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Sicilian   /sɪsˈɪliən/   Listen
Sicilian

adjective
1.
Of or relating to or characteristic of Sicily or the people of Sicily.



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"Sicilian" Quotes from Famous Books



... but with much caution; the old couple treated him with evident distrust. But his attention was soon attracted by the little English deaf-mute, in whom his discernment, though young as yet, enabled him to recognize a girl of African, or at least of Sicilian, origin. The child had the golden-brown color of a Havana cigar, eyes of fire, Armenian eyelids with lashes of very un-British length, hair blacker than black; and under this almost olive skin, sinews of extraordinary strength and feverish alertness. She looked at Rodolphe with amazing ...
— Albert Savarus • Honore de Balzac

... Camerota. L'Infresco Point is ahead, not three miles away. It is of no use to row, for the breeze will come up before long and save you the trouble. But the sea is white and motionless. Far in the offing a Sicilian schooner and a couple of clumsy "martinganes"—there is no proper English name for the craft—are lying becalmed, with hanging sails. The men on board the felucca watch them and the sea. There is a shadow on the ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford

... vast, Who dealt the stroke, came thundering to the ground!— Not B-ck—gh-m himself, with balkier sound, Uprooted from the field of Whiggist glories, Fell souse, of late, among the astonish'd Tories! Instant the ring was broke, and shouts and yells From Trojan Flashmen and Sicilian Swells Fill'd the wide heaven—while, touch'd with grief to see His pall, well-known through many a lark and spree, [8] Thus rumly floor'd, the kind Ascestes ran, [9] And pitying rais'd from earth ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer

... was stealing along the Marin shore, and hiding Golden Gate when we arrived, and the rays of the sun took some time to make a clear path out to sea. Out of the bank of white came gliding the heavy power boats of the Sicilian and Corsican fishermen, while from off shore were the ghostly lateen rigged boats of those who had been fishing up the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, their yards aslant to catch the faint morning breeze. As they slipped through the leaden water to their mooring ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords

... general festival, gold and silver dishes are swindled (by the Jews under Moses's instigation) from their neighbours, and at the moment when the Egyptians believe the Israelites to be occupied in harmless feastings, a reversed Sicilian vesper is executed; the stranger murders the native, the guest the host; and, with a horrible cunning, only the first-born are destroyed to the end that, in a land where the first-born enjoyed such superior rights, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... from Genoa to help the rebels. "I go," he said, "a general without an army, to fight an army without a general." His success was extraordinarily rapid. At the end of May he had taken Palermo from 24,000 regular troops with his volunteers and some Sicilian help, thus making the dictatorship of Sicily, which he had declared on landing, a reality. It soon became known that he intended to recross to the mainland to free the people of Naples itself. Piedmont, of course, wished Garibaldi to succeed in this further ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell

... Sicilian actors in London. They came here from Paris, where, I read, "la passion parait decidement," to a dramatic critic, "avoir partout ses inconvenients," especially on the stage. We are supposed to think so here, but for once London has applauded an ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons

... The Sicilian knight, whose name was Pezare, was a Venetian long absent from the Venetian Republic, and with no desire to return there, since he had obtained a footing in the Court of the King of Sicily. Being short of funds in Venice, because he ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac

... the Joloans, the neighbors of Mindanao, who are robbing the country from us and capturing the Indians of these Filipinas. The fleet is there, and I was to embark with it, but in order not to leave this district alone Father Fabricio Sersali, a Sicilian, went. The fleet consisted of thirty ships and more, and in them sailed two hundred Spaniards and innumerable Indian soldiers and rowers. May our Lord give us the ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XXII, 1625-29 • Various

... Almighty love still reigns and revels in my bosom; and I am at this moment ready to hang myself for a young Edinburgh widow, who has wit and wisdom more murderously fatal than the assassinating stiletto of the Sicilian banditti, or the poisoned arrow of the savage African. My highland dirk, that used to hang beside my crutches, I have gravely removed into a neighbouring closet, the key of which I cannot command in case of spring-tide paroxysms. You may ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... husbandry, not unlike that corn-hunger which merchants suffer from. You know their habits: by reason of this craving after corn, [39] whenever they hear that corn is to be got, they go sailing off to find it, even if they must cross the Aegean, or the Euxine, or the Sicilian seas. And when they have got as much as ever they can get, they will not let it out of their sight, but store it in the vessel on which they sail themselves, and off they go across the seas again. [40] ...
— The Economist • Xenophon

... after his dismissal O'Flannagan, passing the cart of a hot-tamale man at the entrance to the ball park, became involved in an argument between the vendor, a Sicilian, and a boy and was knifed by the vendor. He was buried three days later after a convivial wake, the success of which was in some measure a consolation for ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt

... the dead had prophetic powers, but declares that they could not always be relied on, as the following instance proves.[62] During the Sicilian war, Gabienus, the bravest man in Caesar's fleet, was captured by Sextus Pompeius, and beheaded by his orders. For a whole day the corpse lay upon the shore, the head almost severed from the body. Then, towards evening, a large crowd assembled, attracted by his groans and prayers; ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley

... (said the Genoese courier, constraining himself to speak a little louder), we were all at Rome for the Carnival. I had been out, all day, with a Sicilian, a friend of mine, and a courier, who was there with an English family. As I returned at night to our hotel, I met the little Carolina, who never stirred from home alone, ...
— To be Read at Dusk • Charles Dickens

... very little difference to him. What he wished to settle was no such barren conundrum. For, had there even been any means of coercing the Earth into an honest answer, on such a delicate point, which the Sicilian canon, Recupero, fancied that there was; [Footnote: Recupero. See Brydone's Travels, some sixty or seventy years ago. The canon, being a beneficed clergyman in the Papal church, was naturally an infidel. ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... lines into the water. They are from the hills, and as far removed from our twentieth century as their prototypes who were fishing in the sparkling blue not so very far away when, the world being young, Theocritus passed and gave them immortality. In the valley to the right, the atmosphere of the Sicilian Idylls is preserved by two half-clad goatherds who have brought their flock to pasture from hillside Mediunah, in whose pens they are kept safe from thieves at night. As though he were a reincarnation of Daphnis or Menalcas, one of the brown-skinned ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan

... which means dogs according the Moors, living in the mountains, and independent of the Dey. A considerable number rushed to the coast, armed, and in great numbers, perceiving the tartane to be an Italian vessel, and expecting a raid by Sicilian robbers on their cattle; but the Moors had informed them that it was no such thing, but a prize taken in the name of the Dey of Algiers, in which an illustrious French Bey's harem was being conveyed to Algiers. From that city the tartane was now about a day's ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge

... older and wiser than I am. Everything in our lives makes us women stealthy as cats. It is not our fault. At least, it is not mine. Some women—some girls—may enjoy the excitement, but not I. Perhaps I am different from others, because I have the blood of Europe in my veins. My father's mother was Sicilian. My own mother was Spanish. And he, my father, is an enlightened man, with broader views and more knowledge of the world than most Caids of the south. They all pride themselves on knowing a little French in these days, he tells me, and some have even made visits to Paris once in ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson

... 58). Lombroso and Ferrero (La Donna, p. 540) refer to the objection of prostitutes to be examined during the monthly periods as often greater than that of respectable women. Again, Callari states ("Prostituzione in Sicilia," Archivio di Psichiatria, 1903, p. 205), that Sicilian prostitutes can only with difficulty be persuaded to expose themselves naked in the practice of their profession. Aretino long since remarked (in La Pippa) that no women so detest gratuitous decolletage as prostitutes. When ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... happily associated with "Sweet the Moments" is "Sicily," or the "Sicilian Hymn"—from an ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth

... "Do you know," said Despard, finally, "that I have been thinking much about my father of late. It seems very strange to me that my uncle never told me about that Sicilian affair before. Perhaps he did not wish me to know it, for fear that through all my life I should brood over thoughts of that noble heart lost to me forever. But I intend to write to him, and obtain afresh the particulars of his death. I wish to ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille

... perfection reached by suffering was a barbarous cruelty, held in horror under the beautiful sky of Italy. When the conversation languished, he prudently sought again at the piano the phrases of the graceful and banal Sicilian air, fearing to slip into an air of Trovatore, which was written in ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France

... make him hers alone. The magic word was said. The expected results had, however, failed to follow—perhaps because the word, or words, had not been very happily chosen. They had been these: "Why don't you leave this bourgeois man-and-wife milieu behind you and prove in some Sicilian palace what life may really mean for ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock

... solitude, but out of a love and desire to sequester a man's self for a higher conversation: such as is found to have been falsely and feignedly in some of the heathen, as Epimenides the Candian, Numa the Roman, Empedocles the Sicilian, and Apollonius of Tyana; and truly and really in divers of the ancient hermits and holy fathers of the Church. But little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth. For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various

... observation 'quam parva sapientia regitur mundus,' and is touched with a feeling of the ills which afflict states. The condition of Megara before and during the Peloponnesian War, of Athens under the Thirty and afterwards, of Syracuse and the other Sicilian cities in their alternations of democratic excess and tyranny, might naturally suggest such reflections. Some states he sees already shipwrecked, others foundering for want of a pilot; and he wonders not at their destruction, but at their endurance. For they ought ...
— Statesman • Plato

... Sicilian suns had laid a dower of light and life about her: Her beauty was a gracious flower—the ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall

... Ghibellines were at their height. That was the year in which Count Ugolino della Gherardesca got back his lordship over Pisa—where he was to be starved to death with his two sons and two grandsons some twelve years later. That was the time when four Popes died in sixteen months—the time when the Sicilian Vespers drove Charles of Anjou from Sicily for ever—when Guido da Montefeltro was fighting and betraying and fighting again—the time of Dante's early youth, in which fell most of those deeds for which he consigned the doers to hell and their names ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford

... accustomed to make a world entirely to her liking. Her dark eyes were hollow, her small mouth had lost its colour, and she showed that touch of something wasting and withering that Theocritan shepherds knew in old Sicilian days. It was as though she had defied a god—and the god ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... Waller Procter, better known as Barry Cornwall, who was afterwards to write, in his old age, so pleasant a memoir of Lamb. He was then thirty-five, was practising law, and had already published Marcian Colonna and A Sicilian Story. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb

... of glowing gold He hates—the generous king, the bold! He who four score towers laid low, Ta'en from the Saracenic foe. Before upon Sicilian plains, Shield joined to shield, the fight he gains, The victory at Hild's war game; And now the heathens dread ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson

... even the second generation born in this country we should find, I am convinced, that we are no more homicidal than France and Belgium, and less so than Italy. It is to be expected that with our Chinese, "greaser," and half-breed population in the West, our Black Belt in the South, and our Sicilian and South Italian immigration in the North and East, our murder rate should exceed those of the continental nations, which are nothing if not ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train

... opinion about the excellence of the cuisine, or about the reasonable charges of this trattoria. A soup of lentils, followed by boiled turbot or fried soles, beef-steak or mutton cutlets, tordi or beccafichi, with a salad, the whole enlivened with good red wine or Florio's Sicilian Marsala from the cask, costs about four francs. Gas is unknown in the establishment. There is no noise, no bustle, no brutality of waiters, no ahurissement of tourists. And when dinner is done, we can sit awhile over our cigarette and coffee, talking until the night invites us to a ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds

... important a service. On arriving at Sicily, the Neapolitan ministry, anxious to avoid everything which could endanger their peace with the French directory, declared openly to aid him; but through Lady Hamilton's influence at court, Nelson procured secret orders to the Sicilian governors, under which he obtained all necessary supplies from Syracuse. As soon as he had re-victualled and taken in fresh water, he turned his power again toward Egypt, asserting in a letter to his commander, that if the French were bound to the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... Another was Asclepiades of Samos, both elegiac and lyric, of whose epigrams, (short elegies) those preserved to us are charming. Yet another was the sad and charming Leonidas of Tarentum. The two leaders of this choir were Theocritus and Callimachus. Theocritus, a Sicilian, passes as the founder of the idyll which he did not invent, but to which he gave the importance of a type by marking it with his imprint. The idyll of Theocritus was always a picture of popular customs and even a little drama of popular morals; but at times it had ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet

... MAFFIA, a Sicilian secret society which aims at boycotting the law-courts, superseding the law, and ruling the island; its chief weapon is the boycott; violence is only resorted to for vengeance; funds are raised by blackmail; popular support enables ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... single sun The sands of time grow dimmer as they run, Yet thine is my resplendency, so given To bear my secrets thro' the upper Heaven. Leave tenantless thy crystal home, and fly, With all thy train, athwart the moony sky— Apart—like fire-flies in Sicilian night [14], And wing to other worlds another light! Divulge the secrets of thy embassy To the proud orbs that twinkle—and so be To ev'ry heart a barrier and a ban Lest the stars totter in ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe

... little over a year since we planned the North African campaign. It is six months since we planned the Sicilian campaign. I confess that I am of an impatient disposition, but I think that I understand and that most people understand the amount of time necessary to prepare for any major military or naval operation. We cannot ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt

... he, 'I guess you realize that Bad-Luck Kearny is still on deck. It was a shame, now, about that gun. She only needed to be slewed two inches to clear the rail; and that's why I grabbed that rope's end. Who'd have thought that a sailor—even a Sicilian lubber on a banana coaster—would have fastened a line in a bow-knot? Don't think I'm trying to dodge the responsibility, ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry

... Anjou, would gladly have performed the ceremony at Naples, but Petrarch preferred to be crowned on the Capitol by the senator of Rome. This honor was long the highest object of ambition, and so it seemed to Jacobus Pizinga, an illustrious Sicilian magistrate. Then came the Italian journey of Charles IV, whom it amused to flatter the vanity of ambitious men, and impress the ignorant multitude by means of gorgeous ceremonies. Starting from the fiction that the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... to be performed by small holders? Their masters would have no further use for them and would consequently swell the lists of freedmen in order to avoid the expense of feeding them. This law was passed in the midst of the Sicilian slave war and Tiberius Gracchus would surely not have neglected to make some provision to meet this exigency. The law as it stands in its imperfect condition seems to be the work of an ignorant, unprincipled political charlatan, but we ...
— Public Lands and Agrarian Laws of the Roman Republic • Andrew Stephenson

... like that in Great Britain. The Government has always monopolized the long-distance lines, and is now about to buy out all private companies. There are only fifty-five thousand telephones to thirty-two million people—as many as in Norway and less than in Denmark. And in many of the southern and Sicilian provinces the jingle of the telephone bell ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson

... down, and the resinous Andromeda was beginning to take fire, the tree was put aside, and a feast began, at which full justice was done to the costly Sicilian wine with which a friend had generously supplied us before we left home. We had a dish of roast seal! Some cakes were made by the cook, and the steward produced his best stores. For the evening, the division between the fore and aft cabins was removed, and there was free intercourse between officers ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson

... Europe is my choice. The appointment hardly doubtful, and the probable destination Palermo or Naples. We will talk of the future, and dream of it, on the lake side. * * * I may calculate upon the next six months at my own disposal; so we will climb Skiddaw this year, and scale Etna the next; and Sicilian air will keep us alive till Davy has found out the immortalising elixir, or till we are very well satisfied to do without it, and be immortalised after the manner of our fathers. My pocket-book contains more ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull

... the Italian colony are largely from South Italy,—Calabrian and Sicilian peasants, or Neapolitans from the workingmen's quarters of that city. They have come to America with the distinct aim of earning money, and finding more room for the energies of themselves and their children. In almost all cases they mean to go back again, simply ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams

... endless importance as it proved. Friedrich's life had fallen in times of huge anarchy; the Hohenstauffen line gone miserably out,—Boy Conradin, its last representative, perishing on the scaffold even (by a desperate Pope and a desperate Duke of Anjou); [At Naples, 25th October, 1268.] Germans, Sicilian Normans, Pope and Reich, all at daggers-drawn with one another; no Kaiser, nay as many as Three at once! Which lasted from 1254 onwards; and is called "the Interregnum," or Anarchy "of Nineteen Years," ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle

... again the influence of contemporary science on philosophic thought is clearly marked. Empedocles of Agrigentum (c. 460 B. C.), the only citizen of a Dorian state who finds a place in the early history of science and philosophy, was the founder of the Sicilian school of medicine, and it was probably his pre-occupation with that science that led him to revive the old doctrine of Fire, Air, Earth, and Water, which the Milesians had cast aside, but which lent itself readily to the physiological ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various

... him, above whose guilty head, Suspended by a thread, The naked sword is hung for evermore, Not feasts Sicilian shall With all their cates recall That zest the simplest fare could once inspire; Nor song of birds, nor music of the lyre Shall his lost sleep restore: But gentle sleep shuns not The rustic's lowly cot, Nor mossy bank o'ercanopied ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin

... had been so nearly crushed, and who lay yelping in the puddle where the gun carriage had thrown him, had an Italian wife, a beautiful Sicilian of Messina, who was not indifferent to our Colonel. This circumstance had aggravated his rage. He was pledged to protect the husband, bound to defend him as he would ...
— Another Study of Woman • Honore de Balzac

... nightly orgies. Earth around them laughed; The rocks reechoed; shouts of revelling joy Shrilled from the Naiads, and the river nymphs Sent echoes from their whirlpool-circled tides, Flowing in silence; and beneath the rocks Chanted Sicilian songs, like preludes sweet, That through the warbling throats of Syren nymphs, Most musical drop of honey ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... Unmoved in her bright mansion, when in vain Some naked maiden stretches helpless hands And shifts the magic wheel, and burns the grain, And cannot win her lover back again, Nor her old heart of quiet any more, Where moonlight floods the dim Sicilian main, And the cool wavelets break along ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang

... serpent, but ah, bitter-sweet! She had a woman's mouth with all its pearls complete: 60 And for her eyes: what could such eyes do there But weep, and weep, that they were born so fair? As Proserpine still weeps for her Sicilian air. Her throat was serpent, but the words she spake Came, as through bubbling honey, for Love's sake, And thus; while Hermes on his pinions lay, Like a stoop'd falcon ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats

... outrageous, that I was obliged to postpone my rest till sugar-plums and nursery eloquence had hushed it to repose. At length peace was restored, and about eleven o'clock I fell into a slumber, during which the most lovely Sicilian prospects filled the eye of my fancy. I anticipated the classic scenes of that famous island, and forgot every sorrow in the meadows ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford

... de Insulis, a Sicilian poet and orator of the twelfth century, who wrote a book "De Planctu Naturae" — "The ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer

... Cagliostro, was now playing his dextrous game at Paris; harrowing-up the souls of the curious and gullible of all ranks in that capital, by various thaumaturgic feats; raising the dead from their graves; and, what was more to the purpose, raising himself from the station of a poor Sicilian lacquey to that of a sumptuous and extravagant count. The noise of his exploits appears to have given rise to this work of Schiller's. It is an attempt to exemplify the process of hoodwinking an acute but too sensitive man; of working on the latent germ of superstition, which exists beneath his ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle

... of the presence amid the corn of a kindly Being, who, in return for due rites and offerings, will vouchsafe nourishing rains and golden harvests." He mentioned the references in Virgil, and the description in Theocritus of a Sicilian Harvest Festival—these were no doubt familiar to me; but if I was interested in the subject, I should find, he said, much more information collected in a book which he had written, but of which I had probably never heard, about the Vegetation Deities ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith

... Calicut, a town on the coast of Malabar, and 'muslin' from Mossul, a city in Asiatic Turkey. 'Cordwain' or 'cordovan' is from Cordova—'delf' from Delft—'indigo' (indicum) from India—'gamboge' from Cambodia—the 'agate' from a Sicilian river, Achates—the 'turquoise' from Turkey—the 'chalcedony' or onyx from Chalcedon—'jet' from the river Gages in Lycia, where this black stone is found. [Footnote: In Holland's Pliny, the Greek form 'gagates' is still retained, though he oftener calls ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench

... in mail, with his face concealed by the strange Sicilian nose-piece used then by most of the Northern nations,—had ridden Tostig, who had joined the Earl on his march, with a scanty band of some fifty or sixty of his Danish house-carles. All the men throughout broad England that he ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... happy combination of song, of labour, and of peril, which he acknowledged was "a very terrific process." Our sailors at Newcastle, in heaving their anchors, have their "Heave and ho! rum-below!" but the Sicilian mariners must be more deeply affected by their beautiful hymn to the Virgin. A society, instituted in Holland for general good, do not consider among their least useful projects that of having printed at a low price a ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli

... and recovering the love of the Roman people, as well as of our neighbours. I have brought a man here before you, my lords, who is a robber of the public treasure, an overturner of law and justice, and the disgrace, as well as destruction, of the Sicilian province: of whom, if you shall determine with equity and due severity, your authority will remain entire, and upon such an establishment as it ought to be: but if his great riches will be able to force their way ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift

... The Armines shall hold their heads up again, by Jove they shall! Dearest of men, I dare say you think me mad. I am mad with joy. How that Virginian creeper has grown! I have brought you so many plants, my father! a complete Sicilian Hortus Siccus. Ah, John, good John, how is your wife? Take care of my pistol-case. Ask Louis; he knows all about everything. Well, dear Glastonbury, and how have you been? How is the old tower? How are the old books, and the old staff, ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli

... great in state, motes in the sunne? They say so that would have thee freeze in shades, That (like the grosse Sicilian gurmundist) Empty their noses in the cates they love, 60 That none may eat but they. Do thou but bring Light to the banquet Fortune sets before thee And thou wilt loath leane darknesse like thy death. Who would beleeve thy mettall could let sloth Rust and consume it? If Themistocles ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman

... themselves, yet can they not prevail; though they roar, yet can they not pass over. But this people has a revolted and rebellious heart, they are revolted and gone." Perhaps again, looking down from the sunny Sicilian cliffs of Taormino, or through the pine-clad gulfs and gullies of the Cypriote hills ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley

... ruined Babylon Is blown along the level plain, And songs of mine at dawn have soared Above the blue Sicilian main. ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis

... on their transmission from their parent seas during a former epoch, and subsequent isolation. That epoch was doubtless the newer Pliocene or Glacial Era, when the Mya truncata and other northern forms now extinct in the Mediterranean, and found fossil in the Sicilian tertiaries, ranged into that sea. The changes which there destroyed the shallow water glacial forms, did not affect those living in the depths, ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... little more—of allegiance to the Empire. The Florentine exiles betook themselves to those cities, and before long the spirits of the party had revived sufficiently to allow them to play what must have been felt to be their last stroke in the game. Profiting by the disaffection of certain Apulian and Sicilian barons (whom one may imagine to have found the gloomy discipline of Charles a poor exchange for the brilliancy and licence of Frederick's Court), they cast their eyes towards the last surviving representative of that Count Frederick ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler

... story-tellers in the bazars of Smyrna and other ports of the Levant. The late Mr. Henry Charles Coote (in the "Folk-Lore Record," vol. iii. Part ii. p. 178 et seq.), "On the source of some of M. Galland's Tales," quotes from popular Italian, Sicilian and Romaic stories incidents identical with those in Prince Ahmad, Aladdin, Ali Baba and the Envious Sisters, suggesting that the Frenchman had heard these paramythia in Levantine coffee-houses and had inserted them into his unequalled corpus ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... confirmed her sway over the western half of the island. In later conflicts (317-275 B.C.), in which Agathocles, tyrant of Syracuse, was a noted leader of the Greeks, and, after his death, Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, was their ally, Carthage alternately lost and regained her Sicilian cities. But the result of the war was to establish ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... "Principles," 7th Edition, 1847, page 676, he makes a temperate claim of priority, as he had already done in a private letter of October 14th, 1846, to Forbes ("Life of Sir Charles Lyell," 1881, Volume II., page 106) both as regards the Sicilian flora and the barrier effect of mountain-chains. See Letter 20 for a note on Forbes.) I confess I cannot make out the evidence of his time-notions in distribution, and I cannot help suspecting that they are rather vague. Lyell preceded Forbes ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... us, that one tenth deal [of wheat] was sold for four drachmae, and when no less than seventy cori of flour were brought into the temple, at the feast of unleavened bread, [these cori are thirty-one Sicilian, but forty-one Athenian medimni,] not one of the priests was so hardy as to eat one crumb of it, even while so great a distress was upon the land; and this out of a dread of the law, and of that wrath which God retains against acts of wickedness, even when no one can accuse the actors. ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus

... his wife's unfaithfulness precipitates the catastrophe. Rejected and cast out by her betrayer, SANTUZZA in a moment of extreme jealousy, exposes the infamy of LOLA and TURIDDU. ALFIO challenges TURIDDU, according to the rustic Sicilian code, in which each party bites the other's right ear. It is understood between the combatants that the severity of the bite in the challenge indicates the degree of animosity to be expected in contest. TURIDDU regrets ...
— Zanetto and Cavalleria Rusticana • Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti, Guido Menasci, and Pietro Mascagni

... tried to regain the kingdom, and was defeated and decapitated at Naples. But twenty years later, the French who had made themselves thoroughly unpopular in Sicily were all murdered during the so-called Sicilian Vespers, and so ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon

... the Sicilian, of whom the old Duca della Spina had spoken. He had no permanent abode in Naples, but lived in a hotel down by the public gardens, beyond Santa Lucia; and on the day after the Duca had been to see the Countess Macomer, he strolled ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford

... resolved not to lose sight of the coffin till he had seen it placed in Wincot vault, Monkton decided immediately on hiring the first ship that could be obtained. The vessel in port which we were informed could soonest be got ready for sea was a Sicilian brig, and this vessel my friend accordingly engaged. The best dock-yard artisans that could be got were set to work, and the smartest captain and crew to be picked up on an emergency in Naples were chosen ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins

... for, and the beautiful, gay, famous maid of honor would have no lack of suitors. Against his daughter's wish, he had given to the richest and most aristocratic among them, the Sicilian baron Don Fabrizio di Moncada, the hope of gaining her hand. "Conquer the fortress! When it yields—you can hold it," were his last words; but the citadel remained impregnable, though the besieger could bring into the field as allies a knightly, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... it is, but no African music seems strange to me. I was born on my father's estate, near Tunis. He was a Sicilian; but came to North Africa each winter. I have always heard the tomtoms and the pipes, and I know nearly all the desert ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens

... Mother, was born a daughter more fair than any flower that grew, and ever more dear to her became her child, the lovely Proserpine. By the blue sea, in the Sicilian meadows, Proserpine and the fair nymphs who were her companions spent their happy days. Too short were the days for all their joy, and Demeter made the earth yet fairer than it was that she might bring ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang

... time before they could get a hangman in Corsica, so that the punishment of the gallows was hardly known, all their criminals being shot.[94] At last this creature whom I saw, who is a Sicilian, came with a message to Paoli. The General who has a wonderful talent for physiognomy, on seeing the man, said immediately to some of the people about him, "Ecco il boia. Behold our hangman." He gave orders to ask the man if he would accept of the office, and his answer was, "My ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell

... interesting letter I have just received from our Consul at Trieste: and Acton's answer to my yesterday's letter communicating your kind resolution of taking care of their Sicilian Majesties and their kingdoms; and which, your Lordship will see, gives ...
— The Letters of Lord Nelson to Lady Hamilton, Vol II. - With A Supplement Of Interesting Letters By Distinguished Characters • Horatio Nelson

... friends, many thanks! I chiefly desire life now, that I may recompense every one of you. Most I know something of already. What, a repast prepared? Benedicto benedicatur—ugh, ugh! Where was I? Oh, as you were remarking, Ugo, the weather is 5 mild, very unlike winter weather; but I am a Sicilian, you know, and shiver in your Julys here. To be sure, when 'twas full summer at Messina, as we priests used to cross in procession the great square on Assumption Day, you might see our thickest yellow tapers twist suddenly in 10 ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning

... censures (1710). A partial agreement was arrived at when the royal administrator consented to accept his appointment from the Pope, but the transference of Sicily to the Duke of Savoy led to a new and more serious quarrel. The latter attempted to revive the privileges known as the Sicilian Monarchy, accorded formerly to the ruler of Sicily. The Pope refused to recognise these claims, and as the king remained stubborn nothing was left but to place the island under interdict. To this the king replied by expelling those priests who observed the interdict. This ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey

... But Their Sicilian Majesties have been careful, as much as they were able, to exclude from their councils both German Illuminati and Italian philosophers. Their principal Minister, Chevalier Acton, has proved himself ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith

... shoplifter. swindler, peculator; forger, coiner; fence, receiver of stolen goods, duffer; smasher. burglar, housebreaker; cracksman[obs3], magsman*[obs3]; Bill Sikes, Jack Sheppard, Jonathan Wild. gang[group of thieves], gang of thieves, theft ring; organized crime, mafia, the Sicilian Mafia, the mob, la cosa nostra [Italian]. Dillinger[famous ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... part to-night,' she said. 'You have fallen on Sicilian days and sensual rest, too soon. You might have cajoled, and fawned, and played your traitor's part, a little longer, and grown richer. You purchase your voluptuous ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens

... are now turning in this direction, and that they are coming to see that the only just and permanent arrangement is the divine solution of working on the basis of universal brotherhood."[421] There is a fraternity among Sicilian bandits. The "Divine brotherhood" of the writer would be based on robbery, and have ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker

... happier future dwells; The happy present haunts the past; And those old minstrels who outlast Our looser-textured webs of song, Nursed in Hellenic dells, Sicilian, or Italian, ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave

... their hostility to the Spanish Power. He wrote to a trusted servant that all his thoughts were bent on thwarting Philip.[10] While the Christian navies were fighting at Lepanto, the King of France was treating with the Turks. His menacing attitude in the following year kept Don Juan in Sicilian waters, and made his victory barren for Christendom. Encouraged by French protection, Venice withdrew from the League. Even in Corsica there was a movement which men interpreted as a prelude to the storm that France was raising against the empire of Spain. Rome trembled in expectation ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... established herself at Pavia. Rich with her father's wealth and still of most seductive beauty, she now abandoned herself to a life of profligacy. Three among her lovers must be named: Ardizzino Valperga, Count of Masino; Roberto Sanseverino, of the princely Naples family; and Don Pietro di Cardona, a Sicilian. With each of the two first she quarrelled, and separately besought each to murder the other. They were friends and frustrated her plans by communicating them to one another. The third loved her with the insane passion of a very young man. What she ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds

... intolerably revolting, about which troops of naked children defy vermin, and encrust themselves in filth. At one door we could not help observing that worst form of scabies, the gale a grosses bulles; so we had got, it appeared, from Scylla into Charybdis, and were in the very preserves of Sicilian itch, and we prognosticate it will spread before the month expires wherever human skin is to be found for its entertainment. Partenico lies in a scorching plain full of malaria. Having passed the three ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various

... some morning in July; O wildwood odours of the birch and pine, And heather breaths from great red hill-tops nigh, Than olive sweeter or Sicilian vine;— ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett

... pleasure resort to which few people just now have the pleasure of resorting. They try to revive these places in the winter, but it never succeeds except with Brighton and the old ones. This must be Seawood, I think—Lord Pooley's experiment; he had the Sicilian Singers down at Christmas, and there's talk about holding one of the great glove-fights here. But they'll have to chuck the rotten place into the sea; it's as dreary as a ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton

... text of "Cavalleria Rusticana" is based is taken from a Sicilian tale by Giovanni Verga. It is peculiarly Italian in its motive, running a swift, sure gamut of love, flirtation, jealousy, and death,—a melodrama of a passionate and tragic sort, amid somewhat squalid environments, that particularly lends itself ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton

... letter with alternate inks. You cannot imagine how it cramps the flow of the style. I can conceive Pindar (I do not mean to compare myself [to] him) by the command of Hiero, the Sicilian tyrant (was not he the tyrant of some place? fie on my neglect of history—) conceive him by command of Hiero, or Perillus, set down to pen an a Isthmian or Nemean Panegyre in lines alternate red and black. I ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas

... north, with his ample furs thrown back, sits the Russian in friendly talk with a gay little wanderer from Sicilian valleys. There, with elbow crooked by a foaming tankard, leans the German, narrating his perils and pleasures to a gallant Frenchman and a sunbrowned Spaniard who smoke and chatter together as now and then Mynheer stops for a pull at ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various

... was thought on the eve of the Sicilian Vespers; on the eve of St. Bartholomew; at the time when Castracaro, when De La Trinite, ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley

... a thing be humanly possible I should also prefer to eat it in silence unbroken except by the noises I make myself. I have eaten meals backed up so close to the orchestra that the leader and I were practically wearing the same pair of suspenders. I have been howled at by a troupe of Sicilian brigands armed with their national weapons—the garlic and the guitar. I have been tortured by mechanical pianos and automatic melodeons, and I crave quiet. But in any event I want food. I cannot spare the time to travel nine hundred miles to get it, and ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb

... in "An October Abroad." But even in England it grows wild, and much more abundantly in Southern Europe, while its specific name is said to have been given it because it was so common in the neighborhood of Thapsus; but whether the place of that name in Africa, or the Sicilian town mentioned by Ovid and Virgil, is not certain. Strange that Europeans should labor under the erroneous impression that this mullein is native to America, whereas here it is only an immigrant ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan

... afterwards asked my negro waiter at Fort Monroe about General Washington at Yorktown. "Never heard of him, sir,—was he in the Regular army?" So Battista thought Palinuro must have fished in the Italian fleet, with which the Sicilian boatmen were not well acquainted. Messina made no objections to us. Perhaps, if the sloop of war which lay there had known who was lying in the boat under her guns, I might not be writing these words to-day. Battista went ashore, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various

... Harrow School and Harrow playgrounds to London, and, later on, to Bath. London did not make him much more industrious or more careful than he had been at Harrow-on-the-Hill. It was far pleasanter to translate the honeyed Greek of Theocritus, with its babble of Sicilian shepherds, its nymphs and waters and Sicilian seas, than to follow the beaten track of ordinary education. It was vastly more entertaining to translate the impassioned prose of Aristaenetus into impassioned verse, especially in collaboration with a cherished ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy

... exclusion of worth and intellect and knowledge from civil office compared with trials before Jeffries, tortures in the dark caverns of the Inquisition, Alva-butcheries in the Netherlands, the Eve of Saint Bartholomew, and the Sicilian Vespers? ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... New Holland are indeed "poor wretches;" but let it be remembered that the term poor is relative. The reader must make allowance for prejudice, in judging of their state from the testimony of one who had lived in Otaheitan luxury. A Sicilian, it is probable, would give a very sorry account of the Highlands and ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr

... John pampered Esquire South with Tit-bits, till he grew wanton; how he got drunk with Calabrian Wine, and longed for Sicilian Beef, and how John carried him thither in ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot

... collection, omitted the poem[2] from which the volume published in 1852 took its title. I have done so, not because the subject of it was a Sicilian Greek born between two and three thousand years ago, although many persons would think this a sufficient reason. Neither have I done so because I had, in my own opinion, failed in the delineation which I intended to effect. I intended to delineate the feelings of one ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... the middle ages the one who dwells most largely on Ceylon is EDRISI, born of a family who ruled over Malaga after the fall of the Khalifs of Cordova. He was a protege of the Sicilian king, Roger the Norman, at whose desire he compiled his Geography, A.D. 1154. But with regard to Ceylon, his pages contain only the oft-repeated details of the height of the holy mountain, the gems found in its ravines, the musk, the perfumes, and odoriferous woods which abound there.[1] He particularises ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent

... Pasha had also received reports that led him to underrate the strength of the Christian armada, and so induced him to put out to sea in search of it. Twice he had reconnoitred the allied fleet. Before Don Juan arrived at Messina, Ulugh Ali had sent one of his corsairs, Kara Khodja, to cruise in Sicilian waters. The corsair painted every part of his ship a dead black, and one dark night, under black sails, he slipped into Messina harbour. The utter daring of his enterprise assisted him. Gliding like a ghost about the roadstead, unmarked and unchallenged, he counted galleys, ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale

... too ready to empty his pockets at the call of any charity, whether public or private. Impulse, however, prompted him to give most heartily when he thought to further the cause of liberty. At the time a subscription was opened in Florence to aid Garibaldi's Sicilian expedition, Landor, anxious to lay an offering at the feet of his heart's hero, pulled out his watch, the only article of value about him, and begged Mr. Browning to present it to the fund. Mr. Browning took it, but knowing how lost the old man ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various

... Saint Mark's and the Ducal Palace, not to mention the rest of Venice, and the idea that Ortensia, who had been informed that she was to be the wife of his transcendently gifted and desirable self, could stoop to look at a Sicilian music-master, would have struck him as superlatively comic, though his sense of humour was imperfect, to say ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford

... Masses for these are taken from Scripture, especially from the Psalms. For Feasts of non-Roman origin, the text is taken from the Church from which they are introduced; e.g., the Feast of St. Agatha from the Sicilian Church, or the Feasts coming from the Greek Church which were translated from the Greek. The want of uniformity in the arrangement of the text is seen by comparing the different classes of chants in ...
— St. Gregory and the Gregorian Music • E. G. P. Wyatt

... But he's no Sicilian now: he's a Gaul—he's being galled,[G] anyhow, by that thing he's attached to: he's coupled with the article so as to ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius

... first sight these courts are much alike, they differ in feeling and effect. The Court of Flowers is Italian, the Court of Palms Grecian, though Grecian with an exuberance scarcely Athenian. Perhaps there is something Sicilian in the warmth of its decoration. When it is bright and warm, the Court of Palms is most Greek in feeling; less so on ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber

... three days after Christmas, a boy named Thomas was born in the plain home of a Presbyterian parson in Staunton, Va. When this boy was 4 years old, there was born in Palermo, on the island of Sicily, 4,000 miles away, a black-eyed Sicilian boy. Into the town of Palermo, on that July day, came Garibaldi, in triumph, and the farmer-folk parents of the boy, in honor of the occasion, named their son Victor, after the new Italian king, whom ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer

... head of Herakles, similar to that of some silver coins attributed to Jugurtha, the fronting head of Silenus of the coins of Kyzikos, the galley of the coins of Sidon, etc., all of the purest Greek style. There are also some female heads, recalling Greek Sicilian coins; standing figures; an Athena, a Pan, a Hermes fastening his heel-pieces, a Marsyas, an amazon, a nude woman fastening her sandal, recalling coins of Larissa in Thessaly; some of groups, a man overthrown by a lion, a lion devouring a horse, a man standing and killing a kneeling ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various

... charitable toward their relatives, making them great lamentations in their adversities, in their grief calling to mind all their good fortunes. The relatives, one with another, at the end of their life use the Sicilian lamentation, mingled with singing lasting a long time. This is as much as we were able ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. - Voyages Of Discovery And Early Explorations: 1000 A.D.-1682 • Various

... accordingly, the height of the entablature. The Doric was the favorite order of European Greece for one thousand years, and also of her colonies in Sicily and Magna Graecia. The massive temples of Paestum, the colossal magnificence of the Sicilian ruins, and the more elegant proportions of the Athenian structures, like the Parthenon and Temple of Theseus, show the perfection of the Doric architecture. Although the general style of all the ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord

... of Ducange here quoted, and several articles besides in his Glossarium, as Varangi, Warengangi, &c. The etymology of the name is left uncertain, though the German fort-ganger, i. e. forth-goer, wanderer, exile, seems the most probable. The term occurs in various Italian and Sicilian documents, anterior to the establishment of the Varangian Guards at Constantinople, and collected by Muratori: as, for instance, in an edict of one of the Lombard kings, "Omnes Warengrangi, qui de extens finibus in regni nostri finibus ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott



Words linked to "Sicilian" :   Italian, Sicily, mafioso, Sicilia



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