"Sicilian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... story, which dates, as we have seen, at least as far back as the 9th century appears to be spread over Europe. Mr. E. Sidney Hartland, in an able paper treating of several of its forms in "The Antiquary" for February, 1887, pp. 45-48, gives a Sicilian version from Dr. Pitre's collection, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... shoplifter. swindler, peculator; forger, coiner; fence, receiver of stolen goods, duffer; smasher. burglar, housebreaker; cracksman^, magsman [Slang]; Bill Sikes, Jack Sheppard, Jonathan Wild. gang [group of thieves], gang of thieves, theft ring; organized crime, mafia, the Sicilian Mafia, the mob, la cosa nostra [It]. [famous thieves], Dillinger, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... celestial globe, also constructed by Archimedes, which the same Marcellus placed in the temple of Virtue, is more beautiful as well as more widely known among the people. But when Gallus began to give a very learned explanation of the device, I concluded that the famous Sicilian had been endowed with greater genius than one would imagine possible for human being to possess. For Gallus told us that the other kind of celestial globe, which was solid and contained no hollow space, was a very early invention, the first one of that kind having been constructed by Thales of ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... ever-travailing Stromboli (Strongyle), to which Homer seems to refer in the Odyssey (xii., 68, 202, and 219), and its geographical position was not so well determined. I suspect that tna would be found to be a Sicilian word, if we had any fragmentary materials to refer to. According to Diodorus (v., 6), the Sicani, or aborigines preceding the Sicilians, were compelled to fly to the western part of the island, in the consequence of successive eruptions extending over many years. The most ancient ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... animal forms, and sometimes conventional floral ornament. Patterns originated in the East, and, through Byzantine influence, in Italy, and Saracenic in Spain, they were adopted and modified by Europeans. In 1295 St. Paul's in London owned a hanging "patterned with wheels and two-headed birds." Sicilian silks, and many others of the contemporary textiles, display variations of the "tree of life" pattern. This consists of a little conventional shrub, sometimes hardly more than a "budding rod," with two birds or animals advancing vis-a-vis ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... bids Cross over to Sicilian cities, where Or ocean by a sudden rise o'erwhelmed The land, or split the isthmus right in twain, Leaving a path for seas. Unceasing tides There labour hugely lest again should meet The mountains rent asunder. Nor were left Sardinian shores unvisited: each isle Is blest with noble harvests which ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... two of them in our district: the Chalicodoma of the Walls (Chalicodoma muraria), whose history Reaumur gives us in a masterly fashion; and the Sicilian Chalicodoma (C. sicula) (For reasons that will become apparent after the reader has learnt their habits, the author also speaks of the Mason-bee of the Walls and the Sicilian Mason-bee as the Mason-bee of the Pebbles and the Mason-bee of the Sheds respectively. ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... did not entend to reproch any, but only to blaze abroad new & incredible matters) certaine idle companions knowing neither hell nor heauen haue inuented this fable, no lesse reprochfull then false, and more vaine & detestable then Sicilian scoffes. Which fellowes these writers (being otherwise men of excellent parts, and to whom learning is much indebted) haue followed with an ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... two rows of cells was the cage of Bonifacio, the Sicilian slayer of his betrothed and of two officers who came to arrest him. With him Murray had played checkers many a long hour, each calling his move to his unseen opponent ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... over a year since we planned the North African campaign. It is six months since we planned the Sicilian campaign. I confess that I am of an impatient disposition, but I think that I understand and that most people understand the amount of time necessary to prepare for any major military or naval operation. We cannot just ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... beings differ widely. They vary in color, for instance, from the marble-like pallor of the Scandinavian to the rich, dark brown of the Zulu, passing by the creamy Slav, the yellow Chinese, the light brown Sicilian and the brown Egyptian. Men vary, too, in the texture of hair from the obstinately straight hair of the Chinese to the obstinately tufted and frizzled hair of the Bushman. In measurement of heads, again, men vary; from ...
— The Conservation of Races • W.E. Burghardt Du Bois
... apprehensions for his unstable government; and he was uncertain, whether he had most reason to dread the presence of the French or of the English monarch. Philip was engaged in a strict alliance with the emperor his competitor; Richard was disgusted by his rigours towards the queen-dowager, whom the Sicilian prince had confined in Palermo, because she had opposed with all her interest his succession to the crown. Tancred, therefore, sensible of the present necessity, resolved to pay court to both these formidable princes; and he was not unsuccessful in his ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... before the rising sun to die away in the first hot morning hours, just as you are abreast of Camerota. L'Infresco Point is ahead, not three miles away. It is of no use to row, for the breeze will come up before long and save you the trouble. But the sea is white and motionless. Far in the offing a Sicilian schooner and a couple of clumsy "martinganes"—there is no proper English name for the craft—are lying becalmed, with hanging sails. The men on board the felucca watch them and the sea. There is a shadow on the white, hazy ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... heiress of the Doni, of Florence, had married the Sicilian Duke Cataneo. Her mother, since dead, had hoped, by promoting this marriage, to leave her rich and happy, according to Florentine custom. She had concluded that her daughter, emerging from a convent to embark in life, would achieve, under the laws of love, ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... shown To this poor, timorous, toil-detesting drone? That others feeds on planetary schemes, And pays his host with hideous noon-day dreams. But, prince! for once at least believe a friend; To some Sicilian mart these courtiers send, Where, if they yield their freight across the main, Dear sell the slaves! demand ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... also appear, they turn out to be rascals, who faithlessly desert the hero. In our stories, however, the specially-endowed men are supplied by a grateful supernatural being, to help the kind-hearted hero win in his contests with the stubborn king. (Compare Gonzenbach's Sicilian story, No. 74, which includes a thankful saint, with characteristics of the "Grateful Dead," a "Land-and-water ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... convinced, that we are no more homicidal than France and Belgium, and less so than Italy. It is to be expected that with our Chinese, "greaser," and half-breed population in the West, our Black Belt in the South, and our Sicilian and South Italian immigration in the North and East, our murder rate should exceed those of the continental nations, which are nothing ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... of the sea, white, glaring and with very shallow earth, unfit to bear corn, though it produced plenty of oranges, figs, and melons—with little water, and no wood,—the buildings wretched, and for the most part uninhabited, and the few people a miserable mongrel set, part Arab, part Greek, part Sicilian, and constantly kept down by the descents of the Moorish pirates, who used to land in the unprotected bays, and carry off all the wretched beings they could catch, to sell for slaves. It was a miserable ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... two chiefs went to seek the death they desired, rushing furiously upon the enemy, with intention to strike home but not to ward a blow. The Island of Gozzo being taken some years ago by the Turks, a Sicilian, who had two beautiful daughters marriageable, killed them both with his own hand, and their mother, running in to save them, to boot, which having done, sallying out of the house with a cross-bow and harquebus, with two shots ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... libbed eunuch. Wine, nevertheless, taken moderately worketh quite contrary effects, as is implied by the old proverb, which saith,—That Venus taketh cold, when not accompanied by Ceres and Bacchus.[221] This opinion is of great antiquity as appeareth by the testimony of Diodorus the Sicilian, and confirmed by Pausanias, and it is usually held among the Lampsacians, that Don Priapus was the son ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... any less able," replied Axius, "to have these things at my farm at Reate: is Sicilian honey made at Seius' place and only Corsican honey at Reate,[161] and does the mast which he buys for his wild boars make them fat while that which I get for nothing from my ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... theological controversy, a passionately resolved defender of the national unity, and of the French patriotism, which the religious struggle had imperilled, but he was not intolerant. Under him, and under his successor, the Sicilian Cardinal Mazarin, the religion which had been thought so dangerous was allowed to prosper, and the highest offices were crowded with Huguenots. The rapid expansion of French power was largely due to this policy. It was then that the French proved superior to the Spaniards in war, ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... Bartholomew, the Sicilian Vespers, the death of Lucretia, the two embarkations of Napoleon at Frejus are examples of political catastrophe. It will not be in your power to act on such a large scale; nevertheless, within their own area, ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... flowers in bloom. No one knows who offer these flowers, but they must be descendants of the Doshin Christians, or believers in Christianity, or worshippers of Koshin." Here also was confined Father Baptiste Sidotti, a Sicilian Jesuit who ventured to enter Japan in 1707 with the purpose of resuming the work of the Jesuits which ...
— Japan • David Murray
... doors and windows, and stopped up all the chinks and crannies, to prevent the Sun from coming to fetch away her daughter. But she forgot to stop up the key-hole, and a sunbeam streamed through it and carried off the girl.[169] In a Sicilian story a seer foretells that a king will have a daughter who, in her fourteenth year, will conceive a child by the Sun. So, when the child was born, the king shut her up in a lonely tower which had no window, lest a sunbeam should fall on her. When she was nearly ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... may not give one instant command of spoken communication in the field. I spoke again: "I wish to encounter a representative of the Camorra, in other words the Black Hand, in other words the cruel and sinister Sicilian terrorists named the Mafia. Do you know where these ...
— The Day of the Boomer Dukes • Frederik Pohl
... its ruffling breath, and no longer is the sea shattered round the rocks and sucked back again down towards the deep. West winds breathe, and the swallow titters over the straw-glued chamber that she has built. Be of good cheer, O skilled in seafaring, whether thou sail to the Syrtis or the Sicilian shingle: only by the altars of Priapus of the Anchorage burn a scarus ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... accomplishments of the higher classes; and that Italy, from the time that the great Roman Empire fell and broke into a thousand shivers, had been subject to a continual series of conflicts and struggles, which took from life all security. Norman, Dane, Sicilian, Spaniard, Frenchman, and German mingled and struggled, now up and now down; and every struggle was attended by the little ceremonies of sacking towns, burning villages, and routing out entire populations to utter misery and wretchedness. During these tumultuous ages, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... the same view; he did a few days' sponging, but found himself incompetent and had to leave. He went back to Athens, took considerable pains with himself, and then had another try, with exactly the same result, however. Plato's Sicilian disaster seems to me to bear comparison with that ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... being naturally suggestive of the presence amid the corn of a kindly Being, who, in return for due rites and offerings, will vouchsafe nourishing rains and golden harvests." He mentioned the references in Virgil, and the description in Theocritus of a Sicilian Harvest Festival—these were no doubt familiar to me; but if I was interested in the subject, I should find, he said, much more information collected in a book which he had written, but of which I had probably never heard, about the Vegetation ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... the twelue Goddes, builte vp Altares, and Images, erected Chappelles and Temples, and graued in stone the similitude of many sondrie beastes. All whiche their doynges, dooe manifestly make, that thei came of the Aethiopes, who (as Diodore the Sicilian saieth) ware the firste inuentours of all these. Their women in old tyme, had all the trade of occupiyng, and brokage [Footnote: To broke i.e. to deal, or transact business particularly of an amorous character. (See Fansh. Lusiad, ix., 44; and Daniel, Queen's Arcadia, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... delusions; but the limbo I mentioned before grew so very outrageous, that I was obliged to postpone my rest till sugar-plums and nursery eloquence had hushed it to repose. At length peace was restored, and about eleven o'clock I fell into a slumber, during which the most lovely Sicilian prospects filled the eye of my fancy. I anticipated the classic scenes of that famous island, and forgot every sorrow in the meadows ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... then should baseness of birth be objected to any man? Who thinks worse of Tully for being Arpinas, an upstart? or Agathocles, that Sicilian King, for being a potter's son? Iphicrates and Marius were meanly born. What wise man thinks better of any person for his nobility? as he[64] said in Machiavel, omnes codem patre nati, Adam's sons, conceived all and born in sin, etc. We are by ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... made Cornelius Severus the author,[358] though it is practically certain that his description of the volcano must have occurred in his poem On the Sicilian War.[359] But the fact that Seneca makes no reference to the existence of any learned didactic poem on the subject carries a little more weight, and there are marked parallels between Seneca's 'quaestiones Naturales' and ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... origin of such expressions. The many conquests of the Roman arms furnished so many prisoners that they became a drug in the slave-markets of the world, and were so numerous that in many places they outnumbered the Roman citizens ten to one. In the first century before Christ it is said that some Sicilian estates were worked by as many as twenty thousand slaves. "That each owner might know his own, the poor creatures were branded like cattle." The "mark of the beast" possessed by the followers of a false communion will be found to consist of an Antichristian ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... first word, to buy her pins, and yet when he was solicited by the senate to bestow something to repair the decayed walls of Rome for the commonwealth's good, he would give but 6000 sesterces at most. [5553]Dionysius, that Sicilian tyrant, rejected all his privy councillors, and was so besotted on Mirrha his favourite and mistress, that he would bestow no office, or in the most weightiest business of the kingdom do aught without her especial advice, prefer, depose, send, entertain no man, though worthy and well ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... the second line, where "those who sail the sea" is wisely preferred to any Romanic equivalent of naviganti the version is utterly literal; as literal as the one the school-boy makes, when he opens his Virgil at the Fourth Eclogue, and lumberingly reads, "Sicilian Muses, let us sing things a little greater." But there is nothing clumsy, nothing which smacks of the recitation-room, in these lines of Mr. Longfellow. For easy grace and exquisite beauty it would be difficult to surpass ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... and away went the donkey, making himself as much like an arrow on the wing as any ass could. My companion, who was a handsome fellow, with a moustache that one would expect to see upon the face of a Sicilian brigand, was a cantonnier, and as he scraped out the ditches and mended the roads, his donkey browsed upon what he could find along the wayside. In summer and winter they were inseparable companions, and had come to thoroughly understand one another. The cantonnier confided to me that he was ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... thence; for 'calico' is from Calicut, a town on the coast of Malabar, and 'muslin' from Mossul, a city in Asiatic Turkey. 'Cordwain' or 'cordovan' is from Cordova—'delf' from Delft—'indigo' (indicum) from India—'gamboge' from Cambodia—the 'agate' from a Sicilian river, Achates—the 'turquoise' from Turkey—the 'chalcedony' or onyx from Chalcedon—'jet' from the river Gages in Lycia, where this black stone is found. [Footnote: In Holland's Pliny, the Greek form 'gagates' is still retained, though he oftener calls it 'jeat' ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... Basle upon the following day, Whither the tidings had arrived before: That Count Orlando was, in martial fray, To meet Gradasso and the royal Moor: Nor through Orlando was divulged that say: But one, who crost from the Sicilian shore, And thither had, in haste, the journey made, As certain news, ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... Blacksmith It is not Always May Excelsior The Rainy Day The Arrow and the Song The Day is Done Walter Von Vogelweide The Builders Santa Filomena The Discoverer of the North Cape Sandalphon Tales of a Wayside Inn The Landlord's Tale The Sicilian's Tale ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... development of the Coan medical school along these lines in the sixth and fifth centuries, there was going on a most remarkable movement at the very other extreme of the Greek world. Into the course and general importance of Sicilian philosophy it is not our place to enter, but that extraordinary movement was not without its repercussion on medical theory and practice. Very important in this direction was Empedocles of Agrigentum ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... his ample furs thrown back, sits the Russian in friendly talk with a gay little wanderer from Sicilian valleys. There, with elbow crooked by a foaming tankard, leans the German, narrating his perils and pleasures to a gallant Frenchman and a sunbrowned Spaniard who smoke and chatter together as now and then Mynheer stops for a pull at ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... would I follow thee Past each horizon of fine poesy; Fain would I echo back each pleasant note As o'er Sicilian seas, clear anthems float 'Mong the light skimming gondolas far parted, Just when the sun his farewell beam has darted: But 'tis impossible; far different cares Beckon me sternly from soft "Lydian airs," And hold my ...
— Poems 1817 • John Keats
... time before they could get a hangman in Corsica, so that the punishment of the gallows was hardly known, all their criminals being shot.[94] At last this creature whom I saw, who is a Sicilian, came with a message to Paoli. The General who has a wonderful talent for physiognomy, on seeing the man, said immediately to some of the people about him, "Ecco il boia. Behold our hangman." He gave orders to ask ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... the high price of labor in digging the roots, and the high cost of transportation of the roots to Eastern markets would make it impossible for him to undertake competition in the Eastern markets with the Sicilian producers, unless, perhaps, he could build an extracting factory and market licorice extract, the black solid which is sold by the druggist, and which the Sicilians produce in large quantities. The preparation of licorice ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... were wanted, the consuls were ordered to enlist them. To Titus Otacilius and Marcus Valerius was allotted the protection of the coasts of Sicily and Greece, with the legions and fleets which they had commanded. The Greek coast had fifty ships with one legion; the Sicilian, a hundred ships with two legions. Twenty-three legions were employed by the Romans in carrying on the war this year by land ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... patroness, and at her house the world was regaled with the best music that art could supply. Soon after her brother's death, she married the Count St. Antonio (who was afterwards made Duke of Cannizzaro), a good-looking, intelligent, but penniless Sicilian of high birth, who was pretty successful in all ways in society here. He became disgusted with her, however, and went off to Italy, on a separate allowance which she made him. After a few years he returned to England, and they ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... a Sicilian poet and orator of the twelfth century, who wrote a book "De Planctu Naturae" — ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... 30th December he writes; "Almighty love still reigns and revels in my bosom, and I am at this moment ready to hang myself for a young Edinburgh widow, who has wit and wisdom more murderously fatal than the assassinating stiletto of the Sicilian bandit, or the poisoned arrow of the savage African." For several months his visits to her house were frequent, his letters unremitting. The sentimental correspondence which they began, in which Burns addresses her as Clarinda, assuming to himself the name of Sylvander, has been (p. 083) published ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... isles of Sicily and Malta, being all as then in the service and pay of the Spaniard. Immediately both the Admirals of the galleys sent from each of them a frigate to the Admiral of our English ships, which being come near them, the Sicilian frigate first hailed them, and demanded of them whence they were; they answered that they were of England, the arms whereof appeared in their colours. Whereupon the said frigate expostulated with them, and asked why they delayed to send ...
— Voyager's Tales • Richard Hakluyt
... orchard was pink with apple blossoms, giving the far end of the park a tint not unlike Sicilian almonds in bloom. And the intermittent breeze, as it waned or strengthened, carried delicate perfumes to and fro. Yon was the sea, with well-defined horizon, and down below were the few smacks and the white yacht Laura, ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... first sight these courts are much alike, they differ in feeling and effect. The Court of Flowers is Italian, the Court of Palms Grecian, though Grecian with an exuberance scarcely Athenian. Perhaps there is something Sicilian in the warmth of its decoration. When it is bright and warm, the Court of Palms is most Greek in feeling; less so ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... the new foundation. Jim's foreman was a Greek. His companion, with whom he guided the rock that the derrick lifted was a Sicilian. The steam drillman whom Jim had to help was a negro. There were ten nationalities on the pay roll of the company. Jim had grown accustomed to feeling in school that New York was not in America, but in a foreign country. Down in the five-story hole in the ground, with ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... "Ah! I know the English. You may be sure that the sentinels stationed round this house have orders from the Governor to kill me. They will pretend to give me a thrust with a bayonet by mistake some day." Gourgaud reports him as saying on another occasion, "Hudson Lowe is a Sicilian grafted on a Prussian; they must have chosen him to make me die under his charge by inches. It would have been more generous to have shot me ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... having gained the sanction of the governor, sailed for France to seek the means of fitting out an expedition. In this he succeeded by the favor of the Prince of Conti. The Chevalier de Tonti, a brave officer, who had lost an arm in the Sicilian wars, was associated with him ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... the idyllic dawn when Theocritus sang its pafatoral charms, was that sunny Sicilian land where, one May morning, Leo Gordon wandered with a gay party in quest of historic sites, which the slow silting of the stream of time had not obliterated. Viewed from the heights of Achradina, whence all the vestiges of magnificence and luxury have vanished, and ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... the Molo S. Carlo (so called from a warship which was sunk in 1737), and beyond the health office for the port at the Molo Giuseppino, where many others also lie, and the various passenger steamers in definite berths—the big English steamers at the end of the projecting quays. From a Sicilian ship hundreds of chests of oranges and lemons may be seen unloading; from a Venetian trabarcolo great heaps of onions and ropes of garlic; an Istrian boat disgorges a small mountain of green water-melons; from a Dalmatian ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... devotions, not "because Friday is the day on which creation was finished and Mohammed entered Al-Medinah;" but because there is a popular idea that in times now approaching the Christians will rise up against the Moslems during prayers and will repeat the "Sicilian Vespers." ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... population of the Roman cities were slaves, and in Cicero's time the freedom of the city, which he regarded as necessary to liberty, belonged only to a small proportion of the population of Italy. It was the liberty of a small privileged class for which he was anxious. That a Sicilian should be free under a Roman Proconsul, as a Roman citizen was entitled to be, was abhorrent to his doctrine. The idea of cosmopolitan freedom—an idea which exists with us, but is not common to very many even now—had not as yet been born: that care for freedom which springs from a desire to ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... service of Cleopatra was a Sicilian slave who had been her personal servant since she was a little girl. This man's name was Appolidorus—a man of giant stature and imposing mien. Ten years before his tongue had been torn out as a token that as he was to attend a queen he ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... waved; and suddenly, in one of those unforeseen and incomprehensible movements to which mobs are subject, a trolley car standing at the end of the Hawthorne Street track was surrounded, the desperate clanging of its bell keeping pace with the beating of Janet's heart. A dark Sicilian, holding aloft the green, red, and white flag of Italy, leaped on the rear platform and began to speak, the Slav conductor regarding him stupidly, pulling the bellcord the while. Three or four policemen fought their way to the spot, striving to clear the tracks, bewildered and impotent ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... this monograph students {141} are referred for details as to the development of number-forms in Europe from the tenth to the sixteenth century. It is of interest to add that he has found that among the earliest dates of European coins or medals in these numerals, after the Sicilian one already mentioned, are the following: Austria, 1484; Germany, 1489 (Cologne); Switzerland, 1424 (St. Gall); Netherlands, 1474; France, ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith
... Orosius, (l. vii. c. 35,) and Pacatus, (in Panegyr. Vet. xii. 30-47,) supply the loose and scanty materials of this civil war. Ambrose (tom. ii. Epist. xl. p. 952, 953) darkly alludes to the well-known events of a magazine surprised, an action at Petovio, a Sicilian, perhaps a naval, victory, &c., Ausonius (p. 256, edit. Toll.) applauds the peculiar merit and good fortune of Aquileia.] The orator, who may be silent without danger, may praise without difficulty, and without reluctance; [78] and posterity will confess, that the character of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... METHODIQUE, have copied this description, and have given figures of the Gioenia Sicula. The fact, however, is, that no such animal exists, but that the knight of Malta, finding on the Sicilian shores the three internal bones of one of the species of Bulla, of which some are found on the south-western coast of England, [Bulla lignaria] described and figured these bones most accurately, and drew the whole of the ...
— Decline of Science in England • Charles Babbage
... There the blooming Adonis was seen, not breaking away to pursue the boisterous chase, but crowned with flowers, and languishing in the embraces of celestial beauty. There Acis wooed his Galatea in the shade, with the Sicilian sea spreading in halcyon serenity before them. There were depicted groups of fauns and dryads, fondly reclining in summer bowers, and listening to the liquid piping of the reed; or the wanton satyrs, surprising some wood-nymph during her noontide ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... few parcels of this unique and delicious Wine are still to be had of the grower, a Sicilian Count, for the moment resident in Houndsditch, at the nominal price, inclusive of the bottles, of five ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, VOL. 100. Feb. 28, 1891 • Various
... spread as far as Italy and Sicily, and he had many requests that he would go over and sing to the people there. At length, he determined to make the journey, not only from curiosity to see new countries, but also because he had heard of the songs sung by the Sicilian shepherds, and had a great desire to study them. Periander tried to dissuade him, but, finding him resolved, he assisted him in his preparations, and on his departure exacted from him a promise that he would ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... Henry the Lion, the Guelf leader, having broken the oath he had sworn to Frederick to keep away from Germany, returned and organized a rebellion. So soon as this was quelled and the Guelf party was under control for a time, Henry VI had to hasten south to rescue his Sicilian kingdom. There a certain Norman count, Tancred, was leading a national revolt against the German claimant. The pope, who regarded Sicily as his fief, had freed the emperor's Norman subjects from their oath of fidelity to him. Moreover, Richard the Lion-Hearted of England ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... money, and unable to buy immunity, it is charitable to suppose he was entitled to it from innocence. A nobleman, with a few zecchini, was in little danger of the law, which confined its practice entirely to the lower orders. I knew a Sicilian prince, who most wantonly blew a vassal's brains out, merely because he put him in a passion. The case was not even inquired into. He sent half a dollar to the widow of the defunct (which, by the way, he borrowed from me, and never repaid), and there the matter ended. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... in Syria, and was spread through Asia Minor into Greece; while the Carthaginians, a Phoenician colony introduced it into Sicily. The festival of Adonis is most amusingly described by Theocritus the Sicilian poet, in his 'Adoniazusae.' Some authors have suggested that Adonis was the same with the Egyptian God Osiris, and that the affliction of Venus represented that of Isis at the death of her husband. According ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... battle at the moment when they hurled at your breast and chin darts and quarrels, arrows and lance-shafts." The captivity was endured in the course of the marquis's wars in Italy, and the troubadour refers to a seafight between the forces of Genoa and Pisa in the Sicilian campaign. In 1202 he followed his master upon the crusade which practically ended at Constantinople. He had composed a vigorous sirventes urging Christian men to join the movement, but he does not himself show any great enthusiasm to take the [99] cross. "I would rather, if it please ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor
... father's death, shortly before he went to India. "Here he learned to love the wide scenes of sea and land spread out around that hill—a love he never lost, at home or far away. And long years after, with beautiful Sicilian hills before him and a lovely sea, he writes words of fond recollection of the bleak Fife hills, and the ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... about to buy out all private companies. There are only fifty-five thousand telephones to thirty-two million people—as many as in Norway and less than in Denmark. And in many of the southern and Sicilian provinces the jingle of the telephone bell is ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... mastery of all weapons wielded by a pleader in Rome. He was specially famous for his pathos, and for this reason, when several counsel were employed, always spoke last (Orat. 130). A splendid specimen of pathos is to be found in his account of the condemnation and execution of the Sicilian captains (Verr. (Act. ii.) v. 106-122). Much exaggeration was permitted to a Roman orator. Thus Cicero frequently speaks as if his client were to be put to death, though a criminal could always evade capital consequences by going into exile. His enemies scoffed at ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... in inextinguishable flames; others, more cautious, pronounce no opinion, believing that all which is said concerning the dead is uncertain and full of lies; several, though not in truth the ablest, maintain that, because thou didst elevate the tone of the Sicilian Muses and foretell that a new progeny would descend from heaven, thou wert admitted, like the Emperor Trajan, to enjoy eternal blessedness ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... and to pay him besides forty thousand ounces of gold. In return he betrothed his nephew, Arthur, the son of his next brother, Geoffrey, to Tancred's infant daughter, and formed a league offensive and defensive with the Sicilian king—a connection which afterward cost him dear, for it was the source of the enmity of the Emperor Henry VI., who had married Constantia, the aunt of William, and claimed the throne of Sicily in right of his wife. After the dispute with Tancred had been settled, the latent rivalry of Richard and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... hand to satisfy the rapacious public. She was wont at first to sing Proch's Air and Variations, but that always led to a demand for more, and whether she supplemented it with "Ah! non giunge," from "La Sonnambula," the bolero from "The Sicilian Vespers," "O luce di quest anima," from "Linda," or the vocalized waltz by Strauss, the applause always was riotous, and so remained until she sat down to the pianoforte and sang Chopin's "Maiden's Wish," in Polish, to her own accompaniment. As for ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Philippine Islands. We have bought the islands. They are ours. They are farther away, to be sure, than Cuba which Douglas wanted for his ocean-bound republic. But though farther away, civilization, our duty, and the manifest destiny of old compel us to hold them. When Alcibiades embarked on his Sicilian expedition, it was said that Athens itself was sailing out of the Piraeus, never to return. And some think that when Admiral Dewey sailed into the harbor of Manila with his fleet he took the old America with him, never to return to these shores; and what was worse, it disappeared ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... means became clear. In the spring of 1862 the Oreto went out from Liverpool to become the rebel privateer Florida. Before her departure Mr. Adams complained concerning her to the English government, but was assured that the vessel was designed for the Sicilian fruit trade! As it is not diplomatic to say that gentlemen in office are telling lies, the American minister could push the matter no farther. The Florida, therefore, escaped, not to conduct commerce with Sicily, but to destroy the commerce of the United States. At the same time that she was ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... bachelor hummed or whistled "C'est l'amour," and the French, to return the compliment, have made our "Robin Adair," one of the claptraps of the music of their La Dame Blanche. Next, when will Mr. Bishop's Home, sweet home, be forgotten, although the original is a Sicilian air of considerable antiquity. All the baker's and butcher's boys in London can go through "Di tanti pal"—where they leave off, answer a question, and take up the "piti," with the skill of a musician; and as readily fall into the sympathetic melodies of "Oh no we never ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 330, September 6, 1828 • Various
... came late to the front to inherit and give fresh vigour to the gifts of all. As the effigies of Byzantine art became living men and women beneath the pencil of Giotto, so the mere imitative poetry of the Sicilian Court became Italian literature in Dante and Boccaccio. Freedom, slow as it seemed in awakening, nowhere awakened so grandly, nowhere fought so long and stubbornly for life. Dino Compagni sets us face to face with this awakening, with this patient pitiful struggle. ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... gift he brought me a tiny Sicilian lapdog, which I am going to call Argos, because he is so white and swiftfooted. But in a few days we are to have another present from the good Phanes, for. . . . There, now you can see what I am; I was just going to let out a great secret. My grandmother has strictly forbidden me to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... and his surgeon, Decatur took five young officers from the Constitution, and a Sicilian pilot named Catalano, who ...
— Hero Stories from American History - For Elementary Schools • Albert F. Blaisdell
... attempt, for his own purposes. Charles, of very different memory, was at this time, by invitation of the pope, occupying the double throne of Naples and Sicily. And he it was who provoked by his cruelties that frightful outbreak known as the "Sicilian ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... remembering his own sufferings, and hoping from his conversations with Thebe, that by this time his own family would have turned against him. He was also much encouraged by the glory of the action, that, at a time when the Lacedaemonians were sending out generals and governors to help Dionysius the Sicilian tyrant, and when the Athenians had Alexander in their pay, and had even set up a bronze statue of him as a public benefactor, he might show the Greeks that it was the Thebans alone who took up arms in defence of the oppressed, and who put an end to the violent and illegal rule ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... know by what spirit of madness Rome can be possessed to desire the good of its enemies rather than of its friends. You are about to quit Dresden, and repair to Rome. You are my enemy. In the first place, you are not a Sicilian for nothing. I do not mean by that that you have spoken abusively of me, but you have desired that I should come to nothing, that my armies should be beaten, and that my enemies should triumph. You are not the only one to wish me evil; at Rome people think no better than elsewhere. The ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... two nations, who were now daily coalescing more and more, although Etruria was so powerful, that it filled with the fame of its prowess not only the land, but the sea also, through the whole length of Italy, from the Alps to the Sicilian Strait, though he might have repelled the war by means of fortifications, yet he led out his forces to the field. Upon this a battle ensued successful to the Latins, the last also of the mortal acts of AEneas. He was buried, by whatever name human ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... Gregory of Tours, Paul the Deacon—I speak only of those courses at which I was myself able to be present—and, in the last year of his life, the historians of the Saxon Emperors, 936-1002—Widukind, Thietmar, Richer, Liudprand, and the rest. In these and many other books, such as the Sicilian historians and the authorities for the Norman Conquest, he made the men and the times live again, and he seemed to live in them. Whatever the praise which students outside give to his published lectures, we who have listened to him and worked with him ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... become evident that the enterprise would not be profitable, and its perplexed editor was in doubt whether to continue it. He finally decided to go on. When the fourth number came out, early in 1787, it contained the beginning of a novel, 'The Ghostseer', wherein a mysterious Sicilian, and a still more mysterious Armenian, dog the footsteps of a German Prince von —— living at Venice, and do various things suggesting a connection with occult powers. The first installment of the story broke off at a very exciting point,—just when the Sicilian ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... penciled in fire and shedding a radiance, like the serene light of the moon, on the sea of upturned faces below. I saw the peak of Mount Etna towering above its inky mantle of clouds and lightly curling its wreaths of milk-white smoke against the soft sky flushed with the Sicilian sunset. I saw also the gloomy vaulted passages and the narrow cells of the Passionist convent where I once had sojourned for a few days with the fanatical monks, its pale, stern inmates in their robes of black, and the grated window from whence I could look out, a forbidden ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... and bated breath reserved for her; but for Fede her sister, tears and long kisses and the clinging. Well! the Casa Cattolica is a broad foundation: I find Francis of Umbria at the same board with Sicilian Thomas. If I cleave to the one must I despise the other? Lady Fede has my heart and Lady Dottrina must put aside the birch if she would share that little kingdom. Religio habet, said Pico; theologia autem invenit. Let her find. ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... quality. When the band left off the "Bohemian Girl" and rested, and imagination was picturing the trombone in half, at odds with condensation, a barrel-organ was able to make itself heard, with Il Pescatore, till the band began again with The Sicilian ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... see A woman coming toward us, mounted well On a fair Sicilian palfrey, and her face With brow-defending hood of Thessaly Is shadowed from the sun. What must I think? Is it she or no? Can the eye so far deceive? It is. 'Tis not. Unhappy that I am, I know not.—Yes, 'tis she. For drawing near She greets me with ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... Proaeresius was the leader or proctor of the Attic, Hephaestion of the Oriental, Epiphanius of the Arabic, and Diophantus of the Pontic. Thus the Professors were both patrons of clients, and hosts and proxeni of strangers and visitors, as well as masters of the schools: and the Cappadocian, Syrian, or Sicilian youth who came to one or other of them, would be encouraged to study by his protection, and to ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... lived, in Gothic days, as legends tell, A shepherd-swain, a man of low degree; Whose sires, perchance, in Fairyland might dwell, Sicilian groves, or vales of Arcady; But he, I ween, was of the North Countrie: A nation famed for song, and beauty's charms; Zealous, yet modest; innocent, though free; Patient of toil; serene amidst alarms; Inflexible in ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... the will of a man whom the familiar charged with the inquisitorial business dare not hesitate to obey, surely it is not unreasonable to ask how far does the Salvation Army, in its "tribune of the people" aspect, differ from a Sicilian Mafia? I am no apologist of men guilty of the acts charged against the person who yet, I think, might be as fairly called a "victim," in this case, as his partner in wrong-doing. It is possible that, in so peculiar a case, Solomon himself might ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... the least doubt that we should have "adorned a tale" instead of telling one. The crime of assassination is not confined to Portugal; in Sicily and Malta we are knocked on the head at a handsome average nightly, and not a Sicilian ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... the breeze. The people are variously occupied,—some are fishing with the rod, some bathing, some carrying water-jars on their heads. The gem of the reliefs is a group of oxen, grazing in the meadow, of such exquisite beauty as to cast into shade the best engravings of Italo-Greek or Sicilian coins. ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... Hymettus, Mount Hybla, and Mount Ida produced what may be called the classic honey of antiquity, an article doubtless in nowise superior to our best products. Leigh Hunt's "Jar of Honey" is mainly distilled from Sicilian history and literature, Theocritus furnishing the best yield. Sicily has always been rich in bees. Swinburne (the traveler of a hundred years ago) says the woods on this island abounded in wild honey, and that the people also had many hives near their houses. The idyls of Theocritus ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... Plemmyrium's wave-beat shore An island lies, before Sicania's bay, Now called Ortygia—'twas its name of yore. Hither from distant Elis, legends say, Beneath the seas Alpheus stole his way, And, mingling now with Arethusa here, Mounts, a Sicilian fountain, to the day. Here we with prayer, obedient to the seer, Invoke the guardian gods to ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil |
