In
past times when my wife plagued me; in present times when I have had a drop too much--ROBINSON CRUSOE.
Laurence, so vivid was his conception of
past times, would hardly have deemed it strange if its former occupants, one after another, had resumed the seat which they had each left vacant such a dim length of years ago.
She remembered the likeness between herself and her mother's favourite pupil, as something which had been supposed to exist in
past times; but she did not refer to the gift of the white dresses, or to the singular form of words in which the child had artlessly expressed her gratitude for them.
My thoughts are beginning to drift back to
past times, and to things which are better forgotten." A sudden contraction crossed his livid face.
Here, as in many another detail, we are reminded, of course, of the difference between our own and
past times in mimic as in real life.
In the course of years they will gradually disappear; their songs will die away like the echoes they once awakened, and the Canadian voyageurs will become a forgotten race, or remembered, like their associates, the Indians, among the poetical images of
past times, and as themes for local and romantic associations.
The worst of the literature of
past times, before an ethical conscience began to inform it, or the advance of the race compelled it to decency, is that it leaves the mind foul with filthy images and base thoughts; but what I have been trying to say is that the boy, unless he is exceptionally depraved beforehand, is saved from these through his ignorance.
As the late Edward Forbes often insisted, there is a striking parallelism in the laws of life throughout time and space: the laws governing the succession of forms in
past times being nearly the same with those governing at the present time the differences in different areas.
In
past times, when the boy Horace had come to her from school, she had cherished a secret fancy (too absurd to be communicated to any living creature) that he ought to have been her son, and might have been her son, if she had married his father!
Know that you have here before you (open your eyes and you will see) that great knight of whom the sage Merlin has prophesied such great things; that Don Quixote of La Mancha I mean, who has again, and to better purpose than in
past times, revived in these days knight-errantry, long since forgotten, and by whose intervention and aid it may be we shall be disenchanted; for great deeds are reserved for great men.'
The inhabitants of Shetland know him far and wide, under a name in their dialect which means, being interpreted, "The Master of Books." The one occasion on which he and his daughter have been known to leave their island retreat was at a
past time when a terrible epidemic disease broke out among the villages in the neighborhood.
I have even seen them given as my reason for writing of a
past time, and in that at least there is no truth.
past times - the time that has elapsed; "forget the past"