Sabine Baring-Gould Quotes
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The Dumnonii, whose city or fortress was at Exeter, were an important people. They occupied the whole of the peninsula from the River Parret to Land's End. East of the Tamar was Dyfnaint, the Deep Vales; west of it Corneu, the horn of Britain.
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It is somewhat remarkable that Cornwall has produced no musical genius of any note, and yet the Cornishman is akin to the Welshman and the Irishman.
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In the beginning, before the creation of Heaven and Earth, God made the angels; free intelligences and free wills; out of His love He made them, that they might be eternally happy. And that their happiness might be complete, He gave them the perfection of a created nature; that is, He gave them freedom.
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There is no myth relative to the manners and customs of the English that in my experience is more tenaciously held by the ordinary Frenchman than that the sale of a wife in the market-place is an habitual and an accepted fact in English life.
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Mediaeval mythology, rich and gorgeous, is a compound like Corinthian brass, into which many pure ores have been fused, or it is a full turbid river drawn from numerous feeders, which had their sources in remote climes.
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Happiness is only attained by the free will agreeing in its freedom to accord with the will of God.
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In art, S. Bridget is usually represented with her perpetual flame as a symbol, sometimes with a column of fire, said to have been seen above her head when she took the veil.
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I have wandered over Europe, have rambled to Iceland, climbed the Alps, been for some years lodged among the marshes of Essex - yet nothing that I have seen has quenched in me the longing after the fresh air, and love of the wild scenery, of Dartmoor.
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At the Norman Invasion, the Saxon thanes were themselves humbled in turn; the manors were given a more legal character and transferred to favourites of William the Conqueror.
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Cyder was anciently the main drink of the country people in the West of England.
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The martyrologies are catalogues in which are to be found the names of the saints with the days and places of their deaths and, generally, with the distinctive character of their sanctity and with an historic summary of their lives.
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The stream of civilisation flows on like a river: it is rapid in mid- current, slow at the sides, and has its backwaters. At best, civilisation advances by spirals.
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We are accustomed in England to chalk in rolling downs, except where bitten into by the sea, but elsewhere it is riven and presents cliffs, and these cliffs are not at all like that of Shakespeare at Dover but overhang, where hard beds alternate with others that are friable.
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In winter, the Icelanders told the tales of the brave men of old in their families, and so the tradition was handed on from father to son, the same stories told every winter, till all the particulars became well known.
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Cornwall, peopled mainly by Celts, but with an infusion of English blood, stands and always has stood apart from the rest of England, much, but in a less degree, as has Wales.
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Dartmoor proper consists of that upland region of granite, rising to nearly 2,000 feet above the sea, and actually shooting above that height at a few points, which is the nursery of many of the rivers of Devon.
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I gave up the notion of writing the life of Joan of Arc, as I found that there was absolutely no new material to be gleaned on her history - in fact, she had been thrashed out.
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Connected with the fall of Satan is his lameness. The devil is represented in art and in legion as limping on one foot; this was occasioned by his having broken his leg in his fall.
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A family may be ruined by extravagance, but it is not always through ruin that the representatives in a family are to be found in humble or comparatively humble circumstances, but that the junior members of a gentle family went into trade.
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In North Germany, a troublesome ghost is bagged, and the bag emptied in some lone spot or in the garden of a neighbour against whom a grudge is entertained.
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My own conviction is, confirmed by a very close study of parochial registers, that some of the very best blood in England is to be found among the tradesmen of our county towns.
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Should the time come when the county family will be taken away, then the parish will feel for some time like a mouth from which a molar has been drawn - there will be a vacancy that will cause unrest and discomfort.
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Ireland was, of old, called the Isle of Saints because of the great number of holy ones of both sexes who flourished there in former ages or who, coming thence, propagated the faith amongst other nations.
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In the depths of the moor, the peat may be seen riven like floes of ice, and the rifts are sometimes twelve to fourteen feet deep, cut through black vegetable matter, the product of decay of plants through countless generations.