Umbrellas

An umbrella or parasol (also called a brolly, rainshade, sunshade, gamp or bumbershoot) is a canopy designed to protect against rain or sunlight. The term parasol usually refers to an item designed to protect from the sun; umbrella refers to a device more suited to protect from rain. Often the difference is the material; some parasols are not waterproof.

Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894): Rue de Paris, temps de pluie, 1877.

Quotes

• Accipe quæ nimios vincant umbracula soles;
  Sit licet et ventus, te tua vela tegent.
  • An umbrella for the sun you'll handy find.
    Or it may serve as shelter from the wind.
    • Martial, 14, 28
    • Reported in Classical and Foreign Quotations (1904), no. 14

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 826.

• We bear our shades about us; self-deprived
  Of other screen, the thin umbrella spread,
  And range an Indian waste without a tree.
  • William Cowper, The Task (1785), Book I, line 259.

• Of doues I haue a dainty paire
  Which, when you please to take the aier,
  About your head shall gently houer,
  Your cleere browe from the sunne to couer,
  And with their nimble wings shall fan you
  That neither cold nor heate shall tan you,
  And like umbrellas, with their feathers
  Sheeld you in all sorts of weathers.
  • Michael Drayton, Davis.

• Good housewives all the winter's rage despise,
  Defended by the riding-hood's disguise;
  Or, underneath the umbrella's oily shade,
  Safe through the wet on clinking pattens tread,
  Let Persian dames the umbrella's ribs display,
  To guard their beauties from the sunny ray;
  Or sweating slaves support the shady load,
  When eastern monarchs show their state abroad;
  Britain in winter only knows its aid,
  To guard from chilling showers the walking maid.
  • John Gay, Trivia, Book I, line 209.

• When my water-proof umbrella proved a sieve, sieve, sieve,
  When my shiny new umbrella proved a sieve.
  • Rossiter Johnson, A Rhyme of the Rain.

• The inseparable gold umbrella which in that country [Burma] as much denotes the grandee as the star or garter does in England.
  • J. W. Palmer, Up and Down the Irrawadde.

• See, here's a shadow found; the human nature
  Is made th' umbrella to the Deity,
  To catch the sunbeams of thy just Creator;
  Beneath this covert thou may'st safely lie.
  • Francis Quarles, Emblems, Book IV. 14.

• It is the habitual carriage of the umbrella that is the stamp of Respectability. The umbrella has become the acknowledged index of social position…. Crusoe was rather a moralist than a pietist, and his leaf-umbrella is as fine an example of the civilized mind striving to express itself under adverse circumstances as we have ever met with.
  • Robert Louis Stevenson, Philosophy of Umbrellas; written in collaboration with J. W. Ferrier.

• It is not for nothing, either, that the umbrella has become the very foremost badge of modern civilization—the Urim and Thummim of respectability…. So strongly do we feel on this point, indeed, that we are almost inclined to consider all who possess really well-conditioned umbrellas as worthy of the Franchise.
  • Robert Louis Stevenson, Philosophy of Umbrellas.

• Umbrellas, like faces, acquire a certain sympathy with the individual who carries them…. May it not be said of the bearers of these inappropriate umbrellas, that they go about the streets "with a lie in their right hand?"… Except in a very few cases of hypocrisy joined to a powerful intellect, men, not by nature, umbrellarians, have tried again and again to become so by art, and yet have failed—have expended their patrimony in the purchase of umbrella after umbrella, and yet have systematically lost them, and have finally, with contrite spirits and shrunken purses, given up their vain struggle, and relied on theft and borrowing for the remainder of their lives.
  • Robert Louis Stevenson, Philosophy of Umbrellas.

• The tucked-up sempstress walks with hasty strides,
  While streams run down her oil'd umbrella's sides.
  • Jonathan Swift, Description of a City Shower.