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Posterity   /pɑstˈɛrəti/   Listen
Posterity

noun
1.
All of the offspring of a given progenitor.  Synonym: descendants.
2.
All future generations.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Posterity" Quotes from Famous Books



... give an exact Account of this great Action; of which no Person, that I have heard of, ever yet took upon him to deliver to Posterity the glorious Particulars; and yet the Consequences and Events, by what follows, will appear so great, and so very extraordinary, that few, if any, had they had it in their Power, would have ...
— Military Memoirs of Capt. George Carleton • Daniel Defoe

... cannot. There are, indeed, good reasons for the high cost of the genuine oriental, in its superior coloring, wide range of design, and wonderful durability. The right sort grows richer with age. But our plans are not so much for posterity as for present uses, and we can get along very well without testing our wits in the oriental rug market. It is a test of wits, for there are no standards of size or price, and spurious goods sometimes get into the best of hands. Small ...
— The Complete Home • Various

... on account of the defective natural-historical education of the author, and the indiscreet partisanship for the natives against the settlers, his works have spread many false views concerning South Africa." This, I doubt not, will be the verdict of posterity. See "Anthropologia," in which are included the Proceedings of the London Anthropological Society (inaugurated 22 January, 1873. No. 1, October, 1873. London: Bailliere, Tindall, and Co.) The Review (pp. 89-102), bears the well-known initials J. B. D., and ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... your function is as pure and high as any that the world knows, or in all time has known. May the work which you do in the discharge of your sacred trust be regarded with sympathetic and expectant forbearance by the present generation, and with admiration and gratitude by posterity. ...
— The History Of University Education In Maryland • Bernard Christian Steiner

... glutton of literature.[44] Before he died, he had swallowed six large rooms full of books. Whether he had time to digest any of them we do not know, but we are sure that he wished it; for the only line of his own composition which he has left for the instruction of posterity, is round a medal. The medal represents him sitting with a book in his hand, and with a great number of books scattered on the floor round him. The candid inscription signifies, that to become learned it is ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth

... which formed the secret of his power as a writer, and at the same time as the sources of intellectual temptation which prevented him from gaining a deeper insight into truth, and deprived him of influence with posterity. For his quickness prevented the exercise of the reflection, the patient meditation, which is the only high road to solve the mysteries of existence. It has been well said,(526) that Voltaire saw so much more deeply at a glance than other men, that no second glance was ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar

... why not? Be you sure that it bears Many entries less worthy of record than theirs, The rough sea-faring fellows, whose names now go down, With applause from their Sovereign to swell their renown, To posterity's ears. And right pleasantly, too, They should sound on those ears; for, run over each crew And you'll find that those names have a true homely smack Both of country and kinship; there's JIM, there is Jack, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 19, 1892 • Various

... of it what may (as Sinon said[5] when he was brought before the King of Dardania), I will trace a third book with the pen of Aesop, and dedicate it to you, in acknowledgment of your honor and your goodness.[6] If you read it, I shall rejoice; but if otherwise, at least posterity will have something ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus

... has been writing half a century and it has won for her a place in Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, "entitled to go down to posterity, her lifework preserved as information for future generations." She has written "Land of The Rising Sun," "Sister Ridenour's Sacrifice," "Christmas Cheer In All Lands," "Easter Gladness," "Mission Ships," "The Child's Own Book" and ...
— Kansas Women in Literature • Nettie Garmer Barker

... serenity of nature, to observe the still undisturbed economy and content of the fishes of this century, their happiness a regular fruit of the summer. The Fresh-Water Sun-Fish, Bream, or Ruff, Pomotis vulgaris, as it were, without ancestry, without posterity, still represents the Fresh-Water Sun-Fish in nature. It is the most common of all, and seen on every urchin's string; a simple and inoffensive fish, whose nests are visible all along the shore, hollowed ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau

... inferiour exertions are recorded, as serving to explain or illustrate the sayings of such men, may be proud of being thus associated, and of their names being transmitted to posterity, by being ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell

... behind pushing them forward, and in their fall the row to which they belonged was inevitably involved. The excavators have again and again found whole lines of bas-reliefs that appeared to have fallen together. Such an accident is a thing for posterity to rejoice over. Prone upon a soft and yielding soil the works of the sculptor are better protected than when standing erect, their upper parts clear, perhaps, of the ruin that covers their feet, and exposed to the weather ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot

... "put away the accounts of this as curiosities! You'll have some difficulty in making posterity believe that there was ever a time or place where town lots were sold with magic lanterns and a brass band! And don't advertise it too much with Dorr, Wickersham and those fellows. They think us a little crazy now. But a brass band! That comes ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick

... appendages—the pedestal and the ornaments of that great white tower in the centre, whose sleepless fiery eye blinks all night long over the night-mists of the Atlantic. If, as a wise man has said, the days will come when our degenerate posterity will fall down and worship rusty locomotives and fossil electric-telegraphs, the relics of their ancestors' science, grown to them mythic and impossible, as the Easter-islanders bow before the colossal statues left by a nobler and extinct race, then surely ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley

... famous Nicholas Peyresc, the Mecaenas of his age and the ornament of Provence, who engaged Grotius to handle this subject. He writes to that worthy magistrate, Jan. 11th, 1624. "I go on with my work Of the law of nations: if it may be of use to the world it is to you posterity will owe the obligation, since you made me undertake it, and assisted me in it." In the preliminary discourse he sets forth his motives for treating this subject. "Many strong reasons determined me ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny

... infinitely pathetic work. I mean those effigies of knights and burghers, coats of arms and mere inscriptions, which constitute so large a portion of what we walk upon in Santa Croce. Things not much thought of, maybe, and ruthlessly defaced by all posterity. But the masses, the main lines, were originally noble, and defacement has only made their nobleness and tenderness more evident and poignant: they have come to partake of the special solemnity of stone worn by frost ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee

... parents were made by God not only as particular individuals, but also as principles of the whole human nature to be transmitted by them to their posterity, together with the Divine favor preserving them from death. Hence through their sin the entire human nature, being deprived of that favor in their ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... of Jean Paul Richter's inspiration, and of his obscurity, was reached in "Titan," published during 1801-3. He meant it to be his greatest romance, and posterity has confirmed his judgement. Of all his works, it is the most characteristic of its author. It has all the peculiarities of his style, peculiarities that are reflected in the prose of Thomas Carlyle, his most ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various

... not only so, but they could plainly gather from a free dialogue they had with some perfectly wild Greenlanders (at that time avoiding any direct application to their hearts) that their ancestors must have believed in a Supreme Being, and did render him some service, which their posterity neglected little by little...'[21] Mr. Tylor does not refer to this as a trace of Christian ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang

... Brooke, the loyal admirer and biographer of Sidney, who desired on his tomb no better passport to posterity than that he had been Sir Philip's friend, we have among other works published in 1633 a series of so-called sonnets recording his love for the fair Caelica. There is a thin veil of pastoralism over ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg

... he took it into his head that the "Blind Fiddler" and the "Rent Day" were unworthy of his powers, and challenged competition with Lawrence as a portrait painter. Such failures should be noted for the instruction of posterity, but they detract little from the permanent reputation of those who ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay

... We were the first prairie generation bred of a line of foresters, and were a little like the fools that came to Virginia and Plymouth Colony, who starved in a country filled with food. How many fool things are we doing now, I wonder, to cause posterity to laugh, as foolish as the dying of Sir John Franklin in a land where Stefansson grew fat; many, I guess, as foolish as we did when Magnus Thorkelson and ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick

... to whom it might be applied with a prospect of discovery. No one who read Rousseau with a mind free of ulterior motives could have any doubt on the matter. Jean-Jacques is categorical on the point. The Savoyard Vicar was speaking for Jean-Jacques to posterity when he began his profession of ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry

... for promise and presage, And laugh the laugh back, I think verily, Thine eyes being purged by tears of righteous rage To read a wrong into a prophecy, And measure a true great man's heritage Against a mere great-duke's posterity. I think thy soul said then, "I do not need A princedom and its quarries, after all; For if I write, paint, carve a word, indeed, On book or board or dust, on floor or wall, The same is kept of God who ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning

... Posterity with all its eyes Will come and view him where he lies. Then, turning from the scene away With a concerted shrug, will say: "H'm, Scarabaeus Sisyphus— What interest has that to us? We can't admire at all, at all, A tumble-bug without its ball." And then a sage will rise and say: ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce

... which the Congress of Vienna bequeathed to posterity may be seen at a glance by looking at a political map of Europe in 1815. The entire centre of the Continent from Ostend to Palermo, and from Koenigsberg to Constantinople, was left a political chaos. And it is not too ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,

... on that stuff; that is the stale argument of some of the smart young men who write for posterity. Rent is probably as high to-day as it was when wages were twice as high. The prices of flour, pork, and beef are regulated by the crop, not by the buyers' wages. If I were hammering at an anvil I would take my increased wages and pay increased prices if I had to, and feel pretty sure I was going ...
— A Man of Samples • Wm. H. Maher

... the biography by his friend and law-partner, W. H. Herndon. This book was imperatively needed to brush aside the rank growth of myth and legend which was threatening to hide the real lineaments of Lincoln from the eyes of posterity.... There is no doubt about the faithfulness of Mr. Herndon's delineation. The marks of unflinching veracity are patent ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn

... at all is, however, evident. We are searching for nature's method of building machines. It is perfectly clear that variations among animals and plants are the foundations of the successive steps in advance made in this machine building, but of course only such variations as can be transmitted to posterity can serve any purpose in this development. If therefore it should prove that acquired characters can not be inherited, then we should no longer be able to look upon the direct influence of the surroundings as a factor in the machine building. We should ...
— The Story of the Living Machine • H. W. Conn

... sleep in the bed of honor," said the Princess Medea, with a sly smile at Jason. "The world will always have simpletons enough, just like them, fighting and dying for they know not what, and fancying that posterity will take the trouble to put laurel wreaths on their rusty and battered helmets. Could you help smiling, Prince Jason, to see the self-conceit of that last fellow, just as ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... oppression, and almost in the very same terms, as our forefathers did of the house of Stewart! I will not, I cannot enter into the merits of the cause; but I dare say the American Congress, in 1776, will be allowed to be as able and as enlightened as the English Convention was in 1688; and that their posterity will celebrate the centenary of their deliverance from us, as duly and sincerely as we do ours from the oppressive measures of the ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... The alphabet is general property, and everyone has the right to use it for the creation of a word forming an appellative sound. But he must truly create it. Voltaire, in spite of his genius, would not perhaps have reached posterity under his name of Arouet, especially amongst the French, who always give way so easily to their keen sense of ridicule and equivocation. How could they have imagined that a writer 'a rouet' could be a man of genius? And D'Alembert, would he have attained his high fame, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... into the ground that no one of many that tried could pluck it up; and the soil, being fertile, gave nourishment to the wood, which sent forth branches, and produced a cornel-stock of considerable bigness. This did posterity preserve and worship as one of the most sacred things; and therefore, walled it about; and if to any one it appeared not green nor flourishing, but inclining to pine and wither, he immediately made outcry to all he met, and they, like people hearing ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch

... together and form those rudiments of organism which are called living cellules. These cellules have the marvellous faculty of self-propagation, and the faculty, not less marvellous, of transmitting to their posterity the favorable modifications which they have undergone. Generations succeed one another; gradually they form separate branches. New characteristics show themselves; the organisms become complicated, and becoming complicated they separate. The vegetable is distinguished ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville

... Carrington dryly, "in your case, at least, I quite fail to see any duty toward posterity. You have always lived among us as a bachelor, Lyle. I suspect your other arguments would appear equally foolish on examination. Will somebody else set out the precise advantages we may expect to derive from this creamery. I wish to see ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss

... French colony, for its safety from sudden Indian attack, for the development of its trade, and for its general upbuilding, will never be known. The missionary did not put these things on paper, but he rendered services which in all probability were far greater than posterity will ever realize. ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro

... violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties, the companion of demi-reps, a man who had just closed half a century without one single claim on the gratitude of his country or the respect of posterity." It might be true or it might be false; but certainly there was then not a country in Europe where it would have been allowed to be said of the chief of the state. And I am not sure that it could be said now anywhere ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury

... the first ray of real hope that ultimate separation will be their purchased peace. We will not here draw a picture of that fallacious peace, that suicidal gap, whose festering political sore would breed misery and ruin, not only for ourselves, but for our posterity, for ages to come. But let us be warned in time. Even now the insidious movement of dissension is hailed with satisfaction and delight in the council meetings at Richmond, and no effort will be spared to aid its devastating progress. False rumors will be raised on the slightest and most insignificant ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... greatly bewailed. What became of his body, whether it were buried in the sea or on the land, we known not. The comfort that remaineth to his friends is, that he hath ended his life honourably in respect of the reputation won to his nation and country and of the same to his posterity, and that being dead, he hath not outlived ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall

... hundred years ago Mongolia well-nigh ruled the world. Her people were strong beyond belief, but her empire crumbled as quickly as it rose, leaving to posterity only a glorious tradition and a land of mystery. The tradition will endure for centuries; but the motor car and aeroplane and wireless have ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews

... rester obscurs se sont eclaires et chauffes a ta forge, et si l'heure des restitutions sonnait, quel gain pour toi, rien qu'a reprendre ce que tu as donne et ce qu'on t'a pris!' That is the true verdict of posterity, and he does well who ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley

... ways in which a thing is told Some truth abuse, while others fiction hold; In stories we invention may admit; But diff'rent 'tis with what historick writ; Posterity demands that truth should then Inspire ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine

... what my great-grandson Shem calls my Anecdotage, it has occurred to me that perhaps some of the recollections of a more or less extended existence upon this globular[1] mass of dust and water that we are pleased to call the earth, may prove of interest to posterity, and I have accordingly, at the earnest solicitation of my grandson, Noah, and his sons, Shem, Ham and Japhet, consented to put them into permanent literary form. In view of the facts that at this writing, ink and paper and pens have not as yet been invented, and that we have no capable stenographers ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs

... detestation from Douglas of "this revolting system." Black slavery was not abhorrent to him; but a species of slavery not confined to any color or race, which might, because of a trifling debt, condemn the free white man and his posterity to an endless servitude—this was indeed intolerable. If the Senate was about to abolish black slavery, being unwilling to intrust the territorial legislature with such measures, surely it ought in all consistency to abolish also ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson

... reformers of Henry's reign, as damning evidence of their Popish origin and use; and released from the chains with which they were secured, they were hastily committed to the greedy flames. Thus perished the library of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester! and posterity have to mourn the loss of many an early gem of ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather

... them of a single stone, are about sixty feet high, by seven feet square at the base. The Egyptian priests called these obelisks the sun's fingers, because they served as stiles or gnomons to mark the hours on the ground. In the first ages of the world they were made use of to transmit to posterity the principal precepts of philosophy, which were ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 546, May 12, 1832 • Various

... the instinctive appreciation of the President, considering him (it is said by Mr. Burroughs) "by far the noblest and purest of the political characters of the time;" and, if anything can cast, in the eyes of posterity, an added halo of brightness round the unsullied personal qualities and the great doings of Lincoln, it will assuredly be the written monument reared ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman

... but they allowed us quietly to load our bullocks, and depart, without offering us the least annoyance. Their companion will, no doubt, leave a dreadful account of the adventures of last night to his black posterity. ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt

... Still, however, both Dutch men and women are sometimes afflicted with this disease, and no means have hitherto been found out for prevention or cure. The old legend imputes this disease to the curse laid by St Thomas upon his murderers and their posterity, as an odious mark to distinguish them: But St Thomas was slain by the Tilnigue[3] priests at Miliapoor in Coromandel, above four hundred miles from this coast; and the natives there have no ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr

... in these reactions should be taken by the Government as in any way deflecting them from their clear and definite course of reviving the posterity of this country."—Daily Telegraph. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 23, 1919 • Various

... And in consideration thereof, your said subjects, calling further to their remembrance, that the good unity, peace, and wealth of the realm, specially and principally, above all worldly things, consisteth in the surety and certainty of the procreation and posterity of your Highness, in whose most Royal person at this time is no manner of doubt, do therefore most humbly beseech your Highness that it may be enacted, with the consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal and the Commons in ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude

... by the suspension bridge, built upon the site of an early bridge of boats. A later stone bridge was erected by Odo, Count of Blois and Touraine, "in order," as he recorded, "to make himself agreeable to God, useful to posterity and upon the solicitations of his wife." These were very good reasons, it must be admitted, for building a bridge. The substructure of this old stone bridge, the first of its kind in France, may be seen below the surface of the water a ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton

... hereto subscribed, apprehending ourselves called of God (for advancing of His Kingdom and edifying ourselves and posterity) to combine and embody ourselves into a distinct Church Society, and being for that end orderly dismissed from the Churches to which we heretofore belonged; do (as we hope) with some measure of seriousness and sincerity, take upon us the ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond

... result in the disfranchisement of one entire half of the people is to pass a bill of attainder, or an ex post facto law, and is therefore a violation of the supreme law of the land. By it the blessings of liberty are forever withheld from women and their female posterity. To them this government has no just powers derived from the consent of the governed. To them this government is not a democracy. It is not a republic. It is an odious aristocracy; a hateful oligarchy of sex; the ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee

... indefinite number of years; the idea would be equivalent to transportation: he consoles himself with the hope that something will turn up to alter the apparent certainty of his exile; and in this hope, with his mind ever fixed upon his return, he does nothing for posterity in the colony. He rarely even plants a fruit tree, hoping that his stay will not allow him to gather from it. This accounts for the poverty of the gardens and enclosures around the houses of the English inhabitants, and ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker

... privileged Hebrews rejected him, Christ did not remain a king without subjects, a shepherd without a flock. In the exercise of the same sovereignty through which he chose Abraham at first, he passed over Abraham's degenerate posterity and called another family. This family was Abraham's seed, not by natural generation, but in the regeneration through faith. Of these stones he raised up children to Abraham, when the natural children of the family had through unbelief shut themselves out. "Go to the ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot

... of Dappes was begun between Switzerland and France by a memoir from Captain, afterwards General Dufour. Saint-Simon, ignored, was erecting his sublime dream. There was a celebrated Fourier at the Academy of Science, whom posterity has forgotten; and in some garret an obscure Fourier, whom the future will recall. Lord Byron was beginning to make his mark; a note to a poem by Millevoye introduced him to France in these terms: a certain Lord Baron. David d'Angers was trying to work in marble. The Abbe Caron was ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... came in as I was writing. He says that diaries are good things, and if you didn't put in only your thoughts in a sentimental kind of way, they'd be useful for posterity. I told him I didn't write for posterity, but for Artemas, instead of a letter. He was surprised I hadn't written him about the fire, as the news might reach him exaggerated. I could not help from laughing, for I don't see how it could ...
— The Last of the Peterkins - With Others of Their Kin • Lucretia P. Hale

... giving ground for resentment. He congratulated himself on the fine satire with which he had overthrown his enemies.—"What pleases me in my Defence, is not so much," said he, "to have floored the Ecclesiastics, as to have let them fall so gently." Posterity will find a more valuable charm in this little production; it is, that the author in it has unconsciously painted himself. His contemporaries have recorded, that in reading it they could believe they heard the writer speak; and this proves that his talents in conversation had been equal ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various

... see our papers filled continually with accounts of the most audacious robberies, the most cruel murders, and infinite other atrocities perpetrated by convicts transported from Europe, what melancholy, what terrible reflections must it occasion! What will become of our posterity? These are some of thy favors, Britain! Thou art called our mother country; but what good mother ever sent thieves and villains to accompany her children; to corrupt some with their infectious vices, and murder the rest? What father ever endeavored to spread the plague in his family! We do ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... is shouted, and fails to be heard, perhaps, and goes down-wind, leaving the world unmoved? Once upon a time there lived an emperor who was a sage and something of a literary man. He jotted down on ivory tablets thoughts, maxims, reflections which chance has preserved for the edification of posterity. Among other sayings—I am quoting from memory—I remember this solemn admonition: "Let all thy words have the accent of heroic truth." The accent of heroic truth! This is very fine, but I am thinking ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad

... babe is a male, his face is placed towards his mother's back; if a female, towards her belly." (P. 262, Mr. L G.N. Keith- Falconer's translation.) But there is a curious prolepsis of the spermatozoa-theory. We read (Koran chaps. vii.), "Thy Lord drew forth their posterity from the loins of the sons of Adam;" and the commentators say that Allah stroked Adam's back and extracted from his loins all his posterity, which shall ever be, in the shape of small ants; these confessed their ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... In thy posterity, as I in thee, Dishonourable Boy; O shall that Sun, Which not a year yet since beheld me mounted Upon a fiery Steed, waving my Sword, And teaching this young Man to manage Arms, That was a raw, fresh Novice in the feats Of Chivalrie, shall ...
— The Laws of Candy - Beaumont & Fletcher's Works (3 of 10) • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher

... be the judgment pronounced by posterity upon the events of this, so to speak, extra-human existence, the character of Prince Dakkar would ever remain as one of those whose memory time can ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)

... Thou hast it now, King, Cawdor, Glamis, all, As the weyard Women promis'd, and I feare Thou playd'st most fowly for't: yet it was saide It should not stand in thy Posterity, But that my selfe should be the Roote, and Father Of many Kings. If there come truth from them, As vpon thee Macbeth, their Speeches shine, Why by the verities on thee made good, May they not be my Oracles as well, And set me vp in ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... the Galel Xahil and the Ahuchan Xahil had taken possession, the kings died. Immediately their posterity succeeded. Two by two they entered into power, and the two sons of the sons of Caynoh received homage as Ahpop Xahil and Ahuchan Xahil; the two sons of the chief Caybatz took possession and received the homage of their subjects as Ahpop Qamahay and ...
— The Annals of the Cakchiquels • Daniel G. Brinton

... a word which came from Walt Whitman, who hailed me as one of the literary pioneers of the west for whom he had been waiting. His judgment, so impersonal, so grandly phrased, gave me the feeling of having been "praised by posterity." ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... his powers, the incorruptibility of his genius. Of all the qualities of a great man of his age, he was only wanting in honesty. The people were not his devotees, but his instruments,—his own glory was the god of his idolatry; his faith was posterity; his conscience existed but in his thought; the fanaticism of his idea was quite human; the chilling materialism of his age had crushed in his heart the expansion, force, and craving for imperishable things. His dying words were "sprinkle me with ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine

... repeat his request, but with tears in his eyes gathered up his painting-materials. Josephine smiled. "I see very well," said she, "that I must have recourse to some extraordinary means to save for me and for posterity a portrait of ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach

... answer to that question. Oriental superstition cast its blight upon the fair field of science, whatever compensation it may or may not have brought in other fields. But we must be on our guard lest we overestimate or incorrectly estimate this influence. Posterity, in glancing backward, is always prone to stamp any given age of the past with one idea, and to desire to characterize it with a single phrase; whereas in reality all ages are diversified, and any generalization ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... importunities. But, alas! the most ingenious author has condemned it to obscurity during her life; and conviction, as well as deference, obliges me to yield to her reasons. However, if these Letters appear hereafter, when I am in my grave, let this attend them, in testimony to posterity, that among her contemporaries, one woman, at least, was just to ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague

... himself from society, anchors himself in the future and presses to his heart a posterity innocent ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... is deemed right and proper to abrogate all law, and to establish over the land a reign of terror and of the sword—to pour out, in deference to the paramount claims of the safety of the state, public money, whether obtained from present taxation or the mortgage of posterity, with profusion absolutely uncontrolled—to decree confiscation on a scale of unprecedented magnitude; it is obvious that a reputation for clemency, economy, and respect for the native rights of property, is obtainable under conditions ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin

... humble followers of the court, the immortal Dunbar, who was neglected in his own day, and who has been scarce less neglected and overlooked by posterity, was conspicuous. The poet-priest appeared to be a director of the intellectual amusements of the day. But although they delighted the multitude, and he afterwards immortalised the marriage of his royal master, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various

... resignation as he folded up his package of compositions and went sadly away. They admired his technical skill, but thought him very foolish to waste his time on such "stuff" as they called it. They advised him to write for the hour, and not for posterity. ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein

... his family may see what cause they have to trust in God and to praise his name for his goodness, Whitelocke hath thought fit, hereby in writing, and as a monument of God's mercy, to transmit the memory of these passages to his posterity. ...
— A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, Vol II. • Bulstrode Whitelocke

... occupied the earliest attention of nations just entering on the career of civilization; and the enormous blocks of stone moved from their native repositories to minister to the grandeur or piety of the builders, have remained to excite the astonishment of their posterity, long after the purposes of many of these records, as well as the names of their founders, have been forgotten. The different degrees of force necessary to move these ponderous masses, will have varied ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage

... England and America, why should they not study him both in the nineteenth century and in the twentieth? The judgment of persons who are more or less free from insular prejudices is said in some degree to anticipate that which is admitted to be the conclusive verdict of posterity."—Saturday Review. ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... honour of presenting myself by the name of Jackman. I esteem it a proud privilege to go down to posterity through the instrumentality of the most remarkable boy that ever lived,—by the name of JEMMY JACKMAN LIRRIPER,—and of my most worthy and most highly respected friend, Mrs. Emma Lirriper, of Eighty-one, Norfolk Street, Strand, in the County of Middlesex, in the United Kingdom ...
— Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings • Charles Dickens

... glorious memory as a commentator on the Pandects—why is Ficino, whose Latin is an offence to me, and who wanders purblind among the superstitious fancies that marked the decline at once of art, literature, and philosophy, to descend to posterity as the very high priest of Platonism, while I, who am more than their equal, have not effected anything but scattered work, which will be appropriated by other men? Why? but because my son, whom I had brought up to replenish my ripe learning with young enterprise, ...
— Romola • George Eliot

... influence, as runs the hackneyed phrase, was always for good, and untiringly she did her utmost to incline her despot lover to mercy. She alone sheds a ray of light on Pedro's memory, only her love can save him from the execration of posterity. When she died rich and poor alike mourned her, and the king was inconsolable. He honoured her with pompous obsequies, and throughout the kingdom ordered masses to be sung for the ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham

... several days by a Dumfries doctor. It has since been deposited in a new leaden coffin, and restored to the vault. We learned that there is a surviving daughter of Burns's eldest son, and daughters likewise of the two younger sons,—and, besides these, an illegitimate posterity by the eldest son, who appears to have been of disreputable life in his younger days. He inherited his father's failings, with some faint shadow, I have also understood, of the great qualities which have made the world tender of his father's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... his own land, inherited perhaps and certainly intended for his posterity—"what! Can you separate me from this? Are not this and I bound up inextricably?" The answer is "No; you are not so far as any observer of this world can discover. Space is in no way possessed by man, and he who ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc

... Valentinian' (two years subsequent to the death of Attila), 'nine emperors had successively disappeared; and the son of Orestes, a youth recommended only by his beauty, would be the least entitled to the notice of posterity, if his reign, which was marked by the extinction of the Roman empire in the west, did not leave a memorable era in the ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss

... globe, placing this under a burning sun, and that beneath enduring frosts, will have included in its divine forethought a sufficient care for these bold wanderers to restore them, unharmed, to their friends and country. In a contrary event, their names must be transmitted to posterity as the victims to a laudable desire to enlarge the circle of human knowledge, and with it, we trust, to increase the ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper

... farm of his father—rebuilt the cottage destroyed by the Indians—and there, with his dear Peggy, lived happily to a green old age, beloved and respected by all who knew him; and there his posterity still continue to multiply the name of Younker. With him the good dame, his mother, sojourned for several years, as industrious and talkative as ever; and at last passed quietly from among the living, even while in the act of making a sublime quotation ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett

... did he himself retain the name, but he transmitted it to his posterity, for all the kings that afterward descended from him, extending in a long line through a period of four hundred years, had the word Silvius affixed to their names, in perpetual commemoration of the romantic birth of their ancestor. Rhea, the mother of Romulus, of whom we ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... importance. Though a home, the house has the value of a museum. The portrait of Major Stark, which hangs in the parlour at the right of the square entrance-hall, was painted by Professor Samuel Finley Breese Morse, the discoverer of the electric telegraph, a man who wished to come down to posterity as an artist, but is now remembered by us only ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford

... your books, despise all worldly blessings and wisdom. Everything is void, frail, visionary and delusive as a mirage. Though you be proud and wise and beautiful, yet will death wipe you from the face of the earth like the mice underground; and your posterity, your history, and the immortality of your men of genius will be as frozen slag, burnt down ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various

... do work. You see? They're a 'combine'—a trade union, to coin a new phrase—who band themselves together to force their lowly brother to take what they choose to give. Thirteen hundred years hence—so says the unwritten law—the 'combine' will be the other way, and then how these fine people's posterity will fume and fret and grit their teeth over the insolent tyranny of trade unions! Yes, indeed! the magistrate will tranquilly arrange the wages from now clear away down into the nineteenth century; and then all of a sudden the wage-earner will consider that a couple ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... this far, I lost the further run of his prayer, but regret very much that I did so, because it was so grand and fine that I would have liked very much to have kept such an appropriate prayer for posterity. In fact, it lays it on heavy over any prayer I ever heard, and I think the new translators ought to get it and have it put in their book as a sample prayer. But they will have to get the balance of it from the eminent LL. D. In fact, he ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins

... ink to do so in a serious spirit. Let us dedicate our horror to acts of a more mingled strain, where crime preserves some features of nobility, and where reason and humanity can still relish the temptation. Horror, in this case, is due to Mr. Parnell: he sits before posterity silent, Mr. Forster's appeal echoing down the ages. Horror is due to ourselves, in that we have so long coquetted with political crime; not seriously weighing, not acutely following it from cause to consequence; but with a generous, unfounded heat ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... I take this opportunity of suggesting the query; whether he may not have been occasionally misled, by having assumed, as to me he appears to have done, the non-existence of any absolute synonymes in our language? Now I cannot but think, that there are many which remain for our posterity to distinguish and appropriate, and which I regard as so much reversionary wealth in our mother tongue. When two distinct meanings are confounded under one or more words,— (and such must be the case, as sure as our knowledge is progressive ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... very worthy Gentleman, and Sir Henry had a particular Friendship for him; but (perhaps) that dy'd with him, and only a neighbourly Kindness, or something more than an ordinary Respect, surviv'd to his Posterity. The Day came that was to carry 'em to the young Lady Constance's, and her Lover was preparing to attend 'em, when the old Gentleman ask'd him, What he meant by that Preparation? And whether he design'd to leave him alone? Or if he could think 'twere dutifully or decently done? To which ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn

... substances of countless individualities."—Thus it has been calculated that in the twenty-first generation, in five hundred years let us say, and supposing an average of three children to each couple, the posterity of a single couple will be equal in number to the entire human race. It may, therefore, be said that each one of us has within him a small portion of the living substance belonging to every one of the human beings that were living five ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland

... And, as it is their custom to admit even young boys, who are related to the chiefs, to these assemblies, they become early acquainted with all the affairs of state; and thus the contents of their documents are transmitted to posterity, and cannot ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones

... fond desire, 'Twill gain a brave, a noble friend; And the possessions of thy sire, To his posterity descend." ...
— Elegies and Other Small Poems • Matilda Betham

... object and the design of most writers to perpetuate, with a pen worthy of their virtues, the lives of holy men, that the fervor of sanctity so deserving our veneration might not be buried in oblivion, but rather that it might shine before all as in a glass, to the end that posterity might imitate its brightness—as was commanded from above, that in the breast-plate of the chief priest the names of the twelve patriarchs, the sons of Israel, should be engraven on twelve precious stones, so that by the sight thereof the faithful might be moved ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various

... his Synephebi. What is his object in doing so, except that he is interested in posterity? Shall the industrious husbandman, then, plant trees the fruit of which he shall never see? And shall not the great man found laws, institutions, and a republic? What does the procreation of children imply, and our care to ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... affection for their defenceless wives and unprotected offspring, nor love of self can awaken a single spark of courage or patriotism in their bosoms, can scare away that demon sloth from among them, or induce them to make a solitary exertion to save themselves and posterity from a foreign yoke; why then, they are surely unworthy to be called a people; they deserve to be deprived of their effects, children, and personal liberty, to have their habitual sloth and listlessness converted into labour and usefulness, ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish

... success. The first and the last named have cleared his name from the aspersions of centuries; the second and third, in their endeavors to magnify Columbus by belittling Vespucci, have not convinced posterity that the Florentine was a liar and a villain. He was neither one nor the other; and that he was far more humane than his friend Columbus has been amply shown in his treatment of the Indians. He and his companions made a ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober

... senses). All! Caesar: will you go down to posterity as a barbarous soldier too ignorant to know ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw

... they hammered upon each other's skulls with huge battle-axes, and drove the dagger between the bars of the closed visor? Were not those heroic feats of arms? was not that a courage worthy to be chronicled to all posterity? But our young people want to see new things; they are not satisfied with their own native land: they must wander through Germany, make tours in France. Worse still, they abandon science and its noble fields for trade, arts, industry, as if there had not been in the former ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian

... liquid plaster-of-Paris was poured into the mould formed by the bodies, and then the mould was broken up, leaving the plaster-cast whole. Thus one touching incident in the terrible tragedy of eighteen centuries ago has been preserved for the admiration and respect of posterity. The arms and legs of the child showed a contraction and emaciation which could only result from illness. Of the mother only the right arm was preserved; she fell upon the ashes, and the remaining ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden

... Wei. "Until driven to despair this person not only duly observed the Rites and Ceremonies, but he even avoided the Six Offences. He remained by the side of his parents while they lived, provided an adequate posterity, forbore to tread on any of the benevolent insects, safeguarded all printed paper, did not consume the meat of the industrious ox, and was charitable towards the needs of hungry and ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah

... Posterity will cry shame on us if we do not remedy this deplorable state of things. Nay, if we live twenty years longer, our own consciences ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... midnight robbers at his door, get out of bed, and raise his family for a common defence, and shall a whole kingdom lie in a lethargy, while Mr. Wood comes at the head of his confederates to rob them of all they have, to ruin us and our posterity for ever? If an highwayman meets you on the road, you give him your money to save your life, but, God be thanked, Mr. Wood cannot touch a hair of your heads. You have all the laws of God and man on your side. When he or his accomplices offer you his dross ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift

... brahmastras hurled by Drona and Karna! It was through thy grace that the Samsaptakas were vanquished! It was through thy grace that Partha had never to turn back from even the fiercest of encounters! Similarly, it was through thy grace, O mighty-armed one, that I myself, with my posterity, have, by accomplishing diverse acts one after another, obtained the auspicious end of prowess and energy! At Upaplavya, the great rishi Krishna-Dvaipayana told me that thither is Krishna where righteousness is, and thither is ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... "Has anyone ever been able to write with free and genuine appreciation of even the later novels?" asks or echoes a lady, Miss Grace Toplis, writing on Jefferies. "In brief, he was an essayist and not a novelist at all," says Mr. Henry Salt. "It is therefore certain that his importance for posterity will dwindle, if it has not already dwindled, to that given by a bundle of descriptive selections. But these will occupy a foremost place on their particular shelf, the shelf at the head of which ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies

... their sympathies—apart from judgment—were with the hitherto persecuted princess, and were not extended to her helpless rival, is in no way remarkable; for Lady Jane had been brought up in retirement, and her charms of mind and of character, though known to posterity, were quite unknown to the world in her own day. She had lent herself, however innocently, to an outrageous conspiracy; nor would any one have thought of remonstrance if the Queen had followed the advice of her counsellors instead of the dictates of her own magnanimity, and sent the ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes

... replies, which Dryden crushed in his "Mac Flecnoe," a poem named after an Irish priest—an inferior poet—who, but for this notice, would never have been known to posterity. Shadwell was the man really aimed at; Mac ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange

... feel the inspiration of a sacred cause, the mighty impulse of an idea as grand as their cherished hopes for their country, and as immense as the interests of all humanity. They hear the mute appeals of a swarming posterity, gathered from all nations in pursuit of freedom, progress, and happiness, and they know that these countless millions will justly hold them responsible for the deeds of the present momentous hour. Is it strange that, penetrated and nerved with the high motives to be derived from these solemn ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various

... iz the most ridikilus thing in market. They are generally ashamed ov their ansesstors; and, if they hav enny, and live long enuff, they generally hav cauze tew be ashamed ov their posterity. ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various

... after a short and inglorious reign. Then followed a dynasty which has left an indelible mark upon the civilization as well as on the recorded history of China. A peasant, by mere force of character, succeeded after a three-years' struggle in establishing himself upon the throne, 206 B.C., and his posterity, known as the House of Han, ruled over China for four hundred years, accidentally divided into two nearly equal portions by the Christian era, about which date there occurred a temporary usurpation of the throne which for some time threatened ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles

... days, for the bride's-man and maiden, and a few select friends, to visit the new-married couple after they had retired to rest, and drink a cup to their healths, their happiness, and a numerous posterity. But the laird delighted not in this: he wished to have his jewel to himself; and, slipping away quietly from his jovial party, he retired to his chamber to his beloved, and bolted the door. He found her engaged ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg

... acknowledgment of your favor of April the 11th. I learn from that with great pleasure, that you have resolved on continuing your history of parties. Our opponents are far ahead of us in preparations for placing their cause favorably before posterity. Yet I hope even from some of them the escape of precious truths, in angry explosions or effusions of vanity, which will betray the genuine monarchism of their principles. They do not themselves believe what they endeavor to inculcate, that we were an opposition party, not on principle, but merely ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... sought and procured his ruine and fall: so againe, finding at this flood none but a father and three sonnes liuing, hee so caused one of them to transgresse and disobey his fathers commaundement, that after him all his posterity shoulde bee accursed. [Sidenote: The Arke of Noe.] The fact of disobedience was this: When Noe at the commandement of God had made the Arke and entred therein, and the floud-gates of heauen were opened, so that the whole face of the earth, euery tree and mountaine was couered with ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, Vol. XII., America, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt

... gives the sense of corporate existence that raises man above the brutes." All which lowers the influence or the sacredness of this memory is debasing. The corrupting of this memory "is the impoverishment that threatens our posterity;" and this "new famine, a meagre fiend, with lewd grin and clumsy hoof, is breathing a moral mildew over the harvest of our human sentiments." That eager yearning of the nineteenth century for truth and reality, for something ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke

... she might do she would be severely criticised; that it would be almost impossible to secure the approval of both her father and her husband. Since she was intelligent enough to foresee that she would be blamed by her contemporaries and by posterity, was she not justified in lamenting her unhappy lot? She, who under any other conditions would have been an excellent wife and mother, was compelled by extraordinary circumstances to appear as a heartless wife and ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand

... the Man of the Iron Mask was Hercules Anthony Matthioli, aBolognese of ancient family, born on the 1st December 1640. On the 13th of January 1661 he married Camilla, daughter of Bernard Paleotti, by whom he had two sons, one of whom only had posterity, which has long since been extinct. Early in life Matthioli was public reader in the University of Bologna, which he soon quitted to enter the service of CharlesIII., Duke of Mantua, by whom he was finally made Secretary of State. The successor of CharlesIII., ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black

... are learning not to depend upon mere guesses—no matter how shrewd. Mahmoud Effendi could not pass on to others the art he had acquired. But the science of gunnery can be taught to any man of average intelligence and natural aptitudes. Pericles left posterity not one hint about how to judge men—how to recognize ability. Humanity needs a scientific method of judging men, so that any man of intelligence can discover genius—or just native ability—in himself ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb

... do sometimes choke swine; tulips reduce posterity; causes leather to resist. Our notions empower wisdom, her let's afford while we can. Butter but any cakes, fill any undertaker, we'll wean him from his filly. We feel ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... Wellington, will be as trustworthy as on the day they were written. Yet some suspicion may arise in our minds, that these commanders and historians might have kept back some important events which would have dimmed their reputation with posterity, or might have colored those they have related, so as to add to their fame. Of the great facts related in memoirs addressed to their companions in arms, able at a glance to detect a falsehood, we never entertain ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... will never be more than a memory. Yet even a memory must be kept alive. The great tradition must not die. For the very sake of antiquarian accuracy, for the instruction of posterity, some exact record must be kept of the influence of alcohol upon the human soul. How can this be preserved? Not in books, not in the dead mummies of a museum. No, not in dead mummies, indeed, but in living rummies. That brings ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley

... exclaims: "My only consolation lies in the reflection that, however bad our posterity may become, so far as they hold by the plain rule of not pretending to believe what they have no reason to believe, because it may be to their advantage so to pretend [the word 'pretend' is surely here ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James

... that he beareth thee, is out of his wittes, and now doth conspire against vs, as though we were traytors and murderers of our Prince: in whose handes (as thou knowest) doth rest the life, honor and goods both of thy selfe and of vs all: and what glory and triumphe shall be reported of thee to our posterity, when they shal know how by thy obstinate crueltie, thou haste procured the death of thine old father, the death of thy hooreheaded mother, and the destruction of thy valiaunt and coragious brethren, and dispoyled the rest of thy bloud of their possessions ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter

... against the defendants was very strong, it was not considered that there was sufficient legal evidence, and, there being no jury in Sweden, they were left to the verdict of posterity." (pp. 213-216.) ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead

... any such star in appearance, the historians of that day would surely have recorded it, for there were learned and wise men in the East in those days, and as astrology was a science closely studied, it would have been noted and passed on to posterity by both writings and tradition. But no such record or tradition is to be found among the Eastern peoples, or the records of the astrologers. But another record and tradition is preserved, as we shall see ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka

... scarcely one year older, and who, according to Johnson, distinguished himself by the quickness of his progress, imparted to Jago his love of letters. As the one, in his Schoolmistress, has delivered to posterity the old dame who taught him to read; the other has done the same for their common preceptor, but with less ability and less kindness, in his Edgehill, where he ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary

... happiness of my King and the tranquillity of my fellow subjects are at stake. I am already too high. In descending a little, I shall not only rise in the eyes of my contemporaries, but in the opinion of posterity. Every step I am advancing undermines your throne. In retreating a little, if I do not strengthen, I can never injure it." But I beg your pardon for this digression, and for putting the language of dignified reason into the mouth of a man as ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith

... the conceited and pragmatical pedant who wrote Pierce's Supererogation. He is familiar, almost literally to every schoolboy, as the author of the charming piece, "Cupid with my Campaspe Played," and his dramatic work will come in for notice in a future chapter; but he is chiefly thought of by posterity, whether favourably or the reverse, as the author of Euphues. Exceedingly little is known about his life, and it is necessary to say that the usually accepted dates of his death, his children's birth, and so forth, depend ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury

... Is a murder in the streets worth attending to,—a single wounded man worth carrying to the hospital,—and are all the murders, and massacres, and fields of wounded, and the madness, the conflagrations, the famines, the miseries of families, and the rickety frames and melancholy bloods of posterity, only fit to have an embroidered handkerchief thrown over them? Must "ladies and gentlemen" be called off, that they may not "look that way," the "sight is so shocking"? Does it become us to let others endure, what we cannot ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt

... thy portly ghost Be ever ready at its heavenly post; And may thy proud posterity e'er be ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 354, Saturday, January 31, 1829. • Various

... rules of "composition books" used gravely to stigmatise as "incorrect." Time lifts a great many (though not perhaps all) the restraints upon publication which have been discussed and advocated above: and it will probably be possible some day for posterity to possess, not only a collected body of the now scattered Thackeray letters, but a considerably larger one than has ever appeared even in extracts and catalogues. It will be an addition to our Epistolary Library which can bear comparison with any ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury

... would trust her for anything and there was not at her lodgings a single billet. You will do me the justice to think that the princess of England did not keep her bed the next day for want of a faggot... Posterity will hardly believe that a princess of England, grand-daughter to Henry the Great, hath wanted a faggot in the month of January, in the Louvre, and in the eyes of the French court."] Pepys records ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy

... a mightier overthrow; the men who tortured the righteous have surrendered their guilty spirits under the blows of Heaven and in tortures well deserved though long delayed—yet delayed only that posterity might learn the full terrors of God's vengeance on his enemies.' There is none of this fierce joy in Athanasius, though he too had seen the horrors of the persecution, and some of his early teachers had perished in it. His eyes are fixed on the world-wide victory ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin

... parents of ingenious invention; and as they did not comprehend either the merit or utility of the Roman arts, they destroyed the monuments of them, with an industry not inferior to that with which their posterity have since studied to preserve or to recover them. The convulsions occasioned by the settlement of so many unpolished tribes in the empire; the frequent as well as violent revolutions in every kingdom which they established; together with the interior defects in the form of government ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous

... investigators in the world. Herbert Spencer would have been swamped in a family, and the same with George Eliot. If they had married each other, as Herbert says they might (had Georgie been better-looking), philosophical and imaginative genius would have been lost in getting the meals and bending posterity over the parental knee to make sin seem undesirable. I had always felt that Jim was cut out to get married, and I stood ready to help him through the entire catalogue of crime and conspiracy, for I knew he could not undertake so much alone as well as I knew glue from tallow coming two miles by ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent

... however, lost no friends in this disgrace, nor lost his haughtiness; for when the new chief-justice sent to purchase his Collar of SS., Coke returned for answer, that "he would not part with it, but leave it to his posterity, that they might one day know they had a ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli

... Writings of Shakspeare, vol. i. p. 105.:—"That the entire disappearance of all manuscripts of Shakspeare, so entire that no writing of his remains except his name, and only one letter ever addressed to him, is in some way connected with the religious turn which his posterity took, in whose eyes there would be much to be lamented in what they must, I fear, have considered a prostitution of the noble talents ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 4, Saturday, November 24, 1849 • Various

... verdict set aside and to save the prisoner; I have exposed the weakness of the evidence; I have had the world searched for the missing girl; I have petitioned and agitated. In vain. I have failed. Now I play my last card. As the overweening Wimp could not be allowed to go down to posterity as the solver of this terrible mystery, I decided that the condemned man might just as well profit by his exposure. That is the reason I make the exposure to-night, before it is ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill

... fox did not know what was going to happen, or why he was doing this, for such is commonly the case during the progress of great events. The actors do not recognise the importance of the part they are playing. The age does not know what it is doing; posterity alone can appreciate it. But after a while, as the fox drove the hare out of the hedges, and met and faced her, and bewildered the poor creature, he observed that her zig-zag course, entirely unpremeditated, was leading them closer and closer to the orchard where ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies

... of abridging the constitutional rights of the citizen, by withholding the privilege of free speech, and preventing the expression of popular sentiment at the polls? And yet, methinks, an intelligent posterity will somewhat wonder how such speeches could be made with impunity, and such candidates receive unchallenged votes, in the face of such unscrupulous tyranny. In fact, was there ever so wicked a farce as this "Copperhead" ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various

... buil- ded, whiche Amphion did close & enuiron with wal- les, in the whiche the mightie and valiaunt Hercules was borne, & manie noble Princes helde therin scepter, the which Citie is tituled famous to the posterity by the noble ...
— A booke called the Foundacion of Rhetorike • Richard Rainolde

... yet, not suiting with every low decrepit humour of their own, THOUGH IT WERE KNOX HIMSELF, THE REFORMER OF A KINGDOM, that spake it, they will not pardon him their dash: the sense of that great man shall to all posterity be lost for the fearfulness, or the presumptuous rashnesse of a prefunctory licenser. And to what an Author this violence hath bin lately done, and in what book of greatest consequence to be faithfully publisht, I could now instance, but shall forbear till a more ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox

... all, the match was likely to be historic, and one always feels tempted to hand one's name down to posterity. ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse

... Washington fled from superior forces, and waited till a more convenient season. Fellow-soldiers: there is one of two steps to be immediately taken. We will stand to our post, and fall to a man, like Travis and his noble band, and our names will go down to posterity as did ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans

... left to the World? Consider only, Gentlemen and Ladies, how many Accidents might rob us of these sparkling Pieces, if the industrious Care of the Collector had not taken this Way of preserving them, and handing them to Posterity. In the first Place, some careless Drawer breaks the Drinking-Glasses inscribed to the Beauties of our Age; a furious Mob at an Election breaks the Windows of a contrary Party; and a cleanly Landlord must have, forsooth, his Rooms new painted ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany. Part 1 • Samuel Johnson [AKA Hurlo Thrumbo]

... before the great battle in which he is about to engage. In the morning when they seek the leader they find him sitting on a bench in the castle park of Fehrbellin, whither the moonlight had enticed the sleep walker. He sits absorbed with bared head and open breast, "Both for himself and his posterity, he dreams the splendid crown of fame to win." Still further, the laurel for this crown he himself must have obtained during the night from the electoral greenhouse. The electress thinks, "As true as I'm alive, this man is ill!" an opinion ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger



Words linked to "Posterity" :   generation, biological group, descendants



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