"Proteus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... And Greeks the Trojans scathed in cruel sort, When her gates opened by false Sinon were, And direr ill was done than tales report, This plunder fell to Menelaus' share, Wherewith to Egypt's land he made resort; There left it to King Proteus, Egypt's lord, In ransom for his prisoned ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... dwelt in the Carpathian Sea a wily old deity, known by the name of Proteus, possessing the gift of prophecy, the fruits of which ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... by his famed father's hand, Great Cibber's brazen brainless brothers stand, One cell there is, concealed from vulgar eye. The cave of Poverty and Poetry. Keen, hollow winds howl through the bleak recess, Emblem of music caused by emptiness. Hence bards, like Proteus long in vain tied down, Escape in monsters, and amaze the town. Hence Miscellanies spring, the weekly boast Of Curll's chaste press and Lintot's rubric post; Hence hymning Tyburn's elegiac lines; Hence Journals, Medleys, Mercuries, Magazines, Sepulchral lies, our holy walls to grace, And New-year ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... family. Of one whose intellect and character were infinitely subtle and complex, the blending of all opposites, it is possible to sustain the most conflicting opinions, and perhaps in the end no critic can seize this Proteus. Saint-Simon noticed how in his noble countenance every contrary quality was expressed, and how all were harmonised: "Il fallait faire effort pour cesser de le regarder." During the early years of his clerical career he acted as superior to female converts from Protestantism, and as missionary ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... the palace of Menelaus, from whom he receives some fresh information concerning the return of the Greecians, and is in particular told on the authority of Proteus, that his father is detained by Calypso. The suitors, plotting against the life of Telemachus, lie in wait to intercept him in his return to Ithaca. Penelope being informed of his departure, and of their designs to slay him, becomes inconsolable, but is relieved ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... promontory, even the picturesque fisherman, whom we saw throwing his nets from an insulated rock at some distance from the shore, and whom a very trifling exertion of fancy might have converted into some sea divinity, a Glaucus, or a Proteus, formed altogether a picture of the most wonderful and luxuriant beauty. In England there is a peculiar charm in the soft aerial perspective, which even in the broadest glare of noonday, blends and masses the forms ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... flourished at Paris one of these adventurers, who made a great noise and did a vast amount of evil. This man of a thousand faces, this Proteus, as great a corrupter as he was corrupted, changed his name, his quarters, and field of operations, according to the exigences of business. Although a man of ardent temperament and inconceivable activity, his cold-blooded rascality was never in a hurry. He could wait; he could ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... HISTORY.—I took out of the bed of the river, in the descent below Red Cedar Lake, a greenish substance attached to stone, having an animal organization resembling the sponge. In our descent, the men caught, and killed with their poles, a proteus. The wild rice, which fills this part of the river, is monoecious. The river abounds in muscles, among which the species of unios is common, but not of large size, so far as we observed. The forest growth improves ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... then wrote, I had expressed my own convictions for the gratification of my own feelings, and finished by tranquilly paraphrasing into a chemical allegory the Homeric adventure of Menelaus with Proteus. Oh! with what different feelings, with what a sharp and sudden emotion did I re-peruse the same question yester-morning, having by accident opened the book at the page upon which it was written. I was moved; for it was Admiral Sir Alexander Ball who first proposed the question ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... furnished their angels not with harps—beautiful and sparkling as the sea-foam, as are their most graceful chords—but with this, of all instruments the most musical, whose tones admit of more variety than any, (the Proteus organ alone excepted,) and whose delicious long-drawn notes must entrance every one not absolutely soulless. Oh, they are excruciatingly delightful! And yet you shall hear this identical violin, in the hands of an everyday performer, emit such squeals and screams as shall ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... intends to make his fortune in this ancient capital of the world must be a chameleon susceptible of reflecting all the colours of the atmosphere that surrounds him—a Proteus apt to assume every form, every shape. He must be supple, flexible, insinuating; close, inscrutable, often base, sometimes sincere, some times perfidious, always concealing a part of his knowledge, indulging in one tone of voice, patient, a perfect master of his own countenance ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not.—Great God! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... obloquy and ridicule, in despair he left Edinburgh for London, still encountering the same hostility; that all this was the work of the same hand perhaps was never even known to its victim. The multiplied forms of this Proteus of the Malevoli were still but one devil; fire or water, or a bull or a lion; still it was the same ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... second in his own class; to that power which seated him on one of the two glory-smitten summits of the poetic mountain, with Milton as his compeer not rival. While the former darts himself forth, and passes into all the forms of human character and passion, the one Proteus of the fire and the flood; the other attracts all forms and things to himself, into the unity of his own ideal. All things and modes of action shape themselves anew in the being of Milton; while Shakespeare becomes all things, yet for ever remaining himself. O what great men hast thou not produced, ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... combining the manners and customs, features and figures, of nearly all mankind. He gets on with every one, for every one is gratified by seeing himself reflected in him. And he can jump from one frame to another as freely as Proteus or the populace. And yet, with all that, he is perfectly honest to any allegiance he undertakes. He would not betray us to Vypan, Goad, and Terryer for your great nugget and the ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... has assumed in different ages; but it is humiliating to human nature to reflect, that the conquests obtained by philosophy over her great adversary, are in reality very small. Superstition, like the fabled Proteus, appears under an endless variety of forms; but she is also, like the god, still ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... found pleasure on the seashore in viewing the distant rock whitened by the billows? How much are the ancients to be pitied, who discovered in the ocean naught but the palace of Neptune and the cavern of Proteus; it was hard that they should perceive only the adventures of the Tritons and the Nereids in the immensity of the seas, which seems to give an indistinct measure of the greatness of our souls, and which excites ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... gentlemen. They pretend that their doctrines are infinitely beneficial to mankind; but it seems they would keep them to themselves, if they were not greatly provoked. They are benevolent from spite. Their oracles are like those of Proteus, (whom some people think they resemble in many particulars,) who never would give his responses, unless you used him as ill as possible. These cats, it seems, would not give out their electrical light without having ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... favourites in the Italian world, were natives of Bearn: one of these, Garat, surnamed "the musical Proteus," was born at Ustaritz. Nothing appeared impossible to this prodigious singer: his voice was splendid and his taste exquisite: his only defect was an inordinate vanity—by no means an uncommon fault in artists of this description. A person on one occasion, thinking to ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... Sandie Macleod, who has at times an excessive flow of spirits, and had it now, was, in his days of absconding, known by the name of M'Cruslick, which it seems was the designation of a kind of wild man in the Highlands, something between Proteus and Don Quixotte; and so he was called here. He made much jovial noise. Dr Johnson was so delighted with this scene, that he said, 'I know not how we shall get away.' It entertained me to observe him sitting by, while we ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... Philistinism prevents his really entering the evasive souls of Shelley or Keats or Heine. With Wordsworth or Byron he is more at home. But he misses many subtleties, even in their simple temperaments. He is no Proteus, no Wizard of critical metempsychosis. For all his airy wit, he is "a plain, blunt man, who loves his friend." In fact, when one compares him, as a sheer illuminator of psychological twilights, to Walter Pater, one realizes at once how easily a quite great man may "render himself ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... is the conversation between Julia and her maid Lucetta, in Two Gent. I, ii, 76-93, about the letter from Proteus. ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor
... it with any primitive special organ, and what will be the organ that nature will form before any others, and which in the simplest animal is the only one constantly found; this is the alimentary canal, the principal organ of digestion common to all except colpodes, vibrios, proteus (amoeba), volvoces, ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... congenial spirits among the sea-nymphs and sirens on the shores of the Aegean. He longs to gain freedom from his glass, in which he is still imprisoned. Nereus the sea-god is unable to help him, but sends him to his father Proteus, the great ocean prophet, who bears him out into the midst of the ocean. Here Galatea the sea-goddess (identical with Aphrodite, the sea-born symbol of the beauty of the natural-world) passes by in her chariot drawn by dolphins and surrounded by Nereids. The Homunculus in an ecstasy of ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... be done in one way, however, may sometimes be done in another. Not only was London the central stronghold of English Presbyterianism; the power of Presbyterianism there centralized was a kind of Proteus. One of its forms was the Westminster Assembly, a large nucleus of which consisted of ministers from London and the suburbs; another, since May 1647, was the London Provincial Synod. But, in aid of these two bodies, and including many that belonged ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... arose the class of amphibia, having five toes (the pentadactyla). The gill amphibians are man's most ancient ancestors of the class amphibia. Besides possessing lungs as well as the mud-fish, they retain throughout life regular gills like the still-living proteus and axolotl. Most gilled batrachia live in North America. The paddle-fins of the dipneusta changed into five-toed legs, which were afterwards transmitted to the higher ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... identifying a composition of any length. Defoe's incomparable clearness of statement would alone betray him; that was a gift of nature which no art could successfully imitate. Contemporaries also were quick at recognising their Proteus in his many shapes, and their gossip gives a strong support to internal evidence, resting as it probably did on evidences which were not altogether internal. Though Mr. Lee may have been rash sometimes in quoting little scraps of ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... eye that rests upon it. No dead mechanism moves the stars, or lifts the tides, or calls the flowers from their sleep; truly this is the garment of Deity, and here is the awful splendour of the Perpetual Presence. It is the old story of the Greek Proteus translated into universal speech. It is the ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... no doubt they were quadrupeds, "provided," says Von Meyer, "with hands and feet terminating in distinct toes; but these limbs were weak, serving only for swimming or creeping." The same anatomist has pointed out certain points of analogy between their bones and those of the Proteus anguinus; and Professor Owen has observed that they make an approach to the Proteus in the shortness of their ribs. Two specimens of these ancient reptiles retain a large part of the outer skin, which consisted of long, narrow, wedge-shaped, tile-like, and ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... which all must come, O Eratosthenes, after pondering over high matters; nor did Cyrene where thou sawest the light receive thee within the tomb of thy fathers, O son of Aglaus; yet dear even in a foreign land art thou buried here, by the edge of the beach of Proteus. ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... the applicant was suddenly pounced upon by an officer, as one of the greatest impostors in the Metropolis, who, with the eyes of Argus, could transform themselves into a greater variety of shapes than Proteus, and that he had been only fifty times, if not more, confined in different houses of correction as an incorrigible rogue and vagabond, from one of which he had recently contrived to effect his escape. The officer now bore ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... pressed, To turn awhile, ere I this case relate: In the great northern sea, towards the west, Green Ireland past, an isle is situate. Ebuda is its name, whose shores infest, (Its people wasted through the Godhead's hate) The hideous orc, and Proteus' other herd, By him against that race in ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... preparations, the drama opens, the scenes become rapid and lifelike; events, long impeded, accumulate and pass quickly before us, the action is connected and hastens to an end. We shall see Derues like an unwearied Proteus, changing names, costumes, language, multiplying himself in many forms, scattering deceptions and lies from one end of France to the other; and finally, after so many efforts, such prodigies of calculation and activity, end by wrecking himself ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - DERUES • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... described by Isidore as happening in the days of Jacob, the fourth in Thessaly in the time of Deucalion and Pyrrha, in the days of Moses according to Isidore, in 782 as given by Juan Annius. The fifth flood is mentioned by Xenophon as happening in Egypt in the time of Proteus. The sixth was this which destroyed so great a part of the Atlantic Island and sufficed so to separate the part that was left unsubmerged, that all mortals in Asia, Africa and Europe believed that all were drowned. Thus was lost the intercourse and commerce of the people of these parts ...
— History of the Incas • Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa
... is the Christian preachers, were most in agreement with the Cynics (see Lucian's Peregrinus Proteus), both on the negative and on the positive side; but for that very reason they were hard on one another (Justin and Tatian against Crescens)—not only because the Christians gave a different basis for the right mode of life from the Cynics, but above all, because they ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... robbers, and to protect the oppressor, the Times printing-office now stands, to diffuse its ceaseless floods of knowledge, to spread its resistless aegis over the poor and the oppressed, and ever to use its vast power to extend liberty and crush injustice, whatever shape the Proteus assumes, whether it sits upon a throne or lurks in ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... we are out of tune; It moves us not—Great God! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus coming from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 1 • William Wordsworth
... quod attulit ex suo naturali Adamo.'" "We say, Only the regenerate will cooperates; if you [Strigel] say the same, the controversy is at an end." Strigel, however, who, to use a phrase of Luther (St. L. 18, 1673), was just as hard to catch as Proteus of old, did not reply with a definite yes or no, but repeated that it was only a weak assent (qualiscumque assensio languida trepida et imbecilla) which man was able to render when his will was incited and supported by the prevenient ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... from me again, and found he was mistaken. He wrote, "I am in receipt of your last, which is very encouraging. You were quite right to do as you did. Give Rudd & Carleton no loop-hole. They will soon owe us a good round sum, and will writhe like Proteus to escape ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... functions of a judge,—functions defined by the wisest of mankind! It is not aristocrats alone, federalists, scoundrels of the Orleans faction, open enemies of the fatherland, that we must strike down. The conspirator, the agent of the foreigner is a Proteus, he assumes all shapes, he puts on the guise of a patriot, a revolutionary, an enemy of Kings; he affects the boldness of a heart that beats only for freedom; his voice swells, and the foes of the Republic tremble. ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... Pelagie for debt. His embarrassments are stated to have arisen from a passion for gambling, a propensity which, once indulged, takes deep root in the human mind; and few indeed, lamentably few, are those who can effectually eradicate the fatal passion. Vidocq, who could assume all shapes like a second Proteus, who underwent bitter hardships, and unsparingly jeopardized his life at any time, could not resist the fell temptation which has brought him to distress ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 389, September 12, 1829 • Various
... surprising letter cannot be a forgery of thy own, in order to carry on some view, and to impose upon me. Yet, by the style of it, it cannot though thou art a perfect Proteus too. ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... closely related, we might expect from the well-known relationship of most of their other productions. Far from feeling any surprise that some of the cave-animals should be very anomalous, as Agassiz has remarked in regard to the blind fish, the Amblyopsis, and as is the case with the blind Proteus with reference to the reptiles of Europe, I am only surprised that more wrecks of ancient life have not been preserved, owing to the less severe competition to which the inhabitants of these dark abodes will ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... caught the northeast Trades shortly after turning Cape Palmas, and kept them till close upon Grand Canary. They were a complete contrast with the Harmatan, the firmament looking exceptionally high, and the sun shining hot, while a crisp, steady gale made the 'herds of Proteus' gambol and disport themselves over the long ridges thrown up by the cool plain of bright cerulean. The horizon, when clear, had a pinkish hue, and near coast and islands puffy folds of dazzling white, nearly 5,000 feet high, ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... persuade, my loving Proteus; Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits;— I rather would entreat thy company To see the wonders of the world ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... nerves. On the other hand, when a limb is not used, as by Eastern fanatics, or when the nerve supplying it with nervous power is effectually destroyed, the muscles wither. So again, when the eye is destroyed the optic nerve becomes atrophied, sometimes even in the course of a few months.[734] The Proteus is furnished with branchiae as well as with lungs: and Schreibers[735] found that when the animal was compelled to live in deep water the branchiae were developed to thrice their ordinary size, and the lungs were partially atrophied. When, on the other hand, the animal was ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... shiftily answered, thou ragged Proteus. One cannot be angry with such a fellow. I will just inquire into the present state of his Gospel mission and about the condition of his tribe on the Penobscot; and it may be not amiss to congratulate ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the two sorts of judgments becomes more evident still, if we take an example where the moral sense and the aesthetic sense pronounce a different verdict. Suppose we take the act of Perigrinus Proteus burning himself at Olympia. Judging this act morally, I cannot give it my approbation, inasmuch as I see it determined by impure motives, to which Proteus sacrifices the duty of respecting his own existence. But in the aesthetic judgment this same act delights me; it delights me precisely because ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... of Verona two young gentlemen, whose names were Valentine and Proteus, between whom a firm and uninterrupted friendship had long subsisted. They pursued their studies together, and their hours of leisure were always passed in each other's company, except when Proteus visited a lady he was in love ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... I wish it, however, distinctly understood that I do not suppose that the experience of others whose use of opium had been similar to my own, would necessarily correspond to mine in all or even in many respects. Opium is the Proteus of medicine, and science has not yet succeeded in tearing away the many masks it wears, nor in tracing the marvellously diversified aspects it is capable of assuming. Among many cases of the relinquishment of opium with ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... fleetfoot son, The warrior Maenalus, who left his home In far-renowned Abydos: down on him He hurled Atymnius, the goodly son Whom Pegasis the bright-haired Nymph had borne To strong Emathion by Granicus' stream. Dead by his side he laid Orestius' son, Proteus, who dwelt 'neath lofty Ida's folds. Ah, never did his mother welcome home That son from war, Panaceia beauty-famed! He fell by Odysseus' hands, who spilt the lives Of many more whom his death-hungering spear Reached in that fight around the mighty dead. Yet Alcon, son of Megacles ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... (in the south of Austria, near the top of the Adriatic), which runs, I believe, for miles in length; and in the lakes of which, in darkness from its birth until its death, lives that strange beast, the Proteus a sort of long newt which never comes to perfection—I suppose for want of the genial sunlight which makes all things grow. But he is blind; and more, he keeps all his life the same feathery gills which newts have when they ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... seems to me even more unfortunate than that of Paul. Of Peregrinus himself, historically, we really know little or nothing, for the account of Lucian is scarcely received as serious by anyone. [102:1] Lucian narrates that this Peregrinus Proteus, a cynic philosopher, having been guilty of parricide and other crimes, found it convenient to leave his own country. In the course of his travels he fell in with Christians and learnt their doctrines, and, according to Lucian, ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... thought, For in the portal was displayed on high (The work of Vulcan) a fictitious sky; A waving sea the inferior earth embraced, And gods and goddesses the waters graced. 10 AEgeon here a mighty whale bestrode; Triton, and Proteus, (the deceiving god,) With Doris here were carved, and all her train, Some loosely swimming in the figured main, While some on rocks their dropping hair divide, And some on fishes through the waters glide: Though various ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... thou mate of the white herd, and O ye blunt-faced kids, where are the manifold deeps of the forest, thither get ye to the water, for thereby is Milon; go, thou hornless goat, and say to him, 'Milon, Proteus was a herdsman, and that of seals, though ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... in one of his sermons, declared concerning wit: "It is, indeed, a thing so versatile, multiform, appearing in so many shapes and garbs, so variously apprehended of several eyes and judgments, that it seemeth no less hard to settle a clear and certain notion thereof than to make a portrait of Proteus, or to define the figure of the fleeting wind." Nor is it fitting to attempt exact distinctions between wit and humor, which are essentially two aspects of one thing. It is enough to realize that humor is the product of nature rather than ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... breast-plate, and a stone besides Imagined rather oft than elsewhere seen, That stone, or like to that which here below Philosophers in vain so long have sought, In vain, though by their powerful art they bind Volatile Hermes, and call up unbound In various shapes old Proteus from the sea, Drained through a limbeck to his native form. What wonder then if fields and regions here Breathe forth Elixir pure, and rivers run Potable gold, when with one virtuous touch The arch-chemick sun, so far from us remote, Produces, with ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... of the Augustan age Perused in Virgil's golden page, The story of the secret won From Proteus by Cyrene's son How the dank sea-god sowed the swain Means to restore his hives again More briefly, how a slaughtered bull Breeds honey by ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... especially in concert with a democratic Republic which changed its Ministers every few months. His hatred of the Republic as the symbol of democracy equalled his distrust of it as a political kaleidoscope; and more than once he rejected the idea of a rapprochement to the western Proteus because of "the absence of any personage authorised to assume the responsibility for a treaty of alliance[260]." These were the considerations, doubtless, which led him to dismiss the warlike Ignatieff, and to entrust the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to a hard-headed ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... "likes" with them; and is, by divine law, answerable for his liking. And, even at this late hour of the day, it is still conceivable that such of them as would verily prefer to see, suppose, instead of a tramp with a harmonium, Orpheus with his lute, or Arion on his dolphin, pleased Proteus rising beside him from the sea,—might, standing on the "pleasant lea" of Margate or Brighton, have ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... They are included, as a bed of flowers, between the high walls of duty; love-flowers even grow there, to be plucked, under the blue sky. But take care not to be tempted by that wonderful female Proteus, Lady Meed, the great corruptress. She disappears and reappears, and she, too, assumes all shapes; she is everywhere at the same time: it seems as if the serpent of Eden had become the immense reptile ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... has the perception of divine and internal harmony, and its thoughts and acts accord with the symmetry of the law, innate in all things. Not, as drunk from the cups of Circe, does he go dashing and stumbling, now in this and then in that ditch, now against this or that rock, or like a shifting Proteus, changing now to this, now to the other aspect, never finding place, fashion, or ground to stay and settle in; but, without spoiling the harmony, conquers and overcomes the horrid monsters, and however much he may swerve, he easily returns to himself[B] by means of those inward instincts that, ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... warres, to try their fortune there; Some, to discover Islands farre away; Some, to the studious Universities; For any, or for all these exercises, He said, thou Proteus, your sonne was meet; And did request me, to importune you To let him spend his time no more at home; Which would be great impeachment to his age, In having knowne no travaile in his youth. (Antonio) Nor need'st thou much importune me ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... the rest of Europe, were as the eyes and ears of the great king of the universe, seeing and hearing all things; seraphically illuminated; companions of the holy company of unbodied souls and immortal angels; turning themselves, Proteus-like, into any shape, and having the power of working miracles. The most pious and abstracted brethren could slack the plague in cities, silence the violent winds and tempests, calm the rage of the sea and rivers, walk in the air, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... ebb tides, sail up and down the Avon. From the opposite shore the richly cultivated lands of Somersetshire present themselves in a very beautiful landscape, rising gradually four or five miles from the verge of the river to the top of Dundry Hill, whereon is a high tower, esteemed the Proteus of the weather, as being commonly enveloped with mist, so as scarcely to be visible, against rain; but, on the contrary, if it be seen clear and distinct in the morning, it denotes the approach of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 390, September 19, 1829 • Various
... realm, While soldiers mutiny for want of pay. He wears a lord's revenue on his back, And, Midas-like, he jets it in the court, With base outlandish cullions at his heels, Whose proud fantastic liveries make such show As if that Proteus, god of shapes, appear'd. I have not seen a dapper Jack so brisk: He wears a short Italian hooded cloak, Larded with pearl, and in his Tuscan cap A jewel of more value than the crown. While others walk below, the king and he, From out a window, laugh at such as we, And flout ...
— Edward II. - Marlowe's Plays • Christopher Marlowe
... swarm of court sycophants, hungry harpies, and unprincipled danglers, collected from the neighbouring villages, hovering over the stage in the shape of locusts, led by Massachusettensis in the form of a basilisk; the rear brought up by Proteus, bearing a torch in one hand, and a powder-flask in the other. The whole supported by a mighty army and navy, from Blunderland, for the laudable purpose of ...
— The Group - A Farce • Mercy Warren
... they have treated him less as a type of the youth of his day than as the friend and pupil of Cicero. Caelius will always repay fresh study; he was amusing and interesting to his contemporaries, and so he will be for ever to us. He is a veritable Proteus—you never know what shape ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... account, while the inveterate fault-finder neutralizes, as far as possible, every attempt made by others to do good. To perform any task perfectly to his liking, would be as impossible as to 'make a portrait of Proteus, or fix the figure of the fleeting air.' To speak favourably of anybody or anything is a trait of generosity entirely foreign to his nature; from temperament and confirmed habit, he 'must be cruel only to be kind.' The only benefit he occasions is achieved contrary to his intent; in his efforts ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... might differ from each other only as the movements in circles, volutes, and spirals of ordinary mechanism. The suggestion was confirmed when electrical measurers were refined to the utmost precision, and a single quantum of energy was revealed a very Proteus in its disguises, yet beneath these disguises nothing ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... a start. Like Proteus who changed his shape to save himself the trouble of prophesying, he swiftly changed the key to save himself providing accurate information ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... seems, as ev'ry ship their sov'reign knows, His awful summons they so soon obey: So hear the scaly herds when Proteus blows, And so to pasture follow ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... Organism—Function—Environment, and theories of evolution may be classified in relation to these. To some it has always seemed that the fundamental fact is the living organism,—a creative agent, a striving will, a changeful Proteus, selecting its environment, adjusting itself to it, self-differentiating and self-adaptive. The necessity of recognising the importance of the organism is admitted by all Darwinians who start with inborn variations, but it is open to question whether the whole truth of what we might call ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... intermittent clouds of vapour sent up from the crater assume the most fantastic shapes—trees, ships, men, birds, animals—ever changing like the forms of Proteus. It would seem as if the Spirit of the Mountain were idly amusing himself, like a child blowing bubbles, or a vendor at a fair-stall carving out little figures of gingerbread to tickle the fancy of country boys and girls. The clouds so formed ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... French gentleman replied—"party spirit, taking every Proteus form, calling itself by a hundred names and with a thousand devices and watchwords, which would be too ridiculous, if they were not too terrible—domestic happiness destroyed, all society disordered, disorganised—literature ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... Proteus, I thank thee for thine honest care; Which to requite, command me while I live. This love of theirs myself have often seen, Haply when they have judg'd me fast asleep, And oftentimes have purpos'd to forbid Sir Valentine her company and my court; But, fearing lest my jealous ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... but by a blue-coated serving-man. Two or three days later Humfrey had told him of Langston's interview with Walsingham, which he had at the time laughed to scorn, thinking himself able to penetrate any disguise of that Proteus, and likewise believing ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Triton, blow your wreathed horn Cheerly, as is your wont, and let the blast Circle our island on the breezes borne; Blow, while the shining hours go swiftly past. Rise, Proteus, from the cool depths rise, and be A friend to them that breast your ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... if the wind bloweth fair in her wake. Here did the gods keep me twenty days, nor did the sea winds ever blow. Then all my corn would have been spent, and the lives also of my men lost, if the daughter of Proteus [Footnote: Pro'-teus.]had not taken pity on me. Her heart was moved to see me when I wandered alone, apart from my company, for they all roamed about the island, fishing with hooks because hunger gnawed them. So she stood by me and spake, saying: 'Art thou foolish, stranger, and feeble ...
— The Story Of The Odyssey • The Rev. Alfred J. Church
... he took his proper form, and began to question me. 'Son of Atreus,' he said, 'who hath taught thee how to make me a prisoner? What is it thou wouldst know?' 'Tell me what god is angry with me, O Proteus,' I replied. 'Why am I detained on this island? Why can I not reach my home?' 'Thou didst not make acceptable sacrifices to Zeus,' said Proteus. 'And thou wilt never see thy home again until thou hast offered up a hundred oxen ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer
... cliffs where light reflected from the water dances. Huge caverns open in the limestone; on their edges hang stalactites like beards, and the sea within sleeps dark as night. For some of these caves the maidenhair fern makes a shadowy curtain; and all of them might be the home of Proteus, or of Calypso, by whose side her mortal lover passed ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... Peregri'nus Proteus, a cynic philosopher, born at Parium, on the Hellespont. After a youth spent in debauchery and crimes, he turned Christian, and, to obliterate the memory of his youthful ill practices, divided his inheritance among the people. Ultimately he burned himself to death in ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... eyeless proteus, found in the celebrated cavern of Adelsberg, is an animal very much larger, called the necturus, inhabiting the waters of the Mississippi, and several southern lakes. It is a creature nearly three feet in length, with a ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... bush remained untouched, but the universal eucalyptus, which I had expected to find grey and monotonous, was a Proteus it shape and colour, now branching like an oak or a cork tree, now feathered like a birch, or glowing like an arbutus with an endless variety of ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... endure by myself in the light of the sunshine Guiltless, the death of a kid!' But the boy still lingered around her, Loth, like a boy, to forego her, and waken the cliffs with his laughter. 'Yon is the foe, then? A beast of the sea? I had deemed him immortal. Titan, or Proteus' self, or Nereus, foeman of sailors: Yet would I fight with them all, but Poseidon, shaker of mountains, Uncle of mine, whom I fear, as is fit; for he haunts on Olympus, Holding the third of the world; and the gods all rise at his coming. ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... all of his writing is playful, and we know it. The instinct at the bottom of all mimicry is self-concealment. Hence the illusive and questionable personality of Stevenson. Hence our blind struggle to bind this Proteus who turns into bright fire and then into running water under our hands. The truth is that as a literary force, there was no such man as Stevenson; and after we have racked our brains to find out the mechanism which has been vanquishing the chess players of Europe, ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... they mean by this last much-abused term? On this point the Quarterly Reviewer is silent. Mr. Mivart, on the contrary, is perfectly explicit, and the whole tenor of his remarks leaves no doubt that by "religion" he means theology; and by theology, that particular variety of the great Proteus, which is expounded by the doctors of the Roman Catholic Church, and held by the members of that religious community to be the sole form of absolute truth and ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... a whole the play is disappointing. The plot is too fantastic; Proteus too much of a cad; Julia, though brave and modest, is yet too faithful; Valentine {149} too easy a friend. The illusion of romance throws a transitory glamour over the scene, but, save in the development of character, the play ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... in their present secluded abodes. Far from feeling surprise that some of the cave-animals should be very anomalous, as Agassiz has remarked in regard to the blind fish, the Amblyopsis, and as is the case with the blind Proteus, with reference to the reptiles of Europe, I am only surprised that more wrecks of ancient life have not been preserved, owing to the less severe competition to which the scanty inhabitants of these dark abodes ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... both of men or women; where, in some measure, I gave the 'ton'. This gave me the reputation of having had some women of condition; and that reputation, whether true or false, really got me others. With the men I was a Proteus, and assumed every shape, in order to please them all: among the gay, I was the gayest; among the grave, the gravest; and I never omitted the least attentions of good-breeding, or the least offices of friendship, that could either please, or attach ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... heaven-reflecting sea Which are my realm, will heave, unstained with blood, Beneath the uplifting winds, like plains of corn 20 Swayed by the summer air; my streams will flow Round many-peopled continents, and round Fortunate isles; and from their glassy thrones Blue Proteus and his humid nymphs shall mark The shadow of fair ships, as mortals see 25 The floating bark of the light-laden moon With that white star, its sightless pilot's crest, Borne down the rapid sunset's ebbing sea; Tracking their path no more ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... wit. Jokes are as adaptable to times and circumstances, as the human race itself; and to identify them and pin them down on a specimen card, one must be another Pastor Aristaeus, alert and skilful, in pursuit of a lightning Proteus, infinitely various and ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... canons whereto to conform the expression of his thoughts, but he had, apparently, no inclination to invent and observe—except, indeed, in the most negative of senses—any style of his own. The "style of Sterne," in short, is as though one should say "the form of Proteus." He was determined to be uniformly eccentric, regularly irregular, and that was all. His digressions, his asides, and his fooleries in general would, of course, have in any case necessitated a certain ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our metre; verse that is inexhaustible in the verity of its turns of thought, unfathomable in its secrets of composition and of grace; assuming, like Proteus, a thousand forms without changing its type and character; avoiding long speeches; taking delight in dialogue; always hiding behind the characters of the drama; intent, before everything, on being in its place, and when it falls to its lot to be beautiful, being ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... efforts are needed to break these bonds. The joy of well-doing is the prize of having done well, and we must deserve the prize before we win it. There is nothing sweeter than virtue; but we do not know this till we have tried it. Like Proteus in the fable, she first assumes a thousand terrible shapes when we would embrace her, and only shows her true self to those who refuse to let ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... Sherwood, or any of the art publishers of the day, to undertake its publication. But Egan's hands were full, and he declined the offer. Two years later on, author and artist again met, and the result was that "The Life of an Actor, Peregrine Proteus," made its appearance, "illustrated by twenty-seven coloured scenes and nine woodcuts, representing the vicissitudes of the stage". The publisher was Arnold, of Tavistock Street, Covent Garden, who paid the young artist one hundred and fifty pounds fifteen shillings ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... provinces, agreeably to the design for which the army was raised; that he had returned to the Court at Poitiers, where the King stayed during the siege of Brouage, to be near to M. de Mayenne, in order to afford him whatever succours he stood in need of; that, as the Court is a Proteus, forever putting on a new face, he had found it entirely changed, so that he had been no more considered than if he had done the King no service whatever; and that Bussi, who had been so graciously looked upon before and during this last war, had done great personal ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... grease annoys, after a few days it is forgotten, and at last the "pat of butter" is expected as pleasantly as the pipe or the cup of coffee. It prevents the skin from chaps and sores, obviates the evil effects of heat, cold, and wet, and neutralises the Proteus-like malaria poison. The Somal never fail to anoint themselves when they can afford ghee, and the Bedouin is at the summit of his bliss, when sitting in the blazing sun, or,—heat acts upon these people as ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... minutes the storm seemed gradually to subside, and a calm to succeed. His look and bearing changed; something of depression seemed to steal over him; his voice became deep and melancholy, and the first syllables which he uttered showed this Proteus recalled to himself, and tamed by two words. "Hapless existence!" he exclaimed; then pausing, seemed to muse, and after a while continued, "'tis but too true; comedian or tragedian, all for me is an affair ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... achieve a diabolical purpose, the form of a woman is not always the best disguise. There are men quite insusceptible to feminine witchcraft. But the fox is never at a loss for a disguise; he can assume more forms than Proteus. Furthermore, he can make you see or hear or imagine whatever he wishes you to see, hear, or imagine. He can make you see out of Time and Space; he can recall the past and reveal the future. His power ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... sound was to be heard but the regular dip of the oars, the cry of a startled bird, and the splash of a flock of seals, which had been sunning themselves on the shore, and which floundered into the sea like Proteus' flock of yore before Ulysses. Would that Proteus himself had still been there to be captured and interrogated! For the place was so entirely deserted that, saving for the remains of the wreck, he must have believed himself mistaken in the locality, ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... besides the Cuthites, who occupied the lower provinces towards the sea. The towers which were there raised served for lighthouses, and were, at the same time, temples, denominated from some title of the Deity, such as Canoph, Caneph, Cneph; also Perses, Proteus, Phanes, and Canobus. They were on both accounts much resorted to by mariners, and enriched with offerings. Here were deposited charts of the coast, and of the navigation of the Nile, which were engraved on pillars, and in aftertimes sketched out upon ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... boulders, straying all over it. Some far up, and frightful to look at, others huddled down in the river, immane pecus, and one huge unloosened fellow, as big as a manse, up aloft watching them, like old Proteus with his calves, as if they had fled from the sea by stress of weather, and had been led by their ancient herd altos visere montes—a wilder, more "unreconciled" place I know not; and now that the darkness was ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... overboard—philosophy, for instance, by those who profess it. People are often reproached for wishing for money above all things, and for loving it more than anything else; but it is natural and even inevitable for people to love that which, like an unwearied Proteus, is always ready to turn itself into whatever object their wandering wishes or manifold desires may for the moment fix upon. Everything else can satisfy only one wish, one need: food is good only if ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... nets in our wake, and I pull them up ready to burst. Sometimes I go hunting right in the midst of this element that has long seemed so far out of man's reach, and I corner the game that dwells in my underwater forests. Like the flocks of old Proteus, King Neptune's shepherd, my herds graze without fear on the ocean's immense prairies. There I own vast properties that I harvest myself, and which are forever sown by the hand of the ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... living principle? Does organized existence, and perhaps all material existence, consist of one Proteus principle of life capable of gradual circumstance-suited modifications and aggregations without bound, under the solvent or motion-giving principle of heat or light? There is more beauty and unity of design in this continual balancing of life to circumstance, and greater conformity ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... common sense will enable any one to comprehend what is meant by case. Its real character is extremely simple; but in the different grammars it assumes as many meanings as Proteus had shapes. The most that has been written on it, however, is mere verbiage. What, then, is meant by case? In speaking of a horse, for instance, we say he is in a good case, when he is fat, and in a bad case, when he is lean, and needs more oats; and in this sense we ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... have been hitherto so forcibly diverted? The ear of Fancy, it is said, can discover the voice of sea-nymphs and tritons amid the bursting murmurs of the ocean; would that I could do so, and that some siren or Proteus would arise from these billows, to unriddle for me the strange maze of fate in which I am so deeply entangled!—Happy friend!" he said, looking at the bed where Dinmont had deposited his bulky person, "thy cares are confined ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... analogous cases not being known. The difficulty is, that amongst the blind insects of the caves in distant parts of the world there are some of the same genus, and yet the genus is not found out of the caves or living in the free world. I have little doubt that, like the fish Amblyopsis, and like Proteus in Europe, these insects are "wrecks of ancient life," or "living fossils," saved from competition and extermination. But that formerly SEEING insects of the same genus roamed over the whole area in ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... through a succession of Protean disguises of truth, each "one grade above its last presentment,"[138] until, at the rare moment, by the excepted eye, the naked truth was grasped. But Browning became steadily more reluctant to admit that these fortunate moments ever occurred, that the Proteus was ever caught. Things would be known to the soul as they were known to God only when it was emancipated by death. Infinity receded into an ever more inaccessible remoteness from the finite. For the speaker in Christmas-Eve man's mind ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... admits, through her most learned professors, that "energy has as much claim to be regarded as an objective reality as matter itself"** and as life, according to the occult doctrine, is the one energy acting, Proteus-like, under the most varied forms, the occultists have a certain right to use such phraseology. Life is ever present in the atom or matter, whether organic or inorganic—a difference that the occultists ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... picture galleries or museums. Then she would take to attending race-meetings, wear the most horsey clothes, and talk about nothing but betting. She abandoned religion for mesmerism, mesmerism for politics, and politics for the melodramatic excitements of philanthropy. In fact, she was a kind of Proteus, and as much a failure in all her transformations as was that wondrous sea-god when Odysseus laid hold of him. One day a serial began in one of the French magazines. At that time I used to read serial stories, and I well remember the shock ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... Plus Toxins.—The inoculation of pure cultivations of the organism into some selected situation, together with the subcutaneous, intraperitoneal, or intravenous injection of a toxin—e. g., one of those elaborated by the proteus group—either simultaneously with, before, or immediately after, the injection of the feeble virus. By this means the natural resistance of the animal is lowered, and the organism inoculated is enabled to multiply and produce ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... polyhedric Peter, or a Peter with many sides. He changes colours like a chameleon, and his coat like a snake. He is a Proteus of a Peter. He was at first sublime, pathetic, impressive, profound; then dull; then prosy and dull; and now dull—oh so very dull! it is ...
— Peter Bell the Third • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... instead of finite. His designs of wings to fly with symbolise his whole endeavour. He believed in solving the insoluble; and nature had so richly dowered him in the very dawntime of discovery, that he was almost justified in this delusion. Having caught the Proteus of the world, he tried to grasp him; but the god changed shape beneath his touch. Having surprised Silenus asleep, he begged from him a song; but the song Silenus sang was so marvellous in its variety, so subtle in its modulations, ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... after a night of fitful and unrefreshing slumber. In his dreams he had sought Bullion in vain; that substantial person seemed to have become a new Proteus, and to escape, when nearly overtaken, by taking refuge in some unexpected transformation. Sometimes the scene changed, and it was the dreamer that was flying, while Sandford, shod with swiftness, pursued him, swinging a lasso; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... next befell, we must declare what place it was upon which the unhappy lady was now thrown. In the sea that washes the coast of Ireland there is an island called Ebuda, whose inhabitants, once numerous, had been wasted by the anger of Proteus till there were now but few left. This deity was incensed by some neglect of the usual honors which he had in old times received from the inhabitants of the land, and, to execute his vengeance, had sent a horrid sea-monster, called ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... CHARLES PROTEUS STEINMETZ (1865-), born in Breslau, Germany, was educated at Breslau, Berlin, and Zurich. For twenty-five years he has been Consulting Engineer to the General Electric Company, and for twenty years Professor of Electro-physics at Union University. ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... starvation. Black, mutinous discontent devours them; simply the miserablest feeling that can inhabit the heart of man. English commerce, with its world-wide, convulsive fluctuations, with its immeasurable Proteus Steam demon, makes all paths uncertain for them, all life a bewilderment; society, steadfastness, peaceable continuance, the first blessings of man are not theirs.—This world is for them no home, but a dingy prison-house, of reckless unthrift, rebellion, rancour, ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... Bolingbroke was to have replaced him, had the King lived to come back. But my presumption to the contrary is more strongly corroborated by what had recently passed: the Duchess had actually prevailed on the King to see Bolingbroke secretly in his closet. That intriguing Proteus, aware that he might not obtain an audience long enough to efface former prejudices, and make sufficient impression on the King against Sir Robert, and in his own favour, went provided with a memorial, which he left in the ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... at a distance of a quarter of a mile, leaning against the trunk of a gigantic kauri, stood a human being, the Proteus of those subterranean regions, a new son of Neptune, watching this ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... modern inhabitants of Chaldaea believe in the existence of similar monsters. A. Jeremias places Eabani alongside Priapus, who is generally a god of the fields, and a clever soothsayer. Following out these ideas, we might compare our Eabani with the Graico-Roman Proteus, who pastures the flocks of the sea, and whom it was necessary to pursue and seize by force or cunning words to compel him ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... most cases a refutation of their claim upon our notice,[329] and even those which are not in themselves exceptionable become so from the circumstances or manner in which they took place. Apollonius is said to have been an incarnation of the God Proteus; his birth was announced by the falling of a thunderbolt and a chorus of swans; his death signalized by a wonderful voice calling him up to Heaven; and after death he appeared to a youth to convince him of the immortality of the soul.[330] He is reported to have known the language of birds; to ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... pagan, suckled in a creed outworn; So might I standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn— Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, Or hear old ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... a scene was let down as far back as possible on the stage. This, Pasquale said, represented "una citta qualunque." The collection of little wooden houses on Captain Shandy's bowling-green was not a more perfect Proteus of a town than Pasquale's back cloth. This evening it was Barcelona. In front of it, about halfway to the footlights, was a low wall of fortifications. Just behind the fortifications the Spaniards were hooked up into rather high links of the chains, so that, from the ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... despot of his masters, he exercised boundless control by enacting their parts with such fidelity that they were themselves deceived. It is impossible not to admire the facility with which this accomplished Proteus successively assumed the characters of Philip and of Margaret, through all the complicated affairs and voluminous correspondence ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... stamp of his original genius, but yet no writer was ever further removed from everything like a mannerism derived from habit or personal peculiarities. Rather is he, such is the diversity of tone and color which vary according to the quality of his subjects he assumes, a very Proteus. Each of his compositions is like a world of its own, moving in its own sphere. They are works of art, finished in one pervading style, which revealed the freedom and judicious choice of their author. If the formation of a work throughout, even in its minutest ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... for believing them to be rudimentary gills. Owen says that the thymus appears in vertebrates with the establishment of the lung as the main or exclusive respiratory organ. It is wanting in all fishes, also in the gill-bearing batrachians, siren and proteus. The thyroid appears in fishes, and Gegenbaur believes that it may have been a useful organ to the Tunicata in their former ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... Achilles and Diomedes, as we see in the Scolion of Harmodius and Aristogiton. Sertorius heard of the islands at Cadiz from some sailors who had been there; and he had a wish to go and live in them and rest from his troubles (Plutarch, Sertorius, c. 8). In the Odyssey, Proteus told Menelaus that he should not die in Argos, but be removed to a place at the boundary of the earth where ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... by him often became upon the instant a little acted drama. His mimetic powers were in many respects marvellous. In voice, in countenance, in carriage, almost, it might be said, at moments, in stature, he seemed to be a Proteus. ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... VERTUMNUS, the Proteus of the Roman ritual, was the god of tradesmen, and, from the power he had of assuming any shape, was believed to preside over the thoughts of mankind. His courtship of Pom{o}na makes one of the most elegant and ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... there is no inappropriateness in his maintaining the character of chief speaker, when we remember the close connexion which is assumed by Plato to exist between politics and dialectic. In both dialogues the Proteus Sophist is exhibited, first, in the disguise of an Eristic, secondly, of a false statesman. There are several lesser features which the two dialogues have in common. The styles and the situations of the speakers are very similar; there is the same love of division, and in both of them the mind ...
— Statesman • Plato
... copious Muse Who would express, a thousand tongues must use; Whose fate's no less peculiar than thy art; For as thou couldst all characters impart, So none could render thine, which still escapes, Like Proteus, in variety of shapes; 30 Who was nor this nor that; but all we find, And all we ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... that war, to distant shores we stray. To Proteus' Pillars, far remote from men An exile, Menelaus wends his way; Ulysses shudders at the Cyclops' den; Why speak of Pyrrhus, by Orestes slain? Or poor Idomeneus, expelled his state? Of Locrians, cast upon the Libyan plain? Of Agamemnon, ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... bit of navigation along there. The Proteus was nipped and crushed to kindling in about that same latitude ... h'm" ... Bennett tugged at his mustache. Then, suddenly, as if coming to himself: "Well—these temperatures now. Where were we? 'Eight hundred ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... exceeded the material; for there Mulciber had carved the sea circling round the encompassed Earth; and the orb of the Earth, and the Heavens which hang over that orb. {There} the waves have {in them} the azure Deities, both Triton, sounding {with his shell}, and the changing Proteus, and AEgeon,[1] pressing the huge backs of whales with his arms; Doris,[2] too, and her daughters, part of whom appear to be swimming, part, sitting on the bank, to be drying their green hair; some {are seen} borne ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... one was fire and fickleness,[343] a child Most mutable in wishes, but in mind A wit as various,—gay, grave, sage, or wild,— Historian, bard, philosopher, combined;[ks] He multiplied himself among mankind, The Proteus of their talents: But his own Breathed most in ridicule,—which, as the wind, Blew where it listed, laying all things prone,— Now to o'erthrow a fool, and now to ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... Saylers then the Mermaid shall, Ile slay more gazers then the Basiliske, Ile play the Orator as well as Nestor, Deceiue more slyly then Vlisses could, And like a Synon, take another Troy. I can adde Colours to the Camelion, Change shapes with Proteus, for aduantages, And set the murtherous Macheuill to Schoole. Can I doe this, and cannot get a Crowne? Tut, were it farther off, Ile plucke it ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... were awaked, seeing on one side the fire in the camp, and on the other the inundation of the urinal deluge, could not tell what to say nor what to think. Some said that it was the end of the world and the final judgment, which ought to be by fire. Others again thought that the sea-gods, Neptune, Proteus, Triton, and the rest of them, did persecute them, for that indeed they found it to be like sea-water ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... how he himself came home in the eighth year after the fall of Troy. He had heard from Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea, that Odysseus was alive, and a captive on an island of the deep. Menelaus invites Telemachus to Stay with him for eleven days or twelve, which Telemachus declines to do. It will ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... goozle entangled in the skein of his own intorted argument, so the Advertiser cannot grind out an editorial of equal length without getting hoist with its own logical sequence, split from vermiform appendix to occipitofrontalis by the recoil of its own syllogisms. The Advertiser is unreliable as Proteus; the base vulpine instinct serves it in lieu of brains; the clink of cash in the counting room is the keeper of its conscience. At least such is the pen-portrait drawn of it by the best men in Alabama. ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... mechanism for guiding and governing the minds of men, this mighty enginery for subduing the earth to the dominion of an idea, this harmony of contradictions, this moral Proteus, the faintest sketch must now suffice. A disquisition on the Society of Jesus would be without end. No religious order has ever united in itself so much to be admired and so much to be detested. Unmixed praise has been poured on its Canadian members. It ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... been manoeuvring to-day a little revengefully. That, you will say, is out of character. So baleful a passion does not easily find admission among those softer ones which you well know I cherish. However, I am a mere Proteus, and can assume any shape that ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster
... further, another set of disease-causing protozoan parasites which are similar to the amoeba or proteus-animalcule, and a third, which belong to the group of "ciliated infusoria." They are not so minute as the preceding set, and are not usually referred to as "microbes." They inhabit the intestine of man and animals, and cause, ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... (saith he) "that are not so at all. Some indeed are sad, and not fearful; some fearful and not sad; some neither fearful nor sad; some both." Four kinds he excepts, fanatical persons, such as were Cassandra, Nanto, Nicostrata, Mopsus, Proteus, the sibyls, whom [2475]Aristotle confesseth to have been deeply melancholy. Baptista Porta seconds him, Physiog. lib. 1, cap. 8, they were atra bile perciti: demoniacal persons, and such as speak strange languages, are of this rank: some poets, such as laugh always, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... wrought out pain and punishment for ill deed unforgiven, Till Priam's self might pity us. Witness the star of bane Minerva sent; Euboea's cliffs, Caphereus' vengeful gain! 260 'Scaped from that war, and driven away to countries sundered wide, By Proteus' Pillars exiled now, must Menelaues bide; And those AEtnaean Cyclop-folk Ulysses look upon: Of Pyrrhus's land why tell, or of Idomeneus, that won To ruined house; of Locrian men cast on the Libyan shore? Mycenae's ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... Augustan Age Perused in Virgil's golden page, The story of the secret won From Proteus by Cyrene's son— How the dank sea-god showed the swain Means to restore his hives again. More briefly, how a slaughtered bull Breeds honey ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... one slander Proteus and Thetis, or introduce in tragedies, or any other poems, Hera transformed into the ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... it is that He has perished utterly, too: for thou art He. Hope, therefore, most, and cheeriest smile, at the very apsis and black nadir of Despair: for He is nimble as a weasel, and He twists like Proteus, and His solstices and equinoxes, His tropics and turning-points and recurrences are innate in Being, and when He falls He falls like harlequin and shuttlecocks, shivering plumb to His feet, and each third day, lo, He is risen again, and His defeats are but the stepping-stones and rough ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel |
