Now they are others—men whom this belittling age of the telegraph and the reporter brings so near us that there is at least little chance of their ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various

... the sign of past time and is used as a prefix to nouns, as well as a suffix to verbs. Kubakanan ancestors, those passed away, those who lived in past times. ...
— The Arawack Language of Guiana in its Linguistic and Ethnological Relations • Daniel G. Brinton

... your dear father's departure from amongst you; and I cannot refrain from at once writing and begging you to accept the sincere sympathy and inevitable regret which I feel for your loss. The disappearance of an old friend brings up the long past times vividly to my remembrance—the time when, impelled by irresistible spiritual necessity, I strove to lead a useful but unusual life, and was able to face, with the energy of youth, both social prejudice and the hindrance of poverty. I have to recall those early days ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... Silvio was still at work for Prince Doria and the Fieschi, but he again begs earnestly to be taken back by Michelangelo. "I feel what obligations I am under for all the kindness received from you in past times. When I remember the love you bore me while I was in your service, I do not know how I could repay it; and I tell you that only through having been in your service, wherever I may happen now to be, honour and courtesy are paid me; and that is wholly ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds

... and feelings of the peoples of past times found expression in this way, and are preserved in literature. But our ideas and feelings, so seeking ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... wear lace and drink wine with their meals, and another class consists of sizars, or servitors, who wear badges, as being poor, and are never allowed to take their food with their fellow-students. That arrangements fit for past times are not fit for these is true enough. Consequently they should gradually be changed; and from day to day are changed. But there is no snobbishness in this. Was the fellow-commoner a snob when he acted in accordance ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope

... laid before parliament a list of port dues; some of them were higher than before, and to counterbalance the increase he proposed to give several new advantages to colonial trade. Payment was no longer to be evaded so easily as in past times, and smuggling would be attended with greater risk. The money was to be paid into the English treasury and was to be used only for colonial defence. More would be wanted for that purpose, and he proposed to ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt

... parts also of continental Europe, with regard to the moral and spiritual merits or demerits of Becket, as a subject of the realm and a Christian minister. It is, moreover, only by becoming familiar in all their details with some such remains of past times, that we can form any adequate idea of the great and deplorable extent to which the legends had banished the reading and expounding of Holy Scriptures from our churches; and also how much the praises of mortal man had encroached upon those hours of public worship, which ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler

... not the scenery, or the geology, or the flora of the province, however marvellous these may be, that constitutes the chief interest for the traveller through these Dauphiny valleys, so much as the human endurance, suffering, and faithfulness of the people who have lived in them in past times, and of which so many interesting remnants still survive. For Dauphiny forms a principal part of the country of the ancient Vaudois or Waldenses—literally, the people inhabiting the Vaux, or valleys—who ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles

... everywhere in the City. Many of the electrical amusements provided appear grander from the contrast with the darkness they are made to displace—a contrast scarcely greater than that depicted by our "Nature Delineators" when, in allegory, they paint the present contrasted with past times; the later years of my reign ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)

... could not bring himself to call it by its true name, crime, and fasten it on the man there and then. There was a high-bred delicacy about David Lawrence, a little of the old knightly chivalry that in past times held a man back from striking a fallen foe. And then he was not quite sure. The dishonorable work lay between the two men, and he forbore to ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas

... Barbary, and strengthened by numerous Christian slaves or Mamlukes, trained to serve their captors in arms against their own countrymen. With forces thus constituted, did Al-mansur, in whom once more shone forth the spirit of the Arab conquerors of past times, invade the Christian territories in each spring and autumn for twenty-six successive years, carrying the Moslem arms in triumph even to the shores of the "Green Sea," (Atlantic Ocean,) and into regions which Tarik and Musa had never reached. Astorga ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various

... is, I feel out of spirits now if I think of papa; I am not easy in my mind about him. When he is very much interested, there is a quivering in his face which I don't remember in past times. He seems to have got older and thinner, all on a sudden. He shouts (which he never used to do) when he threatens sinners at sermon-time. Being in dreadful earnest about our souls, he is of course obliged to speak of the devil; but he never ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins

... tolerant than had been customary, not to Roman abuses, but to Roman authoritative language, it was part of the more accurate and the more temperate and charitable thought of our day compared with past times. It was part of the same change which has brought Church opinions from the unmitigated Calvinism of the Lambeth Articles to what the authorities of those days would have denounced, without a doubt, as Arminianism. Hooker was gravely and seriously accused ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church

... duplicate copy of Florio, which the British Museum purchased, with a view of protecting the Shakspeare autograph (as I was informed in the Museum), turned out to have the autograph of Ben Jonson in the fly-leaf. Leigh Hunt relates of Lord Byron, that Montaigne was the only great writer of past times whom he read with avowed satisfaction. Other coincidences, not needful to be mentioned here, concurred to make this old Gascon still new ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... bid and to buy. A rare possession indeed, not without a high, stern kind of beauty! It would be wonderful to possess such a faith; but what had I to offer that Shadowy Auctioneer? What coin that would redeem past times and departed beliefs? ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson

... were scarce in bleeding France, and all sorts of ways were used to raise them. In the past times when Louis XIV had by relentless extravagance and wars depleted the purse, he caused the patiently wrought precious metals to be melted into bullion. Why not now resort to a similar method? So thought a minister of one of the Two Chambers, and suggested ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee

... distinguished foreigners; here a respectable, elderly Signora invited me in vain to follow her into Tuscany, foreseeing, she said, the misfortunes that would befall me if I remained at Milan. What affecting recollections! How rapidly past times came thronging over my memory, ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico

... blacksmith, smiling at the curiosity he had excited, "a young lady opened the door to me, but so lovely, so beautifully and gracefully dressed, that you would have taken her for a beautiful portrait of past times. Before I could say a word, she exclaimed, 'Ah! dear me, sir, you have brought back Frisky; how happy Miss Adrienne will be! Come, pray come in instantly; she would so regret not having an opportunity to thank you in person!' And without giving me time to reply, she beckoned me to follow her. ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue

... mannerisms, conceits, and the affectations of originality,—if they can keep religious faith undimmed by the "world's slow stain"; then we may expect from the school such works of painting as have not been seen in past times,—works which shall be the forerunners of a new period of Art, and shall show what undreamed conquests yet lie open before it,—works which shall take us into regions of yet undiscovered beauty, and reveal to us more and more of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... practise the reading of old clefs, otherwise many treasures of past times will remain a ...
— Advice to Young Musicians. Musikalische Haus- und Lebens-Regeln • Robert Schumann

... selection we can clearly understand the full meaning of that old canon in natural history, 'Natura non facit saltum.' This canon, if we look only to the present inhabitants of the world is not strictly correct, but if we include all those of past times, it must BY MY THEORY be ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler

... lamented over them with a sense of personal disgrace in them, and to this day I have no patience with that code of the world which relaxes itself in behalf of the brilliant and gifted offender; rather he should suffer more blame. The worst of the literature of past times, before an ethical conscience began to inform it, or the advance of the race compelled it to decency, is that it leaves the mind foul with filthy images and base thoughts; but what I have been trying to say is that the boy, unless he is exceptionally depraved beforehand, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... or into some part of the masonry as magical nails destined to preserve the bricks from destruction, and consequently to keep the memory of the dedicator continually before posterity. Stelaa engraved on both sides recalled the wars of past times, the battle-field, the scenes of horror which took place there, and the return of the victor and his triumph. Sitting or standing figures of diorite, silicious sandstone or hard limestone, bearing inscriptions ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... Catherick. Miss Fairlie's recollections of the little scholar at Limmeridge were, however, only of the most vague and general kind. She remembered the likeness between herself and her mother's favourite pupil, as something which had been supposed to exist in past times; but she did not refer to the gift of the white dresses, or to the singular form of words in which the child had artlessly expressed her gratitude for them. She remembered that Anne had remained at Limmeridge for a few months only, and ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins

... the habit of regarding as the greatest Latin writers were born. That literature abounded with metrical romances, such as are found in every country where there is much curiosity and intelligence, but little reading and writing. All human beings, not utterly savage, long for some information about past times, and are delighted by narratives which present pictures to the eye of the mind. But it is only in very enlightened communities that books are readily accessible. Metrical composition, therefore, which, in a highly civilized nation, is a mere luxury, is, in nations ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... Sub-Prior, so on the Feast of St. James the Apostle, before the hour for Vespers, Brother Thomas of Kempen was nominated and elected after a brief scrutiny. He was one of the elders, being sixty-seven years of age, and in past times had been appointed to this office, and albeit he knew himself to be insufficient and would have made excuse, yet he did submit him humbly to the assembled Brothers, for his obedience bade him so to do; neither did he refuse to undergo toil on their behalf for the love of Christ Jesus, ...
— The Chronicle of the Canons Regular of Mount St. Agnes • Thomas a Kempis

... under the sycamore tree, Zacchaeus would begin to feel uncomfortable. He may have had experience in past times of the way in which the great doctors of orthodoxy were in the habit of treating a publican, and may have begun to be afraid that this new one was going to be like all the rest, and elicit some kind of mob demonstration ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... almost as fine as the more famous one in the Carmagnola; both are incomparably finer than anything else in the tragedies and are much more dramatic than the dialogue. It is in the emotion of a spectator belonging to our own time rather than in that of an actor of those past times that the poet shows his dramatic strength; and whenever he speaks abstractly for country and humanity he moves us in a way that permits ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells

... subjects are below the dignity of the church, we might reply that the church is bound to help us for the reason that the present state of things is partly owing to her efforts. The ministers of the church in past times have labored to convince people that this life for its own sake is of little account; that we were placed here, not to develop the faculties and enjoy the pleasures which pertain to this stage of our existence, but solely to prepare for another. They have taught that ...
— A Domestic Problem • Abby Morton Diaz

... at this reply sent a pang through Stephen as great as any he had felt at the sight of Elfride. The words about shortness of time were literally true, but their tone was far from being so. He would have been gratified to talk with Knight as in past times, and saw as a dead loss to himself that, to save the woman who cared nothing for him, he was deliberately throwing ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy

... at this time. That accomplished man was an addition to our society, and was received most affectionately by the family of Lafayette. I have often contemplated with great pleasure, Mr. Fox, General Fitzpatrick and M. de Lafayette walking in the long shady grove near the chateau, speaking of past times, the war in America, and the revolution in France. The rare sight of three such characters was grateful to any one who felt friendly to the cause of civil liberty, and valued men for their services to humanity, rather than ...
— Memoirs of General Lafayette • Lafayette

... work into his hands, and made a Government job of it; how Bedford died, and the fen-men looked on him as a martyr; how Oliver Cromwell arose to avenge the good earl, as his family had supported him in past times; how Oliver St. John came to the help of the fen-men, and drew up the so-called 'Pretended Ordinance' of 1649, which was a compromise between Vermuyden and the adventurers, so able and useful that Charles II.'s Government were content ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley

... are going to sing of the things of yesterday, let us begin with what God did for us in past times. My beloved brethren, you will find it a sweet subject for song at times, to begin to sing of electing love and covenanted mercies. When thou thyself art low, it is well to sing of the fountain-head of mercy; ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser

... to bring the mind into such a condition of training and cultivation that it shall be a perfect mirror of past times, and of the present, so far as the incompleteness of the present will permit, 'in true outline and proportion.' Mommsen, Grote, Droysen, fall short of the ideal, because they drugged ancient history with modern politics. The Jesuit learning of the sixteenth ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley

... her in the end, and I shall if she is to be got; for the men of my blood soon make up their minds when they want a thing, and they do not rest much until it's theirs. This peculiarity has often landed them in trouble in past times, and may land me in trouble now; but I'm ready for the risk, ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson

... them, and told them pleasant tales of past times and far countries, and was blithe to them and they to her and the time wore on toward ...
— The House of the Wolfings - A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse • William Morris

... moisture in his eyes as he folded them to his heart and said, "God bless you! God protect you, my dear ones!" Those melodies of past times had brought their mother before him in all her loving trustfulness, and his soul was full of sorrow for the irreparable wrong he had done ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child

... staring strangely around him. "Art thou here with me, and none other? Verily, past times were present to me, and I deemed that I was to make a funeral prayer, as many a time heretofore, from the head of this staircase. Of a truth, I saw the shades of many that are gone. Yea, I have prayed at their burials, one after another, and the Old ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... grandfather was Captain Fitzpatrick, of a good old Scottish family, which had in past times married with the Stuarts. Captain Fitzpatrick had been American consul at a port in southern Spain. He had a particularly charming daughter, who made a brilliant Spanish marriage, her husband being the Count de Teba ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer

... remote areas of his soul, out of past times of his now weary life, a sound stirred up. It was a word, a syllable, which he, without thinking, with a slurred voice, spoke to himself, the old word which is the beginning and the end of all prayers of the Brahmans, the holy "Om", which roughly ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse

... 110. The island of Elbo, according to Herodotus, who gives a curious account of the Egyptian marshes and their inhabitants, had been constructed of cinders, in long past times, by a king who lay concealed for fifty years from the Ethiopians; but no man knew its situation, till it was again brought to light, after having been lost for five hundred ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various

... of this family, have had a great national existence, and their national music echoes its history and its character. The heartstirring strains of their mazurkas make many a bosom beat and ache as they remind the listeners of past times. Polish music is the voice of a light-minded, brave-hearted people who lived in a gay turmoil and drained with eager lips and reckless spirits the cup of glory and of joy. The Polish polkas and mazurkas, with their changing and fugitive rhythmus ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various

... Western. It still enjoys a lucrative trade, and has recently opened new docks at the mouth of the Avon, seven miles below the city, so that this venerable port may be considered as renewing its prosperous career. It has over two hundred thousand population, and in past times had the honor of being represented in Parliament by Edmund Burke. When ancient Bristol was in its heyday, Macaulay says the streets were so narrow that a coach or cart was in danger of getting wedged between the buildings or falling ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook

... also foolish. It would be well to prescribe a severe course of Burke for the a priori theorists, and while they are occupied with it, set ourselves to the real work. We should not forget, too, that Court influence, which in some past times fostered corruption in political life, has for eighty years been as a rule a purifying influence. It would not be easy for any Minister, pressed by the political exigencies of the hour, to submit, even for formal approval, to a sovereign who has only the national interest to think of, ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson

... connected with the following anecdote of past times; for I am obliged to relate a story. In our times, and in our country, which I hope you love as much as I do, for as far as I am concerned, I am ready to shed the last drop of ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... great picture hung a most exquisite portrait by Vandyke; an elderly, bearded man, of noble and refined countenance, in a rich, grave dress. There are many other pictures of distinguished men of the company, in long past times, and of some of the kings and great people of England, all darkened with age, and producing a rich and sombre effect, in this stately old hall. Nothing is more curious in London than these ancient localities and customs of the City Companies,—each trade and profession having its ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... every soul of man. And after generations have drawn from Him, the water will not have sunk one hairsbreadth in the great fountain, but there will be enough for all coming eternities as there has been enough for all past times. He is like His own miracle—the thousands are gathered on the grass, they do 'all eat and are filled.' As their necessities required the bread was multiplied, and at the last there was more left than there had seemed to be at the beginning. So 'of His fulness ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren

... thoroughfares of the great metropolis; and to whom it points out in a manner which we have correctly designated gossiping, pleasant, and suggestive, "such sites and edifices as have been rendered classical by the romantic or literary associations of past times." ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 48, Saturday, September 28, 1850 • Various

... reproachfully; "don't even think of such a thing while that poor man lies at death's door. I'm sure Mr. Sheldon hasn't any thoughts of that kind. He told me before Mr. and Mrs. Halliday came to town that he and Miss Georgy had forgotten all about past times." ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon

... stored with much acquired information and natural talent, and as she was very old, and had an excellent memory, she could draw, without the least exaggeration or affectation, the most striking pictures of the past age. If I have been able to do anything in the way of painting the past times, it is very much from the studies with which she presented me. She connected a long period of time with the present generation, for she remembered, and had often spoken with, a person who perfectly recollected the battle ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton

... me questions about England, Montenegro's friend in past times of trouble, and seemed surprised to hear that I had seen snow before ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon

... Carlyle as "the youngest born of Eternity, child and heir of all the past times, with their good and evil, and parent of all the future with new questions and significance," on the right or wrong understanding of which depend the issues of life or death to us all, the sphinx ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... Were a Protestant vintner to sell his ale beneath a picture of Catholics burning in hell, I fear we should never hear the last of it. But I must say, that these pictures seemed the production of past times. They were one and all sorely faded, as if their owners were beginning to be somewhat ashamed of them, or lacked zeal to repair them. The conducteur of the stage had an Italian translation of Mr Gladstone's well-known ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie

... appeals to the absent Pompey. After concluding his speech at a late hour, he said that he would not ask for our votes lest he might burden us with a personal controversy; he quite understood the sentiments of the senate from the denunciations of past times and the silence on the present occasion. Milo spoke. Lupus begins the formula of dismissal,[423] when Marcellinus says: "Don't infer from our silence, Lupus, what we approve or disapprove of at this particular time. As far as I am ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... custom, and arrangement was modified; and how the consensus of preceding structures and functions was developed into the consensus of succeeding ones. Such alone is the kind of information respecting past times which can be of service to the citizen for the regulation of his conduct. The only history that is of practical value is what may be called Descriptive Sociology. And the highest office which the historian can discharge, is that of so narrating ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer

... began chatting eagerly together about past times, while I sat by my mother as she held my hand, and I told her the history of my escapade, which was hardly finished when ...
— Burr Junior • G. Manville Fenn

... in the Church, there is little of that moral earnestness in the life of the nation which in past times laid the foundations both of English character and of English greatness. We are becoming swiftly, I think, a light and flippant people, the only seriousness in our midst the economic seriousness of our depressed classes. It is not to any other class in the community that the zealot ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie

... Triggvison had until this time lived always in the firm hope that when he died he would be admitted into the shining hall of Valhalla, where he might expect to meet all the great heroes of past times. He believed that Odin would receive him there, and reward him well for all the glorious deeds that he had done. So he was not at all willing to abandon this Norseman's faith in a future life which, as men promised, should be full of warfare ...
— Olaf the Glorious - A Story of the Viking Age • Robert Leighton

... faith in this world? That is, Can it have been his will that all visible signs of himself should be withdrawn from us; and that we should be left only with the record and the evidence of his mighty works done in our behalf in past times; and with that other evidence of his wisdom and power which is afforded by the ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold

... favor to so large a part of the Czar's people. Slavs there were in plenty to menace the allied German Powers, even if there were not allied French arms, on Germany's other flank, and Britain's naval supremacy to cope with. Slavs in past times had spread over all of eastern Europe, from the Arctic to the Adriatic and the Aegean Seas. Their continuity was long ago broken into by an intrusion of Magyars. Finns, and Roumanians, leaving a northern Slavic section composed of North Russians, Poles, Czechs, ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall

... selection we can clearly understand the full meaning of that old canon in natural history, "Natura non facit saltum." This canon, if we look to the present inhabitants alone of the world, is not strictly correct; but if we include all those of past times, whether known or unknown, it must on this theory be ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin

... of the southern branch of this great family; and the much more limited patrimony and alliances of this new quasi-dynasty rendered its personal power very inferior to that of the northern branch, and consequently lessened the influence possessed by the ruling family in past times. In Ireland the connections, more or less numerous, by blood relationship with the great families, always exercised a powerful influence over the body of the nation in rendering it docile and amenable to the ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud

... Friday, the 4th of March. The three old members concurred in it, and it was signed by all the six in order of seniority. The mere fact of this concurrence affords strong evidence of the growth of the power of public opinion in the Province. In past times members of the Executive Council had been content to pose as figure-heads year after year, while John Beverley Robinson and one or two others manipulated and directed the whole course of public affairs. It is probable, ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent

... that peril attach to individuals and families alone. It stands, a fearful beacon, in the experience of Cities, Republics, and Empires. The lessons of past times, on this subject, are emphatic and solemn. The history of wealth has always been a history of corruption and downfall. The people never existed that could stand the trial. Boundless profusion is too little likely to spread for any people the theatre ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... citizen! look out! (looking at him) But I say, what's the matter with you? You are queerly rigged. Why, I haven't seen a man in such a condition for many a long day. You're like an ancient ruin, a dream of past times. No, really I don't mean to hurt your feelings. Can I do anything to ...
— The Tables Turned - or, Nupkins Awakened. A Socialist Interlude • William Morris

... difficulty from lack of facts. That every existing organism has been developed out of the simple into the complex, is indeed the first established truth of all; and that every organism which existed in past times was similarly developed, is an inference no physiologist will hesitate to draw. But when we pass from individual forms of life to Life in general, and inquire whether the same law is seen in the ensemble of its manifestations,—whether modern plants and animals are of more heterogeneous ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer

... where he is gone, and why he went, and why he did not stay until after luncheon; and Violet explains patiently, recalling past times when the child has been almost inconsolable. She is so solaced by her message that she does not think ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas

... to be an exceptive power. He who thinks it possible to dash off a profoundly coloured and shaded narrative like this of Thierry's will find himself bitterly wrong. Even a great philosophical view may much more easily be extemporised than this lasting and finished image of past times. ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis

... connected with Thorpe Ambrose, not even the visit from Mr. Bashwood, which was to come with the evening, being referred to by either of them. All through the dinner they drifted further and further back into the old endless talk of past times about ships and sailing. When the butler withdrew from his attendance at table, he came downstairs with a nautical problem on his mind, and asked his fellow-servants if they any of them knew the relative merits "on a wind" and "off a wind" of ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins

... Dieppe, is still inhabited almost exclusively by fishermen, who, in past times, more especially, have ever been solid and faithful Christians. The Catholic worship was formerly celebrated with much solemnity in their church, consecrated under the invocation of "Our Lady of the Beach" (Notre Dame des Greves); and the mothers of ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier

... who was nursing her, she sent for two men who in past times had been favoured lovers. They came to her at once, whilst her husband was gone away to fetch a doctor and an apothecary, as she had begged him ...
— One Hundred Merrie And Delightsome Stories - Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles • Various

... in the Spanish race has been shown in their mining methods, and the native population of Mexico, and in a larger scale of Peru, suffered severely at their hands. Guanajuato, one of the most famous and richest of the mining centres of Mexico—in past times as to-day—bears in its archives the stories of oppression which marked the methods of the Spaniards, and may be taken as a concrete example. It was a system of slavery under which these mines were worked—an atrocious ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock

... the virtuous and the wise.' Johnson's Works, viii. 57. Writing to Mrs. Thrale on July 8, 1771, he says, 'I would have been glad to go to Hagley [close to Stourbridge] for I should have had the opportunity of recollecting past times, and wandering per montes notos et flumina nota, of recalling the images of sixteen, and reviewing my conversations with poor Ford.' Piozzi Letters, i. 42. See also ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill

... conceded, for the sake of argument, that such indulgence might be a fatal error; but he insisted that if Pitt's character was to be blackened because he used parliamentary corruption, the same censure ought in justice to be extended to the greatest monarchs of past times, Louis XIV., Joseph II., Frederic the Great, who, to serve their own ends, outraged the immovable principles of humanity and morality in a far graver manner than could be laid to the charge of the illustrious statesman who consolidated the ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco

... this Duchess began, and of several particulars of the Court of the late King, which have a great relation to things that are acted at present." "Far from blaming you," replied the Princess of Cleves, "for repeating the histories of past times, I lament, Madam, that you have not instructed me in those of the present, nor informed me as to the different interests and parties of the Court. I am so entirely ignorant of them, that I thought a few days ago, the Constable was very well with the Queen." ...
— The Princess of Cleves • Madame de La Fayette

... things? The answer is, that names (proper names) have very few associations, very few strings, or clues, leading to them. It is easy to see this; for suppose you moved away from the neighborhood of that sleigh-ride many years before, and in thinking over past times find yourself unable to recall the name of the Corners where the store stood. The place can be remembered perfectly, and a thousand circumstances connected with it, but they furnish no clue to the name: the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various

... composers, but devour them critically while the public is so indifferent. The resume of the whole criticism of the opposition may be summed up in the following words: "All the heroes of Art in past times find, alas! no worthy successors in our day." But our time will not give up its rights—and the rightful successors will ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated

... wore on. Sometimes she stole to the window, and looked out on the sleeping city, on the peaceful Arno which was bathed in silvery moonlight, and on the old, irregular houses, thinking what struggles and agonies this place had witnessed in past times, and realizing what an infinitesimal bit of the world's sufferings she was called to bear. Sometimes she lighted a candle and read, sometimes prayed, but for the most part just lay still, silently enduring, learning, though she did ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall

... are alike mere approximations to the truth—the Sequoia was a well developed race 10,000,000 of years ago. It became one of a large family, including fourteen genera. The master genus—the Sequoia—alone includes thirty extinct species. It was distributed in past times through Canada, Alaska, Greenland, British Columbia, across Siberia, and down into southern Europe. The Ice Age, and perhaps competition with other trees more successful in seeding down, are responsible for the fact that there are now only two living species—the "red wood," or Sequoia ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various

... over and the dishes washed, they discussed the advisability of establishing a guard as they had done when danger threatened them in past times. ...
— The Ranger Boys and the Border Smugglers • Claude A. Labelle

... new and strange world, is the last at the old masters; David, some sixteen years his junior, is the first of the moderns. Now if we look for the most fundamental distinction between our modern art and the art of past times, I believe we shall find it to be this: the art of the past was produced for a public that wanted it and understood it, by artists who understood and sympathized with their public; the art of our time has been, for the most part, produced for a public that did not want it and ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox

... to those Englishmen in past times who anticipated the taste of the present day in respect to laying out grounds, to mention the ever respected name of John Evelyn, and as all other writers before me, I believe, who have treated upon gardening, have ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson

... high began to beat with a sound like thunder against the tremendous cliff, making the earth tremble under him. At length he came to a spot where there was a great gap in the line of the cliff, where in past times a portion of it had tumbled down, and the stupendous masses of rock had rolled far out into the sea, and now formed islands of black jagged rock, standing high above the water. Here among the rocks the sea boiled ...
— A Little Boy Lost • Hudson, W. H.

... ladies continued their good work. It was one of the cardinal points of their creed, that it was not good for the criminals to have much intercourse with their friends outside. In past times unlimited beer had been carried into Newgate; at least the quantity so disposed of was only limited by the amount of ready cash or credit at the disposal of the criminals and their friends. This had been stopped with the happiest results, and now it seemed time to adopt some measures which ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman

... a Kingdom depends not only upon the King and the laws and ordinances of the Kingdom, but also upon the loyal obedience of the subjects. And the subjects of "The Kingdom of Heaven" have, in past times, so far forgotten this duty, that it has come to pass that for centuries the great branches of the Church of Christ have had little, if any, outward communion or fellowship with one another. And in our own country the professed members of Christ are divided into many bodies, not only independent ...
— The Kingdom of Heaven; What is it? • Edward Burbidge

... that subsequently, the females from the danger incurred during incubation, and the young from being inexperienced, had been rendered dull as a protection. But this view is not supported by any evidence, and is not probable; for we thus in imagination expose during past times the females and the young to danger, from which it has subsequently been necessary to shield their modified descendants. We have, also, to reduce, through a gradual process of selection, the females and the young to almost exactly the same tints and ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin

... of criminals I am aware of in past times as having specially tormented myself—the class who have left secrets, riddles, behind them. What business has any man to bequeath a conundrum to all posterity, unless he leaves in some separate channel ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... noise after their deaths who did not do so while they were living. Posterity could not be supposed to rake into the records of past times for the illustrious obscure, and only ratify or annul the lists of great names handed down to them by the voice of common fame. Few people recover from the neglect or obloquy of their contemporaries. The public ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou

... several departments charged with the duty of preparing the various votes will proceed with that work. The financial basis alluded to is, of course, found in the estimates of the previous year, modified by the new conditions that arise. There has been in past times a haphazard character in our shipbuilding programmes, but with the introduction of the Naval Defence Act of 1889, which looked ahead and was not content with hand-to-mouth provision, a better state of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... pane of glass in all the dozen cabins, and it will readily be seen that the place gave rise to no very cheerful fancies. I wondered that the Colonel did not have the houses pulled down; they were not a souvenir of past times which I myself should have ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster

... the dwellers and inhabitants of the same cities and boroughs are commonly bakers, vintners, fishmongers, and other victuallers, and there remain few others to bear the offices." Men have such a propensity to exalt past times above the present, that it seems dangerous to credit this reasoning of the parliament without further evidence to support it. So different are the views in which the same object appears, that some may be inclined to draw an opposite inference from this fact. A more regular police was ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume

... in his three sons. They told his stories precisely as he did himself, taking as long in the telling, and making the points in exactly the same way. By and by they will come to think that they themselves were of those past times. Already the young ones look ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie

... less often than in past times. In the coppersmith's great household she commonly had her hands full, and I felt indeed that her face was changed towards me. A kind of fear, which I had not marked in her of old, had come over her ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... the count, with a caressing suavity—and he kissed his sister's forehead. "Possibly; but, by my honour, I wish to repair to you any wrong, real or supposed, I may have done you in past times. I wish to find again my own dear sister. I may over-value your aid, but not the affection from which it comes. Let us be friends, cara Beatrice mia," added the count, for the ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... nobly or die bravely. The young knights from many lands are seeking the Holy Grail, and finding it in forgetfulness of self and in sacrifice for their fellows. You and I are living to-day among the deeds of men that make the deeds of the heroes of past times pale into insignificance. Never were there bred men of such large and heroic mould as the ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett

... to walk up and down the room. Ellen soon came to his side, and leaning upon his arm as she had been used to do in past times, walked up and down with him, at ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell

... of baptism and pouring libations among different peoples. I may, however, refer the reader to an article by Mr. Elsdon Best, entitled "Ceremonial Performances Pertaining to Birth, as Performed by the Maori of New Zealand in Past Times" (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. XLIV, 1914, p. 127), which sheds a clear light upon ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... the realm of this inhospitable potentate into the territories of the Rajah of Jalone, the once noted patron and protector of Thuggee, by whose agent he was most politely received at Mahoba, a once splendid but now ruined city, celebrated for its artificial lakes, which in long-past times were formed by a famous Rajpoot prince named Purmal, by damming up the narrow gorges of the hills. "Never had I seen, in the plains of India, a prospect more enchanting! Conceive a beautiful sheet of calm, clear, silvery water, of several miles in circumference, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various



Words linked to "Past times" :   auld langsyne, history, future, good old days, yore, yesterday, time, water under the bridge, bygone, langsyne, old times, time out of mind, time immemorial, old



Copyright © 2024 e-Free Translation.com