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Subservient or subordinate, like a handmaid; auxiliary. The Convocation of York seems to have been always considered as inferior, and even ancillary, to the greater province. Hallam.

be breathlessly anxious or eager (for). [Obs.] They anhele . . . for the fruit of our convocation. Latimer.

ssing, prayer, or kind wishes in favor of any person or thing; a solemn or affectionate invocation of happiness. So saying, he arose; whom Adam thus Followed with benediction. Milton. Homeward serenely she walked with God's benediction upon her. Longfellow. Specifically:

A declaration of divine favor, or an invocation imploring divine favor on some or something; a benediction; a wish of happiness pronounces. This is the blessing, where with Moses the man of God blessed the children of Israel. Deut. xxxiii. 1.

es; of a cruel, gross, and stupid nature; coarse; unfeeling; unintelligent. O, let all provocation Take every brutish shape it can devise. Leigh Hunt. Man may . . . render himself brutish, but it is in vain that he would seek to take the rank and density of the brute. I. Taylor.

A divine vocation or summons. St. Paul himself believed he did well, and that he had a call to it, when he persecuted the Christians. Locke.

A summoning or convocation, as of Parliament. The frequent calling and meeting of Parlaiment. Macaulay.

One of the French Protestant insurgents who rebelled against Louis XIV, after the revocation of the edict of Nates; -- so called from the peasant's smock (camise) which they wore.

is placed in the catalogue (canon) of saints and commended to perpetual veneration and invocation. Canonization of saints was not known to the Christian church titl toward the middle of the tenth century. Hoock.

A contrary order; revocation of a former order or command. Have you no countermand for Claudio yet, But he must die to-morrow Shak.

An invocation of, or prayer for, harm or injury; malediction. Lady, you know no rules of charity, Which renders good for bad, blessings for curses. Shak.

An invocation of, or address to, the Supreme Being.

The act of defying, putting in opposition, or provoking to combat; a challenge; a provocation; a summons to combat. A war without a just defiance made. Dryden. Stood for her cause, and flung defiance down. Tennyson.

stes time or distracts attention. Prevented from finishing them [the letters] a thousand avocations and dissipations. Swift. Dissipation of energy. Same as Degradation of energy, under Degradation.

The dreary ground." Prior. Full many a dreary anxious hour. Keble. Johnson entered on his vocation in the most dreary part of that dreary interval which separated two ages of prosperity. Macaulay.

ist.), an edict issued by Henry IV. (A. D. 1598), giving toleration to Protestants. Its revocation by Louis XIV. (A. D. 1685) was followed by terrible persecutions and the expatriation of thousands of French Protestants.

Indicating, or characterized by, equivocation.

An equivocation; a guibble. B. Jonson.

Vocation; business; profession.

the North American Indians, participated in by both sexes, and looked upon as a rite of invocation the purpose of which is, through trance and vision, to bring the dancer into communion with the unseen world and the spirits of departed friends. The dance is the chief rite of the Ghost-dance, or Messiah, religion, which…