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Illegitimacy   Listen
noun
Illegitimacy  n.  The state of being illegitimate.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Illegitimacy" Quotes from Famous Books



... divisions—thirty years at Florence, nearly twenty years at Milan, then nineteen years of wandering, till he sinks to rest under the protection of Francis the First at the Chateau de Clou. The dishonour of illegitimacy hangs over his birth. Piero Antonio, his father, was of a noble Florentine house, of Vinci in the Val d'Arno, and Leonardo, brought up delicately among the true children of that house, was the love-child of his youth, with the ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater

... aside. He was described as the so-called Dauphin in treaties signed by Charles and Isabeau his parents. If anyone knew, she knew; and was it possible that more powerful even than the English, more cruel than the Burgundians, this stain of illegitimacy was upon him, making all effort vain? There is no telling where the sensitive point is in any man's heart, and little worthy as was this King, the story we are here told has a thrill of truth in it. It is reported by a certain Sala, ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant

... son, Hunyadi John, called so after the great man. He would have been universally acknowledged as King of Hungary but for the illegitimacy of his birth. As it was, Ulaszlo, the son of the King of Poland, afterwards called Ulaszlo the Second, who claimed Hungary as being descended from Albert, was nominated king by a great majority of the Magyar electors. Hunyadi ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow

... apostle, is not a physical, but a moral power; a power that is lawful and warranted, in regard of matter, person, title or investiture. A legitimacy in each of these must go to the making of a moral power; and an illegitimacy in any of these is an illegitimacy in the very being and constitution, and so a nullity to the power as moral, a making it of no authority. As the text speaks only of this moral power, so it excludes every unlawful ...
— Act, Declaration, & Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation, as Attained to, and Established in Britain and Ireland; Particularly Betwixt the Years 1638 and 1649, Inclusive • The Reformed Presbytery

... Queen Elizabeth (Vol. ii., p. 393.; Vol. iii., p. 11.).—In Hubback on the Evidence of Succession, p. 253, after some remarks on the word "natural," not of itself in former times denoting illegitimacy, this passage occurs: ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 76, April 12, 1851 • Various

... of high fashion, an officer of the Guards. An action and divorce ensued; but two children whom he had previous to this unfortunate event, he refused to acknowledge, thus endeavoring to put the stain of illegitimacy upon them. Years rolled on, and the father and son never met. Rouge-et-Noir was the fashionable game of the day, and Pall-Mall and St. James-street swarmed with gambling-houses. Two gentlemen were quarrelling upon a ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various

... compelled to deliver up the young Duke of York to Richard, who sent him to join his brother in the Tower. On June 22nd, at the request of Richard, Dr. Shaw, brother of the Lord Mayor of London, delivered a sermon at St. Paul's Cross, in which he insisted on the illegitimacy of Edward V. and his brother. On June 25th a deputation of nobles and citizens of London offered the crown to Richard. He accepted it, and began to reign as Richard III. And, according to a confession afterwards made by Sir James Tyrell, one of Richard's officers, the two young ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson

... attempt to establish his own illegitimate line in the estate of Knockwinnock, gave rise to such family feuds and misfortunes, as strongly to found us in that horror and antipathy to defiled blood and illegitimacy which has been handed down to ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... your soul, for he is a jewel fit for such a cabinet: his form, his parts, and every noble action, shews us the royal race from whence he sprung, and the victorious Orange confesses him his own in every virtue, and in every grace; nor can the illegitimacy eclipse him: sure he was got in the first heat of love, which formed him so a hero—but no more. Philander is as kind a ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn

... the end of the journey; and she began to think of Marion with terror and vindictiveness, and this abstinence from a career became a sinister manifestation of that lack of spiritual sinew which had made her succumb to a bad man and handicap Richard with illegitimacy. She prefigured her ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West

... say that she really thought of that boy as a possible heir. In spite of her hatred of all conquerors from without, was it likely that she would accept him as a conqueror, in the face of her outraged womanly feelings and her bourgeois horror of illegitimacy? And yet if he were not her son, he was at least her husband's. And perhaps an idea of saving her empire by placing the works in the hands of that heir was dimly rising within her, above all her prejudices ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola

... Few indeed were the unworthy ones who evaded the sacred responsibility thus laid upon them, and left their offspring to remain under the badge of shame. When carefully looked at it was but a scant cure, and threw the responsibility of illegitimacy where it did not belong, but it was a mighty step nevertheless. The distance from zero ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee

... only security for the possession of Nid de Merle lay in either the death of the young baron and his child or else in his acquiescence in the invalidity of his marriage, and therefore in the illegitimacy of the child. ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge

... magazines are almost prudishly closed to anything suggesting the improper. The tone of the stage is distinctly healthier, and adaptations of hectic French plays are by no means so popular, in spite of the general sympathy of American taste with French. The statistics of illegitimacy point in the same direction, though I admit that this is not necessarily a sign of unsophisticated morality. In a word, when an Englishman goes to France he feels that the moral tone in this respect is ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead

... of adoptive parents was a very grievous sin, especially on the part of those who were children of parents who were forbidden to have children. Something worse than illegitimacy was their lot. The penalties of having the eye torn out, or the tongue cut out,(363) show the ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns

... asked my advice," said Dr. Ravenshaw gravely, "I say that I entirely agree with Mrs. Pendleton. Your first duty is to Sisily. She should out-weigh all other considerations. If you make her illegitimacy public you may live to be sorry ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees

... imputation which no candid infidel would throw on them. Yet, if there be any proposition which can with perfect confidence be affirmed touching the early Christians, it is this, that they never once refused obedience to any actual ruler on account of the illegitimacy of his title. At one time, indeed, the supreme power was claimed by twenty or thirty competitors. Every province from Britain to Egypt had its own Augustus. All these pretenders could not be rightful Emperors. Yet it does not appear that, in ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... besides Alfieri, and which she could love whether deserving or not; something besides Alfieri's glory, in which she could take an interest whether other people did or did not agree? Such a connection as hers with Alfieri may have had an attraction of romance, of poetry, connected with its very illegitimacy, its very negation of normal domestic life, as long as both she and Alfieri were young and passionately in love; but where was the romance, the poetry now, and where was the humdrum married woman's happiness, at whose expense that romance, ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)

... water. I wanted only that paper, but the old fool made me fight for it. Monsieur, but for me you would still have lorded it in France. 'Twas the cloak that brought you to Rochelle, induced your paternal parent to declare your illegitimacy, made you wind up the night by flaunting abroad your ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath

... excellence, would prevent the application of the law in his individual case. But Alcibiades, for reasons unknown to the public, united his influence with that of Aspasia; and their partizans were active and powerful. When the case was tried in the court of illegitimacy at Cynosarges, Philaemon was declared a sojourner in Athens, incapable of holding any office, and dispossessed ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child

... that he had been acting a base and treacherous game with me to further his own dishonest views; that I was fully aware of his motives, and appreciated them as they deserved; that he well knew the story of my illegitimacy was a forgery, that I had the means to prove it one, and would do it shortly; that the term of my articles would expire on the following day, and I would then leave his house for ever and seek ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie

... against Cardinal Consalvi. "The rest have their theological prejudices," said he, "but he has offended me on political grounds; he is my enemy; he has dared to lay a trap for me by holding out against my dynasty a pretext of illegitimacy. They will not fail to make use of it after my death, when I am no longer there to keep them in awe!" On the day after the marriage the whole court were to defile before the new empress, and the cardinals were in attendance with the utmost punctuality, as they ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt

... partially, so disinterestedly bestowed upon me, and whose existence I had in return polluted by a pretended marriage.—I could not behold of my boy, the descendant of two of the noblest houses in Britain, yet upon whom the stain of illegitimacy might hereafter rest, without feelings of self-accusation which filled the cup of life with the waters of bitterness. Alas! its very springs were poisoned—and Helen, however strong, however just thine ...
— Theresa Marchmont • Mrs Charles Gore

... posterity. Unfortunately, she had not always acted with like circumspection; for at the death of Mary Tudor, known as Bloody. Mary, she had laid claim to the throne of Henry VIII, and, relying on the illegitimacy of Elizabeth's birth, had with the dauphin assumed sovereignty over Scotland, England, and Ireland, and had had coins struck with this new title, and plate engraved with these new ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... it may here be noted, had, if we pass over his own illegitimacy, in the absence of direct male heirs of Earl Hakon since Erlend Haraldson's death in 1156, probably the best title to receive a grant of the jarldom of Orkney and Shetland and the earldom of Caithness of all the surviving descendants of ...
— Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time - or, The Jarls and The Freskyns • James Gray

... horror-inspiring grave. 'William the Conqueror' relatively, but 'William the Bastard' positively; and a bastard he will continue so long as the memory of man shall endure." Sir Francis seems to have forgotten the Bastard of Orleans. Nevertheless, and in spite of his illegitimacy, William became ruler of Normandy when he was but a child, his father abdicating the throne, and forcing the Norman baronage to accept the boy as his successor; and that boy thirty years later founded a royal line, that yet endures in full strength, Queen Victoria being the legitimate ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various

... British waters, Germany declared she would assume no responsibility for destruction of neutral ships within this zone. What this meant was to all intents and purposes a "paper" submarine blockade of the British Isles. Its illegitimacy arose from the fact that it was conducted surreptitiously over a vast area, and was only in the slightest degree effective, causing a destruction each month of less than one percent of the traffic. Had it been restricted to narrow limits, it would have been still ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott

... blessing to the race. This step lies in inculcating in our boys and girls high ideals of parenthood. This is more effective than legal prohibition of certain forms of marriage which cannot prevent matings, and adds the curse of illegitimacy to the other handicaps of the children of such unions. The first step in this process has already been reasonably well accomplished. Both our boys and our girls are in love with health. A good husband ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker

... borne even to see another made your wife; but in a mistaken kindness you put this utterly beyond my power. Too much has been required, and I am found—wanting! If even the most miserable fate that can befall an innocent woman; if the curse of illegitimacy were upon me, I could bear that thought even, and acknowledge the justice and wisdom that did not consider me a fit associate for one whose birth is recognized by a ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur

... seemingly incompatible ends of rapidly accumulating gold while frantically pursuing pleasure, there is an amount of immorality unequalled in any capital in Europe. In the whole German Empire the average of illegitimacy is ten per cent. but in Berlin the average for the last few years is twenty per cent. Out of every five children born in Berlin each year one is illegitimate! It is questionable whether the increasing demands of ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier



Words linked to "Illegitimacy" :   bar sinister, legitimacy, position, bastardy



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