"Black-letter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... When to the table-phrase more than one number is placed, then expect not that the same black-letter word is always to be found in the book to the last number, as is to the first number, but it may be some other black or marked word of like meaning; as for antichrist the black-lettered word in some places is harlot, and for ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... old black-letter volume published in London in 1632, entitled "The Lawes and Resolutions of Women's Rights," says, "the reason why women have no control in Parliament, why they make no laws, consent to none, abrogate none, is their ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... narrow streets and overhanging roofs, there were countless abbeys and priories and convents; and thousands of men and women lived the life of prayer and praise and austerity and miracle and vision which is described in the legends of the Saints. We lingered in the pillared cloisters where the black-letter chronicles were written in Latin, and music was scored and hymns were composed, and many a rare manuscript was illuminated in crimson and blue and emerald and gold; and we looked through the fair arches into the cloister-garth where in the green sward a grave lay ever ready to receive the remains ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... time. My salary has increased steadily year by year; it has now reached a sum that enables me to hope for speedy relief from those financial worries which encompass the head of a numerous household. By the practice of rigid economy in family expenses I have been able to accumulate a large number of black-letter books and a fine collection of curios, including some fifty pieces of mediaeval armor. We have lived in rented houses all these years, but at no time has Alice abandoned the hope and the ambition of having ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... took the few florins he had saved up, bade his master farewell, and went on his way begging—a little fourteenth-century boy, with long, straight hair, and a girdled tunic, as you see them," continued the priest, "in the miniatures in the black-letter missal that lies upon my desk. No doubt heaven favored him very strongly, and the saints watched over him; still, without the boldness of his own courage and the faith in his own heart, they would not have done so. I suppose, too, that when knights in their armor, and ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... up from the thick and crabbed black-letter pages, "why forever is forever, child—always. Pray do not trouble me with such questions; just as I am in the midst of this beautiful ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... the scanty tale, and those of the young at least are almost always worth while. At Siena, for instance, in the great Dominican church, even with the impassioned work of Sodoma at hand, you may linger in a certain dimly lit chapel to spell out the black-letter memorials of the German students who died here—aetatis flore!—at the University, famous early in the last century; young nobles chiefly, far from the Rhine, from Nuremberg, or Leipsic. Note one in particular! ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... vol. i. 1883; vol. ii. 1893). It is one of the results of the unlucky fancy of scholars for re-editing already accessible texts instead of devoting themselves to anecdota, that work of the first interest, like Perceforest, for instance, is left to black-letter, which, not to mention its costliness, is impossible to weak eyes; even where it is not left to manuscript, which is ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... Captain, shaking me off as soon as he had regained his equilibrium. "You do not mean to inherit that infamous crotchet my brother has got into his head? You do not mean to exchange Sir William de Caxton, who fought and fell at Bosworth, for the mechanic who sold black-letter pamphlets ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the blunder uncorrected in his Eccles. Hist. iii. 53. Again, can it be affirmed that the folio impression of Louvain, (Panzer, ix. 243.), in which Gerson's name occurs, was assuredly anterior to the small black-letter and {87} anonymous editions, likewise without dates? Two of the latter (one much older than the other) are of 12mo. size, in 8vo., as is also Bonaventura's Stimulus divini Amoris, printed in ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 66, February 1, 1851 • Various
... and ghost-stories connected with the house; and there is an attic chamber, with a skylight, which is called the Martyr's chamber, from the fact of its having, in old times, been tenanted by a lady, who was imprisoned there, and persecuted to death for her religion. There is an old black-letter library, but the room containing it is shut, barred, and padlocked,—the owner of the house refusing to let it be opened, lest some of the books should be stolen. Meanwhile the rats are devouring them, and the ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... are here added. The present list comprises fifty-one items, all of them, I think, different from those which have been already mentioned. Unless otherwise stated, the copies of the forms here referred to are printed at London, and they are for the most part in black-letter, without pagination. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 235, April 29, 1854 • Various
... is but on sentimental occasions that the exhibition of cannibalism becomes general. But the monsters who interrupt men in the middle of a sentence are to be found everywhere; and they are always practising. Red-letter days or black-letter days, festival or fast, makes no difference to them. This enormous nuisance I feel the more, because it is one which I never retaliate. Interrupted in every sentence, I still practise the American Indian's politeness of never interrupting. What, absolutely never? Is there no case in ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... the universe, and Time is the agent which brings all things under his dominion." This has been demonstrated through our past calendar of monthly characteristics; to which are subjoined, from a still more quaint authority than Feltham, said to be printed in the reign of Henry VII., in a Sarum black-letter missal: ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 287, December 15, 1827 • Various
... of the poore for the death of the right Honourable Earle of Huntington (printed 1596), Joseph Lilly, A Collection of Seventy-Nine Black-Letter Ballads and ...
— The Elizabethan Parish in its Ecclesiastical and Financial Aspects • Sedley Lynch Ware
... pleasure from this medley of balderdash and drivel to the more sober tome of Mr Collier, because we know that whatever he gives us will at least have the merit of being genuine. Out of the thousand black-letter broadsides which constitute the Roxburghe collection, the editor has selected upwards of fifty, and thus states the object of their publication:—"The main purpose of the ensuing collection is to show, in their most genuine ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... themselves with Baxter's statement of the general theme and the topics grouped under it. The details of the bookmaking, however, were gone into thoroughly. The paper was to be of hand-made linen, from the Kelmscott Mills; the type black-letter, with rubricated initials. The cover, which was Baxter's own selection, was to be of dark green morocco, with a cap-and-bells border in red inlays, and doublures of maroon morocco with a blind-tooled design. ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... assists adultery by having to bestow souls upon its fruits. In the Oxford edition of Ralegh's works, A Discourse of Tenures which were before the Conquest is also included. So versatile was Ralegh that he has thus been assumed to have even amassed the lore of a black-letter lawyer. Its authenticity nevertheless does not seem to have been questioned. That of the Life and Death of Mahomet has been, and on very sufficient grounds. The Dutiful Advice of a Loving Son to his Aged Father falls within a different category. It is ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... away delightfully in this quaint-looking apartment, half study, half drawing-room. Scott read several passages from the old romance of "Arthur," with a fine, deep sonorous voice, and a gravity of tone that seemed to suit the antiquated, black-letter volume. It was a rich treat to hear such a work, read by such a person, and in such a place; and his appearance as he sat reading, in a large armed chair, with his favorite hound Maida at his feet, and surrounded by books and relics, ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... still remains in the great and tall family of the Van Hornes. Here are to be seen ancient Dutch corner cupboards, chests of drawers, and massive clothes-presses, quaintly carved, and carefully waxed and polished; together with divers thick, black-letter volumes, with brass clasps, printed of yore in Leydon and Amsterdam, and handed down from generation to generation, in the family, but never read. They are preserved in the archives, among sundry old parchment deeds, ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... In a very rare black-letter book on hop culture, A Perfite Platforme of a Hoppe Garden, published in the year 1578 and therefore over 340 years old, the author, Reynolde Scot, has the following quaint remarks on one of the disorders to which ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... ugly print informed the faithful that the "prodigious image" of Our Lady existed in the Church of the Carmelites at Borgo San Liberale. One might distinguish at the extreme right of the five compartments a willowy St. Michael in armour, like Chaucer's Squire in a black-letter folio, or if the identification had been doubtful, there was the name below ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... towards a taste for everything old, neglected, and for ages despised. Science and refinement have had their day, and now rude nature and the elemental are to be in the ascendant. In our boyhood, we learned the Roman alphabet; but youngsters now had need to add a knowledge of black-letter, which is rapidly getting back into fashion. Perfection is only to be found in the darkness and ignorance of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... Collier, "is decidedly a Roman Catholic production, and I have therefore little doubt that it made its appearance during the reign of Mary;" and he adds, p. 315, "on the whole, this piece is one of the most amusing and most humorous of the class to which it belongs." A fragment of a black-letter copy of the interlude is preserved at Lambeth Palace,[2] and is described by Mr Maitland in his "List of Early Printed Books," ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Robert Dodsley
... book on the bed before him, and he began to read the crabbed marks as easily as though they were good black-letter. ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... disciplined railroad men as having the immutability of the laws of the Medes and Persians, were still interpreted as loosely as if they were but the casual suggestions of a bystander. Rules were formulated and given black-letter emphasis in their postings on the bulletin boards, only to be coolly ignored when they chanced to conflict with some train crew's desire to make up time or to kill it. Directed to account for fuel and oil consumed, ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... the front and at the side. Which of these was Cope's, and what was the boy doing? Was he deep in black-letter, or was he selecting a necktie preliminary to some evening diversion outside? Or had he put out his light—several windows were dark—and already taken the train into town for some ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... rather clumsily effected. There is no chancel arch. The S. porch has a fine groined roof, with niches and holy-water stoup. Note (1) the carved seat-ends (one having the date 1522); (2) the large tomb (temp. Edward III.) in the S. aisle belonging to the Warres; (3) black-letter Bible (1617) and Bishop Jewel's works (chained). The neighbouring mansion of Hestercombe, once the possession of the Warres, but now belonging to the Portmans, is said to preserve a sword taken by one of the Warres from King ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... said, "commonly called Snuffy Davy, from his inveterate addiction to black rappee, was the very prince of scouts for searching blind alleys, cellars, and stalls, for rare volumes. He had the scent of a slow-hound, sir, and the snap of a bull-dog. He would detect you an old black-letter ballad among the leaves of a law-paper, and find an editio princeps under the mask of a school Corderius. Snuffy Davy bought the 'Game of Chess, 1474,' the first book ever printed in England, from ...
— Game and Playe of the Chesse - A Verbatim Reprint Of The First Edition, 1474 • Caxton
... existence of this showy creature. Pliny would have sworn to his having all but seen it, and he would have sworn that too, if any one had taken the trouble to ask him. Kircher, and a few of the German naturalists, and black-letter fools—every naturalist and black-letter man being more or less a fool—dug up the question out of the pit of Teutonic dulness, and ever since, every traveller beyond the Needles, has had his theory, which was quite as good as his fact, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... however, to read such works in the old libraries and chapter-houses to which they belong; for he thinks a black-letter volume reads best in one of those venerable chambers where the light struggles through dusty lancet windows and painted glass; and that it loses half its zest if taken away from the neighbourhood of the quaintly carved oaken book-case and Gothic reading-desk. At his suggestion, the ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... the familiarity and naivete of their delineations, transcribed with a slovenly and hasty hand from what they saw daily before them, is as remote as possible from the elaborate pictures extracted by a modern imitator from black-letter books, and coloured, not from the life, but from learned theories, or at best from mouldy monkish illuminations, and mutilated ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... said William in the background, with his head brushing the skies, and, far in front, two of the tombs which covered the heroes of Ilium, barely tall enough to reach half-way to his knee, and of the length, in proportion to the size of the traveller, of ordinary octavo volumes. He had black-letter books, too, on astrology, and on the planetary properties of vegetables; and an ancient book on medicine, that recommended as a cure for the toothache a bit of the jaw of a suicide, well triturated; and, as an infallible remedy for the falling-sickness, ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... one evening, about six o'clock, over a glass of that gorgeous Burgundy which he kept behind a pile of black-letter folios; he was striding about the room, fingering, after a habit of his, one of the great swords in his collection; the red glare of the strong fire struck his square features and his fierce grey hair; his blue eyes were even unusually full of dreams, and he had opened ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... as the Treasury; it was refitted in 1857, but the old chains are still used. It would occupy too much space were any attempt made to give a list of the books. The oldest volume is a manuscript of 1343, "Regimen Animarum," written on vellum, and containing a few illuminated initials. A "Breeches," Black-Letter Bible, dated 1595, is another book worth mentioning; also a volume of Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World. A hole was burnt through 104 of its pages. It is said that Matthew Prior, the poet, was reading it by candle light and ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Wimborne Minster and Christchurch Priory • Thomas Perkins
... good angel, in mortal shape of a solicitor, may bestow on him a brief: rushing home to his chambers in the Temple, he mastereth the points of the case, cogitating pros and cons: he heareth his own voice in court for the first time: the bottled black-letter of years falleth from his lips, like treacle from a pipkin: he maketh good his points, winneth the verdict and the commendations of the judge: solicitors whisper that there is something in him, and clerks express their conviction that he is a "trump:" ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... the library are often curious, and there is much that receives its monetary value on account of its antiquity and rarity. An old library will frequently include black-letter printing and old volumes illustrated with wood blocks, and, perchance, illuminated initial letters. Some of the volumes may be printed on vellum, and there may be some in manuscript. The bindings of presentation books may be of rich calf and tooled in gold; some may even have edge paintings ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... and Sensenschmidt of 1475, in an equally desirable and pristine condition;[36] the Polish Protestant Bible of 1563, with its first rough-edged margins and in wooden binding; St. Jerom's Epistles, printed at Parma, by A. de Portilia—most captivating to the eye; with a curious black-letter broadside, in Latin sapphics, pasted in the interior of the cover; the History of Bohemia, by Pope Pius II, of 1475, as fresh and crackling as if it had just come from the printer: Schuzler's edition of the Hexameron of Ambrosius, ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... and legitimate? The Society meet, as a corporate body, twice in the year: once in April, the second time in December; and date the foundation of their Club from the 1st of January 1820. Whatever they print, bears the general title of "Melanges;"[G] but whether this word will be executed in the black-letter, lower-case, or in roman capitals, is not yet determined upon. One or two things, however, at starting, cannot fail to be premised; and indeed has been already observed upon—as a species of heresy. The Society assemble ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... descent, not two in twenty can show a pedigree like Talboys. And with that name a princely mansion—antiquity stamped on it—stands in its own park, in the middle of its vast estates, with title-deeds in black-letter, girl." ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... of his competitor in flames, and knocked him on the head as he endeavoured to escape from the conflagration. It is from the great book of Nature, the same through a thousand editions, whether of black-letter, or wire-wove and hot-pressed, that I have venturously essayed to read a chapter to the public. Some favourable opportunities of contrast have been afforded me by the state of society in the northern part of the island at the period of my history, and may serve at once ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... master. "Were he thoughtless or light-headed, or rei suae prodigus," said his instructor, "I would know what to make of him. But he never pays away a shilling without looking anxiously after the change, makes his sixpence go farther than another lad's half-crown, and wilt ponder over an old black-letter copy of the acts of parliament for days, rather than go to the golf or the change-house; and yet he will not bestow one of these days on a little business of routine, that would put twenty shillings in his pocketa strange mixture of frugality and industry, and negligent ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... h]andes of bothe the wardens a ballad intituled, The Norfolk gent his will and Testament and how he Commytted the keepinge of his Children to his owne brother whoe delte moste wickedly with them and howe God plagued him for it." It was printed as a black-letter ballad in 1670. Addison wrote a paper on it in "The Spectator" (No. 85), praising it as "one of the darling songs ...
— A Bundle of Ballads • Various
... (Northamptonshire), Arreton (Isle of Wight), Chelsea, Eustone (Oxfordshire), Kniver (Staffordshire), Lussingham (Norfolk), Stratford-on-Avon, (Warwickshire) Waltham, St. Cuthbert (Wells);** also in that of Lutterworth and many other places. At Cheddar not very long ago was a great black-letter copy of the Acts and Monuments chained to the reading desk, and it is stated in the Life of Lord Macaulay that as a child, the sight of it used to fascinate him as he sat on Sunday afternoons in the family pew, longing to get at the ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... minuteness. You would suppose that he must have softened the stone into wax, until his most delicate fancies were modelled in the pliant material, and then had hardened it into stone again. The whole was a vast, black-letter page of the richest and quaintest poetry. In fit keeping with all this old magnificence was a great marble fountain, where again the Gothic imagination showed its overflow and gratuity of device in the manifold sculptures which ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Discovery of Terra Florida,' This is Captain Jean Ribaut's account of his voyage to Florida in 1562. It was "prynted at London," "newly set forthe in Englishe," in 1563, and reprinted by Hakluyt in 1582 in his black-letter tract entitled 'Divers Voyages.' It is not known to exist ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... turned volutes and arbitrary perpendicularity of outline, does to its graceful Greek mother, with her primitive and expressive scrolls, and the slightly convex profile of her shaft. In more modern times, a black-letter, quaint sentence of Froissart or Monstrelet is like a knight in full armor, bristling with quaint, beautiful devices, golden dragons inlaid on Milan cuirasses, golden vines on broad Venetian blades, apes on the hilts of grooved-bladed, firm stilettoes, ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... of enchanted forest cut from an old black-letter legend, in which one half expected to meet mediaeval knights on foaming steeds—every-day folk ride jogging horses—threading their way through the mysterious forest aisles in search of those romantic ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... there was no such concession made, and sconces on the walls held dim iron lamps, so that only those of the most acute vision were able to read. Even then reading was difficult, for the book-stand on the table contained nothing but a few crabbed black-letter volumes dating from not later than the early seventeenth century, and you had to be in a frantically Elizabethan frame of mind to be at ease there. But Mrs Lucas often spent some of her rare leisure moments in the smoking-parlour, playing on the virginal ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... vol. ii. p. 33, printed by him from The Garland of Delight, by Delone, in the Pepys collection at Cambridge—a black-letter volume; and probably the song ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.03.23 • Various
... 138. Sable-lettered. "Black-letter;" the technical term for the "old English" form of letter, used in the earliest English ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... Ralph said. Albert ran his eye over the crabbed black-letter writing, and gave an ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... Jones, "surpassed him in clearness of intellect and in moderation and simplicity of character; no one equalled him in his accurate knowledge of the technical rules and doctrines of real property, and his familiarity with the skilful and elaborate, but now obsolete and mysterious, black-letter learning of the ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... party—was at the moment likely to injure his own party. To him this was a great opportunity. The speech he delivered on that occasion lives in the memory of those who heard it. His eyes did not at that time let him read, so he repeated by memory, and quite accurately, all the black-letter authorities, bearing on the question. So great an intellectual effort has rarely been seen in an English assembly. But the result was deplorable. Not by means of his black-letter authorities, but by means of his recognised ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... robes. Another old chest contained some ancient Latin writings, the earliest of which bore the dates 1285, 1325, and 1370, written in old lettering with what was known as "monk's ink," made from vegetables. Some of the documents bore seals with rush rings attached, and there was a black-letter Bible, and a chained book dated 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada. We were also shown four pewter flagons for Communion wine, all of the time of Charles I, two churchwardens having each given one in 1633 and two other wardens one each in 1638. Asked why so many were required, we were informed ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... England, and the two winter theatres as his proper palaces. "The period spent on stubborn Troy," has now elapsed, since I began a commentary on the plays of our immortal bard. O, the rivers of ink that I have exhausted in cleansing his Augean page from the black-letter filth heaped upon it by his different commentators! The task was laborious, but such labour is my delight. The waters of Avon suit my palate better than Boniface's ale. "I eat my Shakspeare, I drink my Shakspeare, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... as I have translations of Homer; and of European histories, works of reference generally, a writer who lives in the country must, of course, possess a goodly number. Of rare books I do not pretend to have many. A single shelf contains a few good old works, including a fine black-letter Chaucer, the Venetian Dante of 1578, and some fine examples of the Elizabethan period. I soon found, however, that this taste was far too expensive to cultivate. Last of all, in what I may call the upper Egyptological stratum of my books, come those on Egypt and Egyptian archaeology, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... Sunflower game is calling them after the black-letter saints in the Kalendar, and reading about them in a very old book—a big one with a black leather binding—in the attic, called "Lives of the Saints." I read, and then I tell it to Margery as we walk up and down, and say—"This is S. Prisca, this is S. Fabian, this is S. Agnes, this is S. Agatha, ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... abundant martyrology of the catholics, inflicted by the hands of the protestants; who in the succeeding reign of Elizabeth, after long trepidations and balancings, were confirmed into power. He grieves over the delusion and seduction of the black-letter romance of honest John Fox, which he says, "has obtained a place in protestant churches next to the Bible, while John Fox himself is esteemed little less than an evangelist."[158] Dodd's narratives are not less pathetic: for the situation of the catholic, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... parallels in history; so, in the eighteenth century, the despised ages of monkery, feudalism, and superstition began to reassert their claims upon the imagination. Ruined castles and abbeys, coats of mail, illuminated missals, manuscript romances, black-letter ballads, old tapestries, and wood carvings acquired a new value. Antiquaries and virtuosos first, and then poets and romancers, reconstructed in turn an ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... were printed in black-letter ("gothic") type; lines represent italics. Letters printed as superscripts are shown ...
— Roister Doister - Written, probably also represented, before 1553. Carefully - edited from the unique copy, now at Eton College • Nicholas Udall
... proposal, and the consciousness has been pressing on me more and more painfully ever since. Even my husband's affectionate hopefulness cannot withstand my melancholy demonstration. So pray consider the kill-joy proposition as entirely retracted, and give us something of yourselves only on simple black-letter days, when the Herald Angels have not been raising expectations early ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... naturally the same taste as my master. I soon learned all about heraldry, and in my leisure time drew and colored all the coats of arms that had been borne by the Hamertons in their numerous alliances, as well as the arms of other families from which our own was descended. I wrote black-letter characters on parchment and made pedigrees, and became so much of a mediaevalist that there was considerable risk of my stopping short in the amateur practice of such arts as wood-carving, illumination, and painting ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... part of the famous volume of black-letter tracts (formerly marked AB. 4. 58), which came to the University Library in 1715 by the gift of King George the First with the rest of the library of John Moore, Bishop of Ely. No other copy of this edition is recorded to be ...
— The Assemble of Goddes • Anonymous
... yet working an harmonious development of what you have heretofore seen. The west front is unspeakably grand, and may be read over and over again forever, and still show undetected meanings, like a great, broad page of marvellous writing in black-letter,—so many sculptured ornaments there are, blossoming out before your eyes, and gray statues that have grown there since you looked last, and empty niches, and a hundred airy canopies beneath which carved images used to be, and where ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... that it seems incredible to think that any man could ever have had the heart to send the hammers of masons against it, and set up bald walls of plaster in its stead. Wandering in old Munich—there is not much of it left, alas!—is like reading a black-letter ballad about Henry the Lion or Kaiser Max; it has sombre nooks and corners, bright gleams of stained casements, bold oriels, and sculptured shields, arcades and arches, towers and turrets, light and shade, harmony and irregularity, all, in a word, that old cities have, ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... old black-letter volume, entitled "The Abridgment of the Acts and Monuments of Martyrs, from the earliest period of Christian suffering to the time of Queen Elizabeth, our gracious lady, now reigning," printed in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 286, December 8, 1827 • Various
... le Maire and Willem Cornelisz Schouten, made in 1615 to 1617. They sailed through the Straits of Magellan, crossed the Pacific, touched at the Solomon Islands, and thence made their way round by the north of New Guinea to Java. The word Australia does not occur anywhere in the black-letter text of the narrative, and the word Australische in the phrase "Australische Navigatien," simply means southern. There are references in the book to "Terra Australis," but Le Maire and Schouten knew not Australia. ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... in black lifted up his head from the black-letter page; and, having called his witnesses, went through the requisite ceremonies; and Marion Webster became, within a short space, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... whereupon Mr. H. tendered his resignation. Rumor also says, that Mr. T. Hartley Crawford, of Pennsylvania, is appointed in his stead. This gentleman is represented to be a person of some ability; an old black-letter lawyer, but a man who is apt to lose sight of main questions in the search after technicalities. They say he is very opinionated and dogmatical; personally unacquainted with the character of the Indians, and the geography of the western country, and not likely, therefore, to be very ready or ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... Accordingly Mr. B. had the job, who put them into the hands of his assistant, Mr. Bewick, who executed them as his first work in wood, and that in a most elegant manner, tho' spoiled in the printing by John Nichols, the Black-letter printer. C.H. 1798." ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... of past cruelties are shadowed forth in many of the present games—some of which are not uninteresting. The barbarous custom of whipping martyrs at the stake is perpetuated by the game of whip-top. In a black-letter book in the British Museum, date ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... by its Editors, that it became necessary in 1867 to open, besides the Original Series with which the Society began, an Extra Series which should be mainly devoted to fresh editions of all that is most valuable in printed MSS. and Caxton's and other black-letter books, though first editions of MSS. will not be excluded when the convenience of issuing them demands their inclusion ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... he observes, "was distinguished by the death of a bibliomaniac of the very first order and celebrity; of one who had no doubt frequently discoursed largely and eloquently with Luttrell upon the variety and value of certain editions of old ballad poetry, and between whom presents of curious old black-letter volumes were in all probability passing, I allude to the famous Samuel Pepys, secretary to ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... daughters of sir William Fines, a Knight of Rhodes, in the reign of Edward the Confessor. Richard Johnson, a poetaster of the sixteenth century, published in 1607, The Pleasant Walkes of Moore-fields. Being the Guift of two Sisters, now beautified, to the continuing fame of this worthy Citty. 4to. black-letter, of which Mr. Gough, (Brit. Topog.) who was ignorant of the above, notices an ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... the history of literature. His father had been sexton of the ancient Church of St. Mary Redcliff, in Bristol, and the boy's sensitive imagination took the stamp of his surroundings. He taught himself to read from a black-letter Bible. He drew charcoal sketches of churches, castles, knightly tombs, and heraldic blazonry. When only eleven years old, he began the fabrication of documents in prose and verse, which he ascribed to a fictitious Thomas Rowley, a secular priest ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... of type did the Pilgrims find in their Psalm-book: Roman type, Italics, black-letter, all were used; the verse was printed in Italics, the prose in Roman type, and the annotation in black-letter and small Roman text with close-spaced lines. This variety though picturesque makes the text rather difficult to read; for while one can decipher ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... unexplained. But when that little mystery should have been cleared up, Captain Delano thought he might extremely regret it, did he allow Don Benito to become aware that he had indulged in ungenerous surmises. In short, to the Spaniard's black-letter text, it was best, for awhile, to leave ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... the First Twelve Centuries. Studies from the Lives of the Black-letter Saints of the English Calendar. Crown 8vo. ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A. |
