"King Arthur" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... then he also dragged down his father's kingdom into disgrace and ruin. The minstrels repaid Charlemagne for his kindness to them. They gave him everlasting fame; for all through the Middle Ages the legend of Charlemagne grew, and he shares with our King Arthur the honour of being the hero of one of the greatest romance-cycles of the Middle Ages. Every different century clad him anew in its own dress and sang new lays about him. What the monkish chroniclers in their cells could never do for Charlemagne, these despised ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... which bred that hardy race of mortals who won the fields of Cressy and Agincourt. I need not go so high up as the history of Guy, earl of Warwick, who is well known to have eaten up a dun cow of his own killing. The renowned king Arthur is generally looked upon as the first who ever sat down to a whole roasted ox, which was certainly the best way to preserve the gravy; and it is farther added, that he and his knights sat about it at his round table, and usually consumed ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction - Vol. X, No. 289., Saturday, December 22, 1827 • Various
... Eroica" (op. 50) bears the legend "Flos regum Arthurus." It is also in G minor. The spirit of King Arthur dominates the work ideally, and justifies not only the ferocious and warlike first subject with its peculiar and influential rhythm, but the old-fashioned and unadorned folk-tone of the second subject. In the working out there is much bustle and much business of trumpets. ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... in a sympathetic vein. "Though the success of the 'Prophetess' and 'King Arthur' (two dramatic operas in which the patentees[A] had embark'd all their hopes) was in appearance very great, yet their whole receipts did not so far balance their expense as to keep them out of a large debt, which it was publicly known was about this time contracted.... Every ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... caught And to king Arthur sent, Where Tom was found, and made his dwarfe, Whereas his ...
— Ballad Book • Katherine Lee Bates (ed.)
... ourselves in this new distribution of supremacy. France is to furnish the stock of the new dynasties for Austria, England, Spain, Denmark, and Sweden. What would you think, were you to awake one morning the subject of King Arthur O'Connor the First? You would, I dare say, be even more surprised than I am in being the subject of Napoleon Bonaparte the First. You know, I suppose, that O'Connor is a general of division, and a commander of ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... member of the mess who made jokes about the knights of King Arthur's fellowship. But Maitland went on reading out selected passages from Mallory, and there is no doubt that everyone, even Dalton, became interested. Haddingly, the padre, made no attempt to conceal the fact that ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... Walter Map. On the one hand, in his De Nugis Curialium he chattered over the manners of his contemporaries, and in his satirical poems scourged the greed and vices of the clergy, whilst on the other hand he took a principal part in spreading a knowledge of the legend of the high-souled King Arthur and of the quest of the Holy Grail. Giraldus Cambrensis again, or Gerald of Wales, wrote on all sorts of subjects with shrewd humour and ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... eye from a brick bat, and the assailants were clambering over the outer wall. So the Baron called for his Sunday hauberk of Milan steel, and his great two-handed sword with the terrible name:—it was the fashion in feudal times to give names to swords: King Arthur's was christened Excalibar; the Baron called his Tickletoby, and whenever he took it in ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... Legend, however, like a busy gossip, had stepped in and supplied points upon which history was silent. Traditions of the neighborhood explained the menhirs as twelve giants turned into stone by the magic powers of good King Arthur, who, in defiance of the claims of the isle of Avalon, was supposed to be buried in a hitherto unexplored chamber of the large green mound that stood near. Sometimes, so the story ran, the giants whispered to one another, and any one who came there alone at daybreak on May morning might ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... was the common belief of the Welsh nation that King Arthur was still alive in Fairyland, and would return again to reign ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... assonanced verse; even when they passed into the form of prose they retained something of their charm. Breton harpers wandering through France and England made Celtic themes known through their lais; the fame of King Arthur was spread abroad by these singers and by the History of Geoffrey of Monmouth. French poets welcomed the new matter of romance, infused into it their own chivalric spirit, made it a receptacle for their ideals of gallantry, courtesy, honour, grace, and added their own ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... of poetry. Campbell. Poetry for childhood. Eliot. Bits of talk about home matters. H.H. The Seven Little Sisters. Andrews. Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates. Dodge. Room for one more. Mary T. Higginson. King Arthur for boys. Lanier. Doings of the Bodley family. Scudder. Mother-play and Nursery-rhymes. Children's Robinson Crusoe. The four-footed lovers. Mammy Tittleback and her family. H.H. The ...
— How to Form a Library, 2nd ed • H. B. Wheatley
... and roamed about in the twilight, and talked, and talked, and talked, as only true lovers can talk, be they Strephon and Daphne in life's glad morning, or grey-haired Darby and Joan; and lastly they went down to the hike, and rowed about in the moonlight, and talked of King Arthur's death, and of that mystic sword, Excalibur, 'wrought by the ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... make the Borderland their home; yet I paid them the compliment to believe they were such. And you never would dream that the great-great-grandchildren of raiders could have built for themselves the mild, solid, self-respecting houses these people have dotted along the road where King Arthur passed, and where some of the most romantic battles of history have been fought. But so it is. And there the houses are. The people have found a kind of stone to build them with, which looks like pressed roses; and there are door-stones and even gate-stones of such an incredible ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... his large works in a serious form is the second sonata, called the "Eroica." This is designated by the composer as a "flower from the realm of King Arthur," and it is dedicated to Dr. William Mason. Beginning very seriously and slowly, it almost immediately rises to intense vigor, which, after a while, gives place to a second subject—a song-melody in the folk-tone; and out of these two ingredients—or three, more properly (the ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... some hundred millions, to which the agricultural interest had very properly replied, "Thank you for nothing, my Lord;" but from the sight of the French paper what a host of recollections started up at the moment! The mind flew back to history, and was revelling in all the romance of chivalry, from King Arthur and his Knights, to the Field of the ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... throw off the thick and ample Highland cloak which he had on, and which he had worn all day at the Oban Cattle Show, and on the deck of the boat that had brought him thence. Mr. M'Gregor had been much struck by my remarks on the knights of King Arthur, and their custom of sitting at the Round Table, to avoid questions of precedence. He spoke to this effect: "I do not wish the lecturer to go back to Paisley under the impression that Salen is not a very bye-ordinary and consequential place. We have ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... night, Were rough, uncouth, and impolite, No 'By your leave' or 'S'il vous plait' They came to rob, remained to prey. Horsa Horsa was slain in four-five-five, 455 Leaving Hengist still alive To live out his allotted term, Surviving partner of the Firm. King Arthur Time has many a fable wound About King Arthur's table round, Where Knights quaffed cordials, wines and ales, And told their little fairy tales. Augustine About six hundred years A.D. 597 To teach us Christianity Came Augustine. ...
— A Humorous History of England • C. Harrison
... "King Arthur's sons o' merry Carlisle Were playing at the ba', And there was their sister, burd Ellen, I' the midst, amang them a'. Child Rowland kicked it wi' his foot, And keppit it wi' his knee; And aye as ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... Walter Raleigh esteemed fame more than conscience; the best wits in England were employed in making his history. Ben himself had written a piece to him on the Punic war, which he altered and put in his book. He said there was no such ground for an heroic poem, as King Arthur's fiction, and Sir Philip Sidney had an intention of turning all his Arcadia to the stories of King Arthur. He said Owen was a poor pedantic school-master, sucking his living from the posteriors of little children, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... knights of the Round Table, when twelve grave and ancient men entered the banquet-hall where he sat at table. They bore each an olive-branch in his hand, to signify that they were ambassadors from Lucius the Emperor of Rome, and after they had reverently made obeisance to King Arthur, they delivered ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... traceable, and consist of a quadruple series of ramparts and ditches. The interior "ring" is faced with wrought masonry. The fortifications enclose an area of some 18 acres, and the crest of the hill is crowned by a mound locally known as King Arthur's Palace. The defensive works must originally have been of great strength, and are impressive even in their decay. The S. face of the hill is fashioned into a series of terraces, possibly with a view to cultivation. A well, called King Arthur's ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... build cities, and swing gayly around the curves of the railroads they have stolen, and swagger through the cities they have levied upon the people to build. Do we care to-day whether Charlemagne murdered his enemies with a sword or an axe; do we ask if King Arthur used painless assassination or burned his foes at the stake? Who cares to know that Caesar was a rake, and that William the Conqueror was a robber? They did their work and did it well, and are snugly sitting on their monuments where no moralist can reach them. So those ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... getting! Even the Muses were not bountiful, for my men and I wellnigh ate Edmund Spenser out of Kilcolman. He sends you greeting, Mortimer; swears he is no jealous poet, and begs you to take up that old scheme which he forsook of King Arthur and ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... harshly. The girl upstairs had broken his heart, ruined his life, and practically compared him to Roland Bean, and his pride should have built up an impassable wall between them, but—she had cake and cocoa. In similar circumstances King Arthur would have ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... other evidence. An early Welsh translation of the story was published with an English version and a glossary by the Rev. Robert Williams in the first volume of his "Selections from the Hengwrt MSS". (6) The first volume of this work is entitled "Y Seint Greal, being the adventures of King Arthur's knights of the Round Table, in the quest of the Holy Grail, and on other occasions. Originally written about the year 1200". The volume, following the manuscript now in the library of W.W.E. Wynne, Esq., at Peniarth, ...
— High History of the Holy Graal • Unknown
... hear how the family inquiries go. It is now quite certain that we are a second-rate lot, and came out of Cunningham or Clydesdale, therefore BRITISH folk; so that you are Cymry on both sides, and I Cymry and Pict. We may have fought with King Arthur and known Merlin. The first of the family, Stevenson of Stevenson, was quite a great party, and dates back to the wars of Edward First. The last male heir of Stevenson of Stevenson died 1670, 220 pounds, 10s. to the bad, from drink. About the same time the Stevensons, who were mostly in Cunningham ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Camelot, Glad, though for shame his heart waxed hot, For hope within it withered not To see the shaft it dreamed of shot Fair toward the glimmering goal of fame, And all King Arthur's knightliest there Approved him knightly, swift to dare And keen to bid their records bear Sir ...
— The Tale of Balen • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the Next King of Israel? On Reading Omar Khayyam The Beggar's Valentine Honor Among Scamps The Gamblers On the Road to Nowhere Upon Returning to the Country Road The Angel and the Clown Springfield Magical Incense The Wedding of the Rose and the Lotos King Arthur's Men Have Come Again Foreign Missions in Battle Array Star of My Heart Look You, I'll Go Pray At Mass Heart of God The Empty Boats With a Bouquet of Twelve Roses St. Francis of Assisi Buddha A Prayer to All the ...
— General William Booth enters into Heaven and other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... own part,'" she quoted in a breath, and so rapidly that the words fairly tumbled over one another, "'in the land where he was bred, men would as soon take for their mark King Arthur's round table, which held sixty knights around it. A child of seven might hit yonder target with a headless shaft.' Oh, ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... "here you rove gallantly, and at free will, through our dominions, fulfilling of appointments, and achieving amorous adventures; while we are condemned to sit in our royal halls, as dull and as immovable as if our Majesty was carved on the stern of some Manx smuggling dogger, and christened the King Arthur of Ramsey." ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... The great gateways are known as Henry VIII.'s, St. George's, and King George IV.'s, while within is the Norman or Queen Elizabeth's Gate. The Round Tower or Keep was built for the assemblage of a fraternity of knights which King Edward intended to model after King Arthur's "Knights of the Round Table," but the project was abandoned after the institution of the Order of ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... out to the World, and written some things to that purpose, that Arthur some time King of Britain had both Knowledge of those parts (the New World) and some Dominion in them; for they find (as some report) that King Arthur had under his Government many Islands and great Countries towards the North and West, which one of some special Note hath interpreted to signify America, and the Northern parts thereof, and thereupon have gone about to entitle the Queen ...
— An Enquiry into the Truth of the Tradition, Concerning the - Discovery of America, by Prince Madog ab Owen Gwynedd, about the Year, 1170 • John Williams
... the child's mind with things dead and gone—with the Puritan world of Miles Standish, the Revolutionary days of Paul Revere, the Dutch epoch of Rip Van Winkle; or with not even this comparatively recent national interest, it takes the child back to the strange folk of the days of King Arthur and King Robert of Sicily, of Ivanhoe and the Ancient Mariner. Thus when the child leaves school his literary studies do not connect helpfully with those forms of literature with which—if he reads at all—he is most likely to be concerned: the short ...
— Boy Life - Stories and Readings Selected From The Works of William Dean Howells • William Dean Howells
... which the chief element of interest is that which arises from the deeds of heroic characters, are the Robin Hood and the King Arthur stories. The Robin Hood tales contain material unusually interesting and valuable for children; but, though they have been told and retold times without number, there is but one version that may properly be called a "masterpiece." This is the Howard Pyle version, Merry ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... hospitals. It would also affect the character of the building unless the missionary sword is to become an immovable object, which having once cleft a rock remains fast in the breach until a God-sent hero, like King Arthur, appears to pull it out and set it to work again. We cannot state all the different aims. They are not simple and formulated; they are complex and confused. Very often the establishment of a medical mission turns upon no more thorough examination of the facts of the situation than ...
— Missionary Survey As An Aid To Intelligent Co-Operation In Foreign Missions • Roland Allen
... mountains, clad in the hazy purple of coming night,—with his face turned steadily down the long, long road, "the road that the sun goes down." Dauntless, reckless, without the unearthly purity of Sir Galahad though as gentle to a pure woman as King Arthur, he is truly a knight of the twentieth century. A vagrant puff of wind shakes a corner of the crimson handkerchief knotted loosely at his throat; the thud of his pony's feet mingling with the jingle of his ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various
... faith, was born in this place. This city is well situated on the river Usk, navigable to the sea, and adorned with woods and meadows. The Roman ambassadors here received their audience at the court of the great king Arthur; and here also, the archbishop Dubricius ceded his honours to David of Menevia, the metropolitan see being translated from this place to Menevia, according to the prophecy of Merlin Ambrosius. "Menevia pallio urbis ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... times," replied Simon, "when King Arthur and his Round Table could not make stand against them. I wish, Henry, you would speak more reverently of the Highlanders. They are often in Perth, both alone and in numbers, and you ought to keep peace with them so long as they will keep ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... the adventures and deeds of Sir Launcelot, fully and beautifully illustrated in Mr. Pyle's characteristic style, and uniform with his other two books, "The Story of King Arthur and His Knights" and "The Story of the Champions of the Round Table." This book takes up the adventures of the greatest of the Arthurian heroes, from the very beginning, and also that of his son ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... faintest desire to hurt them. All the rhymes with the old ring have the trick of turning on everything in which the rhymsters most sincerely believed, merely for the pleasure of blowing off steam in startling yet careless phrases. When Tennyson says that King Arthur "drew all the petty princedoms under him," and "made a realm and ruled," his grave Royalism is quite modern. Many mediaevals, outside the mediaeval republics, believed in monarchy as solemnly as ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... Tennyson, "The Lily Maid," "Lady Clare," "The Lord of Burleigh," "The Story of King Arthur," etc., etc., retold in prose, and so introducing to the minds of young people the great poet's works, and familiarising them with his celebrated characters. This is a new edition, with additional beautiful illustrations in colour and black and white ...
— My Book of Favorite Fairy Tales • Edric Vredenburg
... is manly, and clean, and wholesome, and the man who lives by it is a man to be admired. The point of view may be higher in course of time, and the observer's horizon widened. The limitations of the mind which adopts the present standpoint may be found in 'A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur.' Apart from its ethics, the book is a mistake, for a jest which could have been elaborated to tedium in a score of pages is stretched to spread through a bulky volume, and snaps into pieces under ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... the higher class, especially that of exemption from taxation. [69] Knighthood appears to have been regarded with especial favor by the law of Castile. Its ample privileges and its duties are defined with a precision and in a spirit of romance, that might have served for the court of King Arthur. [70] Spain was indeed the land of chivalry. The respect for the sex, which had descended from the Visigoths, [71] was mingled with the religious enthusiasm, which had been kindled in the long wars ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... "King Arthur's sword, Excalibur, Wrought by the lonely maiden of the Lake. Nine years she wrought it, sitting in the deeps Upon the hidden bases of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... about King Arthur and Galahad and all them instead of reading the Scientific American, and about these fool horseless carriages and stuff——There never will be any practical use for horseless ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... reign of the famous King Arthur, there lived, near the Land's End of England, in the county of Cornwall, a worthy farmer, who had an only son named Jack. Jack was a boy of a bold temper; he took pleasure in hearing or reading stories of wizards, conjurors, giants, and fairies; and used to ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... Legends of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth Centuries, relating to King Arthur and other Heroes of the Welsh and Breton cycle of Fiction. To be edited by Sir FREDERIC MADDEN, ...
— The Private Diary of Dr. John Dee - And the Catalog of His Library of Manuscripts • John Dee
... banners of the Welsh archers, who in old days won the battles of Crecy and Agincourt, and now seen on the crests on the town halls and city flags, in heraldry, and in art, the red dragon is as rampant, as when King Arthur sat with His ...
— Welsh Fairy Tales • William Elliot Griffis
... invaders met with brave resistance. The Britons were headed by King Arthur, about whom many marvelous stories are told. His court was held at Caerleon (car'-le-on), in North Wales, where his hundred and fifty knights banqueted at ...
— Famous Men of The Middle Ages • John H. Haaren, LL.D. and A. B. Poland, Ph.D.
... to every member of our profession to enjoy the knowledge that he alone stands between the helpless and suffering or death, for in civilization modern amenities have almost annihilated space and time, and the sensations of the Yankee at the Court of King Arthur are destroyed by the realization of competitors, "just as good," even if it often does leave one conscious of limitations. The successful removal of a molar which has given torture for weeks in a dentistless country, gains one as much gratitude as the amputation ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... that was King of Glathion and Lord of Enisgarth and Camwy and Sargyll: and this was done. And everywhere at the banquet Jurgen heard talk of this King Arthur who was to marry Dame Guenevere, and of the prophecy which Merlin Ambrosius had made as to the young monarch. For ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... history of civilisation, we also encounter occasional references to our subject. Take, for instance, the knightly Code of Love (Liebeskodex), a work highly esteemed in the days of chivalry, and legendarily supposed to have originated in King Arthur's Court. Paragraph 6 of this Code runs: "A man shall not practise love until he is fully grown." According to Rudeck,[5] from whom I quote this instance, the aim of the admonition was to protect the youth of the nobility from ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... stable; a rude natural rock in Hope Dale is his chair; a chasm at Chatsworth is his leap; Blackstone Edge, in Lancashire, is his bed."[20] In fact, his name bids fair to overrun every remarkable object of the sort which has not been already appropriated to King Arthur or the Devil; with the latter of whom, at least, it is presumed, that, however ancient, he ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... the room, and stopped before the bookshelf. He wound the clock mechanically, and read the titles of the books aloud. A chemistry, a book on electricity, a Bible, a worn copy of Tennyson, the "Yankee at King Arthur's Court," and a patent medicine almanac ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... King Arthur, who held sway in Camelot with his Knights of the Round Table, was supposedly a king of Britain hundreds of years ago. Most of the stories about him are probably not historically true, but there was perhaps a real king named Arthur, or with a name very much like Arthur, ...
— In the Court of King Arthur • Samuel Lowe
... Holger Danske, who is to be Denmark's deliverer when heavy troubles come upon her, is one which has its counterpart in other countries, resembling that of our own King Arthur and the German Frederick Barbarossa. When Denmark's necessity demands, Holger Danske will come to her aid; till then he sits "in the deep dark cellar of Kronborg Castle, into which none may enter. He is clad in iron and steel, ...
— Denmark • M. Pearson Thomson
... a lordly tomb, Where Death is mock'd by trophies fair; I pierce the dim aisle's hallow'd gloom; King Arthur sleeps not there." ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... tournament at Kenilworth, or in the picture which Dibdin has extracted from Laneham. 'Captain Cox came marching on, clean trussed and gartered above the knee, all fresh in a velvet cap: an odd man, I promise you: by profession a mason, and that right skilful and very cunning in fence.... As for King Arthur and Huon of Bourdeaux, ... the Fryar and the Boy, Elynor Rumming, and the Nut-brown Maid, with many more than I can rehearse, I believe he has them all at his ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... he was addressing a civilized audience which would have taken little interest in the rude viking of the eighth century, if he had been presented to them in all his savage unrestraint. He did exactly what Tennyson did, when he made King Arthur the model of a modern English gentleman and (by implication) a Protestant a thousand years before Protestantism existed. Ingeborg, too, had to be a trifle modified and disembarrassed of a few somewhat too naturalistic traits with ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... to carry out similar tasks: to find and bring back to King Arthur a magical flying Chessboard that appeared one day through the window and went out again; to bring to King Wonder, the owner of the Chessboard, "the sword of the strange rings"; to win for the owner of the sword the Princess of the ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... Ship Unknown "I Had a Little Husband" Unknown "When I Was a Bachelor" Unknown "Johnny Shall Have a New Bonnet" Unknown The City Mouse and the Garden Mouse Christina Rossetti Robin Redbreast Unknown Solomon Grundy Unknown "Merry Are the Bells" Unknown "When Good King Arthur Ruled This Land" Unknown The Bells of London Unknown "The Owl and the Eel and the Warming Pan" Laura E. Richards The Cow Ann Taylor The Lamb William Blake Little Raindrops Unknown "Moon, So Round and Yellow" Matthias Barr The House That Jack Built Unknown ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... must be labouring under some peculiar delusion. The old man went on, lifting up his head and looking proudly about him, "Ay, that was an artistic age if you like—glorious, vigorous, flourishing, when I decorated this hall with all these gay pictures in honour of the wise King Arthur and his Round Table. I verily believe that the tall stately figure who once came to me as I was working here, and exhorted me to go on and gain my mastership—for at that time I had not reached that ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... said—was it mournfully? "I have a husband, it is true; but he is not exactly of the type of King Arthur—nor Sir Galahad, for that matter. I hope you found Paris as enjoyable ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... true of the Arthurian Legend and the story of the Holy Grail. Dante knew of King Arthur's fame, and mentions him in the Inferno. To Dante he was a Christian hero, and the historical Arthur may have been a Christian; but much in the story goes back to the pagan Celtic religion. We can find in Irish literature many references that indicate a belief in a self-sustaining, ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... naivete (real or apparent), its affectation of seriousness, its fondness for antithesis and anti-climax. Mark Twain may stand as the high priest of irreverence in American humour, as witnessed in his "Innocents Abroad" and his "Yankee at the Court of King Arthur." In this regard the humour of our transatlantic cousins cannot wholly escape a charge of debasing the moral currency by buffoonery. It has no reverence for the awful mystery of death and the Great Beyond. An undertaker will place in his window a card bearing the words: "You kick the bucket; we ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... on the Earth's breast itself, behold the Ruins of the Bastille. All lamplit, allegorically decorated: a Tree of Liberty sixty feet high; and Phrygian Cap on it, of size enormous, under which King Arthur and his round-table might have dined! In the depths of the background, is a single lugubrious lamp, rendering dim-visible one of your iron cages, half-buried, and some Prison stones,—Tyranny vanishing downwards, all gone but the skirt: the rest wholly lamp-festoons, trees real or of pasteboard; ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... King Arthur held in Wales, at a Pentecost, a great feast, and what kings and lords came to ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... "King Arthur's Knights and their connection with the mystic Grail is here the subject of Mr. William Henry Frost's translation into child language. Many volumes have been prepared telling these wonderful legendary stories to young people, but few are so admirably ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... England has been singularly happy in producing men like King Arthur and others who performed actions of only moderate valour or interest, which subsequent ages mistook for great achievements, ...
— The Curious Case of Lady Purbeck - A Scandal of the XVIIth Century • Thomas Longueville
... birds.[1224] The bird form of the soul after death is still a current belief in the Hebrides. Butterflies in Ireland, and moths in Cornwall, and in France bats or butterflies, are believed to be souls of the dead.[1225] King Arthur is thought by Cornishmen to have died and to have been changed into the form of a raven, and in mediaeval Wales souls of the wicked appear as ravens, in Brittany as black dogs, petrels, or hares, or serve their term of penitence as cows or bulls, or remain as crows till the day ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... many others, possess a commanding interest to him who has familiarised himself with their history. All places too connected with the memory and half fabulous history of king Arthur—the grand forms of Welch scenery ennobled and glorified by the fine old romancers, Norman or English, or by the native ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... artist Howard Pyle undertook to retell and illustrate the legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. His four-volume work has long been considered one of the outstanding interpretations of ...
— The Story of the Champions of the Round Table • Howard Pyle
... picture of a particular object as present here and now. Although never having had the actual particular experience, a person can, with the eye of the imagination, picture as now present before him any particular object or event, real or imaginary, such as King Arthur's round table; the death scene of Sir Isaac Brock or Captain Scott; the sinking of the Titanic; the Heroine of Vercheres; or the ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... have fabled that, like Romulus, he was translated to the skies, and forms a very fiery little star somewhere on the left claw of the Crab; while others, equally fanciful, declare that he had experienced a fate similar to that of the good King Arthur, who, we are assured by ancient bards, was carried away to the delicious abodes of fairy-land, where he still exists in pristine worth and vigor, and will one day or another return to restore the gallantry, the honor and the ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... Middle Ages has some points of light, always around a man. The great Frederic Barbarossa stands for Germany, as does William Tell for Switzerland, as Ivan the Great for Russia, as the Cid for Spain, as King Arthur for England ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... the left of the road is the forest of Paimpont, which formerly extended from Montfort to Rostrenan, a kind of neutral desert land, called Broceliande, and famous, under that name, in the history of King Arthur. It was the theatre of the fairies' most wondrous enchantments. Here was the fountain of Youth and also that of Barenton, where they came every day to draw water in an emerald basin. Here, too, the enchanted Merlin has lain sleeping for centuries, enthralled by his pupil ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser
... of King Arthur, and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table. The Original Edition of Caxton revised for modern use. With Introduction, Notes, and Glossary. By Sir ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... She told herself that she might have expected it, for she knew that Malcolm was Joyce's age; but she had associated them so long with the handsome little fellows in the photograph Lloyd had, clad in the knightly costumes of King Arthur's time, that it was hard to recognize them now, in these up-to-date, American college boys, who had long ago discarded ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... what light the traditions of Scotland throw upon the poetry of the Britons of Cumberland, then called Reged. Merlin Wyllt, or the wild, is mentioned by both; and that renowned wizard, the son of an elf or fairy, with King Arthur, the dubious champion of Britain at that early period, were both said by tradition to have been abstracted by the fairies, and to have vanished without having suffered death, just at the time when it was supposed that the magic of the wizard and the celebrated ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... flight. At last Arthur overthrew and slew Hoel, who was his major natu, and became unquestioned rex universalis Britanniae, but incurred the censure of the Church for killing Hoel. From this sin Gildas himself at length absolved him. But King Melvas carried off King Arthur's queen, and it was only after a year that Arthur found her at Glastonbury and laid siege to that place. Gildas and the abbot, however, arranged matters, and the queen was given up. It is most proper to ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... and, on the other, to re-edit and reprint all that is most valuable in printed English books, which from their scarcity or price are not within the reach of the student of moderate means.[6] Those relating to KING ARTHUR will be the Committee's first care; those relating to our Language and its Dialects the second; while in due proportion with these, will be mixed others of general interest, though with no one special common design. The Committee hope that no year will pass without the issue ...
— Of the Orthographie and Congruitie of the Britan Tongue - A Treates, noe shorter than necessarie, for the Schooles • Alexander Hume
... of France—of Navarre—of Aragon—in disguise; nay, at the Whit-Sunday banquet there were those who cast anxious glances to the door, expecting that, in the very land of King Arthur, she would walk in like his errant dames at Pentecost, to demand a champion. And when a joust was given on the sward, young Sir John de Mohun, the Lord of Dunster, announced his intention of tilting in ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Queen Dollallolla, wife to king Arthur, | and mother to Huncamunca, a woman intirely | Mrs MULLART. faultless, saving that she is a little given | to drink, a little too much a virago towards | her husband, and in love ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... wish therefore in the first few lectures on English literature to glance at the character of our old Saxon ancestors, and the legends connected with their first invasion of the country; and above all at the magnificent fables of King Arthur and his times which exercised so great an influence on the English mind, and were in fact, although originally Celtic, so thoroughly adopted and naturalised by the Saxon, as to reappear under different forms in every age, and form the keynote of most of our fictions, from Geoffrey of Monmouth ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... directly, but not before taking another look towards the forest, and then drawing a white blind over the window. I sat down opposite to it by the table, on which I laid the great old volume, and read. It contained many wondrous tales of Fairy Land, and olden times, and the Knights of King Arthur's table. I read on and on, till the shades of the afternoon began to deepen; for in the midst of the forest it gloomed earlier than in the open country. At length ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... Roland. The true epic, arising from the rich and poetical Celtic tradition, came into existence in the eleventh century in the North of France and immediately burst into extraordinary luxuriance. The legends of the heroes of the dreamy Celtic race—King Arthur and his knights, Merlin the magician, the knights of the Holy Grail—travelling across France, became the common property of the civilised European nations, and filled all hearts with longing and fantastic dreams. Chrestien ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... Grizzle, in Fielding's 'Tom Thumb', is the first peer in the Court of King Arthur, who, jealous of Tom Thumb and in love with the Princess Huncamunca, turns traitor, and is run through the body by Tom Thumb. It is the ghost, not Grizzle, who says, "I can no more." (See page ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... old gentleman, on recovering some degree of composure, "you should have lived in the days of good King Arthur, and been one of the Knights of the Round Table. Knocked down Jim ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... Their standards were high. Their energy was tremendous. And when they came to blows the combat was terrific. But Greeley, the last survivor, found his Camlan in 1872. He was ambushed and came to his end much as King Arthur from a race that he had trusted and defended. In Greeley's defeat for the Presidency all theorists who had dwelt upon the so-called "Power of the Press" received a shuddering blow. The men who had affected ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... done; for Tom began to kick and jump about so much that he felt very uncomfortable, and at last threw him up again into the sea. A large fish swallowed Tom the moment he fell into the sea, which was soon after caught, and bought for the table of King Arthur. When they opened the fish in order to cook it, every on was astonished at finding such a little boy, and Tom was quite delighted to be out again. They carried him to the king, who made Tom his dwarf, and he soon grew a great favorite ...
— The History of Tom Thumb, and Others • Anonymous
... as fierce as some of those told of King Arthur's knights. Long and sturdily the two champions fought, foot to foot, sword to scimitar, until their shields and armor were rent and hacked and the ground was red with their blood. Never had those hills seen so furious ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... of thoughts and ideas that filled my mind. I had been plunged into a new world, and floundered about in it pretty hopelessly, I can tell you. The days of knight-errantry had come over again, and chance, mightier even than King Arthur, had commanded me to serve a sweet lady in distress. But I had had no training, no preliminary squireship, in which I could learn how things were done by watching brave and accomplished knights do them. I had lived among the parts of speech, not among the ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... "King Arthur aims at relating one of the most fascinating of all national and chivalrous legends. It is a valuable addition to the poetical treasures of our language, and we regard it as not only worthy, but likely, to take ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... end of a small cottage, is the stone known as the Table Men, a block of granite nearly eight feet in length, and three feet high. The word "main", or "men", is the old Cornish for "stone". Here, according to tradition, a great battle took place between King Arthur and some Danish invaders, and the stone is also said to have been used as a royal dining table, when the number of kings who dined here is given by some old topographers as three, while others speak of seven. Hals gives their names as follows: "Ethelbert, fifth king of Kent; Cissa, ...
— The Cornish Riviera • Sidney Heath
... him. Without too grossly admitting my ignorance, I tried to draw out from my mentor some further biographical facts that my imagination might work on during my stay. He thought that St. David was some relation to King Arthur, but just what the relation was, and whether he was only a relative by marriage, he didn't know. It wasn't very much information, but I was profoundly ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... Macready's 'Memoirs'—the King Arthur of the stage. You will find there, I am sorry to say, all the actor's faults —if faults they can be called which seem rather hard necessities, the discolouring of the dyer's hand; greedy hungering after applause, endless egotism, grudging praise—all ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... rhymes is the same as that found in the nursery songs of all nations, namely, the food element. "Jack Sprat," "Little Jacky Horner," "Four and Twenty Black-birds," "When Good King Arthur Ruled the Land," and a host of others will indicate what I mean. A little child is a highly developed stomach, and anything which tells about something that ministers to the appetite and tends to satisfy that aching void, commends itself to ...
— The Chinese Boy and Girl • Isaac Taylor Headland
... King Arthur. An heroick poem. In twelve books. London, for Awnsham and John Churchill, ...
— The Library of William Congreve • John C. Hodges
... book I greatly enjoy, for it is full of the tales of the mighty King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. You will like to hear me read these brave stories when you are tired with your day's work, or on rainy days when you can neither hunt nor ride. Then you know not how to amuse yourselves and time is heavy on your hands, ...
— Dramatic Reader for Lower Grades • Florence Holbrook
... his subject and retarding speed again, "that opens up a wide field. In Celtic mythology Avallon is Ynys yr Afallon, the Island of Apples. It is the Land of the Blessed, where Morgana holds her court. Great heroes like King Arthur and Ogier le Dane were carried there after death, and, as apples were the only first-rate fruit known to the northern nations, a place where they grew in luscious abundance came to be regarded as the soul-kingdom. Merlin says that fairyland is ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... in Rowley's "When you see me, you know me," 1605: "King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table that were buried in armour are alive again, crying St George for England! and mean ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... in the days of the good King Arthur, there lived a poor man and his wife who had no children. They wanted a child more than anything else in the world; and one day the woman ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... sonny. Mediaeval forests. It means back of old times, don't it? King Arthur and his Round Table—I done a bit of reading, yer know." The old man took out pouch and pipe. "That's what drew us together, sonny, our taste for ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... Bacon and Galileo, as well as of Luther and Shakespeare. Had printing come earlier it would have been to a passive, indifferent populace; now it appeared in answer to the craving of a people thirsty to read of travel, invention, poetry; to consume the Tales of King Arthur, Sir John Mandeville's Travels, Sidney's 'Arcadia', Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The Elizabethans reflected in England the rebirth of literature and learning which was sweeping all Europe at the time. Printing was not the herald, nor yet the servant, ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... books,—Shakespeare, the mutual ancestor of Englishmen and Americans, above all,—and I think the much that they did, and did well, will be the great hold on posterity of Scott and of Byron. Have you happened to see Bulwer's King Arthur? It astonished me very much. I had a full persuasion that, with great merit in a certain way, he would never be a poet. Indeed, he is beginning poetry just at the age when Scott, Southey, and a host of others, left it off. But he is a strange ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... on the tip-top stone of the cradle-turret over the highest battlement of the castle of St. Michael's Mount, with not a ledge or coigne of vantage 'twixt you and the fathomless ocean under you, distant three thousand feet? Last, do I forget you clambering up the goat-path to King Arthur's castle of Tintagel, when, in my vain wish to follow, I grovelled and clung to the soil like a Caliban, and you, in the manner of a tricksy spirit and stout Ariel, actually danced up and down ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... inside,—the thoughts, if not the actions of men,—their feelings and sentiments, even if it treated of apparently far-off themes. You may discuss the Greek republics in the spirit of the modern one; you may sing idyls of King Arthur in the very mood of the nineteenth century. Art, too, will be seen always to have felt this necessity, to have submitted to this law. The great dramatists of Greece, like those of England, all flourished in a single period, blossomed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... wrote to his publisher a letter of appreciation of the beautiful work done upon his volume, "The Boy's King Arthur." It is dated at Number 435 North Calvert Street, the latest Baltimore ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... was tended by a maiden of that nation) about a certain Rebecca Ben Isaacs, of whom, being a married man, he never would have thought, had he been in his sound senses. During this delirium, what were politics to him, or he to politics? King John or King Arthur was entirely indifferent to a man who announced to his nurse-tenders, the good hermits of Chalus before mentioned, that he was the Marquis of Jericho, and about to marry Rebecca the Queen of Sheba. In a word, he only heard ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... undertake, Orlando Furioso or honest King Arthur will never displease a soldier; but the quiddity of ens and prima materia will hardly agree with a corslet; and therefore, as I said in the beginning, even Turks and Tartars are delighted with poets. Homer, a Greek, flourished before ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... only used it to rob the past or deceive the future. The story of Arthur may have been really connected with the most fighting Christianity of falling Rome or with the most heathen traditions hidden in the hills of Wales. But the word "Mappe" or "Malory" will always mean King Arthur; even though we find older and better origins than the Mabinogian; or write later and worse versions than the "Idylls of the King." The nursery fairy tales may have come out of Asia with the Indo-European race, now fortunately extinct; they may have been invented by some fine ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... long the noise of battle rolled Among the mountains by the winter sea; Until King Arthur's Table, man by man, Had fallen in Lyonnesse ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... so there grew great tracts of wilderness, Wherein the beast was ever more and more, But man was less and less, till Arthur came. For first Aurelius lived and fought and died, And after him King Uther fought and died, But either failed to make the kingdom one. And after these King Arthur for a space, And through the puissance of his Table Round, Drew all their petty princedoms under him. Their king and head, and made a realm, ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... the struggle between the Britons and the Saxons was King Arthur, but it was not until many many years after the time in which he lived that all the splendid stories of his knights, of his Round Table, and of his great conquests began to take the form in which we know them. ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... account, it is and has been the inevitable result of the strict adherence to scientific methods by historical investigators. Our forefathers were quite confident about the existence of Romulus and Remus, of King Arthur, and of Hengist and Horsa. Most of us have become agnostics in regard to the reality of these worthies. It is a matter of notoriety of which Mr. Harrison, who accuses us all so freely of ignoring history, should ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... morrow lingered not long in Innsbruck. They did not fail, however, to visit the tomb of Maximilian in the Franciscan Church of the Holy Cross, and gaze with some admiration upon the twenty-eight gigantic bronze statues of Godfrey of Bouillon, and King Arthur and Ernest the Iron-man, and Frederick of the Empty Pockets, kings and heroes, and others, which stand leaning on their swords between the columns of the church, as if guarding the tomb of the dead. These statues reminded Flemming of ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... composed the Bite of the Shoulder, and sang of King Mark and of the blonde Iseult, and of the metamorphosis of the Hoopoe and of the Swallow and of the Nightingale, is now beginning a new tale of a youth who was in Greece of the lineage of King Arthur. But before I tell you anything of him, you shall hear his father's life—whence he was and of what lineage. So valiant was he and of such proud spirit, that to win worth and praise he went from Greece to England, which was then called Britain. We find this story that I desire to tell and to relate ...
— Cliges: A Romance • Chretien de Troyes
... can be or do the best he is capable of unless he is ever reaching out toward an ideal that lies beyond his grasp. Tennyson put this truth in the mouth of the ancient sage who tells the youthful and ambitious Gareth who is eager to enter into the service of King Arthur of ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... history—King Arthur's and Sir Caradoc's, I answer hard acrostics, I've a pretty taste for paradox, I quote in elegiacs all the crimes of Heliogabalus, In conies I can floor peculiarities parabolous. I can tell undoubted ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert
... right as in the chasse-croise of the Caledonians. Failing this, the only remaining method of avoiding monotony and the chilling separation of the extremes of the board is to follow the example of King Arthur and employ a round table. The round dinner-table is the only way of making ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... mythical prince Siegfried, hero of the earliest literature of the Teutonic people, finally immortalized in the nineteenth century through the musical dramas of Wagner. Any understanding of English civilization would be similarly incomplete without the semi-historic figure of King Arthur, glorified through the accumulated legends of the Middle Ages and made to live again in the melodic idylls of the great Victorian laureate. And so one might go on. In many ways the mythology and folklore of a country are a truer index to the life of its people than any ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... life, in bronze; among which my guide pointed out to me those of Clovis, Godfrey of Bouillon, Albert the Wise, Charles V, Philip II of Spain, Rudolph of Hapsburgh, and to my great astonishment the British King Arthur; there were twenty-eight statues altogether. But on my return to my inn, I found that my guide had made a great error respecting King Arthur, and that the said statue represented Prince Arthur, son of Henry VII, King of England, ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... festive scene. Numberless were the solicitations of the dazzled swains of Cambria for the honour of the two first dances with the one or the other of these fascinating friends; but little availed, on this occasion, the pedigree lineally traced from Caractacus or King Arthur; their two philosophical lovers, neither of whom could have given the least account of his great-great-grandfather, had engaged them many days before. Mr Panscope chafed and fretted like Llugwy in his bed of ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... broken this condition, the Holy Grail disappeared. From that time it was a favorite enterprise of the Knights of Arthur's court to go in search of it. Sir Galahad was at last successful in finding it, as may be read in the seventeenth book of the Romance of King Arthur. Tennyson has made Sir Galahad the subject of one of the most ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... Then King Arthur set himself to restore order throughout his kingdom. To all who would submit and amend their evil ways, he showed kindness; but those who persisted in oppression and wrong he removed, putting in their places others who would deal justly with the people. And ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... himself, like Mark Twain's hero, suddenly transported back to King Arthur's Court is landed in a surprising and unknown world. But one of King Arthur's knights brought to life at the court of the present German Emperor aside from steam, electricity, gun powder, telegraph and ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... ages before Hellenic wanderers raised a fortress upon the wooded heights above the dread lake of Avernus.—Venerable Mother of Italy! dost thou still survive muttering thy strange warnings in some sunless labyrinth, that the rapacious guides of Baiae have yet failed to penetrate? Art thou, like King Arthur of romantic Wales, still keeping watch over the destiny of thy country, ever ready to assist in the hour ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... boys are eager to hear about the heroic adventures of King Arthur, Robin Hood, and other characters, in part at least legendary, why should not American boys be equally interested in the true stories of the rugged ...
— Scouting with Daniel Boone • Everett T. Tomlinson
... surnamed "The Desirous," and also "The Haughty." He was son of Lot (king of Orkney) and Margawse half-sister of king Arthur. His brothers were sir Gaw'ain, sir Ga'heris, and sir Gareth. Mordred was his half-brother, being the son of king Arthur and Margawse. Sir Agravain and sir Mordred hated sir Launcelot, and told the king he was too familiar with the queen; so they asked the king to spend ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... remoter days; the outlandish names of streets and courts and byways that stand as a record and a memorial, all these centuries, of Danish dominion here in still earlier times; the hint here and there of King Arthur and his knights and their bloody fights with Saxon oppressors round about this old city more than thirteen hundred years gone by; and, last of all, the melancholy old stone coffins and sculptured inscriptions, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Misses Buzza engaged in rowing their papa homewards. The Three Queens as they steered King Arthur to Avilion can have been no sadder pageant. It is true the Misses Buzza grieved for no Excalibur, but the Admiral ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... summer afternoon, when work was slack, I carried her to the water-side, where she might sit and watch the river flowing past. And to reward me she made me read her about King Arthur and his knights, and stories from Mr Chaucer's book; much of which I understood not, though (being a printer's 'prentice), I ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... the king in seemly sort The ladie was full fain, But King Arthur, all sore amazed, No answer made again 'What wight art thou,' the ladie said, 'That will not speak to me? Sir, I may chance to ease thy pain, Though I be foul ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Almonry at Westminster, at the sign of the Red Pole. It produced in all sixty-four books, nearly all of them in English, some of them written by Caxton himself. One of the most important of them was Sir Thomas Malory's History of King Arthur, the storehouse from which Tennyson drew the stories which form the groundwork of his Idylls of ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... "King Arthur had his knights That girt his table round, But you have won a hundred fights, Will match ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... old fairy tales, and the stories of King Arthur's Round Table, and the Knights of the Faerie Queen, they sometimes wonder sadly why the knights that they see are not like those of ...
— The Story of General Gordon • Jeanie Lang
... out it is hard to say—Tennyson himself could not in later years be induced to define his purpose—but it seems certain that many of the characters are intended to symbolize higher and lower qualities. According to some interpretations King Arthur stands for the power of conscience and Queen Guinevere for the heart. Galahad represents purity, Bors rough honesty, Percivale humility, and Merlin the power of the intellect, which is too easily beguiled by treachery. So the whole story is moralized ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... generally to anything like the old idolatry of the Romish Church, that they destroyed by thousands books, secular as well as sacred, if they contained but illuminated letters. Unable to read, they saw no difference between romance and a psalter, between King Arthur and King David; and so the paper books with all their artistic ornaments went to the bakers to heat their ovens, and the parchment manuscripts, however beautifully illuminated, to the binders and ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... to tell them tales of many things that have been done in the world by clean knights and faithful squires. Of the wars against the Saracens and misbelieving men; of the discomfiture of the Romans when they came to take truage of King Arthur; of the strife with the eleven kings and the battle that was ended but never finished; of the Questing Beast and how King Pellinore and then Sir Palamides followed it; of Balin that gave the dolourous ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... Henry van Dyke in his "Poetry of Tennyson" and Newell Dwight Hillis in his "Great Books as Life-Teachers." Without interpretation "The Idylls" may teach false as well as true lessons of life. Some of the Knights of the Round Table (Galahad and Percivale) were worthy followers of the good and pure King Arthur, and some of them (like Lancelot and Tristram and Merlin) proved unable to live up to the vow of chastity to which Arthur swore all his knights. And on the part of the ladies of Arthur's court, there was ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... of the West Wind, and companion of the tricksy Paupukkeewis, the boastful Iagoo, and the strong Kwasind. If a Chinese traveller, during the middle ages, inquiring into the history and religion of the western nations, had confounded King Alfred with King Arthur, and both with Odin, he would not have made a more preposterous confusion of names and characters than that which has hitherto disguised the genuine personality ...
— Hiawatha and the Iroquois Confederation • Horatio Hale
... the Oldest Member) considered that Mortimer Sturgis was too wrapped up in golf, and blamed him for it. I could never see eye to eye with them. In the days of King Arthur nobody thought the worse of a young knight if he suspended all his social and business engagements in favour of a search for the Holy Grail. In the Middle Ages a man could devote his whole life to the Crusades, and the public fawned upon him. Why, then, ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... "polenta," forms an accompaniment of meat stews, thus affording all the elements of a "perfect ration." American cooks should employ cornmeal far more than they do. Mush in particular has the advantage possessed by King Arthur's bag-pudding, what cannot be eaten at night may be served "next morning fried." While fried food is, as a rule, not good at breakfast for any save one who has hard manual labor or physical exercise to perform, an exception may be made of fried mush and fried eggs, because their base ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... immense self-reliance, of a disrespect for the past so complete that a mummy is in itself a comical object, and the blowing out of an ill-guarded sacred flame, a delightful jest. One thinks of the enterprise of the sky-scraper and the humour of "A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur," and of "Innocents Abroad." Its dominant notes are democracy, freedom, and confidence. It is religious-spirited without superstition consciously Christian in the vein of a nearly Unitarian Christianity, fervent but broadened, broadened as a halfpenny is broadened by being run over by an express ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... Literature from the Norman Conquest to Chaucer; Lewis's Beginnings of English Literature; Ker's Epic and Romance; Saintsbury's The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory; Newell's King Arthur and the Round Table; Maynadier, The Arthur of the English Poets; Rhys's Studies in the ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... under the sea, like King Arthur's lost country of Lyonesse, where the fisher-folk say they can hear the bells ring from the drowned churches as they sail over them on still summer mornings; but near Porlock the sea has yielded the strip of land it has stolen from Bideford, and the Danish long-ships ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... who was allowed to wear arms. In the story "How the Child of the Sea was made Knight," we are told how a boy of twelve became a page to the queen, and in the opening pages of the story "The Adventures of Sir Gareth," we get a glimpse of a young man growing up at the court of King Arthur. It was not an easy life, that of a boy who wished to become a knight, but it made a man of him. He was taken at an early age, sometimes when only seven years old, to the castle of the king or knight ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... on the grass again, but propped up so that she could see through the doorway. And she lay in still ecstasy. But there was more to be seen ere we descended. There was the rest of the little islet with its crop of down-grass, on which the horses of all the knights of King Arthur's round table might have fed for a week—yes, for a fortnight, without, by any means, encountering the short commons of war. There were the ruins of the castle so built of plates of the laminated ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... serious question added considerably to my perplexity. Jack the Giant-killer had once, it is true, been rather an intimate friend of mine, as far as (printer's) ink and paper can keep up a friendship, but I had not heard his name mentioned for years; and for aught I knew he lay enchanted with King Arthur's knights, who lie entranced until the blast of the trumpets of four mighty kings shall call them to help at England's need. But the question had been asked in serious earnest by that gentleman, whom I more wished to think well of me than I ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... almost to grotesqueness just to show it was not done for mere delight in the frank naturalism of the functions with which it deals. That Mark Twain had made considerable study of this frankness is apparent from chapter four of 'A Yankee At King Arthur's Court,' where he refers to the conversation at the famous ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... marked, and the historical accounts will accord. With regard to Gildas, who inveighs so bitterly against his own nation, the Britons affirm that, highly irritated at the death of his brother, the prince of Albania, whom king Arthur had slain, he wrote these invectives, and upon the same occasion threw into the sea many excellent books, in which he had described the actions of Arthur, and the celebrated deeds of his countrymen; from which cause it arises, that no authentic account of so great a prince is ...
— The Description of Wales • Geraldus Cambrensis
... and yet in any thorough and honest inquiry not only had details to be modified here and there, but the whole building had to be overturned as much as the Franconian primitive history of king Pharamund or the British of king Arthur. An inquirer of conservative views, such as was Varro for instance, could have no wish to put his hand to such a work; and if a daring freethinker had undertaken it, an outcry would have been raised by all good citizens against this worst of all revolutionaries, who was preparing to deprive ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... grass-grown and lost in places, that wound through the woodland three-quarters of a mile to his house. And as he moved through the park, through sunlight and shadow of these great trees that were his, he felt like a knight of King Arthur, like some young knight long exiled, at last coming to his own. He longed with an unreasonable seizure of desire to come here to live, to take care of it, beautify it, fill it with life and prosperity as ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... belongs to the period of King Arthur and his Round Table. At that time Cornwall, we learn, was subject to Ireland, to the extent at least of owing tribute. But the subject country, with increase of power, had become impatient of the tax, and, when the Irish hero Morold was sent to collect ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... good King Arthur ruled all the west country from Exeter to Land's End, a maiden named Ginnifer lived with her father in a little, round, stone hut on the top of Dartmoor. They were poor, but she was a good girl, and she could spin, and weave ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... which (I dare to say) you must recognise if you have ears to hear. So you see that already our English prose not only achieves the 'high moment,' but seems to obey it rather and be lifted by it, until we ask ourselves, 'Who could help writing nobly, having to tell how King Arthur died or how the Bruce?' Yes, but I bid you observe that Malory and Berners are both relating what, however noble, is quite simple, quite straightforward. It is when prose attempts to philosophise, to express thoughts as well as to relate simple ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... "is my very own tree, because he's so very big, an' so very, very old,—Adam says he's the oldest tree in the orchard. I call him 'King Arthur' 'cause he is so big, an' strong,—just like a king should be, you know,—an' all the other trees are his Knights of ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... entirely idle. He did an occasional magazine article or story, and he began a book which he worked at from time to time the story of a Connecticut Yankee who suddenly finds himself back in the days of King Arthur's reign. Webster was eager to publish another book by his great literary partner, but the work on it went slowly. Then Webster broke down from two years of overwork, and the business management fell into other hands. Though still recognized as a great publishing-house, those within ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... brighter, and two pulses quicker; Ten minutes more of quiet talk unbroken, And heaven alone can tell what might be spoken! But it was not to be, for fates unequal Compelled—but this anticipates the sequel. Just in the nick of time, King Arthur rose From his sedate post-prandial repose, And called for lights. Along the shadowy aisles His pages' footsteps pattered o'er the tiles, Speeding to do his errand, and at once Four tapers flickered from each silver sconce. The scene was changed, the dreamer's dream dispelled, ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis
... a high lattice on the other shows dim outlines of the hills beyond. In the wall are arches with gates so curved as to leave circular openings, through which we get glimpses of the sea. It makes me think of King Arthur's castle at Tintagel. In the lattice there is a wicket gate. There is something very alluring about a wicket gate—it connotes a Robin. Unfortunately, my Robin can only appear from Friday to Monday, but I'm not complaining. Any ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... to a performance; by-and-by they were to become the main features and attractions of stage representation. Still they had not escaped ridicule and caricature. Fielding, in his burlesque tragedy of "Tom Thumb," introduced the audience to a scene between King Arthur and the ghost of Gaffer Thumb. The king threatens to kill the ghost, and prepares to execute his threat, when the apparition kindly explains to him, "I am a ghost and am already dead." "Ye stars!" exclaims ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook |
