The fame of Frederick’s valour and maiden fortune, never as yet spotted with ill success, like a harbinger hastening before, had provided victory to entertain him at his arrival.—Fuller, Holy War, b. iii. c. 31.
A winged harbinger from bright heaven flown
Bespeaks a lodging-room
For the mighty King of love,
The spotless structure of a virgin womb.
Bishop Taylor, On the Annunciation.
| Hardy, | } |
| Hardily. |
When used of persons, ‘hardy’ means now enduring, indifferent to fatigue, hunger, thirst, heat, cold, and the like. But it had once a far more prevailing sense of bold, which now only remains to it in connexion with things, as we should still speak of a ‘hardy,’ meaning thereby a bold, assertion; though never now of a ‘hardy,’ if we intended a bold or daring person. Lord Bacon’s Charles the Hardy is Charles le Téméraire, or Charles the Bold, as we always style him now.
Hap helpeth hardy man alday, quod he.
Chaucer, Legend of Good Women (Skeat, p. 86).