"Didactical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... once on a time, Condescend to accept, in the humblest of rhyme, And a style more of Gay than of Milton, A few opportune verses design'd to impart Some didactical hints in a Needlework Art, Not described by the ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... walls of her sitting-room, seeking counsel of ancestral daguerreotypes and didactic samplers; but they seemed to make utterance ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... subjection to architecture and employed in the service of the Church, was decorative in scope; its purpose was illustration, its function was to teach. As painters, from generation to generation, went deeper into the secrets of their craft, they became less interested in the didactic import of their work, and they concerned themselves more and more with its purely artistic significance. Religious subjects were no longer used merely as symbols for the expression of piety and as incitements to devotion; they became ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... being didactic, he upheld his end in most discussions on applied sciences or philosophic arguments, putting forth his deep knowledge in an unobtrusive way. I found this trait to be an invariable rule with most of the ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... the Oriental story came to Germany, and so we get such works as August Gottlob Meissner's tales of Nushirvan, Massoud, Giaffar, Sadi and others,[78] or Klinger's Derwisch. Wieland used the Eastern costume in his Schach Lolo (1778) and in his politico-didactic romance of the wise Danischmende. This fondness for an Oriental atmosphere continues even into the nineteenth century and may be seen in such works as Tieck's Abdallah and Hauff's Karawane. But this brings us to the time when India and Persia were to give ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... satisfactory as, the epistles of 1613 prepared under the Advocate's instructions, had been, while the exuberant commentary upon the royal text, delivered in full assembly by his ambassador soon after the reception of the letter, was more than usually didactic, offensive, and ignorant. Sir Dudley never omitted an opportunity of imparting instruction to the States-General as to the nature of their constitution and the essential dogmas on which their Church was founded. It is true that the great lawyers and the great theologians ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... "Forgive his crimes," etc. This is quoted from Night Thoughts by the English didactic ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... impelled by their own evolutional process to seek the development in themselves of these psychic powers; and to these a word of warning seems necessary, so that at the risk of appearing didactic I must essay the task. To some it may seem unwelcome, to others redundant and supererogatory. But we are dealing with a new stage in evolutional progress—the waking up of new forces in ourselves and the prospective use of a new set of faculties. It ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... was translated into French, and became the chief source of later collections, thus appearing in the remote ancestry of the work of La Fontaine. The aesthetic value of the mediaeval fables, including those of Marie de France, is small; the didactic intention was strong, the literary ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... art little can be said; their influence is profound and silent, like the influence of nature; they mould by contact; we drink them up like water, and are bettered, yet know not how. It is in books more specifically didactic that we can follow out the effect, and distinguish and weigh and compare. A book which has been very influential upon me fell early into my hands, and so may stand first, though I think its influence was only sensible later ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Most of us, in this work-a-day world, find no small benefit from allowing our minds to lie fallow at certain times, as farmers do with their fields. In the following pages, however, I believe wisdom and wit, the didactic and the diverting, will be found ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... He ceased to consider that by fate he was a Conservative, bound by traditional conventionalities: in that great moment he knew himself sufficiently a man to exercise whatever individuality instinct prompted. He forgot the didactic methods by which he had proposed to show knowledge of his subject—both as a past and a future factor in European politics. With his own strong appreciation of present things, he saw and grasped the vast present interest lying beneath ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... of this unequalled drama, epitomized somewhat at undue length, in order to show the reader how much the philosophy that had awakened in the age of Solon now actuated the creations of poetry. Not that Aeschylus, like Euripides, deals in didactic sentences and oracular aphorisms. He rightly held such pedantries of the closet foreign to the tragic genius [22]. His philosophy is in the spirit, and not in the diction of his works—in vast conceptions, ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Adams was an orator, but he did not fall into the error of the Roman, in practically valuing eloquence more than the beneficence to which it should be devoted. Like him he was a statesman and magistrate worthy to be called "The second founder of the Republic,"—like him a teacher of didactic philosophy, of morals, and even of his own peculiar art; and like him he made all liberal learning tributary to that noble art, while poetry was the inseparable companion of his genius in its hours of relaxation from the labors of the forum and ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... thought Logan; but what he said was, 'You know Mr. Tierney, your neighbour? Out of a job as a composition master. Almost reduced to University Extension Lectures on the didactic Drama.' ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... passion—came like a surprise. Did the great actress find those attributes in the part (they asked themselves), or did she infuse them into it? Previous representatives of Portia had placed the emphasis chiefly, if not exclusively, upon morals and mind. The stage Portia of the past has usually been a didactic lady, self-contained, formal, conventional, and oratorical. Ellen Terry came, and Portia was figured exactly as she lives in the pages of Shakespeare—an imperial and yet an enchanting woman, dazzling in her ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... vague and formless infinite;" but he "proves all things," and "holds fast that which is good." If he is not an essentially popular preacher—and this is a merit which even his most partial admirers would scarcely venture to claim for him—he is edifying and didactic, and few ministers are better qualified to build up and consolidate a church. Rather too stereotyped (if we may hint such a fault) in his tendencies, he is yet deeply skilled in the form of sound doctrine, and his style is terse, vigorous, and polished. There is, perhaps, ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... ballad, entitled "Your Mission," was written one stormy day in the winter of 1861-2 by Miss Ellen M. Huntington (Mrs. Isaac Gates), and made her reputation as one of the few didactic poets whose exquisite art wins a hearing for them everywhere. In a moment of revery, while looking through the window at the falling snow, ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... laid hold of, and hung upon the gallows in sight of the people; what a lesson to all the people! Sermons might be preached; the Son of Thunder and the Mouth of Gold might turn their periods now with some hope; for here, in the most impressive way, is a divine sermon acted. Didactic as no spoken sermon could be. Didactic, devotional too;—in awed solemnity, a recognition that Eternal Justice rules the world; that at the call of this, human pity shall fall silent, and man be stern as his Master and Mandatory is!—Understand too that except upon a basis of even ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... still linger, of course, over other verse-writers of the period. Anne Bradstreet's poems, for instance, are not without grace and womanly sweetness, in spite of their didactic themes and portentous length. But this lady, born in England, the daughter of Governor Dudley and later the wife of Governor Bradstreet, chose to imitate the more fantastic of the moralizing poets of England and ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... effort may be produced, we cannot refrain from the highest admiration. How happily the epic, lyric, and dramatic diction is interwoven, not compelling, but enticing us to sympathize with such cruel fates! And how well the scanty didactic reflection becomes the chorus as it speaks! All this cannot receive too ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... more felicitous form after once departing from that of his original. He has almost re-created the stanza for his purpose, giving it new movement, and successfully adapting to the exigencies of dialogue and of narrative what has hitherto chiefly been associated with elegiac and didactic poetry. Something of this may be seen in the following passages (from the description of the transit through the frozen circle of Caina), which moreover appear to us among the best sustained of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... dependent upon varying considerations. As to the right or wrong wording of a clause in the Factory Amendment Act, he could be lucid, explanatory and convincing; as to the justice of the same clause when compared with other forms of legislation, he was vague and unconvincing, didactic and prejudiced. If Dartrey's object had been to bring these two men into closer understanding of each other, he was certainly succeeding. It is doubtful, however, whether the understanding progressed entirely in the fashion he had desired. Nora, curled up in ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... book," though jointly purchased by the Basins from a travelling salesman, as a highly illuminated volume, promising much of a lively nature, had turned out to be to an altogether unexpected degree serious and didactic. ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... Gaon, born about 940, collaborator, then successor, of his father. He wrote much, and his reputation reached Europe. Philosopher, scholar, didactic poet, and commentator of the Bible, he left authoritative Responsa, Talmudic commentaries, collections of rabbinical jurisprudence, and a Hebrew dictionary, ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... Progress addressed itself in simple, earnest English to each individual human being, telling him what he must do to escape the City of Destruction and to reach the City of All Delight; (3) JOHN DRYDEN (1631-1700), a master in the field of satiric and didactic verse and one of the pioneers in the field of modern prose criticism; (4) ALEXANDER POPE (1688-1744), another poet of the satiric and didactic school, who exalted form above matter, and wrote polished ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... of which this is a translation, is universally considered one of the very best among many beautiful poems written by the same illustrious author. The sublime didactic thoughts therein expressed, in language majestic and yet so simple, have won for it a constantly increasing popularity; and, during half a century, in a language so rich in literary beauties as the Swedish, have maintained it among the foremost of poetical productions ...
— The Angel of Death • Johan Olof Wallin
... giving the form of beauty to his conceptions, is trying to make them as significant to others as they are to him, and that aesthetic and ethical, or spiritual, significance are inextricably interwoven. It will, of course, be the care of the artist to see that any didactic ...
— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith
... to see Tavish too," continued Kenneth, with a half-laugh at his companion's didactic form of speech. "Tavish is ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... the early Victorian period, the latter work has special historical interest for the philosophical and theological student; in this respect it may be likened to Pater's "Marius the Epicurean," which vividly reproduces the Intellectual ferment of an earlier age. "Thorndale," however, is primarily didactic, and the philosophical dialogues (interesting as these are to the metaphysician) hardly atone to the general reader for an almost entire absence of plot. The above is, doubtless, an altogether extreme instance, but the exclusion of several other works from ...
— A Guide to the Best Historical Novels and Tales • Jonathan Nield
... Friendship's Garland) in the famous preserves of Six Mile Bottom, and soon after his mother dies. But it is not given to all men not to be motherless till they themselves are fifty. And 1874 is again rather barren, even such yield as it gives being rather didactic and controversial, as for instance in a letter to his sister, who had apparently remonstrated with some vigour against the tone of Literature and Dogma. A pleasant letter to Miss Kingsley on her father's death (1875) puts in good evidence against the charge ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... problems, the periodicals record, of course, the events and the interests of the little college world. Through the "Free Press" columns of these papers, the didactic, critical, and combative impulses, always so strong in the undergraduate temperament, find a safe vent. Mentor and agitator alike are welcomed in the "Free Press", and many college reforms have been inaugurated, and many college grievances—real and imagined—have ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... the nucleus of a catalogue, well worth disseminating if only it could be compiled, of fiction worthy the consumption of girlhood. Perhaps it would hardly be necessary for the present writer to protest that the didactic, the unnaturally good, the well-meaning, the entirely amateur types of fiction, including those which ignore the facts of human nature, and, above all, those which decry instead of seeking to deify the natural, would find no place ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... are performed in the course of the day at the temple of Bhuvaneshwar in Orissa. It is clear that the spirit of these rites is very different from that which inspires public worship in other civilized countries at the present day. They are not congregational or didactic, though if any of the faithful are in the temple at the time of the god's levee it is proper for them to enter and salute him. Neither do they recall the magical ceremonies of the Vedic sacrifices.[415] The waving of lights (arati) before the god and the burning ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... of the club was often, as was to be expected from its composition, scientific, but Professor Playfair says it was always free, and never didactic or disputatious, and that "as the club was much the resort of the strangers who visited Edinburgh from any objects connected with art or with science, it derived from them an extraordinary ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... character from the Krishna of the milkmaids and, without some effort at reconciliation, the two must obviously present a baffling enigma. Indeed so great is the contrast that many Englishmen, entranced by the lover, might be astonished to hear of a more didactic role, while those who value the Gita might easily be disturbed on finding its author so daringly identified with the theory and practice of romantic love. The truth, if we are to admit it, is that ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... trouble the teacher who uses the nature story as a story, rather than as a text-book, for she will not be so keenly attracted toward the books prepared with a didactic purpose. She will find a good gift for the child in nature stories which are stories, over and above any stimulus to his curiosity about fact. That good gift is a certain possession of all ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... Doctrine or Principle is taught, recognized, illustrated, or enforced, 53 Note the Promises and Predictions, 53 Take Notes, 53 Read the Gospel to study the Character of Christ, 53 Things to be observed in Sacred History and Biography, 54 Poetic and Didactic Parts of the Bible, 55 ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... he finished, feeling inadequate and hopelessly didactic. "Cure them; send them out with a smile; and—leave the rest to ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Bk. IV. It is of Syriac origin, undoubtedly introduced into Eastern Turkestan by the early Nestorian missions, probably in the 8th or 9th century. The oldest known example of this character so applied, the Kudatku Bilik, a didactic poem in Uighur (a branch of Oriental Turkish), dating from A.D. 1069, was published by Prof. Vambery in 1870. A new edition of the Kudatku Bilik was published at St. Petersburg, in 1891, by Dr. W. Radloff. Vambery had a pleasing ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... dropped her cloak, and, not even glancing at G.J., went to the fire and teased it with the poker. Bending down, with one hand on the graphic and didactic mantelpiece, and staring into the fire, ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... teachers of the Haggadah, called Rabbanan d'Aggadta in the Talmud, were no folklorists, from whom a faithful reproduction of legendary material may be expected. Primarily they were homilists, who used legends for didactic purposes, and their main object was to establish a close connection between the Scripture and the creations of the popular fancy, to give the latter a firm basis and secure a long term of life ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... entered the house, her father and Mr. Heddegan immediately at her back. Her mother had been so didactic that she had felt herself absolutely unable to broach the subjects in the centre ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... pleasant nature, since momentarily they kept leaving behind them a satisfied smile. Indeed, so engrossed was he that he never noticed that his coachman, elated with the hospitality of Manilov's domestics, was making remarks of a didactic nature to the off horse of the troika [11], a skewbald. This skewbald was a knowing animal, and made only a show of pulling; whereas its comrades, the middle horse (a bay, and known as the Assessor, owing to his having been acquired from a gentleman ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... mind a detestation of such cold-blooded, inhuman profligacy, and I felt that I would rather every pleasure that can flow from the intercourse of women were debarred me than run such a course. The moral effect upon my mind was stronger than any which ever resulted from the most didactic work, and if anyone wants to excite remorse in the most vicious mind I would recommend him to make use of 'Les Liaisons ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... (thrusting his hand into his waistcoat, and in his most didactic of tones).—"From a remote period, the choice of a title has perplexed the scribbling portion of mankind. We may guess how their invention has been racked by the strange contortions it has produced. To begin with the Hebrews. 'The Lips ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... obviously prepared for children, begin to appear, they are almost entirely educational and by no means the work of the best artists of the period. Even when they come to be numerous, their object is seldom to amuse; they are didactic, and as a rule convey solemn warnings. The idea of a draughtsman of note setting himself deliberately to please a child would have been inconceivable not so many years ago. To be seen and not heard was the utmost demanded ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... penetrating questions drives the guilty pair to an involuntary confession, or the fidelity with which the whole immortal scene reflects the eternal facts of human nature. The religious teaching of J is extraordinarily powerful and impressive, all the more that it is never directly didactic; it shines through the simple and unstudied ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... notaries, lawyers, music-masters, gardeners, pastoureaux; in short, a spectacle for the eyes and the ears, for all the senses, the very opposite of the prevailing drama in which three pasteboard characters, seated on classic chairs, exchange didactic arguments in an abstract saloon. And still better, it is an imbroglio displaying a superabundance of action, amidst intrigues that cross, interrupt and renew each other, through a pele-mele of travesties, exposures, surprises, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... (2) journeymanship, (3) mastership—are fixed limitations in the didactic process; they are relative only in the concrete. The standard of special excellence varies with the different grades of culture, and must be varied that it may have any historical value. The master is complete only in relation to the journeyman and apprentice; to them he is superior. But ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... greatest educational work was undoubtedly his "Great Didactic," or the "Art of Teaching All Things to All Men." It was a thorough and comprehensive treatise on the whole science, method, scope and purpose of universal education. As this book has been recently translated into English, I need not here attempt the task of giving an outline of its contents. ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... This discussion is necessarily didactic and assertive for it is impossible to prove or disprove any of these postulates. It is for that reason, and the lack of time that I cite no instances. They would be merely illustrative and not probative, ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... the same direction, and the impression which each makes upon the tottering fabric of the Roman greatness, connects their distant movements, and measures the relative importance assigned to them in the panoramic history. The more peaceful and didactic episodes on the development of the Roman law, or even on the details of ecclesiastical history, interpose themselves as resting-places or divisions between the periods of barbaric invasion. In short, though distracted first ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... God's Way" belongs to the second group of Bjoernson's novels, of which the first group is represented by early peasant tales like "Arne." In this later category the stories are of a more or less didactic nature. Although "In God's Way" lacks something of the freshness and beauty that distinguished "Arne," it is, nevertheless a powerful and vivid picture of Norwegian religious life; and it is, of all Bjoernson's books, the one by which he is most widely known ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... least dignified and intelligent. His mind has absorbed the Christian religion and the Christian theology, and he not unfrequently rises to noble heights in the interpretation of their mysteries. His didactic poems, the Hamartigenia or the Origin of Evil and the Apotheosis, a treatise on the Person of Christ, prove him to be a theologian of no mean calibre. He is also an allegorist, as is proved by the Psychomachia or the Battle ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius
... the school, the simplest offshoot, perhaps, from a congeries of families, we have, or ought to have, the parental element; we have magistracy also, and a certain statehood; we have, or should have, worship. The state, properly apprehended, is not only governmental but didactic—it is a teaching power; and though not, at this age of the world, theocratic, it should be, in a large view, religious. In the church, having specially and predominantly the last-named characteristic,—being of divine appointment, and as ministering to our imperative needs, the foster-mother ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... was "Beauty and the Beast" in a long-winded style extending to more than 250 pages. In 1757, a greatly abridged form of this version was published by Madame de Beaumont, who was then living in England and who wrote many spirited tales designed for children. Her stories are full of the didactic element, and "Beauty and the Beast" is no exception to the rule. These "edifying commonplaces," however, are so sound and fit into the story so naturally that the reader does not suffer from their ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... mind richly imbued with the lore of the finest literature, and distinguished by just that touch of paradox, of the unexpected, which is the other indispensable requisite of the true essayist. Also her philosophy is never aggressively didactic, but ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... and Mara, evidently on the closest terms of intimacy, and more than usually demonstrative and affectionate; they would sit together and use each other's needles, scissors, thread, and thimbles interchangeably, as if anxious to express every minute the most overflowing confidence. Sly winks and didactic nods were covertly exchanged among the elderly people, and when Mrs. Kittridge entered with more than usual airs of impressive solemnity, several of these were covertly directed toward her, as a matron whose views in life ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... 'haflin callant,' and never became a full-grown and brawny man. Wordsworth was equal to the epic of the age, but has only constructed the great porch leading up to the edifice, and one or two beautiful cottages lying around. Coleridge could have written a poem—whether didactic, or epic, or dramatic—equal in fire and force to the 'Iliad,' or the 'Hamlet,' or the 'De Rerum Natura,' and superior to any of the three in artistic finish and metaphysical truth and religious feeling—a work ranking immediately beside the 'Paradise Lost;' but he has, instead, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... next day. I cut a clerical meeting; I flouted the True Romance in the shape of the Pageant's second performance; I also missed the bazaar of St. Uriel's Native Church that was held on the Pageant ground. St. Uriel's structure had been put out to European contract; it was a very didactic building, so the Pageant-Master told us. We passed it on our way ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... abundance and freshness of the quotations makes the volume very attractive reading, without reference to its didactic value. ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... name leaps to my lips—have a certain freedom in our outlook upon life, a freedom which I think produces strength and not weakness. Manners are not morals, but I grow heavy and it does not become a seafaring man to be didactic. ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... humor, which is really a sense of proportion; to correct certain tendencies by showing the consequences in the career of the hero in the story [Of this motive the children must be quite unconscious and there should be no didactic emphasis]; to present by means of example, not precept, such ideals as will sooner or later be translated into action; and finally, to develop the imagination, which really ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... Jeremiah with Lamentations, Ezekiel and the twelve minor prophets. It was not completed prior to 300 B.C., because the book of Jonah was not written before. This work may be called a historical parable composed for a didactic purpose, giving a milder, larger view of Jehovah's favor than the orthodox one, that excluded the Gentiles. Ruth, containing an idyllic story with an unfinished genealogy attached, meant to glorify the house of David, and presenting a kindred ...
— The Canon of the Bible • Samuel Davidson
... a kiss. Now what she said set him on edge. The talk he had been living amongst had spoilt him for silly criticisms. Moreover, for the first time he detected in her a slight tone of the 'schoolmarm'—didactic and self-satisfied, without knowledge. The measure Madame de Pastourelles had dealt out to him, he in ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Thorough Treatise on the Art of Speaking and Reading. With numerous Selections of Didactic, ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... year 1810, and after he had brought to a certain conclusion four years previously the researches which he had pursued most carefully the whole time, did he make public the actual masterpiece, Entwurf einer Farbenlehre.7 (An English translation of the didactic part appeared about ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... afterwards when she came into power. Gilby had explained other things to her, small practical things, such as some points in English grammar, some principles of taste in woman's dress, how to choose the wools for her knitting, how to make muffins for his tea. It was his kindly, conceited, didactic nature that made him instruct whenever he talked to her. Zilda learned it all, and learned also to admire and love the ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... marvels of science or pseudo-science, conundrums, tables of the assize of food; the laws respecting the sale of meat, bread, beer, wine, and other necessaries; while above and beyond all are a collection in various handwritten of ballads, songs, hymns, and didactic poems of a religious kind, some few of which have been met with elsewhere; but of the greater number of them no other copy, I ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... even in practical jokes. The objection, however, is not only false, but very much the reverse of the facts. The fairy-tales are at root not only moral in the sense of being innocent, but moral in the sense of being didactic, moral in the sense of being moralising. It is all very well to talk of the freedom of fairyland, but there was precious little freedom in fairyland by the best official accounts. Mr. W.B. Yeats and other sensitive modern souls, feeling that modern life is ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... native city. He applied himself with laborious zeal to the mastery of a wide range of subjects, and hastened, with pedantic gravity, to retail his newly won learning to his sisters and a group of their friends. For the time being, the impulse of self-expression took this didactic turn, which is very prominent also in his correspondence. Within the year he was betrothed to a member of this informal class, Wilhelmina von Zenge, the daughter of an officer. The question of a career now crowded ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... great educational works of Comenius are his "Gate of Tongues Unlocked," the "Great Didactic," and his "Orbis Pictus." Mr. Quick thinks that the "Great Didactic" contains, in the best form, the principles he afterward endeavored to work out"[100] in his other educational writings. "The ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... Colophon, an Alexandrian didactic poet. The [Greek: theriaka] survives, is over 1,000 lines long, and deals with the bites ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... well-defined transaction; and the story of King Canute is a ballad,—one of the best that has been produced in our language in modern years. But such pieces as those called The End of the Play and Vanitas Vanitatum, which are didactic as well as pathetic, are not ballads in the common sense; nor are such songs as The Mahogany Tree, or the little collection called Love Songs made Easy. The majority of the pieces are not ballads, but if they be good of the kind we should be ungrateful to ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... practice he married his first wife, who died within two years afterward, plunging him into the deepest grief. During his courtship he dabbled (as almost every young lawyer does until he finds that clients are severe critics) in poetry, and wrote a didactic poem of two parts in heroic verse, entitled "The Power of Solitude." Adopting the criticism of the biographers—its prominent defects were exaggeration of feeling, confusion of imagery, want of simplicity of expression, stilted and artificial style. But though dull as a poem, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... appearance—a pleasant quarto with roomy pages faithfully printed in a fair type. You ought to enjoy the owner's evident enjoyment (he was never bored and therefore never boring), his charmingly ingenuous pride of possession, his shrewd, humorous and excessively didactic utterances about painters, pictures, architecture and female beauty, his zeal for water-colour sketching and his apparently profound contempt of other exponents of the craft. Nothing could be less like (I thank Heaven) the ordinary yachtsman's recollections ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 21, 1920 • Various
... with others which do not appeal to us. To put aside altogether its extraordinary and in a way epoch-making style, which gives it its main actual place in the history of English literature, it is further loaded with didactic digressions which, though certain later novelists have been somewhat peccant in the kind, have never been quite equalled—no, not in Rasselas itself or the Fool of Quality. But if anybody, who has the necessary knowledge to understand, and therefore ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... the spirit of meekness his didactic attitude seemed to require. "I'll try to remember that, and not fall into ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... was with the Johnsons everything was superficial; and, as regards life, everything was brought down to the question of right and wrong. They were too didactic; art should never be didactic; and what is life but an art? Pater has said that so well, somewhere. With the Johnsons I am afraid I lost many opportunities; the tone was gray and cottony, I might almost ...
— A Bundle of Letters • Henry James
... treated as a child's book. Berquin's Children's Friend, Edgeworth's Parent's Assistant and the Aikins's Evenings at Home, will surely still amuse children, although some may think their teaching too didactic. It is only by practical experience that we can tell what children will like. Sandford and Merton is, I believe, usually considered as hopelessly out of date, but I have found young hearers follow my reading of it with the greatest interest. The Pilgrim's Progress will always have ...
— How to Form a Library, 2nd ed • H. B. Wheatley
... bravely against physical weakness, but their work has not usually been of a creative order, dependent for its success on high animal spirits. They have written histories, essays, contemplative or didactic poems, works which may more or less be regarded as 'dull narcotics numbing pain.' But who, in so fragile a frame as Robert Louis Stevenson's, has retained such indomitable elasticity, such fertility of ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... not catch them, nor, I'm afraid, did Nina,' said Dick. 'Look there! I'll be shot if she's not giving your friend the major a lesson! When she performs in that way with her hands, you may swear she is didactic.' ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... take care, Cerinthy Ann," said her mother; "they say that 'those who sing before breakfast will cry before supper.' Girls talk about getting married," she said, relapsing into a gentle didactic melancholy, "without ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... your didactic and respectable rules won't do for me. If you expect straws to stop currents, you are sadly mistaken! But no—let matters be: I am a happy contented mortal at present, say what you will.... You don't ask why? Perhaps you know. ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... elements—a question indeed which among those who care for him most has always been at issue. Or again, what degree of true inspiring and illuminating power belongs to the gospel, or gospels, airily encouraging or gravely didactic, which are set forth in the essays with so captivating a grace? Or whether in romance and tale he had a power of inventing and constructing a whole fable comparable to his admitted power of conceiving and presenting single scenes ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... rather than me, speak awhile. Allow me to give you a few specimens of these choruses—the first as an example of that practical and yet surely not un-divine wisdom, by which they supplied the place of our modern preacher, or essayist, or didactic poet. ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... weakness, his poverty and distress only add to his titles; he sues in forma pauperis: he ought to be a favourite of the Court. But when the other ground is taken, when the question is political, when a new Constitution is to be made on a sound theory of government, then the presumptuous pride of didactic ignorance is to be excluded from the council in this high and arduous matter, which often bids defiance to the experience of the wisest. The first claims a personal representation; the latter rejects it with scorn and fervour. The language of the first party is plain and intelligible; ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... was better off, and as he was vain of all his advantages, he was particularly pleased to have an opportunity of exhibiting them. Turning to the paragraph he read the following lines, in that sort of didactic tone and elaborate style with which gentlemen who commence the graces after thirty are a little ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... offer to my friends in London, I took my departure, but not without protestations from them that I ought to let my services be employed in nothing short of the Pansophic Design." [Footnote: Autobiographic Introduction to the "Second Part" of the Opera Didactica of Comenius (1657), containing his Didactic writings from 1642 to 1650.] This is very interesting, and, I have no doubt, quite accurate. [Footnote: I have not been able to find in the Lords or Commons Journals for 1641 and 1642 any traces of those communications ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... the Rev. Robley Wilson preached one of his very best sermons. His preaching was ex tempore, and full of vigour. He discoursed of righteousness, of temperance, and of judgment to come on the unrighteous and the intemperate. He waxed more and more didactic. He called upon his hearers to thank the Lord that such men as he, the Reverend Robley Wilson, had thought fit to devote their lives to the service of the children of Ham, instead of shining in metropolitan pulpits and pouring vials of saving grace over the heads of the elect of the children ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... of sentimentalism were not grasped by any noteworthy poet before Thomson. The Seasons was an innovation, and its novelty lay not so much in the choice of the subject as in the interpretation. Didactic as well as descriptive, it was designed not merely to present realistic pictures but to arouse certain explicitly stated thoughts and feelings. Thomson had absorbed some of Shaftesbury's ideas. ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... to see the only permanent trace of the now old usurping deluge of Byronism; but it is truly a fact of the time,—less a characteristic than a portion of it. Every species of composition—the dramatic, the narrative, the lyric, the didactic, the descriptive—is imbued with this spirit; and the reader may calculate with almost equal certainty on becoming acquainted with the belief of a poet as of a theologian or a moralist. Of the evils resulting from the practice, the most annoying and the worst is that some of the lesser poets, ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... have brought great things to pass. Though these themes are as old as the human race, yet they are ever new, and more interesting to the young than any fiction. The cry of youth is for life! more life! No didactic or dogmatic teaching, however brilliant, will capture a twentieth-century boy, keyed up to the highest pitch by the pressure of an intense civilization. The romance of achievement under difficulties, of obscure beginnings and triumphant ends; the story ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... the Church Fathers, born about 250 A.D., and died about 330, probably at Treves. He wrote Divinarum Institutionum Libri VII. and other controversial and didactic works against the learning and philosophy ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... consented, but he gave in at last and began reading aloud out of his copybook. Mariana sat close to him and gazed into his face as he read. She had been right; she turned out to be a very severe critic. Very few of the verses pleased her. She preferred the purely lyrical, short ones, to the didactic, as she expressed it. Nejdanov did not read well. He had not the courage to attempt any style, and at the same time wanted to avoid a dry tone. It turned out neither the one thing nor the other. Mariana ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... to portray in some degree their influence in the struggle of the Colonies to attain their independence. The narration of events takes the form of a story—a slight thread of romance being employed, rather than didactic narrative, to more vividly picture the scenes and the parts performed by the actors in the great historic drama. It will not be difficult for the reader to discern between the facts of history and the imaginative parts of ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... can ever wholly extinguish among mankind;" to illustrate "the growth and progress of individual mind aspiring after excellence, and devoted to the love of mankind;" and to celebrate Love "as the sole law which should govern the moral world." The wild romantic treatment of this didactic motive makes the poem highly characteristic of its author. It is written in Spenserian stanzas, with a rapidity of movement and a dazzling brilliance that are Shelley's own. The story relates the kindling of a nation to freedom at the cry of a young poet-prophet, the temporary triumph ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... we have mentioned on another occasion. Young still survived, a venerable monument of poetical talents. Thomson, the poet of the Seasons, displayed a luxuriancy of genius in describing the beauties of nature. Akenside and Armstrong excelled in didactic poetry. Even the Epopoea did not disdain an English dress; but appeared to advantage in the Leonidas of Glover, and the Epigoniad of Wilkie. The public acknowledged a considerable share of dramatic merit in the tragedies of Young, Mallet, Home, and some other less distinguished ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... Advena, rebelliously; and indeed he had been a trifle didactic to her grievance. They laughed together, and then with a look at her in which observation seemed suddenly ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... the Third Division was never even begun, and "the materials," we are told, "of which it would have been formed have been incorporated, for the most part, in the author's other publications." Nor need this change of plan be regretted: didactic poems admit easily of mutilation; and all that can be called plot in this series of works is contained in the Prelude, in which we see Wordsworth arriving at those convictions which in the Excursion ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers |
