"Century" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... As a committee man, he was incomparable. No one could be better equipped for the direction of the Treasury Department than he, but he was not satisfied with direction; he would manage also; and he went to the work with untiring energy. A quarter of a century later he said of it, in a letter to his son, "To fill that office in the manner I did, and as it ought to be filled, is a most laborious task and labor of the most tedious kind. To fit myself for it, to be able to understand ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... great artists have been men of this Stone Age— quality men who dared. Michelangelo was the pure type: Titian who lived a century (lacking one year) was another. Leonardo was the same fine savage (who in some miraculous way also possessed the grace of a courtier). Franz Hals, Van Dyck, Rembrandt and Botticelli were all men of fierce appetites and heroic physiques. They had animality ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... in the middle of the eighteenth century, when Scio was at the height of her glory and prosperity, when the people were wealthy and happy, and all was delight and pleasure-it was at such a time that a small vessel might have been seen at a short distance from her ...
— The Duke's Prize - A Story of Art and Heart in Florence • Maturin Murray
... Marques de los Balbazez, one of the most distinguished generals of the seventeenth century, was the descendant of an illustrious family of Geneva, whose branches spread alike over Italy and Spain. He was born in 1569, and first bore arms in Flanders. In 1604, being in command of the army, he took ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... deemed sufficient to compare a work, produced under such disadvantages, in the seventeenth century, (notwithstanding the extraordinary powers of its author) with what is now becoming the admiration of the nineteenth. Much less, sir, will it be just or candid to suppose me capable of publishing my feeble attempt with any view of comparison ...
— The Fourth Book of Virgil's Aeneid and the Ninth Book of Voltaire's Henriad • Virgil and Voltaire
... rustic lope. It was the gait of the homely toiling men of the village which his young muscles had caught, as if they had in themselves powers of observation and assimilation. Jerome at twelve walked as if he had held plough-shares, bent over potato hills, and hewn wood in cedar swamps for half a century. Jerome's feet were bare, and his red rasped ankles showed below his hitching trousers. His poor winter shoes had quite failed him for many weeks, his blue stockings had shown at the gaps in their sides which had torn away from his mother's strong mending. Now the soles had gone, ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Count Victor with nonchalance, "I daresay they will speedily recapture him. If they only knew the way with any of my compatriots it is to put a woman in his path, only she must be a woman of esprit and charm, and she shall engage him, I'll warrant, till the pursuit come up, even if it takes a century and the axe is at the end ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... now showing five terraces, is said to have had a height of seven terraces as late as the middle of the present century, but at the time of the survey of the village no traces were seen of such additional stories. The top of the present fifth terrace, however, is more than 50 feet long, and affords sufficient space for the addition of a ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... stumbling-block to students of naval history. Only a few copies of them were generally known to exist; fewer still could readily be consulted by the public, and of these the best known had been wrongly dated. The discovery therefore of a number of seventeenth century Instructions amongst the Earl of Dartmouth's papers, which he had generously placed at the disposal of the Society, seemed to encourage an attempt to make something like a complete collection. The result, such as it is, is now offered to the Society. It is by no means exhaustive. ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... you ever learned? Our English poets have all been ridiculous creatures about music, any how; I don't believe there was one in this century, except Browning, that really knew anything about it, and all their groaning and pining for inspiration was nothing in the world but a need of some music; I was reading the 'Palace of Art' only the other day, ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... supremacy had moved Bible students to the earnest study of the prophecies, and as the predicted signs of the near approach of Christ's coming began to appear, there arose the great advent awakening in the earlier decades of the nineteenth century. ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... Ramsey house with admiration. It stood close to the street, as is the case with so many old houses in rural New England. It had a tiny brick strip of yard in front, on which was set, on either side of the stoop, a great century-plant in a pot. Above them rose a curving flight of steps to a broad veranda, supported with Corinthian pillars, which were now upright and glistening with white paint, as was ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... before ships will appear of a proper and convenient form. Fortunately, that new generation has already sprung up beyond the Atlantic, and by their aid we shall get out of this hundred years' dilemma a little sooner. Even they have been half a century in arriving at what is yet far from perfection in the art; but, unsaddled by the incubus of the tax, they have been looking at the fishes in the sea, and drawing a few ideas from the mechanism of nature; and hence ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... that the Feast of the Nativity was held originally on the 6th January (the Epiphany), but in 353-4 the Pope Liberius displaced it to the 25th December... but there is no evidence of a Feast of the Nativity taking place at all, before the fourth century A.D." It was not till 534 A.D. that Christmas Day and Epiphany were reckoned by the ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... anywhere, at any time. Nursery rhymes, so often alluded to, lend themselves to an endless variety of imaginary people and places. The old woman might be living still in her shoe and whipping her children soundly, in a twentieth-century wrapper, or clothed in skins she might send them supperless to bed in pre-historic ages. Whether Jack and Jill wore wooden shoes or patent-leather pumps we shall never really know; perhaps their little feet were encased in moccasins, or ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... outwitted by the help of the Virgin or some other saint, and in this way the reader is reminded of the Norse Devil, the successor of the Giants, who always makes bad bargains. When the story was applied to Faust in the sixteenth century, the terrible Middle Age Devil was paramount, and knew how to ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... French, and Spaniards had battled, and which lay within the limits of his command. The renown of his achievements had carried his name to Ciudadela, the remote inland city where his father was born over a century before; and the quiet islanders, who had exulted in the fame of one sprung from their race, were ready to greet him and claim him as their own. In response to an invitation given by them, the admiral, in December, 1867, paid a visit to Ciudadela, of which the following account ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... our history is recorded an odder phase of curious fortune than that by which Bishop Berkeley, of Cloyne, was enabled early in the eighteenth century to sail o'erseas to Newport, Rhode Island, there to build (in 1729) the beautiful old place, Whitehall, which is still standing. Hundreds of interested visitors drive every summer to the old house, to take a cup of tea, to ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... his epoch, he was also the heaven-born dramatist of his century. Some of the best scenes in this new book are from his mediaeval pen, and illumine the pages whence they come; for the words of a genius, so high as his, are not born to die; their immediate work upon mankind fulfilled, they may seem to lie torpid; but, at each fresh shower of intelligence ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... not? He was ten years her senior, but that makes nothing. His auburn hair and beard, in the style of Henry the Great, could show no streak of grey. His eyes had the brightness of one-and-twenty; for the eyes of a man whose soul preserves its youthfulness will keep their clear lustre for half a century. The tall figure, straight as a dart; the frank handsome face which M. Lenoble saw in the glass when he made his toilet, were not calculated to dishearten a hopeful lover; and Gustave, by nature sanguine, enjoyed his dream of happiness, untroubled ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... on which he was particularly eloquent—radioactivity; that most strange property of matter whose discovery had been the crowning glory of science in the closing decade of the nineteenth century. None of us really knew anything about it except what Stonewall taught us. If some new incomprehensible announcement appeared in the newspapers we skipped it, being sure that Edmund would make it all clear at the club in the evening. He made us understand, in a dim way, that some vast, tremendous ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... ascribed to Scott, is a common proverb of the seventeenth century. It is found in Ray and ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... the Country.—The United States was now three times as large as it was at Jefferson's election. It contained over three million square miles of land. About one-third of this great area was settled. In the sixty years of the century the population had increased even faster than the area had increased. In 1800 there were five and a half million people living in the United States. In 1860 there were over thirty-one million people within its borders. Of these nearly five millions were white immigrants. ...
— A Short History of the United States • Edward Channing
... that many thousands of years ago, right after the Great Horror, the whole continent of the west had slowly sunk beneath the West Water, and that once every century it arose during a full moon. Still, Captain Hinrik clung to the hope that the legend would not be borne out by truth. Perhaps the west continent still existed; perhaps, dare he hope, with civilization. The crew of the Semilunis ...
— Longevity • Therese Windser
... have I listened to in the last quarter of a century of fairly regular church attendance; once I heard an Englishman preaching bitterly of the Suffragettes' militant methods, and he said they should all "be condemned to motherhood to tame their wild spirits." ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung
... and a fine spring of water supplied fresh drink. All the next day the great wheels of the lumbering baggage wagons cut through the sod of the Warren prairies, leaving a long trail over the plains that was plainly traceable for a half century afterwards. Night found the army encamped on the east bank of Pine creek, above the site of the old Brier milldam. An old bayonet of the revolutionary type was long years afterward picked up in an adjoining wheat field and is now lodged ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... knew of the life and works of 'Dominus Sanctus Nicolaus' was told them by the Spaniards at the time of their influence in Holland, and so it is believed that the Saint was born at Myra, in Lycie, and lived in the commencement of the fourth century, in the reign of Constantine the Great. From his earliest youth he showed signs of great piety and self-denial, refusing, it is said, even when quite a tiny child, to take food more than once a day on fast days! His whole ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... particular heredity, faithfully transmitted from mother to daughter since the middle ages. The name of this woman was La Marana. In her family, existing solely in the female line, the idea, person, name and power of a father had been completely unknown since the thirteenth century. The name Marana was to her what the designation of Stuart is to the celebrated royal race of Scotland, a name of distinction substituted for the patronymic name by the constant heredity of the same office devolving on ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac
... built by Maun Deo, (Mana Deva,) who, according to him, was the sixty-first prince of the country, before the year of Christ 1323. Allowing ten years for each reign, this would place the building of the temple in the beginning of the eighth century, which, from its appearance, is fully as early a date as ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... middle wall, 4 feet 8 inches thick, is faced with herring-bone work, and this, and the coarseness of its workmanship, prove it to be of great antiquity. It is almost undoubtedly Saxon, and has been supposed, though on slender evidence, to be part of the original church begun by Edwin in the seventh century. A bit of this wall is now bare, and may ...
— The Cathedral Church of York - Bell's Cathedrals: A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief - History of the Archi-Episcopal See • A. Clutton-Brock
... century opened with a fulness of glory and unheard-of prosperity; "but Louis XIV. did not suffer himself to be lulled to sleep by the apparent indifference with which Europe, the empire excepted, received ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... equality the Americans of the Middle West are far in advance of the English of the twentieth century. It is not their fault if they are still some centuries behind the English of the twelfth century. But the defect by which they fall short of being a true peasantry is that they do not produce their own spiritual food, in the same sense as their own material food. They do ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... and fierce outcries of excited men. At a distance from that quarter in which the strife commenced, stands a simple village church, within whose shadow many of those who had worshipped in its walls during the last half century, have lain down to rest from the toils of life. No proud mausoleum shuts the sunshine from those lowly graves. Drooping elms and willows bend over them, and the whispering of their long pendent branches, as the summer breeze sweeps them hither and thither, is the only sound that breaks the ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... life. However, as I didn't fall, I was not drowned, and the effect on me was curious enough. For all I had seen and suffered on that the opening day of my sea-life made me think for the first time—and I have never ceased thinking (half a century has passed since then)—how to oppose tyranny in every shape. Indeed, I have always done so to such an extent as to have been frequently called by my superiors 'a troublesome character,' 'a ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... Pursuit of Truth Occultism defined Psychic Phenomena The Ancient Iberians The Star Dust of the Universe MISCELLANEOUS—Bright Literature; The Two Worlds; Foote's Health Monthly; Psychic Theories; Twentieth Century Science, Dawning at the end of the Nineteenth; Comparative Speed of Light and Electricity; Wonderful Photography; Wooden Cloth; The Phylloxera; Falling Rents; Boston Civilization; Psychic Blundering; Beecher's ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, January 1888 - Volume 1, Number 12 • Various
... it that the means of food, clothing, and shelter are now so much more cheaply and abundantly procured than formerly? Sir, the main cause I take to be the progress of scientific art, or a new extension of the application of science to art. This it is which has so much distinguished the last half-century in Europe and in America, and its effects are everywhere visible, and especially among us. Man has found new allies and auxiliaries in the powers of nature and ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... a young fellow myself? As to BEAUTY; pr'ythee, Jack, do thou, to spare my modesty, make a comparison between my Clarissa for a woman, and thy Lovelace for a man. For her FAMILY; that was not known to its country a century ago: and I hate them all but her. Have I not cause?—For her FORTUNE; fortune, thou knowest, was ever a stimulus with me; and this for reasons not ignoble. Do not girls of fortune adorn themselves on purpose to engage our attention? Seek they not to draw us into their snares? Depend ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... a conqueror of far more terrible mood. We have seen that when the Goths first entered Roman territory they were driven on by a vast migration of the Asiatic Huns. These wild and hideous tribes then spent half a century roaming through central Europe, ere they were gathered into one huge body by their great chief, Attila, and in their turn approached the shattered regions of the Mediterranean.[3] Their invasion, if we are to trust the tales of their ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... in saying that the Bishop of Blanford was an exceedingly fortunate man. No one was possessed of an estate boasting fairer lawns or more noble beeches, and the palace was a singularly successful combination of ecclesiastical antiquity and nineteenth-century comfort. The cathedral was a gem, and its boy choir the despair of three neighbouring sees, while, owing to a certain amount of worldly wisdom on the part of former investors of the revenues, the bishopric was among the most handsomely ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... he was reading in the library, from a big volume open on his knees, how for over a century the chicory root had been dried and ground in France, and used to strengthen the cheaper grades of coffee, when Letty broke in, as if she had not been ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... known: the earliest written accounts of the use of Coffee are by Arabian writers in the 15th century; it appears that in the city of Aden it became, in the latter half of that century, a very popular drink, first with lawyers, studious persons, and those whose occupation required wakefulness at night, and soon after, with all ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... was a very flower of woman. Women such as she are born rarely, scarce twice a century the whole world over. She was unhampered by rule or convention. Religion, with her, was a series of abstractions, partly learned from Yunsan, partly worked out for herself. Vulgar religion, the public religion, she held, was a device to keep the toiling millions to their ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... of Josiah Wedgwood, the English potter, was less chequered and more prosperous than that of either Palissy or Bottgher, and his lot was cast in happier times. Down to the middle of last century England was behind most other nations of the first order in Europe in respect of skilled industry. Although there were many potters in Staffordshire—and Wedgwood himself belonged to a numerous clan of potters of the same name—their productions were of the rudest ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... riches and security of the long nave of Winchester. Do we not there see the truth; can stones lie or an answer be demanded of them according to folly? And if a man would know the truth, let us say, of the thirteenth century here in England, where else will he find any answer? Consider it then, the joy as of flowers, the happiness as of Spring, in that architecture we call Early English, which for joy and happiness surpasses any other in the world. The men who carved those shafts and ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... did far more. After the great revulsion from the excesses of the French Revolution, she was with him a continually sanative influence. That whole period, which ranged from 1795 till his settling at Grasmere at the opening of the next century, and of which the residence at Racedown and Alfoxden formed a large part, was the healing time of his spirit. And in that healing time she was the chief human minister. Somewhere in the 'Prelude' he tells ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... agreed on between myself and M. Vicq-d'Azyr, but that I gave myself very unnecessary trouble. "Remember," added she, "that not a grain of poison will be put in use against me. The Brinvilliers do not belong to this century: this age possesses calumny, which is a much more convenient instrument of death; and it is by ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... talk of the whole town; and as for Glycera, she behaved confoundedly ill to me. Well, well, now that we understand each other, it is for ever that our hearts are united, and we can look at Sir Cresswell Cresswell, and snap our fingers at his wig. But this Maria of the last century was a woman of an ill-regulated mind. You, my love, who know the world, know that in the course of this lady's career a great deal must have passed that would not bear the light, or edify in the telling. You know (not, my dear creature, that I mean you ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... potatoes are the two greatest gifts in the way of food that America has bestowed on the other nations. Since their adoption in the sixteenth century as a new food from recently discovered America, white potatoes have become one of ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett
... illustration. The former of these is commonly defined as the theory of reality or of first principles, the latter as the theory of knowledge. But the most distinctive philosophical movement of the nineteenth century issues from the idea that knowing and being are identical.[150:1] The prime reality is defined as a knowing mind, and the terms of reality are interpreted as terms of a cognitive process. Ideas and logical principles constitute the world. It is evident that in this Hegelian philosophy ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... shall find them less again; so that if we go on from little to less, and from less to nothing, I hesitate not one moment to affirm, that in half a century at this rate, we shall have no souls at all; which being the period beyond which I doubt likewise of the existence of the Christian faith, 'twill be one advantage that both of 'em will be ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... "the Urim and the Thummim," a pair of supernatural spectacles, by means of which he was able to read and translate this "Reformed Egyptian" language. This is the sort of story which has been believed, in this nineteenth century, by tens of thousands of Mormon votaries. Concerning the books of the Bible no such astonishing stories are told. Nevertheless some good people seem inclined to think that if such stories are not told, they might well be; they imagine that the Bible must ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... ignorant scribblers, the word means something like bright or brilliant, or perhaps towering; yet its precise meaning is pale yellow, wan, ghastly. Journalists of the last quarter of the nineteenth century will remember a long list of such sins against precision, recorded by Charles A. Dana, editor of the New York Sun. A few additions have been made to his list, and the whole is given below. The reader should distinguish keenly between each pair of words and should ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... P., a grey-haired old man, who had been born about the twenties of the present century;—"there were reckless men in days gone by also. Some one said of the poet Yazykoff, that he had enthusiasm which was not directed to anything, an objectless enthusiasm; and it was much the same with those people—their recklessness ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... carried great weight with me. I also visited his Italian colleague, an astute diplomat, thoroughly versed in German statecraft. He had always put me in mind of those dexterous agents employed by the sixteenth-century ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... a book as big as 'The Annals;' and, after I've been slaving at it for half a century or so, I'm to be told it won't do, and all my labor must go for nothing? I must say the proposal is rather a cool one to make,—to the ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... to drag his father with him. Canon Egremont was a good and upright man, according to his lights, which were rather those of a well-beneficed clergyman of the first than of the last half of the century, intensified perhaps that the passive voice was the strongest in him. All the country knew that Canon Egremont could be relied on to give a prudent, scholarly judgment, and to be kind and liberal, when once induced to stir mind or body—but how to do that was the problem. He had not ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... have been quietly at work during the past century removing false rabbinical traditions and misconceptions that had gathered about these ancient Scriptures, while from other sources has come new light to illumine their pages. The result is that in the Old Testament the Christian world is discerning a new heritage, the beauty and ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... at the University. Personally, I have no love for Greek particles, and only a very moderate taste for port wine. But I do love, with all my heart, the grace of antiquity that mellows our crumbling courts, the old tradition of multifarious humanity that has century by century entwined itself with the very fabric of the place. I love the youthful spirit that flashes and brightens in every corner of the old courts, as the wallflower that rises spring by spring with its rich orange-tawny hue, its wild scent, on the tops of our mouldering walls. It is ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... century the little republic prospered. It was perhaps only natural that the Portuguese settlers should wish to destroy it, for it represented an alien force and an ever present danger, certainly so far as their profits from the use of slave labor went. At any rate, in ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... of olden time. It was decisive; Lourdes was only an explainable accident, whose reactionary violence was even a proof of the extreme agony in which belief under the antique form of Catholicism was struggling. Never again, as in the cathedrals of the twelfth century, would the entire nation kneel like a docile flock in the hands of the Master. To blindly, obstinately cling to the attempt to bring that to pass would mean to dash oneself against the impossible, to rush, perhaps, towards ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... days the answer was sent, in which the bishop founds his claim to the two lordships, upon a grant of Charles the fifth, guaranteed by France and Spain; alleges that his predecessors had enjoyed this grant above a century, and that he never intended to infringe the rights of Prussia; but as the house of Brandenburgh had always made some pretensions to that territory, he was willing to do what other bishops had offered, to purchase that claim for ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... said, "What a pity Napoleon didn't thrash the whole dunderheaded lot! His empire would have been a blessing to them, and they would have had some chance of being civilized under the French. All this unification of nationalities is the great humbug of the century. Every stupid race thinks it's happy because it's united, and civilization has been set back a hundred years by the wars that were fought to bring the unions about; and more wars will have to be fought ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... curls, and a rose in her powdered hair. In the corner stood porcelain shepherds and shepherdesses, dining-room clocks from the workshop of the celebrated Lefroy, bandboxes, roulettes, fans, and the various playthings for the amusement of ladies that were in vogue at the end of the last century, when Montgolfier's balloons and Niesber's magnetism were the rage. Hermann stepped behind the screen. At the back of it stood a little iron bedstead; on the right was the door which led to the cabinet; on the left, the other which led to the corridor. He opened the latter, and saw the little ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... growth, in the unfolding of a romantic passage of Maryland history, of which no annalist has ever given more than an ambiguous and meagre hint. It refers to a deed of bloodshed, of which the only trace that was not obliterated from living rumor so long as a century ago was to be found in a vague and misty relic of an old memory of the provincial period of the State. The facts by which I have been enabled to bring it to the full light of an historical incident, it will be seen in the perusal of this narrative, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... supposes in his history of English Poetry, a short play performed between the courses of a banquet or festival; or it may mean the playing of something by two or more parties, the interchange of playing or acting which occurs when two or more people act. It was about the middle of the fifteenth century that dramatic pieces began in England to be called Interludes; for some time previous they had been styled Moralities; but the earliest name by which they were known was Mysteries. The first Mysteries composed in England were by one Ranald, or Ranulf, a monk of Chester, who flourished ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... just completed over the river Avon, at Bristol, when Chatterton sends to the printer a genuine description, in antiquated language, of the passing over the old bridge, for the first time, in the thirteenth century, on which occasion two songs are chanted, by two saints, of whom nothing was known, and expressed in language precisely the same as Rowley's, though he lived two hundred years after ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... story, perhaps mythical, of the discovery of Herculaneum at the beginning of the eighteenth century by the accidental sinking of a well upon its long-forgotten site and of the subsequent excavations made by the Prince d'Elboeuf. These so-called explorations were, however, made in the most greedy and destructive spirit, for the prince's ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... ladder, and peep at him through a small window. A wine merchant at Hamburgh, who was above seventy years of age, requested to speak with Lady Hamilton; and told her he had some Rhenish wine, of the vintage of 1625, which had been in his own possession more than half-a-century: he had preserved it for some extraordinary occasion; and that which had now arrived was far beyond any that he could ever have expected. His request was, that her ladyship would prevail upon Lord Nelson to accept six dozen of this incomparable wine: part of it would then have the honour to flow ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... Mr. Redfield is universally laughed at. He has completely proven that he does not belong to the present century, or, at least, that he has been asleep for the last twenty years. Barnum should deposit it among the curiosities of his shop."—New York Herald, ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... that he knew how to govern a nation which no English statesman before his time or since was able to rule from Dublin Castle. If the policy of Chesterfield had been adopted with regard to Ireland, these countries would have been saved more than a century of trouble. We cannot believe the statesman to have been only superficial and worthless who anticipated in his Irish policy the convictions of Burke and the ideas ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... numbered an amount of years to which the human race is seldom permitted to attain. His frame, which had once been tall and erect, like the cedar, was now bending under the pressure of more than a century. The elastic, light step of an Indian was gone, and in its place he was compelled to toil his tardy way over the ground, inch by inch. His dark, wrinkled countenance was in singular and wild contrast with ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... light weather. The galley, or longship, had carried guns on a platform at the bows, pointing forward. But these new vessels carried guns in broadside, in addition to the bow-chasers. These broadside guns were at first mounted en barbette, pointing over the bulwarks. Early in the sixteenth century the port-hole, with a hinged lid, was invented, and the guns were then pointed through the ship's sides. As these ships carried more guns than the galleys, they were built more strongly, lest the shock of the explosions should shake them to pieces. They were strong enough to keep ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... one link gives power of suspension to another, so that a ring which is not touched by the magnet is yet thrilled with its force, so one who is out of touch with Plato's supernal melodies, may be sensitized by the virtue imparted to his nineteenth century disciples, who are able to "temper this ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... long-gone years when the miners first came into the mountains. Living quietly in the beautiful valley to which they had given their name, his tribe dwelt. Wild children of nature, they had for many a century had the freedom of those hills. Far and wide on many a hunting expedition they had roamed, and none had said nay. But the pale-face, the greedy pale-face, came and stole the forests and creeks yonder. ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... passage Brasseur builds his theory of the formation of a great Toltec empire in Central America, about the close of the eleventh century (Hist. des Nations Civilisees[TN-28] du Mexique, Tom. II, pp. 101-5). He explains Nacxit as the last two syllables of Topiltzin Acxitl, a title of Quetzalcoatl. Cinpual Taxuch is undoubtedly from the same tongue. Orbal tzam, Bored Nose, the pendent from the ...
— The Annals of the Cakchiquels • Daniel G. Brinton
... most of all Black Barrow Down lay under grave imputation of having been enchanted with a very evil spell. Moreover, it was known, though folk were loath to speak of it, even on a summer morning, that Squire Thom, who had been murdered there, a century ago or more, had been seen by several shepherds, even in the middle day, walking with his severed head carried in his left hand, and his right arm ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... I should pursue the historical sketch further. Those who wish to know the views of writers of the Middle Ages will find them recorded by Sir Charles Lyell.[6] The long controversy carried on during the latter part of the eighteenth century between "Neptunists," led by Werner on the one side, and "Vulcanists," led by Hutton and Playfair on the other, regarding the origin of such rocks as granite and basalt, was finally brought to a close by the triumph of the "Vulcanists," who demonstrated that such ...
— Volcanoes: Past and Present • Edward Hull
... one, leaving the dust to mix with dust forever. The body wants not the soul again; for it is a senseless clod and wants nothing. The soul wants not its old body again: it prefers to have the freedom of the universe, a spirit. Philip the Solitary wrote, in the twelfth century, a book called "Dioptra," presenting the controversy between the soul and the body very quaintly and at length. The same thing was done by Henry Nicholson in a "Conference between the Soul and Body concerning the Present and Future State." ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... nations oscillates between epochs when the substance and when the form prevails. The formation of America was the epoch when substance prevailed. Afterward, for more than half a century, the form was paramount; the term of substance again begins. The Constitution is substance and form. The substance in it is perennial; but every form is transient, and must ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... in various magazines. Letters to Clergymen of the Northern Methodist Church. Letters from Georgia to Massachusetts. Georgia Scenes, Characters, Incidents, in First Half Century of the Republic, by a Native Georgian. ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... century, wonderful art thou indeed—wonderful, but wearisome in thy stale and deadly uniformity. Thy men are more like numerals than men. They must bear their idiosyncrasies or their professions written on a placard about their neck, like the scenery in Shakespeare's theatre. ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... chatting, went the two children, along the cobble-paved streets of the ancient town, past old churches that had been sacked and pillaged by the very ancestors of one of them, taking short cuts through narrow passages that twisted and wormed their way between, and sometimes beneath, century-old stone houses; across the flower-market, where faint odors of dying violets and crushed lilies-of-the-valley still clung to the bare wooden booths; and so, finally, to the door of a tall building where, from the concierge's room ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... little boy to sleep "by humming to him an ode of Anacreon," and by Dr Moncure Conway that he was versed in mediaeval legend, and seemed to have known Paracelsus, Faustus, and even Talmudic personages with an intimate familiarity. He wrote verses in excellent couplets of the eighteenth century manner, and strung together fantastic rhymes as a mode of aiding his boy in tasks which tried the memory. He was a dexterous draughtsman, and of his amateur handiwork in portraiture and caricature—sometimes produced, as it were, instinctively, ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... kiss me now"—and when it was finished, his fingers strayed into another, "Nancie," by Thomas Morley. His hands moved over the keyboard softly, as if they loved it, and his thoughts, though deep in the gentle music, entertained casual admiration of the sixteenth century organ, which had lately come into his possession, and which he could see at the end of the room on a slightly raised platform. Its beautiful shape, and the shape of the old instruments, vaguely perceived, lent an enchantment to the darkness. In the corner was a viola da gamba, and against ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... of Sainte-Radegonde, built by the saint of that name in the sixth century, is famous throughout Poitou. In the crypt between the tombs of Ste. Agnes and St. Disciole is that of Ste. Radegonde herself, but it now only contains some particles of her remains, as the greater portion was burnt by the Huguenots ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... height." The translators and commentators Hirth and Rockhill have (p. 129) the following notes: "Quotation from Ling-wai-tai-ta, 3, 6a. The ostrich was first made known to the Chinese in the beginning of the second century of our era, when some were brought to the court of China from Parthia. The Chinese then called them An-si-tsio 'Parthian bird.' See Hou Han Shu, 88, and Hirth, China and Roman Orient, 39. In the Wei shu, 102, 12b, no name ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... to Lucetta. Mr. John Lee. There were at this time two actors and two actresses of the name Lee, Leigh, who, especially in view of the eclectic spelling of seventeenth-century proper names, need to be carefully distinguished. John Lee, who appeared in the small role of Sancho and also took the equally unimportant part of Sebastian in Abdelazer this same year, had, according to ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... plunder, together with the great wealth in gold and silver coin which they had wrung by way of tribute from the weak rulers of the Eastern Empire. A conception of the extent of this spoil may be gathered from the fact that the Greek emperor during the seventh century paid the Avars annually as tribute eighty thousand gold solidi, and that on a single occasion the Emperor Heraclius was forced to pay them ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... that fugitives were often seized under this Act. From a competent inquirer we learn that twenty-six years elapsed before it was successfully enforced in any Free State. It is certain, that, in a case at Boston, towards the close of the last century, illustrated by Josiah Quincy as counsel, the crowd about the magistrate, at the examination, quietly and spontaneously opened a way for the fugitive, and thus the Act failed to be executed. It is also certain, ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... sort of blooming sand-bar intersected by a single narrow creek which does duty as a canal and occupied by a meagre cluster of huts, the dwellings apparently of market- gardeners and fishermen, and by a ruinous church of the eleventh century. It is impossible to imagine a more penetrating case of unheeded collapse. Torcello was the mother-city of Venice, and she lies there now, a mere mouldering vestige, like a group of weather-bleached parental bones left impiously unburied. I stopped my gondola ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... forgotten. This error has been renewed in our day, because the consciousness of the limits of the natural sciences and of the value of the truth which belongs to intuition and to art, have been renewed. But just as, a century ago, during the idealistic and romantic period, there were some who reminded the fanatics for art, and the artists who were transforming philosophy, that art was not "the most lofty form of apprehending the Absolute"; so, in our day, it is necessary ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... why, he was met even now As mad as the vex'd sea; singing aloud; Crown'd with rank fumiter and furrow weeds, With harlocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers, Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow In our sustaining corn.—A century send forth; Search every acre in the high-grown field, And bring him to our eye. [Exit an Officer.] What can man's wisdom In the restoring his bereaved sense? He that helps him ...
— The Tragedy of King Lear • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... act of the bloody drama of the seventeenth century, when the allied Protestant princes of Germany, assisted by the English and the Dutch, rallied under the leadership of Christian, King of Denmark, and resolved to recover what they had lost; while Bethlen Gabor, a Transylvanian prince, at the head of an ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... descendants, and not least to him who was to use his "meikle" mouth to best advantage as the spokesman of his race. Rather more than half-way between Auld Wat of Harden's times—i. e., the middle of the sixteenth century—and those of Sir Walter Scott, poet and novelist, lived Sir Walter's great-grandfather, Walter Scott generally known in Teviotdale by the surname of Beardie, because he would never cut his beard after the banishment of the Stuarts, and who took arms in their cause and lost by his intrigues on ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... waters, ever westward—towards Cathay, as they believed—made Quebec their base for exploration. And as time went on, the rock-built stronghold of the north became the nerve-centre of that half-century of conflict which left the flag of Britain waving in victory on ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... right. A large part of half a century has passed since then, and a steady stream of human beings has been setting in ever since, and still there is room for all who come ...
— Peter Biddulph - The Story of an Australian Settler • W.H.G. Kingston
... a pioneer, and he had all the courage, enterprise, and resourcefulness of the pioneer. He was virile, above all things else. He owned and controlled everything in sight. He was a state-builder. Half a century ago, in the Middle West, the strong men and the influential families were largely farmers. Even professional men owned and managed farms, frequently living upon them. The smell of the soil sweetened musty law books, deodorized ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... partially accounted for by its being given to churchgoers, for it seems unlikely that the pamphlet would have a tremendous sale, even if one allows for the strong opposition to the stage which persisted in the minds of many people at the turn of the century. The author of the tract is unknown, although Sister Rose Anthony in 'The Jeremy Collier Stage Controversy, 1698-1726' (Milwaukee, 1937), pages 194-209, ascribed it to Jeremy Collier, an attribution which E. N. Hooker, ...
— Representation of the Impiety and Immorality of the English Stage (1704); Some Thoughts Concerning the Stage in a Letter to a Lady (1704) • Anonymous
... the name Virginia, being discovered in the reign of a virgin Queen. But having failed in this and several other attempts of a similar kind, Sir Walter Raleigh surrendered his patent, and nothing more was done in colonizing Virginia during the remainder of that century. ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter
... in and said she considered "Le Visage Emerveille," by the Comtesse de Noailles, to be the most beautiful book of the century, with the exception, perhaps, of the "Tagebuch ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... hear the cry of dissent: You make Homer too introspective, you make him a self-introverted, self-torturing nineteenth century man, whereas he is the most unreflective, unconscious of poets. Very natural is such a protest, my good reader; this sort of thing may be carried too far, and become fantastic. Still it is a great mistake to think that Homer never ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... "The Father of all Fables;" for from its numerous translations have probably come Esop and Pilpay, and in latter days Reineke Fuchs. Originally compiled in Sanskrit, it was rendered, by order of Nushirvan, in the sixth century A.D., into Persic. From the Persic it passed, A.D. 850, into the Arabic, and thence into Hebrew and Greek. In its own land it obtained as wide a circulation. The Emperor Akbar, impressed with the wisdom of its maxims and the ingenuity of its apologues, commended ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... Herodotus, which places the date of Homer four hundred years before his own, therefore in the ninth century B.C., was little better than mere conjecture. Common opinion has certainly presumed him to be posterior to the Dorian conquest. The "Hymn to Apollo," however, which was the main prop of this opinion, is assuredly not his. In a work which attempts to turn ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... he was obliged to leave his business and family in Warwickshire and shelter himself in London." The independent testimony of Archdeacon Davies, who was vicar of Saperton, Gloucestershire, late in the seventeenth century, is to the effect that Shakespeare "was much given to all unluckiness in stealing venison and rabbits, particularly from Sir Thomas Lucy, who had him oft whipt, and sometimes imprisoned, and at last made him fly his native county to his great advancement." ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... more than twenty or twenty-five feet in diameter. Our gunners, completely concealed beneath the foliage of the forest, with weapons which did not reveal their position, as did the flashes and detonation of the Twentieth Century artillery, hit their repeller ...
— The Airlords of Han • Philip Francis Nowlan
... taking part in a battle that doesn't even spare the children? Do you remember my little sister Karen, who had to drown herself? How many thousand children are there not standing behind her and Johanna! They call this the children's century, and the children's blood is crying out from the earth! They're happy when they can steal away. Fancy if Johanna had lived on with her burden! The shadows of childhood stretch over the ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... respecting the exact state of government to which the city of Timbuctoo was subject. It is well known, that the vernacular histories, both traditionary and written, of the wars of the Moorish empire, agree in stating, that from the middle of the seventeenth century, Timbuctoo was occupied by the troops of the emperors of Morocco, in whose name a considerable annual tribute was levied upon the inhabitants; but that the negroes, in the early part of the last century, taking ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... to hear the Bible quoted. He believes in a higher law, no doubt, Frederic Douglas being editorial expounder; a sort of Moses of this century, a little less meek, though, than the one who instructed the Israelites. George won't hear the Bible; he prefers, he says, appealing to the Almighty himself. This makes me fear his Abolitionist friends are not doing right by him; putting him up to shooting, and turning Spanish gentleman, and all ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... In the early period, furs appear to have constituted the entire riches of the Northern countries, and they were almost the only exports. Taxes were paid on them, and they were the medium of exchange. So it was also in our own Western territories in the latter part of the last century, and is to the present day, to a great extent, among the Indians. In the eleventh century, furs had become fashionable throughout Europe, and the art of dyeing them, was practiced in the twelfth. In the history of ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... this carping, I certainly derived from it. As an expert on stage finance, for example, to-day and forty years back, Mr. HIBBERT has revelations that may well cause the least concerned to marvel. And there is an appendix, which gives a list of Drury Lane pantomimes, with casts, for half a century, including, of course, the incomparable first one; but that is not a memory of this world. A book to be kept for odd references in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 29, 1920 • Various
... they were placed in elaborate lacquer boxes. There were countless numbers of such books, devout and mystic, all inscribed in Pali; they included the "Three Baskets of the Law," also the Laws of Manu, which dated from the fifth century before Christ. Professional scribes were kept constantly employed in re-copying and restoring these precious tomes, as the palm leaves only last about a hundred years, after which they become brittle and difficult to decipher, and the copyists ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... dominant race in ranching, stimulated cattle prices far beyond what was justified by the laws of supply and demand. The boom in live stock in the Southwest which began in the early '80's stands alone in the market variations of the last half-century. And as if to rebuke the folly of man and remind him that he is but grass, Nature frowned with two successive severe winters, humbling the kings and princes ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... e.g. at Caen, where medical students who have been "ploughed" have to take an oath not to bring "malum vel damnum" upon the examiners. But even at Louvain, where the examination system (p. 149) was fully developed in the Middle Ages, and where there were class lists in the fifteenth century (the classes being distinguished as Rigorosi, Transibiles, and Gratiosi), failure was regarded as an exceptional event ("si autem, quod absit, aliqui inveniantur simpliciter gratiosi seu refutabiles, erunt ...
— Life in the Medieval University • Robert S. Rait
... century keeps on this noble duel between the Physician and the Devil, this battle of light and knowledge with the dark shades of falsehood. We saw its beginning in Agrippa and Wyer. Doctor Duncan carried it bravely on at Loudun, and fearlessly impressed ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... steep slope to the garden surrounding the ancient castle of Dunroe, which had been built as a stronghold somewhere about the fourteenth century, and still stood solid on its rocky foundation; a square, keep-like edifice, with a round tower at each corner, mouldering, with portions of the battlements broken away, but a fine monument still of the way in which builders ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... "In this century," Mr. Collier had declared, "nothing can stand still. It's the same with a corporation, or a country, or a man. We must either march ahead or fall out. ...
— The Lion and the Unicorn and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis |
