What is "essaying"

Usage examples of "essaying".

You see, besides their casks of water and brined pork, the other ships were laden with all manner of digging and essaying equipment.

For the next ten minutes I was obliged to wheeze over and fumble through a dozen-odd other documents, all of them patents for various monopolies and inventions – new methods of essaying gold or rigging ships – together with the title-deeds for freehold properties scattered across England, Ireland and Virginia.

They took their time, ever shifting, feinting, circling, testing, side-stepping, essaying strokes that were hastily blocked and as hastily aborted while the attacker covered himself.

Once he's mastered the fundamentals and if Your Grace so desire it, I'll go on with him to the Florentine drill—rapier and left-hand dagger—before essaying to teach him broadsword and buckler.

Also, winter is almost upon us, and I doubt that the Archbishop or you, his mother, would want the boy essaying the so-called roads in a coach.

Once he's mastered the fundamentals and if Your Grace so desire it, I'll go on with him to the Florentine drill-rapier and left-hand daggerbefore essaying to teach him broadsword and buckler.

Langholme dropped the truncheon of a lance for the onset, and they moved in with a double, weaving, essaying swiftness, like one man before a mirror.

He had moved to the center of the square, looking behind him to make sure there was room for the movements he was now essaying, then retreating so that the fountain would protect his back.

I refrain from mentioning the many times when, essaying a route in the dark, Roberto ended up among the hammocks of the crew, or stumbled over the pilgrims.

Once he's mastered the fundamentals and if Your Grace so desire it, I'll go on with him to the Florentine drill-rapier and left-hand dagger-before essaying to teach him broadsword and buckler.

But, quickly repenting, and essaying to overtake the departing Hebrews, who had crossed the sea on dry ground, they were covered and overwhelmed in the returning waters.

But after that proud and therefore envious angel (of whose fall I have said as much as I was able in the eleventh and twelfth books of this work, as well as that of his fellows, who, from being God’s angels, became his angels), preferring to rule with a kind of pomp of empire rather than to be another’s subject, fell from the spiritual Paradise, and essaying to insinuate his persuasive guile into the mind of man, whose unfallen condition provoked him to envy now that himself was fallen, he chose the serpent as his mouthpiece in that bodily Paradise in which it and all the other earthly animals were living with those two human beings, the man and his wife, subject to them, and harmless.

With his gift of tongues, he was already pointing at objects and essaying the Indian names for them.