"Illiterate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... house up and shut his door, after the ticking of the clock had ceased to be incidental and become portentous, Hazel lay and tried to think. But she only heard two voices in endless contradiction, 'I munna go. I mun go.' At last she got up and fetched the book of charms, written in a childish, illiterate hand, ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... Five long, rich, closely packed columns stood under the head of "Condition"; and amid a thousand illustrations of its use, the text: "1684, Bunyan, Pilgr., ii. 84. He said that Mercy was a pretty lass, but troubled with ill conditions." Poor illiterate John Bunyan stood in the centre of a group of learned and famous men, composed of Chaucer, Wyclif, Skelton, Palsgrave, Raleigh, Featly, Richard Steel, and Walter Scott—all agreeing in their use ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... his office. Mr Chalk, a quiet-looking little man, with easy familiar manners, which won the confidence of his illiterate constituents, knowing Bob Fox well, received us graciously. His eyes glittered as he heard the ...
— Peter Trawl - The Adventures of a Whaler • W. H. G. Kingston
... a famous Empire run-up by Jordan, the sly builder and decorator who had got on so surprisingly. In James's younger days, Jordan was an obscure and illiterate nobody. And now he had a motor car, and looked at the tottering James with sardonic contempt, from under his heavy, heavy-lidded dark eyes. He was rather stout, frail in health, but silent and insuperable, was A. ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... refuse it, because I am convinced that, by giving it, I should only increase their distress. I admit that the end of government is their happiness. But, that they may be governed for their happiness, they must not be governed according to the doctrines which they have learned from their illiterate, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of the sixteenth century ''the majority of the clergy were nearly illiterate, and many of them addicted to drunkenness and low vices.—Hallam, "Const. Hist, ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener
... out forged letters to the illiterate people. A very judicious expedient, I must say. Village folks can be got to believe anything. But how ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... that the idle and illiterate will complain that I have increased their labours by endeavouring to diminish them; and that I have explained what is more easy by what is more difficult— ignotum per ignotius. I expect, on the other hand, the liberal acknowledgements of ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... been systematically collected; it stretched pretty equably through two centuries,—namely, from about 1600 to 1800,—and might, perhaps, amount to seventeen thousand volumes. Lord Massey was far from illiterate; and his interest in books was unaffected, if limited, and too often interrupted, by defective knowledge. The library was dispersed through six or seven small rooms, lying between the drawing-room in one wing, and the dining-room ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... and general good. "It combines all the fascination of a fairy tale and all the simple truth of human adventure, holding out the same allurement to every being, whether he is a noble, a commoner, a merchant, a literate or illiterate person, a private soldier, a lackey, children of both sexes, beginning at an age when a child begins to love a fairy tale—all might read it or listen to it, without tedium." Every one will draw from it what he most needs. Not less ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... work, not only to incidents unknown to the medium, but to scientific facts which the medium can not possibly comprehend. It is a matter of common knowledge that mediums are usually people without technical scientific knowledge. Some of them have some degree of education and some of them are illiterate. Some of the most celebrated belong to the ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... to the custom of profound historians, who always assign deep causes to great events,) to ascribe the better half of the Duke of Marlborough's greatness and riches to those graces. He was eminently illiterate, wrote bad English, and spelled it still worse. He had no share of what is commonly called parts; that is, he had no brightness, nothing shining in his genius. He had, most undoubtedly, an excellent good plain understanding, with sound judgment. But these alone would probably ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... Demosthenes bemoaned, that although he had been the most industrious of all the pleaders, and had spent almost the whole strength and vigor of his body in that employment, he could not yet find any acceptance with the people, while drunken sots, mariners, and illiterate fellows were heard, and had the hustings for their own. "You say true, Demosthenes," replied Satyrus, "but I will quickly remedy the cause of all this, if you will repeat to me some passage out of Euripides or Sophocles." When Demosthenes had pronounced one, ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... affairs of art, as in other matters, important discoveries are sometimes made, and great events occasionally accomplished, by very ignoble agencies. Mat's deplorable ignorance of Painting in general, and grossly illiterate misunderstanding of the subject represented by Columbus in particular, seemed to mark him out as the last man in the world who could possibly be associated with Art Mystic in the character of guardian ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... that had been given me. The first was a medical prescription for an anti-lice ointment and the second an illiterate letter extremely difficult to decipher, mostly about somebody whom the writer was having trouble to manage, "now that you aren't here." I translated as well as I could for an attentive audience. "Toujours les totos," they cried merrily ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... replied, "be contented that men of learning praise our actions, and thereby inspire us with additional courage in war. I wish I could employ more time in reading, and could expend some of that money on learned men which I must throw away on so many illiterate knights." ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... Negroes, and illiterate persons of all complexions, set up as doctors. Old Joe Pye and Sabbatus were famous Indian healers. Indian squaws, such as Molly Orcutt, sold many a decoction of leaves and barks to ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... writers which suddenly broke into this field." Shakespeare found a great mass of old plays existing in manuscript and reproduced from time to time on the stage. He borrowed in all directions: "A great poet who appears in illiterate times absorbs into his sphere all the light which is anywhere radiating." Homer, Chaucer, Saadi, felt that all wit was their wit. "Chaucer is a huge borrower." Emerson gives a list of authors from whom he drew. This list is in many particulars ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Adela was surprised he shouldn't have communicated with herself. Muriel accomplished an upright little letter to Mrs. Churchley—her eldest sister neither fostered nor discouraged the performance—to which Mrs. Churchley replied, after a fortnight, in a meagre and, as Adela thought, illiterate fashion, making no allusion to the approach of any closer tie. Evidently the situation had changed; the question of the marriage was dropped, at any rate for the time. This idea gave our young woman a singular and almost intoxicating sense of power; she felt as if she were riding a great ...
— The Marriages • Henry James
... would be comparatively little crime to chronicle. This offense must always exist here, unless through some unexpected agency a complete change should be effected in the social conditions which prevail. The abiding place of a large class of idle, illiterate, and consequently vicious persons, it is but reasonable that the respectable element should be preyed upon ...
— A Review of Hoffman's Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 1 • Kelly Miller
... uttered since then. There were pigmies in the old days, too. I had a friend who, as a stenographer some years ago, made a fortune by knocking bad grammar out of the speeches of Congressmen and Senators, who were illiterate. They said to him haughtily, "Stenographer, here are a couple of hundred dollars; fix up that speech I made this morning, and see that it gets into the Congressional Record all right. If you can't fix ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... Paul's victory had somewhat subsided, Roy produced the letter he had found in the cabin of the paralyzed Indian. Colonel Howell, having heard the explanation of the finding of the letter, without any hesitation and evidently without any qualms of conscience, drew out the enclosure. The letter was an illiterate scrawl. ...
— On the Edge of the Arctic - An Aeroplane in Snowland • Harry Lincoln Sayler
... amazing to me that this person should have assurance, in the face of the sun, to go about persuading your Highness that our age is almost wholly illiterate and has hardly produced one writer upon any subject. I know very well that when your Highness shall come to riper years, and have gone through the learning of antiquity, you will be too curious to neglect inquiring into the authors of the very age before you; and ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... priests among the lower orders; and we have had the opportunity of making an analogous comparison in England, where many of us can remember country districts in which the great mass of the people were christianized by illiterate Methodist and Independent ministers, while the influence of the parish clergyman among the poor did not extend much beyond a few old women in scarlet cloaks and a ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... Conspiracy to respectability and editorial law, but when he sent the manuscript on to the Quarterly, the editor of the Quarterly also refused it. The literary standard of the two Quarterlies was not so high as to suggest that the article was illiterate beyond the power of an active and willing editor to redeem it. Adams had no choice but to realize that he had to deal in 1870 with the same old English character of 1860, and the same inability in himself to understand it. As usual, when an ally was needed, the ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... agreeable hour without the assistance of a companion, which has always appeared to me necessary to such enjoyment; my daughter and her companion were both retired sea-sick to bed; the other passengers were a rude school-boy of fourteen years old and an illiterate Portuguese friar, who understood no language but his own, in which I had not the least smattering. The captain was the only person left in whose conversation I might indulge myself; but unluckily, besides a total ...
— Journal of A Voyage to Lisbon • Henry Fielding
... Extremely illiterate, not hoping, like the middle classes, to ascend the social scale, not in any way feeling itself the equal of the nobles, and not aspiring ever to become their equal, the people had views and interests very different to those of the ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... was the only human being who had ever understood him. He could never, he thought, have got through his tortured school days without her. After she died he would not go to school. He was not in any sense educated. His father and grandfather had been illiterate men and he had inherited their underdeveloped brain cells. But he loved poetry and read all he could get of it. It overlaid his primitive nature with a curious iridescence of fancy and furnished him with ideals and hungers his environment could never satisfy. He loved beauty in everything. Moonrises ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... learning, is by no means exposed to the vicissitudes of those that are polished by refined nations;[AF] and that, however paradoxical it may appear, it is nevertheless true, that the degeneracy of a language is more frequently to be attributed to an extravagant refinement than to the neglect of an illiterate people, unless indeed external causes interfere. May we not hence conclude, that as the Romansh has never been used in any regular composition in writing till the sixteenth century, nor affected by any foreign invasion or intimate connexion, it is not likely to have ...
— Account of the Romansh Language - In a Letter to Sir John Pringle, Bart. P. R. S. • Joseph Planta, Esq. F. R. S.
... was corporal in Africa, sergeant in the Crimea, and after Solferino had been made lieutenant, having devoted fifteen years of laborious toil and heroic bravery to obtaining that rank, and was so illiterate that he had no chance of ever getting ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... coarse and illiterate, but she had some natural affection; she "took on" sadly when the little girl was about to leave her, and Ann clung to her frantically. It was a pitiful scene, and Samuel Wales, who was a very tender-hearted man, was glad when it was over, and he jogging ...
— The Adventures of Ann - Stories of Colonial Times • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... of Louisiana was convicted of fraud. A supreme court judge of South Carolina offered his decisions for sale, and Whipper and Moses, both notorious thieves, were elected judges by the South Carolina Legislature. In Alabama there were many illiterate magistrates, among them the city judge of Selma, who in April 1865, was still living as a slave. Governor Chamberlain, a radical, asserted that there were two hundred trial judges in South Carolina ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... an instinctive sentiment. The contrary is the fact. Unless we are dominated by some other sentiment than justice, we instinctively yield assent to Aristotle's proposition that the prize flute should be awarded to the best flute player whether opulent or indigent, literate or illiterate, citizen or slave. A group of small children exploring the fields and woods for wild flowers will concede to each what flowers he finds whether by his better eyes or better luck. So with groups of small boys fishing in the streams ...
— Concerning Justice • Lucilius A. Emery
... back to life, he had brought her life, and never once since that day had he chilled her with a littleness or broken a thread of what was spinning in her heart. He was illiterate, he was rough, but he was Raft. He was the great beach of Kerguelen and the sea-bulls and the distant islands, he was the hand that had destroyed Loneliness and driven away Death, the child who had listened to Jack and the Bean Stalk, the Lion that had destroyed Chang, ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... than to any other single cause. At the beginning of his administration, there were no steam railroads, but fifteen hundred miles were in operation before the end of his second term. His predecessor in the presidential chair was John Quincy Adams, a Harvard graduate and an aristocrat. Jackson was illiterate, a man of the people. There was an extension of the social ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... first time in his life, I do not think he expected in the least that his performance would enable me to boast of his Tom Broadbent as a genuine stage classic. Mrs Patrick Campbell was famous before I wrote for her, but not for playing illiterate cockney flower-maidens. And in the case which is provoking me to all these impertinences, I am quite sure that Miss Gertrude Kingston, who first made her reputation as an impersonator of the most delightfully feather-headed ...
— Great Catherine • George Bernard Shaw
... religion? Can it be a matter of astonishment, that slaves often feel that there is no just God for the poor African? Nay, verily; and were it not for the comforting and sustaining influence that these poor, illiterate and suffering creatures feel as coming from an unearthly source, they would in their ignorance all become infidels. To me, that beautiful Sabbath morning was clouded in midnight darkness, and I retired to ponder on ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... it is true, but he was entirely illiterate, and all his money had been made in trade. As a lad his education had been neglected, for his early life had been spent in the mere struggle for existence. He had been more than successful, but the honours of the student never could be his, and never could he act as one ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... little tracts, which dealt so summarily with the destinies of the human race, even when his growing reason and the perusal of works more classical or more logical had led him to perceive that they were illiterate, and to suspect that they jumped from premises to conclusions with a celerity very different from the careful ratiocination of mechanical science, had still, in the citations and references wherewith ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in the works of religion or law or in any but modern profane literature, an invocation to Civa. But he is no more a patron of literature than is Ganeca, or in other words, Civaism is not more literary than is Ganecaism. In a literary country no religion is so illiterate as Civaism, no writings are so inane as are those in his honor. There is no poem, no religious literary monument, no Pur[a]na even, dedicated to Civa, that has any literary merit. All that is readable in sectarian literature, the best Pur[a]nas, the Divine Song, the sectarian R[a]m[a]yana, ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... Lady Grosvenor, a correspondence which in 1770 gave great delight to contemporary caricaturists and scandal-mongers. Other poets besides Goldsmith seem to have been attracted by this particular lapse of his illiterate Royal Highness, since it is woven into a ballad printed in 'The Public Advertiser' for August ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... houses, some with floors and some with none; some with a tiny window and some without; some have doors and some haven't. Very few have desks; in most there are but slab benches. But worse than the school house and its surroundings is the illiterate, immoral teacher who attempts to teach the children. As for church organizations they are numerous, and a large majority are church members; but alas for the Christianity taught and practiced. Religion and morality ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 1, January, 1889 • Various
... Lincoln soon learned his letters and drank in all the learning that his few books could supply. Hence at an early age he became the oracle on the rude frontier, where even a smattering made him handy and valuable to the illiterate backwoodsmen. Besides, as working at any place and at any work, he rarely abided long in any one spot, and had not what might be called a ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... daughters of Colonel Montford, of Halifax county, North Carolina. When Cornwallis and his army were at Halifax, on their way to Virginia, Tarleton was at the house of an American citizen. In the presence of Mrs. Willie Jones, Tarleton spoke of Colonel Washington as an illiterate fellow, hardly able to write his name. "Ah! Colonel," said Mrs. Jones, "you ought to know better, for you bear on your person proof that he knows very well how to make his mark!" At another time, Tarleton was sarcastically speaking of ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter
... illiterate old man. What do you know of literature? Aint all them gentlemen as I plays with chice sperits and writers? Isn't it a honour to jine 'em in the old English drammy, and to eat of the wittles and drink of ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... the Soldiers, it was soon required of them that they should sign "Articles of War" before they could be enrolled. These Articles formed so simple and clear an expression of The Army's teachings and system, that the most illiterate in every land could at once ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... mentally responsible for his acts, was convicted at Quebec for complicity in the designs of French agents, and was executed near St. John's gate with all the revolting incidents of a traitor's death in those relentless times. His illiterate accomplice, Frechette, was sentenced to imprisonment for life, but was soon released on the grounds of his ignorance of the serious crime he was committing. No doubt in these days some restlessness existed in the French Canadian districts, ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... already seen how mind triumphs over matter and have not some of you with only a few months' preparation stood fearless at your post in Mesopotamia and won recognition by your calm collectedness and true heroism? They may say that you are but a small handful, what of the vast illiterate millions? Illiterate in what sense? Have not the ballads of these illiterates rendered into English by our Poet touched profoundly the hearts of the very elect of the West? Have not the stories of their common life appealed to ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... among the Lutherans of Scandinavia. Driven from pillar to post by the relentless hatred of the Established Church, they sought refuge in America, where Janson planned a theocratic socialistic community. Its communism was based entirely upon religious convictions, for neither Janson nor any of his illiterate followers had heard of the politico-economic systems of French reformers. Over one thousand young and vigorous peasants followed him to America. The first contingent of four hundred arrived in 1846 and spent their first winter ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... Comparatively few of the half-pay officers settled above Montreal before 1791; and most of these were, as Haldimand said, 'mechanics, only removed from one situation to practise their trade in another.' Major Van Alstine, it appears, was a blacksmith before he came to Canada. That many of the Loyalists were illiterate is evident from the testimony of the Rev. William Smart, a Presbyterian clergyman who came to Upper Canada in 1811: 'There were but few of the U. E. Loyalists who possessed a complete education. He was personally ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace
... morning we surveyed the remains of antiquity at this place, accompanied by an illiterate fellow, as Cicerone, who called himself a descendant of a cousin of Saint Columba, the founder of the religious establishment here. As I knew that many persons had already examined them, and as I saw Dr. Johnson inspecting and measuring several ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... Lichfield—are charitable enough to ignore almost any crime which is just a matter of common knowledge. In fact, they are mildly grateful. It gives them something to talk about. But when detraction is printed in the morning paper you can't overlook it without incurring the suspicion of being illiterate ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... person, not wholly illiterate and ignorant of Church-History, could go about the metropolis only, seeking after such matters during one month, without gathering into ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 53. Saturday, November 2, 1850 • Various
... wants of others. Violent antipathies are always suspicious, and betray a secret affinity. The difference between the 'Great Vulgar and the Small' is mostly in outward circumstances. The coxcomb criticises the dress of the clown, as the pedant cavils at the bad grammar of the illiterate, or the prude is shocked at the backslidings of her frail acquaintance. Those who have the fewest resources in themselves naturally seek the food of their self-love elsewhere. The most ignorant people find most to laugh at in strangers: scandal and satire ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... it have admitted that it is not intrinsically improbable. In our own island, it was the complaint of Alfred that not a single priest south of the Thames, and very few on the north, could read either Latin or English. And this illiterate clergy exercised their ministry amidst a rude and half-heathen population, in which Danish pirates, unchristened, or christened by the hundred on a field of battle, were mingled with a Saxon peasantry scarcely better instructed in religion. The state of Ireland was still worse. "Tota illa per ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... have done this ting, nailed this insult to Garth's very door. The illiterate characters stamped it as the work of some one in the lower walks of life, and, with a frown of annoyance, Sara promptly—and quite correctly—ascribed it ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... subject went down. We had to hurry to the rescue and tell him it was only necessary to damage them a little, he need not kill them.—In two minutes we were alone with the sheik, and remained so. The persuasive powers of this illiterate savage were remarkable. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... veins. Only little Paul, of all the household, lent me the aid of his nimble hand to seize the fugitives. I have already stated that the entomologist has need of simplicity of mind. In this important business of the Necrophori, my assistants were a child and an illiterate. ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... protege, you are now so sanguine with respect to yourself, that a trifle light as air is magnified, as the poet says, 'into confirmation strong as holy writ.' Now, consider, somebody calls at the Foundling to ask after you—which I acknowledge to be a satisfactory point—his name is taken down by an illiterate brute, as Derbennon; but how you can decide upon the real name, and assume it is De Benyon, is really more than I can imagine, allowing every scope to fancy. It is in the first instance, therefore, you are at fault, as there are many ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... parish of Caddo during the following month. In fact, the number of murders, maimings and whippings during these months aggregated over one thousand.[4] The result was that the intelligent Negroes were either intimidated or killed so that the illiterate masses of Negro voters might be ordered to refrain from voting the Republican ticket to strengthen the Democrats or be subjected to starvation through the operation of the mischievous land tenure and credit system. What was not done in 1868 to overthrow the Republican ...
— A Century of Negro Migration • Carter G. Woodson
... of you to trouble, Mr. Vernon!" said Mrs. Lorton. "As if it mattered how you wrote! My poor father used to say that only the illiterate were careful of their handwriting, and that illegible caligraphy—it is caligraphy, is it not?—was ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... investigating this subject, that every solid argument is against the extraordinary court, and that every one in its favor is specious only. It is a transfer from a judicature of learning and integrity, to one, the greatness of which is both illiterate and unprincipled. Yet such is the force of prejudice with some, and of the want of reflection in others, that many of our constitutions have copied this absurdity, without suspecting it to be one. I am glad to hear that our new constitution is pretty sure of being accepted by States ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... Rome never produced a Rev. Seasholes, nor Greece a Senator Bowser. The Imperial City did manage to breed a Brutus and a Cato, but never proved equal to a Culberson. Think of a Texas legislature, composed chiefly of illiterate jabber- whacks who string out the sessions interminably for the sake of the $2 a day—imagine these fellows, each with a large pendulous ear to the earth, listening for the approach of some Pegasus to carry him to Congress—teaching the aesthetics ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... of that day were not quite so illiterate as Elder Hankins, and it is but fair to say that the Adventists of to-day are a very respectable denomination, doing a work which deserves more recognition from others than it receives. And for the delusion which expects the world ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... sympathy could so instantaneously prompt. Will these ladies say that we are nothing to them? Oh, no; they will not say that. They cannot deny—they do not deny—that for this night they are our sisters: gentle or simple, scholar or illiterate servant, for twelve hours to come—we on the outside have the honor to be their brothers. Those poor women again, who stop to gaze upon us with delight at the entrance of Barnet, and seem, by their air of weariness, to be returning from labor—do you mean to say that they are washerwomen and ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... Presbyterians, or Prohibitionists, or Republicans, as the case may be. But a theatre audience is composed of all sorts and conditions of men. The same theatre in New York contains the rich and the poor, the literate and the illiterate, the old and the young, the native and the naturalised. The same play, therefore, must appeal to all of these. It follows that the dramatist must be broader in his appeal than any other artist. He cannot confine his message to any single caste of society. In the same single work of art he must incorporate ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... write, the pupil was ready to enter on the coveted career of a scribe. In a community where nearly every one was illiterate, the scribes naturally held an honorable place. They conducted the correspondence of the time. When a man wished to send a letter, he had a scribe write it, signing it himself by affixing his seal. When he received a letter, he usually employed a scribe to read it to ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... by the Congress for the benefit of the most illiterate and humble of our people, and with the intention of encouraging in them industry and thrift. Most of its branches were presided over by officers holding the commissions and clothed in the uniform of the United ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... braggart, afraid of nothing but danger; seducing women to learn their husband's secrets; exiling his daughter, not because she had lovers, but because she had other lovers than himself; exiling Ovid because of Livia, who in the end poisoned her prince, and adroitly, too; illiterate, blundering of speech, and coarse of manner—a hypocrite and a comedian in one—so guileful and yet so stupid that while a credulous moribund ordered the gods to be thanked that Augustus survived him, the people publicly applied to him an epithet which does ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... inefficient and unsuccessful; but their Church policy was charged with far-reaching consequences. In that, they were superior to the people about them, and they introduced certain moderate reforms, literary rather than dogmatic, in the externals of ritual, and in the liturgical books. An illiterate clergy had allowed abuses to take root, and were excessively intolerant of change. A schism arose between the established church with its rectified texts and improved ceremonial, and the large minority who rejected them. Everybody knows Newman's story of the ancient priest who ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... people, 326,000 are colored and many of the others of mixed blood. They differ little from other Spanish-Americans, being fond of ease, courteous, and hospitable, and, as in other Spanish countries, the common people are illiterate, public education having been grievously neglected. The natives are the agriculturists of the country, and are a majority in the interior, while the Spaniards, who control business and commerce, are found mainly in the towns ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... was born at Genoa on the night of February 18, 1784, of parents in humbly prosperous circumstances, his father being a ship-broker, and, though illiterate in a general way, a passionate lover of music and an amateur of some skill. The father soon perceived the child's talent, and caused him to study so severely that it not only affected his constitution, but actually made ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... to spread Raboff's "message." Borykin, the master-carpenter, took employment under a certain Grigorieff, and succeeded in converting all his fellow-workers. Finally Grigorieff's house was turned into a church for the new sect, and an illiterate woman named Vassilisa became their prophetess. Under the influence of the general excitement, she would fall into trances and give extravagant and incomprehensible discourses, while her listeners laughed, danced and wept ecstatically. By degrees the ceremonial grew more complex, and took forms ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... superstitious belief that certain people have the power of exercising a baneful influence on others, and even animals, by the glance of the eyes. The superstition is of ancient date, and is met with among almost all races, as it is among illiterate people and savages still. It was customary to wear amulets ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... is a possible President, some undesirable results are inevitable. The successful men become egotistic, and it is a common, well-nigh universal, practise for all sorts and conditions of men to speak harshly of the authorities. In the loafers on the street corners, in the illiterate that use the country store as their club, in the very halls of congress, are heard the most unsparing criticisms and denunciations of the administration. These unwarranted comments fell thick and fast on Lincoln, ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... of it," replied Woodward, "with contempt, as I do of everything that proceeds from the lips of an ignorant and illiterate Roman ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... have often regretted that the sculptured marble of Greece and Egypt,—classic urns, to whose keeping the ashes of the dead had been consigned, and antique sarcophagi, roughened with hieroglyphics,—should have been so often condemned to the lime-kiln by the illiterate Copt or tasteless Mohammedan; and I could not help experiencing a somewhat similar feeling here. The urns and sarcophagi, many times more ancient than those of Greece and Egypt, and that told still more wondrous stories, lay ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... slow progress. The people who were in power believed that "progress" was a very undesirable invention of the Evil One and ought to be discouraged, and as they hap-pened to occupy the seats of the mighty, it was easy to enforce their will upon the patient serfs and the illiterate knights. Here and there a few brave souls sometimes ventured forth into the forbidden region of science, but they fared badly and were considered lucky when they escaped with their lives and a jail sentence ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... formidable as they knew it to be from past experience, but it is doubtful whether the Seik soldiery ever seriously thought, although they often hauntingly boasted of fighting with the greatest power in Hindostan, until within two or three months of the first battle, and even then the rude and illiterate yeoman considered that they were about to enter upon a war purely defensive, although one in every way congenial to their feelings of pride and national jealousy. To the general impression of the Seiks, in common with other Indian nations, that the English were and are ...
— Vellenaux - A Novel • Edmund William Forrest
... industrial classes'—an absurd and shallow system which has been urged by quacks and dabblers in world-bettering, and which has been exhausted without avail in England—the system dear to single-sided Gradgrinds and illiterate men who grasp a twig here and there without knowing of the existence of the trunk and roots. It lays down a perfectly scientific and universal basis, believing that the most insignificant industry, to be perfectly ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... lay without doubt in his Lordship's charter, which gave to the parishioners no voice in the choosing of their pastors. This matter was left to Lord Baltimore's whim. Hence it was that he sent among us so many fox-hunting and gaming parsons who read the service ill and preached drowsy and illiterate sermons. Gaming and fox-hunting, did I say? These are but charitable words to cover the real characters of those impostors in holy orders, whose doings would often bring the blush of shame to your cheeks. Nay, I have seen a clergyman drunk in the pulpit, and even in those freer days ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Durham, there is the record of the hanging and quartering in 1590 of "Duke, Hyll, Hogge and Holyday, iiij Semynaryes, Papysts, Tretors and Rebels for their horrible offences." "Burials, 1687 April 17th Georges Vilaus Lord dooke of bookingham," is the illiterate description of the Duke who was assassinated by Felton and buried at Helmsley. It is impossible to mention all the gleanings from parish registers; each parish tells its tale, its trades, its belief in witchcraft, its burials of soldiers killed ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... garden, for when once planted it never dies out. This root is bitter and waxy, though it is cultivated. It was not in flower, so I can not say whether it is a solanaceous plant or not. One never expects to find a grave nor a stone of remembrance set up in Africa; the very rocks are illiterate, they contain so few fossils. Those here are of reddish variegated, hardened sandstone, with madrepore holes in it. This, and broad horizontal strata of trap, sometimes a hundred miles in extent, and each layer having ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... being so closely guarded that the publisher did not know who was the author. Dr. Johnson characterized it as "A production so new and strange that it filled the reader with admiration and amazement. It was read by the high and low, the learned and the illiterate." In this work, Jonathan Swift appears as one of the greatest masters of English we have ever had; as endowed with an imaginative genius inferior to few; as a keen and pitiless critic of the world, and a bitter misanthropic accounter ...
— Gulliver's Travels - Into Several Remote Regions of the World • Jonathan Swift
... 15 and over can read and write total population: 82% male: 87% female: 77% note: over two-thirds of the world's 785 million illiterate adults are found in only eight countries (India, China, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Egypt); of all the illiterate adults in the world, two-thirds are women; extremely low literacy ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... disappearance of the boat with Mulford's apparition, though the logical inference would have been, that the body which required planks to transport it, could scarcely be classed with anything of the world of spirits. The links in arguments, however, are seldom respected by the illiterate and vulgar, who jump to their conclusions, in cases of the marvellous, much as politicians find an expression of the common mind in the prepared opinions of the few who speak for them, totally disregarding the dissenting ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... the door. This is a sort of signature, whose brilliancy eclipses all other names, and really dazzles the eyes of the spectators. But at the same time it draws the attention both of the learned and the illiterate: I will venture to affirm that the name of one of these jewellers is more frequently spelt and pronounced than that of any great man recorded in history, either ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... labours, the less dross and rubbish we have.... His tenaciousness of what is grand and lofty, is more praiseworthy than his delight in what is low and disagreeable. His pedantry accords better with didactic pomp than with illiterate and vulgar gabble; his learning engrafted on romantic tradition or classical history, looks like genius.... His tragedy of the Fall of Sejanus, in particular, is an admirable piece of ancient mosaic.... The depth of knowledge and gravity of expression ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... common to both Christians and heathens, that assigns to them the gifts of prophecy and divination. The habit that the mantis has of first stretching out one fore leg, and then the other, and of preserving such a position for some little time, has also led to the belief among the illiterate that it is in the act, in such cases, of pointing out the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... that are ever in conflict with the forces of right are notoriously ingenious in making the worse appear the better cause, and with every desire for illumination and for following the right way, the multitude, whether educated or illiterate, fall into the falsehoods of others' imaginings. Money, efficiency, an acquired knowledge of mob psychology, the printing press and the mail service acting in alliance, and directed by fanatical or cynical energy, form a force of enormous potency ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... serious defects in the labor laws of North Borneo is that trivial actions or omissions on the part of ignorant coolies, such as misconduct, neglect of work, or absence from the estate without leave, are punishable by imprisonment. As a result, the illiterate and incoherent coolie does not know where he stands. He can never be sure that some trivial action on his part, no matter how innocent his intent, will not bring him within reach of the criminal law. He is, moreover, ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... of the evil spirit, malicious and revengeful, is common to all primitive peoples, and Brittany has its full share of demonology. Wherever, in fact, a primitive and illiterate peasantry is found the demon is its inevitable accompaniment. But we shall not find these Breton devils so very different from the fiends ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... think that these corruptions of language do no harm. Those who are struggling with the difficulty (and who know by experience how great it already is) of expressing one's self clearly with precision, find their resources continually narrowed by illiterate writers, who seize and twist from its purpose some form of speech which once served to convey briefly and compactly an unambiguous meaning. It would hardly be believed how often a writer is compelled to a circumlocution by the single vulgarism, introduced during the last few years, of using the ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... they naturally resort. They are in all ranks and occupations, of all ages and characters. They are very earnest people, and their purpose is bona fide the dissemination of their paradoxes. A great many—the mass, indeed—are illiterate, and a great many waste their means, and are in or approaching penury. But I must say that never, in any one instance, has the quadrature of the circle, or the like, been made a pretext for begging; even to be asked to purchase a book is of the very rarest occurrence—it has ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... proved an active source of ill-will and discontent. The favoured occupant of place and power was not at all inclined to conciliate his Canadian rival, or to give up the title to mental superiority which he derived from birth and education; and he too often treated his illiterate, but sagacious political opponent, with a contempt which his practical knowledge and experience did not merit. It was a miserable state of things; and I believe that most large towns in the province bore, in these respects, ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... in all national fetes. The number of the rhetoricians was so immense, that during the reign of Philip II. of Spain more than thirty chambers, composed of fifteen hundred members, often entered Antwerp in triumphal procession. But the effect of these associations, composed for the most part of illiterate men, was to destroy the purity of the language and to produce degeneracy in the literature. The Chamber of Amsterdam, however, was an honorable exception, and towards the close of the sixteenth century it counted among its members distinguished scholars, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... to convert the majority and with its strength make the Revolution. Out of the adult population of Russia at that time approximately 85 per cent. were peasants and less than 5 per cent. belonged to the industrial proletariat. At that time something like 70 per cent. of the people were illiterate. Even in St. Petersburg—where the standard of literacy was higher than in any other city—not more than 55 per cent. of the people could sign their own names in 1905, according to the most authentic government reports. When we contemplate such facts as these ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... of the Duke of Somerset is printed off too; besides, I should imagine the letter you mention not to be of his own composition, for, though not illiterate, he certainly could not write any thing like classic Latin.(925) I may, too, possibly, have inclusively mentioned the very letter; I have not Ascham's book, to see from what copy the letter was taken, but probably from one of those ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... friends, and combated with foes; but none of these gratify my ambition, or decide what is to be my destiny. I see the learned world have an influence with the voice of the people themselves. The despoilers of the remotest kingdoms of the earth refer their differences to this class of persons. This the illiterate and inexperienced little dream of; and now if you will receive me as I am, with these deficiencies—with all my misguided opinions, I will give you my honor, sir, that I will never disgrace the Institution, or those who have placed you in this honorable ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... at Asti on the 9th of September. Here he was received with great honour by Lodovico and his father-in-law, Duke Ercole, who rode out to meet him on his entry into the town. The magistrates and citizens welcomed him as their liege lord, and the illiterate French barons were amazed to hear a child of eleven, Margareta Solari, declaim a Latin oration with perfect ease and fluency. Two days afterwards Beatrice herself arrived at the castle of Annona, in the neighbourhood of Asti, bringing her choir ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... not informed, or not conscientious? The crying need of to-day is, that men and women shall be urged into positions of conviction and activity against this most colossal evil of our time. In our country the responsibility for drunkenness rests not with the illiterate, blasphemous, ex-prison convicts who operate the 250,000 saloons of our Nation, nor yet with the 250,000 finished products of the saloon who go down into drunkards' graves every year, but with ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... you are accusing Anaxagoras, my dear Melitus, and thus you put a slight on these men, and suppose them to be so illiterate as not to know that the books of Anaxagoras of Clazomene are full of such assertions. And the young, moreover, learn these things from me, which they might purchase for a drachma, at most, in the orchestra, and so ridicule Socrates, if he pretended ...
— Apology, Crito, and Phaedo of Socrates • Plato
... first dwelling-house, not being a toll-house, was laid in ashes; the first blood was shed by "Rebecca's company," as they call the rioters here. And here resides, rants, prays, and preaches, and scribbles sedition, an illiterate fanatic, who is recognised as an organ of one sect of Methodists, Whitfieldites publishing a monthly inflammatory Magazine, called Y Diwygiwr, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... novel is purposely pitched in a style that will be easily understood; but even so, there is a great deal of word- and phrase-skipping to be done by many illiterate readers, who are quite satisfied if they can extract the general sense as they go along. The book-language, as cultivated by the best writers, is to be freely understood only by those who have stocked their minds ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... Socialism may be worthless as a scheme, but it is not meaningless as a symptom. Rousseau's theory of the origin of society, of the social contract, and of a cure for all social evils by a return to a state of nature, had, as we all know now, no more relation to fact than the dreams of an illiterate drunkard; but they were not without value as a vague and symbolical expression of certain evils from which the France of his day was suffering. As a child, I was told a story of an old woman in Devonshire who, ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... overflowed into the fertile, free lands of the mid-West. Nearly 800,000 of them reached the United States in one year, 1882. Most of them were men—an overwhelming portion of them men of working age, unskilled, frequently illiterate and hence compelled to seek employment in a relatively small number of occupations. Both the chances of unemployment and the danger of a lowered standard of living were increased ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... they are so conscientiously illiterate; what I can't bear is unconscientious illiterateness. Nellie Farren has caught something of the jangle of modern life; she has something of the freshness of the music-hall about her that appeals ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... wearied, footsore, in rags, and often sick and nearly dead from starvation. When they reached Nashville, or Knoxville after it came into our possession, they were in need of all things; shelter, food, clothing, medicine and care. A few of them were well educated; the majority were illiterate so far as book knowledge was concerned, but intelligent and thoughtful on the subject of loyalty and the war; not a few were almost reduced to a state of fatuity by their sufferings, and seemed to have lost all distinct consciousness of what was occurring ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... seem, the isolated Red River Colony was far from being an illiterate community. The presence of the officers of the Hudson's Bay Company, the coming of the clergy of the different churches, who established schools, and the leisure for reading books supplied by the Red River Library produced a people whose speech was generally ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... house, or of the laws of atmosphere to know how to ventilate one? Why should the preparation of food, that subtile art on which life, health, cheerfulness, good temper, and good looks so largely depend, forever be left in the hands of the illiterate and vulgar? ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... and obtained the honour of a degree in that science, to petition regularly for a license to preach, and to engage in the cure of souls;" and intended, in his theological exercise, to discuss this question, "why so many were formerly converted to Christianity by illiterate persons, and so few at present by ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... sang its praises. They hated lawyers, and were jealous of wealthy merchants. "These lawyers," said Amos Singletary, "and men of learning, and moneyed men that talk so finely and gloss over matters so smoothly, to make us poor illiterate people swallow the pill, expect to get into Congress themselves. They mean to be managers of the Constitution. They mean to get all the money into their hands, and then they will swallow up us little folk, like the great Leviathan, Mr. President; yes, just as the whale swallowed up Jonah." ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... Aston-juxta-Birmingham, refers to the tradition that one of the family "murdered his cook, and was afterwards compelled to adopt the red hand in his arms." Este is perfectly correct in his concise but comprehensive particulars. That which, by the illiterate, is termed "the bloody hand," and by them reputed as an abatement of honour, is nothing more than the "Ulster badge" of dignity. The tradition adds, that Sir Thomas Holt murdered the cook in a cellar, at the old family mansion, by "running him through with ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various
... dissimulation, and he felt that he could do no good either for himself or for his country, which was then overrun with Spaniards and scourged by petty tyrants; and with the lower orders sunk in ignorance, and the upper classes illiterate, uncultivated, and corrupt, the mission of Giordano Bruno was impossible. "Altiora Peto" was Bruno's motto, and to realize it he had gone forth with the pilgrim's staff in his hand, sometimes covered with the cowl of the monk, at others wearing the simple habit of a schoolmaster, or, again, ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable, nay, letter by letter. You might read all the books in the British Museum, if you could live long enough, and remain an utterly illiterate, uneducated person; but if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter,—that is to say, with real accuracy,—you are forevermore, in some ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof
... me, and the other is the reading of French books. I didn't see how I was going to keep my circle here together, and my own mind in decent repair, unless I could find somebody to be eyes for me, and to read to me. And as I'm a bundle of nerves, and I never was agreeable to illiterate people, nor they to me, I was rather put to it. Well, one day these girls and their mother came over to tea, and, as you guess, of course, they brought Mademoiselle Le Breton with them. I had asked them to come, but when they arrived ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... newcomer will gleam out like a new book to be read. And a trained priest learns to read shrewdly the faces of those who assemble to worship under his guidance. But American vagrants, with no thoughts save of gold-digging, and an overweening illiterate jargon for their speech, had long ceased to interest this priest, even in his starvation for company and talk from the outside world; and therefore after the intoning, he sat with his homesick thoughts unchanged, to draw both pain and enjoyment from the music that he had set to the Dixit ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... illiterate words, so pregnant with meaning, a remarkable change came over the face and manner of the man. His voice, even, for the moment, lost its huskiness, and vibrated with sincere feeling as he steadied himself; and, bowing ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... recruited among the prize-winners of schools; while in a recent work a distinguished magistrate, M. Adolphe Guillot, made the observation that at present 3,000 educated criminals are met with for every 1,000 illiterate delinquents, and that in fifty years the criminal percentage of the population has passed from 227 to 552 for every 100,000 inhabitants, an increase of 133 per cent. He has also noted in common with his colleagues that criminality is particularly on the increase among young ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... mortifying her daughter by this kind of illiterate gaucherie. But the most painful part of it was that the good lady always remained perfectly unconscious of having said anything incredibly silly, and ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... husband's wardrobe for the poor man, and insisted that he should at once go to his room and change the wet garments for the dry ones. She then prepared him supper which he ate in the kitchen, and choked for gratitude when this middle-aged, stout and illiterate woman poured his tea and called ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... from the sublimity, excellence, and purity of his doctrine and precepts, unparalleled by all the aggregated wisdom and learning of many preceding ages, though, to appearance, he himself was the obscurest and most illiterate of our species; therefore Jesus Christ was ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... of this special rule, Harvard College was founded in the early days of the Colony. It was the pet and pride and hope of the colonists. They gave to it of their abundance and their poverty. To what end? "Dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches," says the author of "New England First-Fruits." The first Constitution of the College declares one of its objects to be "to make and establish all such orders, statutes, and constitutions as they ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... next day, having some occasion to write, the Indian King, who saw me, believ'd that he could write as well as I. Whereupon, I wrote a Word, and gave it him to copy, which he did with more Exactness, than any European could have done, that was illiterate. It was so well, that he who could read mine, might have done the same by his. Afterwards, he took great Delight in making Fish-hooks of his own Invention, which would have been a good Piece for an Antiquary to have puzzled his Brains withal, in tracing out the Characters of all the Oriental ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson
... settle the question of supremacy with the Naimans, who were both hostile and defiant. The Naiman chief shared the opinion of Wang Khan, that there could not be two masters on the Tian Shan, and with that vigorous illustration which has never been wanting to these illiterate tribes, he wrote, "There cannot be two suns in the sky, two swords in one sheath, two eyes in one eyepit, or two kings in one empire." Both sides made strenuous efforts for the fray, and brought every fighting man they could into the field. The decisive battle of the war was fought ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... generally made by ignorant and illiterate persons. The true parts of the record were so mixed up with imaginary additions, that cautious men refused to credit the statements that such objects really fell from the sky. Even at the present day it is often extremely difficult ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... the shepherds to join the party. "I am provoked," said Lady Mabel, "to find how little progress I have made in speaking Portuguese. But it is not surprising what a complete mastery the rudest and most illiterate people ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... subjunctive mood, but at the close was invited to try his hand—a quick, if not a cultivated one—at the instrument. He did so. Like her, he added his voice. Like hers, it was a love song. But there the similitude ended. Negro in dialect, illiterate in construction, idiotic in passion, and presumably addressed to the "Rose of Alabama," in the very extravagance of its childish infatuation it might have been a mockery of the schoolmistress's song but for one tremendous fact! In unrestrained feeling, pathetic ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Kahal, and exercising absolute authority over the moral and material interests of those subordinated to his jurisdiction. The study of the Law was carried to the extreme of devotion. To have an illiterate, an 'Am ha-Arez, a "rustic", in one's family, was considered a ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... with snow, is their favourite haunt. In this vicinity the Southern glens afford them food and shelter during the severity of the winter; in milder seasons the Northern aspect is more congenial to their nature, and admits a wider range. They are a very valuable property to the tribes of illiterate Tartars, who live in tents, and tend them from place to place, affording their herdsmen a mode of conveyance, a good covering, and subsistence. They are never employed in agriculture, but are extremely useful as beasts of burden; for they ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey
... surveys of the country through which they passed, was extremely useful to his general, and his integrity made it safe to trust him as a secretary. His commanding officer, though a brave man, was illiterate, and a secretary was to him a necessary of life. Basile was not only useful, but agreeable; without any mean arts, or servile adulation, he pleased by simply showing the desire to oblige and the ability ...
— Murad the Unlucky and Other Tales • Maria Edgeworth
... Then highest rate, when fury-factions roar, And folly's choicest fools the most despise:— —O happy Poet! laid in peace before Rival intolerants each 'gainst other flamed, And flames were slaked in blood, and all the grace Of life before that sad illiterate gloom Puritan, fled ashamed: While, as the red moon lifts her turbid face, Titanic features ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... Napa, and of all the other towns and villages in that rich and populous valley, she had been the only-survivor. Next, there were the three young men—Cardiff and Hale, who had been farmers, and Wainwright, a common day-laborer. All three had found wives. To Hale, a crude, illiterate farmer, had fallen Isadore, the greatest prize, next to Vesta, of the women who came through the plague. She was one of the world's most noted singers, and the plague had caught her at San Francisco. She has ...
— The Scarlet Plague • Jack London
... band was a man far from illiterate: he was able to travel by the stars, or the compass, and had marked, in his erratick expeditions, such places as are most worthy the notice of a passenger. He observed to me, that buildings are always best preserved in places little frequented, and difficult of access: for, when once a country ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... face of some Garibaldi or Hampden or Lincoln, the beloved one is seen to be clothed with genius and beauty and truth indeed, but also to be crowned with self-sacrifice. Society makes haste to forget him who remembers only himself. As there can be no illiterate sage, no ignorant Shakespeare, so history knows no selfish hero. For the mercenary forehead memory has no wreath. A sentinel with a flaming sword guards the threshold of the temple of fame against those aspirants named ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... New England, it had been the custom of the inhabitants, in all matters of doubt and difficulty, to look to their ministers for counsel. So they did now; but, unfortunately, the ministers and wise men were more deluded than the illiterate people. Cotton Mather, a very learned and eminent clergyman, believed that the whole country was full of witches and wizards, who had given up their hopes of heaven, and signed a ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... illiterate woman on one side, impressed with a conviction of the justice of her cause; and further stimulated by a deep consciousness of the importance of success to herself and family; and on the other side, a refined mind, delicately alive to the least approximation to indecorum, ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... who, in the vulgar language, had struck, or taken him in for a guinea with so much ease and dexterity. Booth answered, he did not know his name; all that he knew of him was, that he was the most impudent and illiterate fellow he had ever seen, and that, by his own account, he was the author of most of the wonderful productions of the age. "Perhaps," said he, "it may look uncharitable in me to blame you for your generosity; but I am convinced the fellow hath not the least merit or capacity, and you ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... education has developed, that they are not being subjected to the deadening methods of the average public school, and above all that their manners are not being corrupted by promiscuous mingling with the offspring of illiterate immigrants. And yet soon afterward, I visited a high school in one of the poorest slum districts of a large city. I saw pupils well-behaved, courteous to one another, to their instructors, and to visitors. The instruction was much below that given in the first school ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... course of years, and acquired other property. His children were now all settled in life, and he had given them everything he had except the cottage in which he lived. I was struck by the strong virtue of this illiterate peasant, who had evidently no notion of his own value, and who would not have told the simple story of his life passed amidst the moors of the Correze had I not ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... read of the man who lived at Gades who was so fired by the name and glory of Titus Livius that he came from the remotest corner of the world to see him, and returned the moment he had set eyes on him? It would stamp a man as an illiterate boor and a lazy idler, it would be disgraceful almost for any one not to think the journey worth the trouble when the reward is a study which is more delightful, more elegant, and has more of the humanities than any other. You will say: "But I have here authors ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... good qualities, or who have merit of their own, are welcomed into what are called "select circles" with as much warmth as though they were millionaires. In New York, however, men and women are judged by their bank accounts. The most illiterate boor, the most unprincipled knave, finds every fashionable door open to him without reserve, while St. Peter himself, if he came "without purse or scrip," would see it closed in his face. Money makes up for every deficiency ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... hard-drinking race; for though tea and coffee were scarcely known, the land flowed with New England rum, which was ranked among the necessaries of life. The better sort could read and write in a bungling way; but many were wholly illiterate, and it was not till long after Queen Anne's War that the remoter settlements established schools, taught by poor students from Harvard or less competent instructors, and held at first in private houses ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... divine power and aspiration: a conception which at moments becomes an actual experience of ecstatic possession by that power. And above and below all have been millions of humble and obscure persons, sometimes totally illiterate, sometimes unconscious of having any religion at all, sometimes believing in their simplicity that the gods and temples and priests of their district stood for their instinctive righteousness, who have kept sweet the ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... readers suppose that the above version in the mouth of a totally illiterate peasant is overcharged; for we have the advantage of remembering how we ourselves used to hear it pronounced in our early days. We will back the version in the text against Edward Irving's new language—for ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... records the most memorable event of this century. Our Blessed Lady has personally appeared to her votaries before during that period, but never at Rome. Wisely and well she has worked in villages and among the illiterate as at the beginning did her Divine Son. But the time is now ripe for terminating the infidelity of the world. In the eternal city, amid all its matchless learning and profound theology, in the sight of thousands, this great act has been accomplished, in a manner which can ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... the problem of how to keep these men in touch with their households in isolated and illiterate villages in India. Mr. Hume, one of the secretaries in Lahore, devised a far-reaching plan whereby every letter was forwarded through missionaries or Christian workers or officials to the distant home of the soldier. The whole community gathers to hear the ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... SCANDAL, his friend, a free speaker,—Mr Smith. TATTLE, a half-witted beau, vain of his amours, yet valuing himself for secrecy,—Mr Bowman. BEN, Sir Sampson's younger son, half home-bred and half sea-bred, designed to marry Miss Prue,—Mr Dogget. FORESIGHT, an illiterate old fellow, peevish and positive, superstitious, and pretending to understand astrology, palmistry, physiognomy, omens, dreams, etc; uncle to Angelica,—Mr Sanford. JEREMY, servant to Valentine,—Mr Bowen. TRAPLAND, a scrivener,—Mr Triffusis. ...
— Love for Love • William Congreve
... in the summer he turnes king of the gipsies: if not, some great man's protection is a sufficient warrant for his peregrination, and a meanes to procure him the town-hall, where hee may long exercise his qualities, with clown-claps of great admiration, in a tone sutable to the large eares of his illiterate auditorie. Hee is one seldome takes care for old age, because ill diet and disorder, together with a consumption, or some worse disease, taken vp in his full careere, haue onely chalked out his catastrophe but to a colon: and ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... hitherto been pledged to "neutrality," began secretly exchanging views with the genuinely Republican South. The group of Tientsin generals and "politicals," confused by these developments, remained inactive; and this was no doubt responsible for the mad coup attempted by the semi-illiterate General Chang Hsun. In the small hours of July 1st General Chang Hsun, relying on the disorganization in the capital which we have dealt with in our preceding account, entered the Imperial City with his troops by prearrangement ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... in China, not even in the sacred books, which is so generally known as their nursery rhymes. These are understood and repeated by the educated and the illiterate alike; by the children of princes and the children of beggars; children in the city and children in the country and villages, and they produce like results in the minds and hearts of all. The little folks laugh over the Cow, look sober over the Little ...
— The Chinese Boy and Girl • Isaac Taylor Headland
... utterance to its meaning, was there. He had hardly surrendered his commission as chaplain in the army. He had fought to win the freedom of a race. To make that race true free men was a task much more vast than to emancipate them. The parting of the ways had come. An illiterate people must be taught. No longer should it be a crime to instruct them. The rather was he the criminal who should deny them an education. It was an hour for the voice of a prophet. With the ken of a seer, Chaplain Cravath, representing the American ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 54, No. 01, January, 1900 • Various
... German as plain as sunshine, for that must correct itself. You know I am homo unius linguae: in English—illiterate, a ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... renown was theirs in Zulu or Kaffir wars. Amajuba, at which only about half a battalion of our troops took part, was the biggest battle they had ever fought against the British, and it led the more illiterate among them to believe they could whip all England's armies as easily as they could sjambok a Kaffir. Their leaders of course knew better, but even they believed there was being played a game of bluff on both sides, with this ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry |
