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Monkish   Listen
adjective
Monkish  adj.  Like a monk, or pertaining to monks; monastic; as, monkish manners; monkish dress; monkish solitude.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Monkish" Quotes from Famous Books



... of having imitated, either in particular passages, or in the tone and 20 the spirit of the whole, would be among the first to vindicate me from the charge, and who, on any striking coincidence, would permit me to address them in this doggerel version of two monkish Latin hexameters.[215:2] ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... it should be so, but I have seen many parents who were miserable because their children were sportive and joyful. Oh, when will the days of monkish sadness and austerity be over; and the public sentiment in the christian world get right ...
— The Young Mother - Management of Children in Regard to Health • William A. Alcott

... had been brought to that part of America long before their arrival; and they adopted the belief that the Gospel was preached there by St. Thomas. This furnished excellent material for the hagiologists of that age; but, like every thing else peculiar to these monkish romancers, it betrayed ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin

... from the milder malady of nerves. The medical or the spiritual adviser who should prescribe a course of Labrador whenever we are physically or spiritually "run down" would be of little use to the majority of us. We see here the monkish side of Mr. Wells' temperament deliberately torturing the social and worldly side of him, the spirit suggesting to the flesh and the devil that they ought to be content with spiritual contemplation. The mystic ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James

... woman. He was a very old man, for his eyes were horny, his snow-white hair and beard hung upon the bent breast and shoulders, and his sardonic, wrinkled features were yellow as wax. They might have been those of a death mask cut in marble. There, clad in an ample, monkish robe, and leaning upon the staff, he stood still as a statue and watched us. I noted it all, every detail, although at the time I did not know that I was doing so, as we broke our way through the ice towards them and afterwards the ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard

... no evidence that he was ever tied to any man or woman by his affections; yet it would be stupid to call him cold, for his one grand passion absorbed him. Monks suspected him, but in his heart he was celibate like the great monkish saints, celibate not by vows but by preoccupation. It is clear that from youth to age life had no cumulative power over him; as we should say in our prosaic language, he never settled down, for he let things happen to him and valued the very ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock

... of the word. But the etymon he proposes is rather unsatisfactory. Anglo-Saxonism is a very good thing; simplicity and common sense are very good things too. May not {421} berefellarius, the dirty raggamuffin with tattered clothes, be good monkish Latin for bare-fell (i.e. bare-skin), or rather bare-fellow? the most natural metamorphosis imaginable. Bere is the old orthoepy of bare; and every one knows that in London (east) a fellow naturally ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various

... the manuscripts relative to these objects which had been scattered abroad at the dissolution of the monasteries, and must have been irretrievably lost but for his diligence in inquiring after them and the liberality with which he rewarded their discovery. He edited four of our monkish historians; was the first publisher of that interesting specimen of early English satire and versification, Pierce Plowman's Visions; composed a history in Latin of his predecessors in the see of Canterbury, and encouraged ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin

... of Saint Augustine next Appeared to the sight, All clad in homely russet weeds, Of godly monkish plight: ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various

... may, Sarpi was not the man to work his way by monkish intrigue or courtly service into high place either in his Order or the Church. Long before he unsheathed the sword in defense of Venetian liberties, he had become an object of suspicion to Rome and his superiors. Some frank words which escaped ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... fled into Israelitish territory from Gath. The exact locality of the cave Adullam, where we next find him, is doubtful; but several strong reasons occur for rejecting the monkish tradition which places it away to the east, in one of the wild wadies which run down from Bethlehem to the Dead Sea. We should expect it to be much more accessible by a hasty march from Gath. Obviously it would be convenient for him to hang about the frontier of Philistia and Israel, that he ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren

... as Harnack(1166) thinks, "partly to assuage and partly to excite the restlessness that still remains, by means of the sacraments, indulgences, liturgical worship and ecclesiastical encouragement of mystical and monkish practices," but to prevent undue security and careless assurance. What the Church condemns, in accordance with Sacred Scripture and Tradition, is the certitudo fidei, that vain confidence which leads men to feel certain that they are in the state of grace (inanis fiducia), not the ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle

... inconsiderable do the Bruncks and Porsons of the old school, appear before the Bopps, Schlegels, Burnoufs, and Muellers of the new! For as yet, even where here and there in colleges a liberal and enlightened method is partially attempted, still the old monkish spirit appears, driving away with something like a 'mystery' or 'guild' feeling the merely practical man, and interposing a mass of 'dead vocables,' which must be learned by years of labor, between him and the realization of an education. The young man who is to ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various

... inferior, and dwelling in love and peace. Her greatest enjoyments were of a kind despised by Clotilda. It was her delight to steal away from the gay assembly, where she was never missed, and to pore over the romantic lays of troubadours and monkish legends, and to make to herself a world, different from the one in which her lot was cast. Then she would be the lowly peasant-girl, singing while she worked, beloved by those for whom she toiled, and rising before the sun to deck the shrine of the Virgin with ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins

... Observatory, with a salary for an astronomer and assistant, for nightly observations and periodical publications; annual courses of lectures upon the natural, moral, and political sciences. Above all, no jobbing, no sinecure, no monkish stalls for lazy idlers. I urged the deep responsibility of the nation to the world and to all posterity worthily to fulfil the great object of the testator. I only lamented my inability to communicate ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy

... was perfect. On board the Tremolino, wrapped up in a black caban, the picturesque cloak of Mediterranean seamen, with those massive moustaches and his remorseless eyes set off by the shadow of the deep hood, he looked piratical and monkish and darkly initiated into the most awful mysteries ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad

... generally of the monastic life of the middle ages—was not one of useless idleness. The Brethren taught school and did mechanical work. Besides, before the invention of printing had been perfected and brought into common service, the multiplication of books was principally the work of monkish pens. Kempis spent his days copying the Bible and good books—as well as in exercises of devotion that ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth

... ruin. At every cross-roads the brooding crucifixes hang. The British mind does not like this constant reiteration of mishandling and defeat in the death of Christ. It does not seem to it to be the final message of the Cross. Indeed, it is the product of the mediaeval, monkish mind. It was not until the tenth century that the representations of the Crucifixion showed Our Lord as dead; it was much later before the emphasis was laid on agony and despair. Once from among the debris of the convent in Voormezeele I rescued such ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan

... were true there would have been an apparition somewhere near the traditional date of the birth of Christ, a date which is itself uncertain. But even the data on which the assumption was based are inconsistent with the theory. Certain monkish records speak of something wonderful appearing in the sky in the years 1264 and 945, and these were taken to have been outbursts of Tycho's star. Investigation shows that the records more probably refer to comets, ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss

... so in keeping with the style, the manners, the countenance, the voice, the language, of any man. All things smiled upon our traveller, and the traveller smiled back in return. "Similia similibus,"—he believed in homoeopathy. Puns, horse-laugh, monkish face, skin of a friar, true Rabelaisian exterior, clothing, body, mind, and features, all pulled together to put a devil-may-care jollity into every inch of his person. Free-handed and easy-going, he might be recognized at once as the favorite of grisettes, the man ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac

... Emperour Charles the fifth, esteemed by our age the most happy that hath liued these many ages: he will curse his conquestes, his victories, his triumphes: and not be ashamed to confesse that farre more good in comparison he hath felt in one day of his Monkish solitarines, then in all his triumphant life. Now shall we thinke those happie in this imaginate greatnes, who themselues thinke themselues vnhappie? seeking their happines in lessening themselues, and not finding in the world one place to rest this greatnes, or one bed quietly to sleepe ...
— A Discourse of Life and Death, by Mornay; and Antonius by Garnier • Philippe de Mornay

... for their own private eas and conveniencie in outward things; that beeing accommodated with all necessarie helps of the Bodie, they may pleas themselvs onely in the cours of their Studies, with that Reservation and Retiredness, which is proper to a Monkish life in Popish Cloisters; wherein the Spirit of Mutual envie, of detraction and division is more irreconcilably entertained, then in anie other Societies of the World. For their Cloister-constitutions, obliging them onely to the observation of som formal works as ...
— The Reformed Librarie-Keeper (1650) • John Dury

... last of the metamorphoses which that all-powerful enchantress called the human imagination made him undergo; and it was only right that, after having gone through so many dangers, he should don a monkish frock, wherein to take his rest after ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various

... in a brown riding-suit, dusty and travel-stained, appeared in the doorway. Not pausing for any monkish salutations or genuflections, he strode some half-dozen paces up the hall; then swung off his hat, stopped short with his spurs together, and bowed in soldierly fashion toward ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay

... lesson given on the housetop, but he began to put it in practice that day. How little he knew the sweep of the truth then declared to him! How little we have learned it yet! All exclusiveness which looks down on classes or races, all monkish asceticism which taboos natural appetites and tastes, all morbid scrupulosity which shuts out from religious men large fields of life, all Pharisaism which says 'The temple of the Lord are we,' are smitten to dust by the great words which gather all men into the same ample, impartial divine ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren

... at least, it seemed in that hour of mystery and glamour. For behind them the evening sky had dulled to a deep and solemn wash of blood red, across which lay one lonely bar of black cloud, solid as spilled ink on a monkish page. But under the trees themselves, blazing with lamps and breathing odours of all grace and daintiness, stood a lighted pavilion of rose-coloured silk, anchored to the ground with ropes of sendal of the ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett

... Mr. Ishmael, Mr. Dove arrived from a little Kloof, where he had been engaged with the Kaffirs in cutting bushes to make a thorn fence round their camp as a protection against lions and hyenas. He looked older than when we last met him, and save for a fringe of white hair, which increased his monkish appearance, was quite bald. His face, too, was even thinner and more eager, and his grey eyes were more far-away than formerly; also he had grown a long ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard

... facade of the building legend had chosen as the palace of Wamba the Benefactor—the Farmer King. I saw the old man waking to life in the dungeon where the treachery of one loved and trusted had thrown him, dressed in the monkish garb which never again could be changed for robes of state. I saw a haggard company of Jews marching into "Tarshish," scarred and bleeding from the persecutions of Nebuchadnezzar who had flung them from Jerusalem. I saw Moorish men fighting to take Toledo—the ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... of Denmark, but her earliest writer. In the latter half of the twelfth century, when Iceland was in the flush of literary production, Denmark lingered behind. No literature in her vernacular, save a few Runic inscriptions, has survived. Monkish annals, devotional works, and lives were written in Latin; but the chronicle of Roskild, the necrology of Lund, the register of gifts to the cloister of Sora, are not literature. Neither are the half-mythological genealogies of kings; and besides, the mass of these, ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")

... down the glade, which led from the second terrace and the pleasaunce, I almost overran the Prince himself. He was seated under a tree, a parchment of troubadours' songs lay by him, illuminated (to judge by the woeful pictures) by no decent monkish or clerkly hand. He had a bottle of Rhenish at hand, and looked the same hearty, hard-headed, ironic soldier he ever was, and yet, what is more strange, every inch ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett

... No more can be imagined to have been possessed by a people so rude, who had not, without the assistance of the Romans, art of masonry sufficient to raise a stone rampart for their own defence; yet the Monkish historians [x], who treat of those events, complain of the luxury of the Britons during this period, and ascribe to that vice, not to their cowardice or improvident counsels, all their subsequent calamities. [FN [x] Gildas. ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume

... no interest in monkish chronicles, may reverence St. Anne's Hill, because of its having been the favorite residence of Charles James Fox, the contemporary of Pitt and Burke and Sheridan and Grattan, at a period when men felt strongly and spoke eloquently. The site of the house on the south-eastern ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various

... that St. Bridget planted a monastery for women at Kildare and entrusted to its inmates the keeping of the sacred fire, and that in later times the Asiatic missionaries founded there a female monkish order. After the establishment of Western Christianity, however, no woman was permitted to enter into the monasteries, and we are assured that this ridiculous affectation of purity was extended even to the grave. During the earlier ages of ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble

... if the monkish writers are to be trusted. "They added to their company, during a sojourn of some time in England, only one girl (muliercula), who, as report says, was fascinated by magic." Perhaps their work was of more value than appeared on the surface. After seven years of this quiet evangelising, the King ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt

... delighted Dorriforth, and for six weeks all around was the picture of tranquillity. Then Lord Frederick suddenly appeared at the door as she alighted from her coach, and seizing her hand, entreated her "not to desert him in compliance with the injunctions of monkish hypocrisy." ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

... turned from the weaving of mats to the copying of manuscripts—a fortunate day when he began to compose those noble hymns and strains of music which will live for ever. From the "Dies Irae" there rings forth grand poetry even in monkish Latin. The perpetual movements of the monastic orders gave life to the Church. The Protestant admits that to a resolute monk the ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper

... hid In monkish chronicle or rhyme, Burgos, the birthplace of the Cid, Zamora and Valladolid, Toledo, built and walled amid The wars ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... to be my tutor, and finding I was not yet fixed in that particular, I was requested to construe one of the easiest passages in the AEneid; my next task was to read a few paragraphs of monkish Latin from a little white book, which I found contained the university statutes: having acquitted myself in this to the apparent satisfaction of the doctor, he next proceeded to give me his advice upon my future conduct and pursuits in the university; remarked that his old ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle

... stripped of their monkish robes and degraded. Tranquilly they mounted the scaffold, the dregs of the populace assailing them with vile words. But silence reigned at the moment of the execution. As soon as life was extinct the flames were kindled beneath the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various

... age of one hundred and sixty-eight years: his name was Clarembaldus. The youngest, named Thurgar, died at the premature age of one hundred and fifteen. Can any of your correspondents inform me of any similar instance of longevity being recorded in monkish chronicles? I remember reading of some old English monks who died at a greater age than brother Thurgar, but omitted to "make a note of it" at the time, and should now be glad ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 65, January 25, 1851 • Various

... as lascivious old men seek by being whipped to excite new power of enjoyment, so old Rome endured monkish chastisement to find more exquisite delight in torture and voluptuous rapture in pain? Evil excess of stimulant! it took from the body of the state of Rome its last strength. It was not by division into two realms that Rome perished. On ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... much under the influence of his mother, seeing little or nothing of his easy-going, inebriated father. It was his mother who turned her son's attention towards the literature of his country, and he became an omnivorous reader of the old monkish manuscripts with which the Palace was well supplied. Especially had his mind been attracted by the stories and legends of the Rhine. The mixture of history, fiction, and superstition which he found in these vellum pages, so daintily limned, and ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr

... of John of Salisbury till shortly before the publication of the Annals, no further reference is made to Tacitus by any writer or historian, monkish or otherwise, not even of erudite Germany, beginning with Abbot Hermannus, who wrote in the twelfth century the history of his own monastery of St. Martin's at Dornick, and ending with Caspar Bruschius, who, in the sixteenth century, wrote an Epitome ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross

... respect was particularly insisted upon by the ancients: hence Plato and Aristotle recommended the custom of going barefoot as a means of checking the stimulus to carnal desire, a suggestion which appears to have been acted upon by some of the monkish orders. The cold bath was considered equally efficacious, while some, among whom may be reckoned Pliny and Galen, advised thin sheets of lead to be worn on the calves of the legs and near ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport

... And still the second dread command be free, Their likeness is not found on earth, in air, or sea. Mansions that would disgrace the building taste Of any mason reptile, bird or beast; Fit only for a doited monkish race, Or frosty maids forsworn the dear embrace; Or cuifs of later times wha held the notion That sullen gloom was sterling true devotion; Fancies that our guid Brugh denies protection! And soon may they ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... children; in the afternoon, they ran wild out of doors whilst she wrote—when the invalid musician was well enough to be left. In the evenings she and the young people went wandering by moonlight through the cloisters, exploring the monkish cells and chapels. Maurice had fortunately recovered his health completely, but poor Chopin's state, aggravated by the damp weather and privations—for the difficulties in obtaining a regular supply of provisions were immense—remained throughout their stay a constant and ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas

... I saw standing at the door of a cottage, the name of the district, was told that it was called Ystrad Manach—the Monks' Strath or valley. This name it probably acquired from having belonged in times of old to some monkish establishment. The moon now arose and the night was delightful. As I was wandering along I heard again the same wild noise which I had heard the night before, on the other side of Merthyr Tydvil. The cry of the owl afar off in the woodlands. Oh that strange bird! Oh that strange ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow

... old town of Rouen, where weeds and grass grow high on the cathedral towers, and the venerable Norman streets are still warm in the blessed sunlight though the monkish fires that once gleamed horribly upon them have long grown cold, there is a statue of Joan of Arc, in the scene of her last agony, the square to which she has given its present name. I know some statues of modern times—even in the World's metropolis, I think—which commemorate ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens

... satirical inventions. As far back as in 1300, we find in Wolfius[90] the description of a picture of this kind, in a MS. of AEsop's Fables found in the Abbey of Fulda, among other emblems of the corrupt lives of the churchmen. The present was a wolf, large as life, wearing a monkish cowl, with a shaven crown, preaching to a flock of sheep, with these words of the apostle in a label from his mouth—"God is my witness how I long for you all in my bowels!" And underneath was inscribed—"This ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... to town," he said. "I shall persuade my old uncle, who is more a monk than a king, that you are dreadfully pious, attached to monkish Latin, and all that sort of thing, so that he will long to get you to town, if it is only to ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake

... now obstructed with brushwood, remained entire. Above the vast and magnificent portal of this gate arose a window of the same order, whose pointed arches still exhibited fragments of stained glass, once the pride of monkish devotion. La Motte, thinking it possible it might yet shelter some human being, advanced to the gate and lifted a massy knocker. The hollow sounds rung through the emptiness of the place. After waiting a few minutes, he forced back the gate, which was heavy with iron-work, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... radical book-stores of the middle west. We shall not give the title, for it is too foul and indecent. On page 4 it warns its readers "not to forget this fact, celibacy, absolute continence from want of desire congenial or acquired, monkish asceticism are pathological states, diseased states of mind or body." Further on, we read, ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto

... ways of Nature as unmodified by the voluntary agency of man. These the author finds worthy of all abhorrence; and Nature in its purely physical aspect he considers to be full of blemishes, which are patent to the eye of modern science, and which "all but monkish quietists think it a religious duty to amend." A competent master-workman with good materials would not have turned out a world so "bunglingly" made, with great patches of poisonous morass and arid desert unfit for ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various

... as the Caesars. A narrow passage of the blue Mediterranean separates this island from a bold cape on the main, whence follows a succession of picturesque, village-clad heights and valleys, relieved by scenery equally bold and soft, and adorned by the monkish habitations called in the language of the country Camaldolis, until we reach a small city which stands on a plain that rises above the water between one and two hundred feet, on a base of tufa, and the houses of which extend to the very verge of the dizzy cliffs that ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper

... people stepped Who through darkling centuries Held the keys Of all wisdom, truth, and art, In a Paradise apart, Lapped in ease, Sagely pondering deathless themes, While, befooled with monkish ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus

... discrepancy between ancient and modern altitudes is presented, and especially, we hear, at Jerusalem. The Seven Hills whereon Rome was built are all distinguishable, visible to-day; but they are undoubtedly much lower than at first, while all the intervening valleys have been filling up through centuries. Monkish traditions say that what is now the basement of the Church of Sts. Peter and Paul (not the modern St. Peter's) was originally on the level of the street, and this is quite probable: though I did not so readily lubricate the stories I was told in that basement to-day of St. Peter, Paul and Luke ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley

... generation, were afflicted, as a penalty, with some bodily blemish. This horn is described as holding nearly three quarts, and as being encircled by a strong gilt copper ring, about three inches broad, on which, in monkish characters, are to be read the names of the Three Kings of Cologne, Melchior, Baltazar, and Caspar. It is further ornamented with a small gilt copper plate, forming the setting of an oval crystal. Another horn, preserved in the museum at Arendal, was obtained in a similar manner. ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland

... black. The legend went, unconfirmed and unaccredited, but still propagated, that this was the portal of a vault, imprisoning deep beneath that ground, on whose surface grass grew and flowers bloomed, the bones of a girl whom a monkish conclave of the drear middle ages had here buried alive for some sin against her vow. Her shadow it was that tremblers had feared, through long generations after her poor frame was dust; her black robe and white veil that, for ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte

... should have hardened his heart against him, he could only go on his way and do the best he might by his skill as a craftsman and a scrivener. At the end of a year he would be free to return to the cloisters, for such had been his father's bequest. A monkish upbringing, one year in the world after the age of twenty, and then a free selection one way or the other—it was a strange course which had been marked out for him. Such as it was, however, he had no choice but to follow it, and ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle

... his deeds. It was hard, cold, despotic, yet in judging it we should consider the woulds of that quaint old writer, Thomas Fuller, when he says, "No pen hath originally written the life of this King but what was made with a monkish penknife, and no wonder if his picture seems bad, which was thus drawn ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery

... this arrangement in the educational process of Nature is worthy of especial notice, as it leads us directly to the conclusion, that learning, of whatever kind, is not intended to be a monkish and personal thing, but is really designed by Nature for the benefit of the community at large. Those connected with education, therefore, are here taught, that the training of the young should be so conducted, that while the attainments of the pupil shall in every ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall

... of all those outcries which have been so repeatedly raised against the illiterate state of the dark ages, many and valuable efforts have been made towards a just elucidation of those monkish days. These labors have produced evidence of what few anticipated, and some even now deny, viz., that here and there great glimmerings of learning are perceivable; and although debased, and often barbarous too, they were not quite so bad as historians have usually proclaimed them. It may surprise ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather

... than the rest. In the middle of the chapter house an enormous crucifix. The sun is shining on the statue of the Virgin in the courtyard. The STRANGER enters from the back. He is wearing a coarse monkish cowl, with a rope round his waist and sandals on his feet. He halts in the doorway and looks at the chapter house, then goes over to the crucifix and stops in front of it. The last strophe of the choral service can be heard from across the courtyard. The CONFESSOR enters from ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg

... refuge from violence, and Bruno, either from religious enthusiasm, or in order to be able to devote himself to study, became a friar at the age of fifteen. There, in the quiet cloister of the convent of St. Dominic at Naples, his mind was nourished and his intellect developed; the cloistral and monkish education failed to enslave his thought, and he emerged from this tutelage the boldest and least fettered of philosophers. Everything about this church and this convent, famous as having been the abode of Thomas Aquinas, was calculated to fire the enthusiasm ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno

... the theological seminary, a writer on various things, and withal a man of marked power and worth. He was a spiritualist, heard voices and received messages from the spirit world. It will be remembered that Martin Luther, in his monkish days, heard voices, and was in communication with both angels and devils. Many of his followers, knowing of his strange experiences, gave themselves up to fasts and vigils, and they, too, saw things. Abstain from food for two days and this sense ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard

... existence. On the opposite bank of the Severn, about three-quarters of a mile from Stourport, is Arley Kings, or Lower Arley; and about a mile lower down the river is Redstone Cliff, in which is the famous hermitage of Layamon, a monkish historian of the 13th century, who is said to have composed a "Chronicle of Britain," embracing that mythical period extending from Brute ...
— Handbook to the Severn Valley Railway - Illustrative and Descriptive of Places along the Line from - Worcester to Shrewsbury • J. Randall

... from all parts of France, Italy, Germany, and even Denmark, that we are here in hope to see one day established a Museum Charlemagne, by the side of the museums Napoleon and Josephine. A ballad, written in monkish Latin, said to be sung by the daughters and maids of Charlemagne at his Court on great festivities, was addressed to Duroc, by a Danish professor, Cranener, who in return was presented, on the part of Bonaparte, with a diamond ring worth twelve thousand ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith

... of false wit that vanished in the refined ages of the world, discovered themselves again in the times of monkish ignorance. ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison

... public use, and, at all hours of the day, the picturesque figures of the peasants of every age, from the old hag, whose skin is like a brown and crumpled palimpsest, (where Anacreontic verses are overwritten by a dull, monkish sermon,) to the round, dark-eyed girl, with broad, straight back and shining hair, may be seen gathered around it,—their heads protected from the sun by their folded tovaglia, their skirts knotted up behind, and their waists embraced by stiff, red busti. Their work is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various

... laboriously epitomized, supplemented and improved, but he was a mere literary monk after all; a student, a bookworm, simple, conscientious, and truthful; a trustworthy reporter, 'a picker-up of learning's crumbs,' a monkish historiographer, in short; but by no means a historian of large views and of original mind. Roger of Wendover died in 1236, and Matthew Paris succeeded to his office ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various

... Marcus Wilkeson's relish for a good book, an after-dinner pipe, and a chat with a friend. It was plain to all his friends—even to those who were happiest in their wedded lives—that Marcus was a great deal better off single than married. His was the genial monkish nature, ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton

... not be strictly orthodox from a monkish standpoint, but it commended itself to the understanding and the approval of simple folks; and the brother was none the less beloved and respected that his talk and his teaching did not follow the cut-and-dried rules ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green

... and poets of the Middle Ages did not always see Nature under the brilliant light of Hellenic influence; there were wide spaces of time in which monkish asceticism held sway, and she was treated with most unscientific contempt. For the development of feeling did not proceed in one unswerving line, but was subject to backward movements. The rosy afterglow of the classic world was upon these Greek Fathers; but at the same time ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese

... the Middle Age preserved the Fauna and Flora of the primaeval forest, haunted by the descendants of some at least of those wild beasts which roamed on the older continent of the 'gravel age.' The all-preserving peat, as well as the monkish records of the early Middle Age, enable us to repeople, tolerably ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley

... should the new age begin more fitly than in this city of beginnings? As of old the Greek torch first gleamed here, here first on Sicilian soil was the Cross planted. The gods of Olympus had many temples about the hill slopes, shrines of venerable antiquity even in those days; but if the monkish chronicles be credited, the new faith signalized its victory rather over three strange idolatries,—the worship of Falcone, of Lissone, and of Scamandro, a goddess. I refuse to believe that the citizens were accustomed to ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry

... "I have it prepared for you. They have allowed you, I see, a pallet-bed. You must leave your clothes upon it, stuffed out as we can best arrange them; so that, should the warder look in, he may suppose you to be asleep. Quickly put on these monkish habiliments. I have already spoken to them of having a companion; and I hope, before they expect any deception, we may have ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston

... in the Forest of Dean in Anglo-Saxon times Monkish iron-workers Early iron-smelting in Yorkshire Much iron imported from abroad Iron manufactures of Sussex Manufacture of cannon Wealthy ironmasters of Sussex Founder of the Gale family Extensive exports ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles

... as some have accused them. At Rome, a part of a book of Livy was found, between the lines of a parchment but half effaced, on which they had substituted a book of the Bible; and a recent discovery of Cicero De Republica, which lay concealed under some monkish writing, shows the fate of ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... remains of ancient monastic buildings. The railroad terminus is situated in a property formerly part of a Carthusian convent, and the wheelwrights' and blacksmiths' and carpenters' cottages are built partly in the old monkish cells, of which two low ranges remain round a space now covered with sleepers, and huge chains, and iron rails, and all the modern materials of ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... stately throne, To walk, enraptured, in a world its own. O'er sylvan scenes the muse her radiance flings; And hallows wheresoe'er she rests her wings. And thou, all joyous in her blessed smile, (Soft as the moonbeam on a monkish pile,) Art gifted with the godlike power to give A speechless charm to meanest things that live; And lifeless nature where thy voice is heard, Like midnight music of the summer bird, Receives new lustre. E'en the "taper's" light, Which in the lowly inn illumed the night, The "wood-fire" ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 398, November 14, 1829 • Various

... Europe by the titles of The Fables of Bidpai, The Seven Wise Masters, Gesia Romanorum, and Barlaam and Josaphat, were extremely popular during the Middle Ages, and their contents passed on the one hand into the Exempla of the monkish preachers, and on the other into the Novelle of Italy, thence, after many days, to contribute their quota to the Elizabethan Drama. Perhaps nearly one-tenth of the main incidents of European folktales can be traced to ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs

... none, but in this respect he was no worse off than the majority of the knights and barons of the time, who were well content to trust to monkish scribes to draw up such documents as were required, and to affix their seal to them. He himself had once, some six years before, expressed a wish to be sent for a year to the care of the monks at Rothbury, whose superior was a distant connection of his father, in order to ...
— Both Sides the Border - A Tale of Hotspur and Glendower • G. A. Henty

... to the New World, while a fragment of Pythagorean astronomy set Copernicus thinking on that train of reasoning which has revolutionised the whole position of our planet in the universe. Then it was seen that the only meaning of progress is a return to Greek modes of thought. The monkish hymns which obscured the pages of Greek manuscripts were blotted out, the splendours of a new method were unfolded to the world, and out of the melancholy sea of mediaevalism rose the free spirit of man ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde

... on choice viands, and the finest wines of France, we adjourned to tea, where we amused ourselves with reading, or improving conversation,—each, according to his fancy,—and, after sandwiches, &c. retired to rest. A set of monkish dresses, which had been provided, with all the proper apparatus of crosses, beads, tonsures, &c. often gave a variety to our appearance, and ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore

... for Centuries, and which upon the whole are supported by very respectable authorities. In reading History, I make in a strict rule to give every Writer a fair and candid perusal. While I reject old Women's Fables, monkish Tales, Absurdities, and pretended Miracles, I am disposed to receive as Truth, that which seems natural, reasonable, and well supported by evidence. Agreeably to this rule, I shall now consider the accounts we have of the Discovery of America by the ...
— 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

... Accompanied by a young Roman student, whose acquaintance I had the happiness to make, but whose name I do not here mention, I repaired one day to the Collegio Romano,—a fine quadrangular building; and, after visiting its library, in whose "dark unfathomed caves" lies full many a monkish gem, I passed to the class-room of Professor Perrone. It was a lofty hall, benched after the manner of our own class-rooms, and hung round with portraits of the Professor's predecessors in office,—at least I took them for such. A tall pulpit rose on the end wall, with a crucifix beside ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie

... of his burial," says the Monkish Annalist, "a column of light, brighter than the sun, arose towards heaven"; and three nights afterwards the figure (or ghost) of King AEthelberht appeared to Brithfrid, a nobleman, and commanded him to convey ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Hereford, A Description - Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • A. Hugh Fisher

... contemplating life throughout a golden medium, he owned to himself, with a flush, a smile, and a half-pleasurable sigh, that he had been somewhat over plain in dealing with his cousin. 'He said the truth, too,' added the penitent librarian, 'for in my monkish fashion I adore the Princess.' And then, with a still deepening flush and a certain stealth, although he sat all alone in that great gallery, he toasted Seraphina ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson

... interpretation of Scripture texts, the grotesque material horrors of hell with its grisly fiends, the vileness of the human body and the loathsome details of its corruption after death. Now and then a single poem rises above the tedious and hideous barbarism of the general level of this monkish literature, either from a more intensely personal feeling in the poet, or from an occasional grace or beauty in his verse. A poem so distinguished is, for example, A Luve Ron (A Love Counsel) by the Minorite friar, Thomas de Hales, one stanza of which ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... character—legends regarding Biblical personages, moral tales, fables, parables, and facetious stories. Of the rabbinical legends, many are extremely puerile and absurd, and may rank with the extravagant and incredible monkish legends of mediaeval times; some, however, are characterised by a richness of humour which one would hardly expect to meet with in such a work; while not a few of the parables, fables, and tales are strikingly beautiful, and will favourably compare with the ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston

... remarked Pitt. 'But this chapel was to be much more than a monument. It was a chantry. The king ordered ten thousand masses to be said here for the repose of his soul; and intended that the monkish establishment should remain for ever to attend to them. Here around his tomb you see the king's particular patron saints,—nine of them,—to whom he looked for help in time of need; all over the chapel you will find the four national ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner

... "Stolen or strayed, a monkish priest, who paints apostles. He is not to be found. Any person or persons who can give information concerning this ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam

... society which I chiefly delighted in, and in which I became the connoisseur of good wine, that I asserted myself to be, when your highness overheard me, I had no occasion for it, being quite as well received when I sang and played the guitar in my monkish dress, as I should have been in my other. Besides which, I never had to pay when in that costume, as I was obliged to do when I sported the other; which was only put on when I wished to make myself agreeable to any fair one. I hardly need observe, that ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat

... however, had accommodation for only thirty or forty; while at the present time a single monastery in Thibet, visited by MM. Huc and Gabet (the lamasery of Kounboum), is occupied by four thousand lamas. The structure of these monasteries shows clearly that the monkish system of the Buddhists is far too ancient to have been copied ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke

... learn things out of books. She wished to make a monk of me, but the mere idea made me shudder with fear. I loved to climb the oaks, to swing in the maples, to scale the roofs and the towers and the masts of the vessels. What had I to do with a monkish frock and a whitewashed cell? Ouf! I put my fingers in my ears and ran away whenever my poor mother ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various

... Newcastle, 1833, p. 46.) gravely assert was to be seen "in the south aisle of the choir of Durham Cathedral at its eastern termination, in front of a wooden screen richly gilt and decorated with stars and other ornaments," are not all agreed that the story is a mere monkish legend, invented long after Holyrood was founded (although, perhaps, not so recent as Lord Hailes supposed)? and is it not, therefore, absurd to speak of such a cross being taken at the battle of Durham, or to identify it with ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 67, February 8, 1851 • Various

... laid out with walks; the tombstones were of every possible strange device, and crowded together in a way which would have been far from pleasing to some of the more aristocratic inhabitants in their lifetime; but the monkish sexton in his own graveyard read the lesson to visitors, often uttered before, that death is a leveller of all ranks, ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston

... city of Essex; which shows the absurdity of a phrase very common at the present day. Sebert lived till 616 or later, but there is no distinct mention of his life in London. His supposed burial, whether in St. Paul's or at Westminster, belongs to monkish legendary lore, and cannot be discussed as serious history. When his three sons turned back from Christianity they were attacked and slain by the men of Wessex, who seem to have acquired an ascendancy over the East Saxons which they retained till ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various

... thou wilt prove that our charge is not ungrounded, call him to thee privately; and, to try him, say that thou desirest to leave thy fathers' religion, and the glory of thy kingship, and to become a Christian, and to put on the monkish habit which formerly thou didst persecute, having, thou shalt tell him, found thine old course evil." The authors of this villainous charge against the Christian knew the tenderness of his heart, how that, if he heard such speech ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus

... Brahmanism?—Before proceeding to discuss the religion to which this somewhat monkish narrative forms the preface, it is necessary to say a few words on the relation which that religion is now supposed to hold to the general history of Indian piety. It was customary, till recently, to regard Buddha as a great reformer, and his religion as a great revolt against that which ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies

... very good, Though one should wear no monkish hood. Right good, when Spring awakes her flute, And good in ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various

... possession of his monkish cell and dormitory. He ordered tea, and began to feel at home. Berkley passed the evening with him. On going away ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... Lonja, near the Solomonic pillars which disappeared within the shadows of the vaulted ceilings, his ancestors in regal majesty used to receive voyagers from the Orient who came clad in wide breeches and red fezzes; Genoese and Provencals wearing capes with monkish hoods; and the valiant native captains of the island covered with their red Catalonian helmets. Venetian merchants sent their Majorcan friends ebony furniture delicately inlaid with ivory and lapis lazuli, or enormous, heavy plate-glass mirrors with bevelled edges. Seafarers returning from ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... Catholic Church only by being too much like the latter. With Protestant ideas, we have semi-Catholic Churches. We claim as our fundamental principle the right of private judgment, and then denounce and exclude those who differ from us. We claim that the soul is not to be saved by monkish seclusion, by going away from the world; and yet we do not preach and carry out in our church-action the purpose of saving the bodies of men as well as their souls. When the Protestant Church work gets more into harmony with ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke

... sensibilities, justice, or mercy; but even the public of those days was horrified, and gave expression to its horror. Abelard, overwhelmed with shame, despair, and remorse, could now think of nothing better than to abandon the world. Without any vocation, as he well knew, he assumed the monkish habit and retired to the monastery of St. Denis, while Heloise, by his order, took the veil at Argenteuil. Her devotion and heroism on this occasion Abelard has described in touching terms. Thus supernaturalism ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... lengthy fasts every year. The fasting of the monks and nuns during the epidemic period of monasticism is too well known to call for more than a mere reference. Perhaps the most curious religious reason given for fasting is that cited by a writer from a monkish chronicler:— ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen

... the tablet: it was bound in plain red leather, with a silver clasp; it contained but one sheet of thick vellum, and on that sheet were inscribed within a double pentacle, words in old monkish Latin, which are literally to be translated thus: "On all that it can reach within these walls—sentient or inanimate, living or dead—as moves the needle, so work my will! Accursed be the house, and ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various

... the Trappist from his pretended designs, was trying with all his power to frighten me, in the hope that I should be brought to make considerable sacrifices of money. In his eyes it was clear that this old man, faithful to the monkish spirit, wished to put into the hands of a clerical Mauprat the fruit of the labours and thrift of ...
— Mauprat • George Sand

... models, even in their noblest works, as was the practice of Ghirlandajo perpetually, and Masaccio and Raffaelle, and manifestly of the men of highest and purest ideal purpose, as again, Giotto, and in his characteristic monkish heads, Angelico, and John Bellini, (note especially the St. Christopher at the side of that mighty picture of St. Jerome, at Venice,) and so of all: which practice had indeed a perilous tendency for ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin

... the monasteries. His stupendous collections, in his own handwriting, still exist, to provoke the feeble industry of literary loiterers. He felt through life the enthusiasm of study; and seated in his monkish library, living with the dead more than with the living, he was still a student of taste: for Spenser the poet visited the library of Stowe; and the first good edition of Chaucer was made so chiefly by the labours of our author. Late in life, worn-out with study and the cares of poverty, neglected ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli

... monkish line about it ran to this effect: Cur moriatur homo cui Salvia crescit in horto? "Why should a man die whilst Sage grows in his garden?" And even at this time, in many parts of England, the following piece of advice ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie

... when there were no plays either merry or sad? Yet it was so. But at a very early time the people of England began to act. And, strange as it may seem to us now, the earliest plays were acted by monks and took place in church. And it is from these very early monkish plays that the theater with its different kinds of plays, that pageants ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall

... situation, extensive meadow and pasture land, sheltered from keen blasts by woods and rising hills. The monastery was built, we are told, in the time of King John, by a number of Cistercian monks. A monkish legend, which, like most other monkish legends, is probably false, asserts that the abbots of that order being summoned by the king to Lincoln, expected to receive some benefit, instead of which the savage monarch ordered them to be trodden to death by horses. None of his attendants ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston

... N. neology, neologism; newfangled expression, nonce expression; back-formation; caconym[obs3]; barbarism. archaism, black letter, monkish Latin. corruption, missaying[obs3], malapropism, antiphrasis[obs3]. pun, paranomasia[obs3], play upon words; word play &c. (wit) 842; double-entendre &c. (ambiguity) 520[Fr]; palindrome, paragram[obs3], anagram, clinch; abuse of ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... report was flashy and vulgar and unscrupulous, but it was not brutal, except by accident, and not unkind except through the necessities of the case. But it was helplessly and thoroughly personal, and it was no more philosophized than a monkish chronicle of the ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells

... as that of San Francisco. The padre prior is a good little old man, but has not the impressive, ascetic visage of the guardian of the other convent. His room is as simple, though not in such perfect order; and his bed is also furnished with a comfortable mattress. An air half military, half monkish, pervades the convent—aides-de-camp of the president passing along the galleries, their uniforms contrasting with the dark robe of a passing monk, returning at nightfall ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca

... that they might not be unprovided for when they should arrive at the hunting-grounds of the Great Spirit. A little digging, a few years ago,[11] has furnished the evidence on which I base this assertion. This digging has destroyed the old monkish fiction to reinstate the truly Indian idea of the dead, and of the necessity of ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson

... Soissons, from the Countess of Salisbury, from the word Souvenez, and lastly, from the office of Seneschalus, or Steward of England, held by John of Ghent,—which is, as he says, "Mr. Nichols's notion," but the whole of which he stigmatises alike "as mere monkish or heraldic gossip;" and, finally, he proceeds to unfold his own recondite discovery, "viz. that it comes from the S-shaped lever upon the bit {250} of the bridle of the war steed,"—a conjecture which will assuredly have fewer adherents than any one of its predecessors. But now comes ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 46, Saturday, September 14, 1850 • Various

... occasionally be antiquated, and require now and then to be renewed, as in the case of Chaucer; but the brilliancy and intrinsic value of the gems continue unaltered. Cast a look back over the long reach of literary history. What vast valleys of dulness, filled with monkish legends and academical controversies! What bogs of theological speculations! What dreary wastes of metaphysics! Here and there only do we behold the heaven-illumined bards, elevated like beacons on their widely-separated heights, to transmit the ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving

... to Ely Cathedral. Numerous miracles were claimed to have been wrought by the relics of the princess, who was famed for her piety. The supposed value of these relics was the cause of the night raid on the tomb—a practice not uncommon in the days of monkish supremacy. The bones of saint or martyr had to be guarded with pious care or they were likely to be stolen by the enterprising churchmen of some rival establishment. Shortly afterwards, it would transpire that miracles were being successfully performed by the relics in ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy

... answer the mighty earl That asked of Wessex men Why they be meek and monkish folk, And bow to the White Lord's broken yoke; What sign have we save blood and smoke? Here ...
— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton

... Was ever monkish work begun in more unchurch-like surroundings? Alwin wondered, a festal board for a desk and a wine-cup for an ink-horn! The brawling crew along the benches drank and sang and rattled dice in their nightly carousal; and, in ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz

... of innocent amusements, and delighted to encourage them. His table-talk, collected by his friends, makes one of the most brilliant books in the world. He had no monkish theories about the necessity of abstinence; but he was temperate from habit and principle. A salt herring and a hunch of bread was his ordinary meal; and he was once four days without food of any sort, having emptied his larder ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude

... luggage as Lefroy and Shaw, Oh! shade of Goldsmith, shade of Swift, Bright spirits whom, in days of yore, This Queen of Dulness sent adrift, As aliens to her foggy shore;—- Shade of our glorious Grattan, too, Whose very name her shame recalls; Whose effigy her bigot crew Reversed upon their monkish walls,[1]— Bear witness (lest the world should doubt) To your mute Mother's dull renown, Then famous but for Wit turned out, And Eloquence turned upside down; But now ordained new wreaths to ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... scattered, but Skule escaped, and at length was traced to the woods, where he was wandering with a few friends. The friars of a monastery took pity on them and hid them in a tower, disguised with monkish cowls. Despite their disguise they were traced to their hiding place, and when the friars refused to give them up the pursuers set fire to the tower. Driven out by the smoke and heat, Skule stepped from the gate, holding his shield above his head ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris

... buys for Topham drawings and designs, For Fountain statues, and for Curio coins, Rare monkish manuscripts for Hearne alone, And books for Mead, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 188, June 4, 1853 • Various

... power of curing scrofula by touching the sore. The right or faculty, the French people say, existed originally in their monarch; but the English nation would not admit this, and claimed the power for their king. In support of England's claim, monkish writers assert that the virtue was inherent in our kings as early as the days of Edward the Confessor. Others will have it that King Robert first exhibited the miraculous gift. Charles VIII. of France touched ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant

... was I plunged that I could seriously consider abandoning self entirely and devoting the remainder of my wrecked life to doing good, though just what trend my saintliness would take I never determined. In monkish days, I suppose, I should have gone into a cloister. But Hanks aroused me. Of course he did not know my thoughts. With his clear eyes he did not see that my life was a ruin. He regarded me rather as a fortunate man to whom opportunities were ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd

... But he had escaped, and he took to himself all the world could give, and revelled in it with every sensation of his gifted, sensuous nature. It was only when he could not get what he wanted that he had curious returns of monkish reasoning. The historian of his life says that he would give all he possessed to secure the gratification of whatever inclination chanced to be predominant at the moment; but if he could by no means accomplish ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford

... the doom prepared for me by monkish ingenuity in torture. My cognizance of the pit had become known to the inquisitorial agents—the pit whose horrors had been destined for so bold a recusant as myself—the pit, typical of hell, and regarded by rumor as the Ultima Thule of all their punishments. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... and wrote a theme in which he maintained, to the wrath of his teacher, that Ariosto was a better poet than Homer. In later life he declared that he had forgotten even the letters of the Greek alphabet. Latin would have fared as badly, had not his interest in Matthew Paris and other monkish chroniclers "kept up a kind of familiarity with the language even in its rudest state." "To my Gothic ear, the 'Stabat Mater,' the 'Dies Irae,'[4] and some of the other hymns of the Catholic Church are more solemn and affecting ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... doctor could be called a big man: he was broad-shouldered and well-muscled, but, hidden as his body was beneath the folds of his blue, monkish robe, only his shortness of stature was noticeable. He was only fifty-four, but the pale face, the full, flowing beard, and the long white hair topped by a small blue skullcap gave him an ageless look, as though centuries of time had flowed over him ...
— Fifty Per Cent Prophet • Gordon Randall Garrett

... human nature, as its Creator made it, and maintains it wherever His laws are observed, is entirely harmonious. No physical error can be more profound, no moral error more dangerous, than that involved in the monkish doctrine of the opposition of body to soul. No soul can be perfect in an imperfect body: no body perfect without perfect soul. Every right action and true thought sets the seal of its beauty on person and face; ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... has remained closed and uninfluenced by the ordinary progress of the human mind elsewhere. The monkish and despotic spirit has long preserved itself in the midst of ignorance, without, indeed, acquiring strength from abroad, but at the same time without permitting the intelligence of the nation to borrow foreign arms against it." ...
— The Christian Foundation, June, 1880

... pretended infallibility; auricular confession, founded upon the priest's power to forgive sins; indulgences; pretended relics; penance; strings of beads for Ave-Marys and pater-nosters; celibacy; merits and works of supererogations; restrictions; monkish austerities; religious vows and orders; palms; candles; decorated images; holy water; christening of bells; hallowed flowers and branches; agnus ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox

... with her. The picture of their room rises clearly on my memory. A small square room, sparingly, yet sufficiently furnished, with polished floor and frescoed ceiling,—and, drawn up closely before the cheerful fire, an oval table, on which stood a monkish lamp of brass, with depending chains that support quaint classic cups for the olive oil. There, seated beside his wife, I was sure to find the Marchese, reading from some patriotic book, and dressed in the dark brown, red-corded coat of the Guardia Civica, which ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... reckoned from midnight, and hours of the day reckoned from sunrise, or more frequently from six A.M. With such an understanding, it is clear that ten might be called four, and four ten, and yet the same identical hour to be referred to; nor is it in the least difficult to imagine that some monkish transcriber, ignorant perhaps of the meaning of "o'clock," might fancy he was correcting, rather that corrupting, Chaucer's text, by changing ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 81, May 17, 1851 • Various



Words linked to "Monkish" :   nonindulgent



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