"Dower" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... breeding-beds of this disease. Among the large numbers of women and girls thus assembled—many of them forced into monastic seclusion against their will, for the reason that their families could give them no dower—subjected to the unsatisfied longings, suspicions, bickerings, petty jealousies, envies, and hatreds, so inevitable in convent life—mental disease was not unlikely to be developed at any moment. Hysterical excitement in nunneries took shapes sometimes comical, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... accounts for and assigns to other legatees every known item of his property refutes the conjecture that he had set aside any portion of it under a previous settlement or jointure with a view to making independent provision for his wife. Her right to a widow's dower—i.e. to a third share for life in freehold estate—was not subject to testamentary disposition, but Shakespeare had taken steps to prevent her from benefiting—at any rate to the full extent—by that legal arrangement. He had barred ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... sure, even the highest and the driest of these censors contrived to close an indulgent eye when a moneyless scion of nobility sought to prop his tottering house by rebuilding it upon a commercial foundation, and cementing it with the dower of a "tradesman's" daughter. But if these blameless ones, whose exclusive dust has long since been consigned to family vaults with appropriate inscriptions, could have foreseen the dreadful inroads of the trading spirit, if in a moment of prophetic rapture ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. July 4, 1891 • Various
... usage, however, was softened gradually. The widow got more independence, and more authority over her children and property, over the marriage of her daughters, and at last the right to contract a second marriage after a year of mourning.[1318] In England, in the eleventh century, a widow's dower could not be taken to pay her husband's taxes, although the exchequer showed little pity for anybody else. The reason given is that "it is the price of her virginity."[1319] The later law also exempted a wife's dower from ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... dewdrops—at the bent spray's edge— That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, Lest you should think he never could recapture The first fine careless rapture! And though the fields look rough with hoary dew, All will be gay when noontide wakes anew The buttercups, the little children's dower —Far brighter than ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
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