"Pedant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... M. 'Tis true—his dashes of coarse fun and drollery, Might smooth the wrinkles of a pedant's brow, And loose a stoic's muscles: and sometimes Beneath his various merry-andrew coat I've thought I spied the stamp of manly genius, Some vestige of his father's purest wit. But ah! I fear 'twas a false light betray'd me. Let him write farce; but let him not presume To jumble fun and opera, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... "Powhatan" of the Indians; and no true lover of Virginia can cease to deplore the change which robbed this graceful stream of a title pregnant with all the associations of Indian valor and of the departed glory of their empire, and bestowed a name that can only recall a royal pedant and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... in us that the memory of him in literature shall be left to perish; that what is lewd and ribald in the great poets shall be kept out of such editions as are meant for general reading, and that the pedant-pride which now perpetuates it as an essential part of those poets shall no longer have its way. At the end of the ends such things do defile, they do corrupt. We may palliate them or excuse them for this reason or that, but that is the truth, and I do not see why they should not be dropped from ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... laughter becomes a social initiation. It is a kind of hazing which we visit upon one another. But we do not isolate the comic personage as we do the solitary, tragic figure. The comic personage is usually a type; he is one of an absurd group; he is a miser, a pedant, a pretentious person, a doctor or a lawyer in whom the professional traits have become automatic so that he thinks more of his professional behavior than he does of human health and human justice. Of all these separatist tendencies, laughter is the great corrective. When the individual ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... talk is to profitable conversation what the stone is to the pulp of the peach, what the cob is to the kernels on an ear of Indian corn. Once more: Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant, with all his knowledge and valuable qualities, and will "cavil on the ninth part of a hair," if it will give him a chance to ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... of melody and rhythm, and harmony and tone, can no more be translated than a symphony for the strings can be adequately represented upon the organ. You may persuade yourself that you have got the substance; you have missed the perfection of the form. Yet who but a narrow pedant will insist that the study of any literature, ancient or modern, is valuable chiefly for familiarizing us with the language, not for enriching our minds with the subject matter? Do we desire to understand the past and so to be better able to estimate the importance of great ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... is not the knowledge that you can pour into him that will satisfy him, or enable him to work out his nature. He must see things for himself; he must have bodily work and intellectual work different from his bread-getting work; or he runs the danger of becoming a contracted pedant with a poor mind ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... had set one living man Beyond the pedant's tether,— His virtues, frailties, HE may scan, Who ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... and I forsooth in loue, I that haue beene loues whip? A verie Beadle to a humerous sigh: A Criticke, Nay, a night-watch Constable. A domineering pedant ore the Boy, Then whom no mortall so magnificent, This wimpled, whyning, purblinde waiward Boy, This signior Iunios gyant dwarfe, don Cupid, Regent of Loue-rimes, Lord of folded armes, Th' annointed soueraigne of sighes ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... was a pedant fool, Meting beauty by a rule: Pallas? Juno? Venus?—he Should have chosen all ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... be no less futile than presumptuous to lay down exact formulae as to what the artist ought and ought not to do. No modern critic is likely to waste his time in framing rules and canons, which can be so easily handled by the pedant and stand condemned by the first great man who defies them. Aristotle did it once and for all for the Greek drama, and when the perspective of life widened and new forms of literature grew up to ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... everything except about the school list and the remarks he had made about each boy's character. This infamy was more than he could own to, and he kept his counsel concerning it. Fortunately he was safe in doing so, for Dr Skinner, pedant and more than pedant though he was, had still just sense enough to turn on Theobald in the matter of the school list. Whether he resented being told that he did not know the characters of his own boys, or whether he dreaded a scandal about ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... be subjected." "To play the lion under such circumstances must," as the knowing Lockhart observes, "be difficult at the best; but a delicate business indeed, when the jackals are presumptuous. The pedant could not stomach the superior success of his friend, and yet—alas for poor human nature!—he certainly was one of the most enthusiastic of his admirers, and one of the most affectionate of all his intimates." It ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... representative of the house, also used the anchor, the effect of which is to a great extent destroyed by the elaborate coat-of-arms granted to the family by the Emperor Maximilian. Aldus "the younger," was a precocious scholar, of the pedant type, and under him the traditions of the family rapidly fell. He married into the eminent Giunta family of printers, and died at the age of 49. The famous Mark of the anchor had been suggested by the reverse of the beautiful silver medal of Vespasian, aspecimen of which had been ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts
... some of his former intimates. But the Colonel, after one or two visits, shook his head, and declined farther experiment. Indeed he went farther, and characterised the Baron as the most intolerable formal pedant he had ever had the misfortune to meet with, and the Chief of Glennaquoich as a Frenchified Scotchman, possessing all the cunning and plausibility of the nation where he was educated, with the proud, vindictive, and turbulent humour of that of his birth. 'If the devil,' he said, 'had sought out ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... fear intrude, To check my bosom's fondest thought, And interrupt the golden dream, I crush the fiend with malice fraught, And still indulge my wonted theme. Although we ne'er again can trace In Granta's vale the pedant's lore; Nor through the groves of Ida chase Our raptured visions as before, Though Youth has flown on rosy pinion, And Manhood claims his stern dominion, Age will not every hope destroy, But yield some ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... 200 miles of the great stream, which section still remained under Confederate control. Vicksburg was General Grant's objective point. Even to conceive the capture of this stronghold seemed in itself evidence of genius; no mere pedant in warfare could have had the conception. Every difficulty lay in the way of the assailant. The Confederates had spared no skill, no labor, no expense in fortifying the town; yet after all had been done that military science could do, human achievement counted for little in comparison with ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... if, in fine (to speak in my own praise), I live undefiled, and innocent, and dear to my friends; my father was the cause of all this: who though a poor man on a lean farm, was unwilling to send me to a school under [the pedant] Flavius, where great boys, sprung from great centurions, having their satchels and tablets swung over their left arm, used to go with money in their hands the very day it was due; but had the spirit to bring me a child to Rome, to be taught those arts which any Roman ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... This opinion however he had very much to himself. Men who had passed half their lives on the waves, and who had been in battles, storms and shipwrecks, were impatient of his somewhat pompous lectures and reprimands, and pronounced him a mere pedant, who, with all his book learning, was ignorant of what every cabin boy knew. Russell had always been froward, arrogant and mutinous; and now prosperity and glory brought out his vices in full strength. With the government which he had saved he took all the liberties of an insolent ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... might almost induce me to exclaim with the plagiarising pedant of antiquity, "Pereant qui ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 380, July 11, 1829 • Various
... not say that dear Casey's estimate had the arid accuracy of the pedant, but she had a rich and helpful imagination. In rare moments of depression and unhappiness I have found that by reading one of her testimonials I can always recover my tone. And they were effective for their purpose. By this time I was accepting no ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... artillery of theology, and in a long series of elaborate propositions demonstrated that any other doctrine than that of the fixity and persistence of species is absolutely contrary to Scripture. The Abbe Desorges, a former Professor of Theology, stigmatized Darwin as a "pedant," and evolution as "gloomy". Monseigneur Segur, referring to Darwin and his followers, went into hysterics and shrieked: "These infamous doctrines have for their only support the most abject passions. Their ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... Epicurus himself allows there are some pleasures derived from fame. And indeed why should he not, when he himself had such a furious lechery and wriggling after glory as made him not only to disown his masters and scuffle about syllables and accents with his fellow-pedant Democritus (whose principles he stole verbatim), and to tell his disciples there never was a wise man in the world besides himself, but also to put it in writing how Colotes performed adoration to him, as he was one day philosophizing, by touching his knees, and ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... the old days was the relation of students to classical professors. The majority of the average class looked on such a professor as generally a bore and, as examinations approached, an enemy; they usually sneered at him as a pedant, and frequently made his peculiarities a subject for derision. Since that day far better relations have grown up between teachers and taught, especially in those institutions where much is left to the option of the students. The students in each subject, being ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... letters have often observed to me, that in paraphrasing Horace, my sex would be an unpardonable crime with every Pedant, whether within, or without the pale of professional criticism. It is not in their power to speak or write more contemptuously of my Horatian Odes than the Critics of Dryden's and Pope's time, in the literary journals ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... regarding Rosendo's welfare. Jose might not divine the thoughts which the woman's placid exterior concealed. But for the child, he well knew that her problem had been met and solved, and that she had laid it aside with a trust in immanent good which he did not believe all the worldly argument of pedant or philosopher could shake. ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... little beggar!" said Daventry. "And we don't know so very much more about it all than he does. I expect he's a Muscovy duck, or drake, if you're a pedant ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... continually seeking new outlets—new forms for its expression. He had just the temperament to take up with the mode of the Nineties that drove the Young Men to asserting themselves and upholding their doctrines in papers and magazines of their own. The pedant may trace the fashion back to the Hobby-horse of the Eighties, or, in a further access of pedantry to the Germ of the early Fifties. He may follow its growth as late as the Blast of yesterday and The Gypsy ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... significance in the history of the human soul. It is this deeper knowledge, however, which is essential for culture; for culture is such an appropriation of knowledge that it becomes a part of ourselves. It is no longer something added by the memory; it is something possessed by the soul. A pedant is formed by his memory; a man of culture is formed by the habit of meditation, and by the constant use of the imagination. An alert and curious man goes through the world taking note of all that passes ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... a father" is certainly like a father; and although a man may be surly in his "countenance," I do not well see how he could be surly in his "gait;" besides, what had occurred to make the pedant surly? This appears to me the best reason for rejecting surly in favour of "surely;" but I have another, which can hardly be refused to an editor who professes to follow the old copies, where ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 195, July 23, 1853 • Various
... school, tinctures their judgment of others throughout life, mixing I know not what, both of liking and esteem, with their admiration of one who uses his classical weapons with a scholar's dexterity, not a pedant's inaptitude: for such a one there is a sort of agreeable confusion in their respect; they are inclined, unconsciously, to believe that he must necessarily be a high gentleman—ay, and something of a ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... against botany. A flower worth a five-mile walk and a wet foot is worthy of something better than dissection with the Linnaean classification, afterward adding insult to injury. The botanist is not a discoverer; he is only a pedant. He finds out nothing about the plant; he serves it as we might fancy a monster doing, who should take this number of the "Atlantic" and sit down, not to read it, not to inhale the delicate fragrance of its thought, but to count its articles, examine ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... meanwhile other promotions were in precarious prospect, for the failure of which these would not even in their abundance, be a compensation. He kept an unembarrassed eye on Downing Street, and while it may frankly be said for him that he was neither a pedant nor a prig he remembered that the last impression he ought to wish to produce there was that of ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... value, on account of the quarter whence it comes. It is that of the great German writer Niebuhr, whose accurate acquaintance with every important scene of modern as well as ancient history was unparalleled: and who was no mere pedant, but a man practically versed in active life, and had been personally acquainted with most of the leading men in the great events of the early part of this century. Niebuhr, in the passage which I allude to, [Roman History, vol. v. p. 17.] after referring to the ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... like a pedant that keeps a school i' the church.—I have dogged him like his murderer. He does obey every point of the letter that I dropped to betray him. He does smile his face into more lines than is in the new map, with the augmentation of the Indies: you have ...
— Twelfth Night; or, What You Will • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... Des Esseintes felt himself intrigued toward this ill-balanced but subtile mind. No fusion had been effected between the skilful psychologist and the pious pedant, and the very jolts and incoherencies constituted the ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... doings, and of some of their contemplated doings. These kindergarten pictures I will endeavor to paint, not in that "over-the-head" verbosity or "under-the-feet" profundity and intricacy of the political economy pedant, which are as the canvases of the Whistler school to the masses; but rather will I use the brush of the artisan who in giving us our white fences, our gray cottages, and our green blinds sets off those things which make up the pictures ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... these Stuart princes of yours are not wise men. Legitimate monarchs of England though they may be, they do not possess the qualities that endear kings to their people. From what I have heard, James was a heavy pedant, a rank coward, essentially not a man to be popular among a spirited people. Charles had a noble presence and many fine qualities. But, although his ideas of kingly power would have suited us well enough in France, his arbitrary measures alienated a large ...
— In the Irish Brigade - A Tale of War in Flanders and Spain • G. A. Henty
... had little wit or pride, Preferr'd to take the strongest side. And Willard soon receiv'd commission To give a publick admonition. With pedant strut to prayers he came, Call'd out the criminals by name; Obedient to his dire command, Prescott and Wier before him stand. The rulers merciful and kind, With equal grief and wonder find, That you do drink, and play, and sing, And make with noise the ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... of size, a tutor had, No pedant rude, with Greek and Latin mad, But young and smart, a master too of arts, Particularly learned in what imparts, The gentle flame, the pleasing poignant pang, That Ovid formerly so sweetly sang. Some knowledge of good company he'd got; A ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... just here that the greatness of Dickens comes in; it is just here that the difference lies between the pedant and the poet. Dickens enters the social and political war, and the first stroke he deals is not only significant but even startling. Fully to see this we must appreciate the national situation. It was an age of ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... when Hobart had died, they were all dragged into a net of suspicion and melodrama—they all became for a time absurd actors in an absurd serial in the Potter press. You could not escape from sensationalism in a sensational world. There was no room for the pedant, with his greed for unadorned ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... snow, as figured in the waves, CRAWLED over the ground. There was in the image that engraved itself on my memory something cruel—I could not help thinking of the "cruel, crawling foam" and the ruminating pedant Ruskin, and I laughed. "The cruel, crawling snow!" Yes, and in spite of Ruskin and his "Pathetic Fallacy," there it was! Of course, the snow is not cruel. Of course, it merely is propelled by something which, according to Karl Pearson, I do not even with ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... bas-bleu[Fr]; bigwig, learned Theban, don; Artium Baccalaureus[Lat][obs3], Artium Magister[Lat]. learned man, literary man; homo multarum literarum[Lat]; man of learning, man of letters, man of education, man of genius. antiquarian, antiquary; archaeologist. sage &c. (wise man) 500. pedant, doctrinaire; pedagogue, Dr. Pangloss; pantologist[obs3], criminologist. schoolboy &c. (learner) 541. Adj. learned &c. 490; brought up at the feet of Gamaliel. Phr. "he was a scholar and a ripe and good one" [Henry VIII]; "the manifold linguist" ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... need not possess a cent. If well-read, so much the better, provided she is not too fond of her book to neglect overseeing her affairs and suffering the hole in her stocking to go unmended. She must not be a pedant or a scold but must know enough of books to distinguish between a volume of history and a novel; and have sufficient spirit to prevent being imposed upon. Communication addressed to A. B. and left at the composing room, if originating in honorable intentions will be attended to with secrecy, ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... still extant, and already published. The critics may praise their subtle and elegant brevity; yet Dr. Bentley (Dissertation upon Phalaris, p. 48) might justly, though quaintly observe, that "you feel, by the emptiness and deadness of them, that you converse with some dreaming pedant, with his ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... in his parasites, in his Ministers, for absorption in their one essential quality, their ability, as holding headsman and gaolers in a leash, to keep alive or kill, to bind or let loose. To this age James is an awkward, ludicrous pedant. The spectacle of Ralegh's veneration is exasperating. For Ralegh he was a symbol of sovereign authority, a mysterious keeper of the scales of fate. He represented for Ralegh a power above courts of law, and entitled to set right their mistakes or misdeeds. Of his ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... finds the ground ready prepared for its growth in the natural laziness and idleness of the man's disposition. The desire to acquire things by a short cut, without taking the trouble to work for them honestly, is perhaps the most fruitful of all sources of crime. Butler, a bit of a pedant, is pleased to justify his conduct by reason and philosophy—he finds in the acts of unscrupulous monarchs an analogy to his own attitude towards life. What is good enough for Caesar Borgia is good enough for Robert Butler. Like Borgia he comes ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... reach. Like others, however, I learned by heart all Horace's odes and epodes, the Ajax and the Antigone of Sophocles, and other like efforts of memory, almost useless in after life, except for capping quotations, and thereby being thought a pedant by the display of schoolboy erudition. How often have I wished that the years wasted over Latin verses and Greek plays had been utilised among French and German, astronomy, geology, chemistry and the like; but all such useful educationals were quite ignored by the clerical boobies who then ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... King of Persia was to come so young to so mighty a kingdom." "'Tis true [said he], but neither was Priam unhappy at his years." In a short time, of kings of Macedon, successors to that mighty Alexander, were made joyners and scriveners at Rome; of a tyrant of Sicily, a pedant at Corinth; of a conqueror of one-half of the world, and general of so many armies, a miserable suppliant to the rascally officers of a king of Egypt. So much the prolongation of five or six months of life ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... that Myrtle had forgotten the discreet kindness of Master Gridley in bringing her back and making the best of her adventure. He, on his part, had acquired a kind of right to consider himself her adviser, and had begun to take a pleasure in the thought that he, the worn-out and useless old pedant, as he had been in the way of considering himself, might perhaps do something even more important than his previous achievement to save this young girl from the dangers that surrounded her. He loved his classics and his old books; he took ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Commander-in-Chief had over-rated his ability; and I was therefore not surprised when he afterwards turned out to be the most complete example, amongst the many this War has afforded, of the Staff College "pedant," whose "superior education" had given him little idea ...
— 1914 • John French, Viscount of Ypres
... school-fellow Andrew Corbet that Addison had been at the school and had been the leader in a barring out. (Johnson's Works, vii. 419.) Garrick entered the school about two years after Johnson left. According to Garrick's biographer, Tom Davies (p. 3), 'Hunter was an odd mixture of the pedant and the sportsman. Happy was the boy who could slily inform his offended master where a covey of partridges was to be found; this notice was a certain pledge of his pardon.' Lord Campbell in his Lives of the Chief Justices, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... about that lofty figure, and he was seized by a powerful temptation to depict the giant in all his aspects. It was a rich soil. Beside the man of war and the statesman, it remained to draw the theologian, the pedant, the wretched poet, the seer of visions, the buffoon, the father, the husband, the human Proteus—in a word, the twofold Cromwell, homo ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... to a German Brigadier-General on behalf of some homeless women and children, the Prussian martinet—half pedant and half poltroon—answered her with a quotation from Nietzsche to the effect that "Pity is a waste of feeling—a moral parasite injurious to the health." She early felt the cruel and iron will of the invader, but, nothing daunted, she proceeded in the arduous work, supervised ...
— The Case of Edith Cavell - A Study of the Rights of Non-Combatants • James M. Beck
... did La Boulaye count in the village of Bellecour. This was old Duhamel, the schoolmaster, an eccentric pedant and a fellow-worshipper of the immortal Jean Jacques. It was to him that La Boulaye now repaired intent upon seeking counsel touching a future that wore that morning a ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... interprets allegorically the grosser portions of Scripture, and, by a reverse process, lends to the soul the vilest functions of the body, and discusses virtue in the terms of fleshliness. No knowledge can come out of this straw-splitting in vacuo; and certainly no art out of this indecent pedant's symbolism: all things are turned ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... handwriting, and the volume had been superintended by many learned heads,—awaited with impatience, as a triumph for its makers,—and thought a thing rare enough to be offered, like a jewel, to the learned and illustrious lady, Isabella of Mantua. Marcantonio was no pedant, but these treasures simply had their place in the richly painted cabinet, beside many other bits of exquisite workmanship, because rare things in every art were beautiful to our dilettante, and possessions of all kinds ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... in this "model of human life," to quote Fielding's own descriptive phrase of his book, those which tell us most of their author are that worthy, authoritative, humourous clergyman, Dr Harrison; the good Sergeant Atkinson; and that fiery pedant Colonel Bath, with his kind heart hidden under a ferocious passion for calling out every man whom he conceived to have slighted his honour. Dr Harrison does not win quite the same place in our hearts as the man whom Thackeray ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... childhood. At the age of eighteen, Chesterfield, then Lord Stanhope, was entered at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. It was one of the features of his character to fall at once into the tone of the society into which he happened to be thrown. One can hardly imagine his being 'an absolute pedant,' but such was, actually, his own account of himself:—'When I talked my best, I quoted Horace; when I aimed at being facetious, I quoted Martial; and when I had a mind to be a fine gentleman, I talked Ovid. I was convinced ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... our own time sought for one mind on which to lay the burden of its anger, one hard master or pedant who could be made responsible for the drying up of the wells, Malherbe again was found. He became the butt of Hugo's splendid ridicule. He was the god of plaster that could not hear or speak or feel, but which fools had worshipped; a god easy to break to pieces. His austerity—for them ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... Hence, pedant Nature! with thy Grecian rules! Centaurs (not fabulous) those rules efface; Back, sister Muses, to your native schools; Here booted grooms usurp Apollo's place, Hoofs shame the boards that Garrick used to grace, The play of limbs ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... for new works of controversy, and his rust is more precious than the most costly gilding. Under his plastic hand trifles rise into importance; the nonsense of one age becomes the wisdom of another; the levity of the wit gravitates into the learning of the pedant, and an ancient farthing moulders into infinitely more value than a ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... trip to Paris that though he could set Gilbert right on many a detail yet his generalisations were marvellous. He had, said Mr. Eccles, an intuitive mind. He had, too, read more than was realised, partly because his carelessness and contempt for scholarship misled. Where the pedant would have referred and quoted and cross-referred, he went dashing on, throwing out ideas from his abundance and caring little if among his wealth were a few faults of fact or interpretation. "Abundance" was a word much used of his work just now, and in the field of literary criticism he was ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... he was not a professional rhetorician, but a man of affairs. Gascoigne, Lodge, Spenser, were poets who incidentally wrote on the technic of their art or in defence of its value. Sidney, the poet, courtier, and soldier, wrote not from the musty alcoves of libraries. Webbe, it is true, was a pedant, but certainly not a scholar. Puttenham was a bad poet, a well-read man, and a courtier. Jonson's scholarship was thorough, but sweetened and ventilated by his activities as poet and dramatist. ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... Holofernes, a pedant schoolmaster, are introduced into the play by William to illustrate the asinine pretensions of ministers and pedagogues, who are constantly introducing Latin or French words in their daily conversation, for the purpose of impressing common people with their great learning, when, in fact, they only ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... to me, "you are nothing but an old pedant. I always suspected as much. The smallest little ragamuffin who goes along the road with his shirt-tail sticking out through a hole in his pantaloons knows more about me than all the old spectacled folks in your Institutes and your Academies. To know is nothing at all; to imagine ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... eh?" said he, after a little pause. "I'm rather well acquainted with his method, and the fact that he's been given charge of the coroner's examination isn't a very hopeful sign. He's a sort of pedant, who has come to think that the mixture of medical learning and knowledge of police conventions which he possesses makes ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... among the Indians, nor farther to the northwest than Montreal, nor of higher rank than barkeeper of a tavern or marker of a billiard-table, excepting one, who had been a school-master, and whom he emphatically sets down for "as foolish a pedant ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... vocabulary, an entire system of composition, for himself, his own true manner; and when we speak of the manner of a true master we mean what is essential in his art. Pedantry being only the scholarship of le cuistre (we have no English equivalent) he is no pedant, and does but show his intelligence of the rules of language in his freedoms with it, addition or expansion, which like the spontaneities of manner in a well-bred person will still further illustrate good taste.—The ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... and that was universal peace in our little church. We had no disputes and wrangling about the nature and equality of the holy, blessed, and undivided Trinity, no niceties in doctrine, or schemes of church government; no sour or morale dissenters to impose more sublimated notions upon us; no pedant sophisters to confound us with unintelligible mysteries: but, instead of all this, we enjoyed the most certain guide to Heaven; that is, the word of God: besides which, we had the comfortable views of his Spirit leading us to the truth, and making us both willing and ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... to bring the hand-mirror, and when in an instant she returned and, at her bidding, he held the shining glass before her, she patted his cheeks with their thin, fair, pointed beard, and called him her faithful little Wolf, her clear, stupid pedant and Satan in person, who would ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... who knows nothing but books, must be ignorant even of them. 'Books do not teach the use of books.' How should he know anything of a work who knows nothing of the subject of it? The learned pedant is conversant with books only as they are made of other books, and those again of others, without end. He parrots those who have parroted others. He can translate the same word into ten different languages, but ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... large; what does it matter how his own countrymen pronounce the letters? Shall we insist on the French pronouncing Newton without that final tong which they never fail to give him? They would be wise enough to laugh at us if we did. We remember that a pedant who was insisting on all the pronunciations being retained, was met by a maxim in contradiction, invented at the moment, and fathered upon Kaen-foo-tzee,[612] an authority which he was challenged to dispute. Whom did you speak of? said the bewildered man of accuracy. Learn ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... Phaedra and to Lucius he is very happily facetious; but in the prologue before the queen the pedant has found his way with Minerva, ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... Strachey of Saffron Walden, who was married in 1588 and was living in 1620, and that it was his grandson of the same name who was subsequently connected with the Virginia colony. He was, judged by his writings, a man of considerable education, a good deal of a pedant, and shared the credulity and fondness for embellishment of the writers of his time. His connection with Lord Delaware, and his part in framing the code of laws in Virginia, which may be inferred from the fact that he first published them, show ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... critics such as Meres. And if adventurous spirits, like Spenser and Sidney, were for a time misled into the vain attempt to graft exotic forms upon the homely growths of native poetry, they soon saw their mistake and revolted in silence against the ridiculous pedant who preferred the limping hexameters of the Arcadia to Sidney's sonnets, and the spavined iambics of Spenser to the ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... in love; I, that have been love's whip; A very beadle to a humorous sigh; A critic, nay, a night-watch constable; A domineering pedant o'er the boy, Than whom no mortal so magnificent! This wimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy, This senior-junior, giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid; Regent of love-rimes, lord of folded arms, The anointed sovereign of sighs and groans, Liege of all loiterers and malcontents, Dread prince ...
— Love's Labour's Lost • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... untrue. She knew Mark Pattison's quality, and could never have meant to draw the writer of some of the most fruitful and illuminating of English essays, and one of the most brilliant pieces of European biography, in the dreary and foolish pedant who overshadows Middlemarch. But the fact that Mark Pattison was an elderly scholar with a young wife, and that George Eliot knew him, led later on to a legend which was, I am sure, unwelcome to the writer of Middlemarch, while her supposed ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... outgrown, He loved himself the singer's art; Tenderly, gently, by his own He knew and judged an author's heart. No Rhadamanthine brow of doom Bowed the dazed pedant from his room; And bards, whose name is legion, if denied, Bore off alike intact their verses and ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... camp! And there upon the one side they shall see Britannicus the child of Claudius, And me the daughter of Germanicus; And on the other side a harp-player, A withered pedant, and a maimed sergeant, Disputing for the diadem of the earth. Come, ...
— Nero • Stephen Phillips
... been increased by the birth of a Daughter, Luise, waited but a short time in Ludwigsburg till the Father brought them over to the new dwelling at Solituede. Fritz, on the removal of his Parents, was given over as boarder to his actual Teacher, the rigorous pedant Jahn; and remained yet two years at the Latin school in Ludwigsburg. During this time, the lively, and perhaps also sometimes mischievous Boy, was kept in the strictest fetters; and, by the continual admonitions, exhortations, and manually practical corrections of Father and of Teacher, ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... 'genius,' in its common sense, seems ludicrously inadequate. James V. had some of the erratic qualities of the poetic tribe, but his claim to the songs—such as the 'Gaberlunzie Man'—which go under his name, is exceedingly doubtful. James VI. was a pedant, without being a scholar—a rhymester, not a poet. Of the rest we need not speak. Seldom has the sceptre become an Aaron's rod, and flourished with the buds and blossoms of song. In our annals there has been one, and but ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... no songster sings, For me no joyous lark upsprings; For I, confined in gloomy school, Must own the pedant's iron rule, And far from sylvan shades and bowers, In durance vile must pass the hours; There con the scholiast's dreary lines, Where no bright ray of genius shines, And close to rugged learning cling, While laughs around the jocund spring. How gladly would my soul forego All that ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... "You are a pedant, and I trust the Muses will revenge themselves upon you this night," said Joseph, angrily. "I prophesy that you will become this evening a wild enthusiast for Eckhof: that is always the punishment for those ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... say is true enough; the misfortune is that I can't act upon it. I am no uncompromising artistic pedant; I am quite willing to try and do the kind of work that will sell; under the circumstances it would be a kind of insanity if I refused. But power doesn't answer to the will. My efforts are utterly ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... statesman and of an author), at first made a deep impression on his mind; and at the present day he owes his reputation principally to those pursuits which, as Plutarch tells us, exposed him to the ridicule and even to the contempt of his contemporaries as a "pedant and a professor."[111] But his love of popularity overcame his philosophy, and he commenced a career which gained him one ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... Murdoch, student of divinity, who undertook to teach arithmetic, grammar, French, and Latin, to the boys of Lochlea, and the sons of five neighboring farmers. Murdoch, who was an enthusiast in learning, much of a pedant, and such a judge of genius that he thought wit should always be laughing, and poetry wear an eternal smile, performed his task well: he found Robert to be quick in apprehension, and not afraid to study when knowledge was the reward. He taught him to turn verse into its natural ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... elephant's As Woman's brain to Man's - (that's rule of three),— Conquers the foolish giant of the woods, As Woman, in her turn, shall conquer Man. In Mathematics, Woman leads the way; The narrow-minded pedant still believes That two and two make four! Why, we can prove, We women — household drudges as we are— That two and two make five — or three — or seven; Or five and twenty, if the case demands! Diplomacy? The wiliest diplomat Is absolutely helpless in our hands. He wheedles ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... the gossips, "the prettiest pedant in the world," was thus paid out for his intrigues against La Bruyere in the ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... to the regard of all pious and good men. But while he grew in the esteem of the religious and worthy, he sunk in the opinion of his old companions in gaiety: He was reckoned by them to have degenerated from the gay, sprightly companion, to the dull disagreeable pedant, and they measured the least levity of his words and actions with the character of a Christian Hero. Thus he found himself slighted, instead of being encouraged for his declarations as to religion; but happily those who held ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... tends less and less to rest on experience, and more and more to repose upon tradition. It is academic, a thing on which scribes may lecture, while the voice of the scholastic pedant with blatant repetitions overpowers the living, authoritative voice within the soul. "They marvelled, because He taught with authority, and not as the scribes. A fresh (not ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz
... Another places on his nose a pair of wooden or cardboard spectacles. He fulfils the duties of "engineer," walks up and down, constructs a plan, stares at the workmen through his glasses, plays the pedant, cries out that everything will be spoiled, has the work stopped and begun afresh as his fancy directs, and makes the whole performance as long and ridiculous as he can. This is an addition to the formula of an ancient ceremony held in mockery of theorists in general, for peasants despise them ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... His insatiable curiosity drove him forward. He scurried, in childish fashion by all shortcuts available, to get at the heart of the matter—a habit of mind detestable to pedants, since to them the letter is the main object, not the spirit. Happily Julius was ceasing to be a pedant, even in matters ecclesiastical. He loved the little boy, the mingled charm and pathos of whose personality held him as with a spell. With untiring patience he answered, to the best of his ability, Dickie's endless questions, of how and why. And, perhaps, he ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... affectation of bombastic diction—it is lamentable to see a preelucidated theme rendered semidiaphonous, by the elimination of simple expression, to make room for the conglomeration of pondrous periods, and to exhibit the phonocamptic coxcombry of some pedant, who mistakes sentences for wagons, and words for the ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... withal!" hint some calumniously. [Paulus Jovius, &c. See Pauli, iii. 70-73.] "Hector of Germany!" say others. He tried some small prefatory Siege or scalade of Pesth; could not do it; and came his ways home again, as the best course. Pedant Chroniclers give him the name HECTOR, "Joachim Hector,"—to match that of CICERO and that of ACHILLES. A man of solid structure, this our Hector, in body and mind: extensive cheeks, very large heavy-laden face; capable of terrible bursts of anger, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... pray advise me; my master is gone the circuit, and left me particular orders to send him an express if the King died: but here's the Prince, dead and he said nothing about him." You would easily believe this story, if you knew what a mere law-pedant it is! ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... influence of Warburton, for he alludes constantly and almost nervously to 'the foul-mouthed critic whom I know you have at your elbow,' and anticipates objections which he suspected 'the dogmatical pedant' would raise. ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... we speak about books, let us avoid the extravagance of expecting too much from books, the pedant's habit of extolling books as synonymous with education. Books are no more education than laws are virtue; and just as profligacy is easy within the strict limits of law, a boundless knowledge of books may be ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... Goya stems more from Caravaggio and Salvator Rosa than from any of his predecessors, except Velasquez. The presence of Tiepolo, the last of the Venetians, in Spain may have influenced him. Certainly Raphael Mengs, the "Saxon pedant," did not—Mengs associated with Tiepolo at Madrid. It is in company with the bravos of the brush, Caravaggio and Rosa, that Goya is closely affiliated. We must go to Gustave Courbet for a like violence of temperament; both men painted con furia; both were ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... in him, while giving all that was common and vicious in him as spoil to oblivion. He is like the Old-Man-of-the-Sea on the shoulders of our youth; he has become an obsession to the critic, a weapon to the pedant, a nuisance to the man of genius. True, he has painted great pictures in a superb, romantic fashion; he is the Titian of dramatic art: but is there to be no Rembrandt, no Balzac, no greater Tolstoi in English letters? I want to liberate Englishmen so far as I can ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... and skulked in every out-of-the-way corner of Europe, a hunted being in peril of his life. There had come a great change over their lives, and they had drifted farther apart again. He himself had gone out into the world something of a scholar and something of a pedant, and he had found that all his ideas of life had lain rusting in his country home, and that he had almost as much to unlearn as to learn. With ample means, and an eager thirst for knowledge, he had passed from one to another ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... had erected Froude into his demon incarnate. Other men might be, Froude must be, wrong. He detested Froude's opinions. He could not away with his style. Freeman's own style was forcible, vigorous, rhetorical, hard; the sort of style which Macaulay might have written if he had been a pedant and a professor instead of a politician and a man of the world. It was not ill suited for the blood-and-thunder sort of reviewing to which his nature disposed him, and for the vengeance of the High Churchmen he seemed ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... solicitous that men speak of us, than how they speak More supportable to be always alone than never to be so More valued a victory obtained by counsel than by force Morosity and melancholic humour of a sour ill-natured pedant Most cruel people, and upon frivolous occasions, apt to cry Most men are rich in borrowed sufficiency Most men do not so much believe as they acquiesce and permit Most of my actions are guided by example, ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Michel De Montaigne • Michel De Montaigne
... in the struggles and vicissitudes of life. He can appreciate their enormous learning, their unwearied labour, their sense of honour in their profession; and the editor of texts, the collator of various readings and emendations, the annotator who to us perhaps seems but a learned pedant appears to him as a man of sound and philosophic thought, of enthusiasm for truth and light—perhaps of genius—a man, too, with human affections and interests, with a history not devoid of romance. There is something touching in Mr. Pattison's affection for those ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... show; Nature, serenely fair to see; The book of birds and spirits free, God's poem, worth much more than mine, Where flowers for perfect stanzas shine— Flowers that a child may pluck in play, No harsh voice frightening it away. And I'm alone—all pleasure o'er— Alone with pedant called "Ennui," For since the morning at my door Ennui has waited patiently. That docto-r-London born, you mark, One Sunday in December dark, Poor little ones—he loved you not, And waited till the chance he got To enter as you passed away, And in the very corner where You played ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... Alexander VI, and quotes portions of the declarations of loyalty which the Italian envoys addressed to the Pope. Court flattery could not be carried further than it was in this case by Hieronymus, an affected pedant, an empty-headed braggart, a fanatical papist. Alexander made him Bishop of Andria and Governor of the Romagna. In 1497 Hieronymus, then in Cesena, composed a dialogue on Savonarola and his "heresy concerning the ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... desire to live by my goods; and I hope you will be pleased to allow some difference between a neat fresh piece, piping hot out of the classicks, and old threadbare worn-out stuff that has past through every pedant's mouth and been as common at the universities ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... where every science is taught which is liberal, and at the same time useful to mankind? Nothing would so much tend to bring classical literature within proper bounds as a steady and invariable appeal to these tests in our appreciation of all human knowledge. The puffed-up pedant would collapse into his proper size, and the maker of verses and the rememberer of words would soon assume that station which is the lot of those who go up unbidden to the upper places of ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... I always wrong, I was quite sure to come out second best, in the judgment of his friends and worshippers, who had no sympathy for anybody who ventured to tilt with their champion. Nevertheless I persisted, and, not standing much in awe of the pedant and the pedagogue, however much I admired the logician and the poet or the lawyer, I lost no opportunity of asserting my independence, and took, I am afraid, a sort of malicious pleasure in showing that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... at all? Was he a pedant? have those who have sedulously spread that report of him in the West told the truth about him? Or—hath a pleasant little lie ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... even more deluded than I am to come to this secluded spot at this unseasonable moment and be satisfied with my own society—no, not my own society, but that of these kind brotherly mountains. From a prosaic pedant I can almost feel myself becoming an ecstatical hermit, and my soul ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... Dante more intensely though less widely, and Shakespeare (but Shakespeare had already felt the Renaissance spirit) fully and perfectly, on the broad ground of humanity, so that anachronisms, and faults of costume, matter not one jot to any one but a pedant or a fool. When he came to something in the story—something in sentiment, manners, religion, what not—which was out of the range of his own experience, he changed it into something within the range of his own experience. When the whole story did not lend itself to the treatment ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... Faust. Pedant! will writing gain thy faith, alone? In all thy life, no man, nor man's word hast thou known? Is't not enough that I the fatal word That passes on my future days have spoken? The world-stream raves ...
— Faust • Goethe
... they did not suspect that this austere man, who came so punctually to the lectures in a wide village sledge with a pair of horses, was inwardly almost a child. He appeared to them to be a queer kind of pedant; they did not care for him, and made no overtures to him, and he avoided them. During the first two years he spent in the university, he only made acquaintance with one student, from whom he took lessons in Latin. This student Mihalevitch ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... as to the aims of kings and courts; to understand financial and diplomatic movements; briefly, as far as was then possible, to be an incarnate blue-book. He was to study literature and appreciate art, though he was carefully to avoid the excess which makes the pedant or the virtuoso. He was to cultivate a good style in writing and speaking, and even to learn German. Chesterfield's prophecy of a revolution in France (though, I fancy, a little overpraised) shows at least that he was a serious observer of political phenomena. But besides these solid attainments, ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... think that anyone will call either Mr. Sheppard's statements, or mine, exaggerated, who knows the bitter complaints of the wickedness and folly of the time, which are to be found in the writings of the Emperor Julian. Pedant and apostate as he was, he devoted his short life to one great idea, the restoration of the Roman Empire to what it had been (as he fancied) in the days of the virtuous stoic Emperors of the second century. He found his dream a dream, owing to the dead heap ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... arrogance and without excusing himself; so that when he had them, he enjoyed them without affectation, and when he had them not, he did not want them. No one could ever say of him that he was either a sophist or a [home-bred] flippant slave or a pedant; but every one acknowledged him to be a man ripe, perfect, above flattery, able to manage his own and other men's affairs. Besides this, he honored those who were true philosophers, and he did not reproach those who pretended to be philosophers, nor ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... on the whole, an image of affairs which is altogether oblique, dislocated, exaggerative; and which, in fine, proves unintelligible, if you try to construe it into a fact or thing DONE. Yet her Human Narrative, in that wide waste of merely Pedant Maunderings, is of great worth to us. A green tree, a leafy grove, better or worse, in the wilderness of dead bones and sand,—how welcome! Many other Books have been written on the matter; but these to my experience, only darken it more and more. Pull Wilhelmina STRAIGHT, the best ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the youth may, in his effort to prove his individuality, become vain and conceited, and fall into an attempt to appear interesting; or he may become slavishly dependent on conventional forms, a kind of social pedant. This state of nullity which contents itself with the mechanical polish of social formalism is ethically more dangerous than the tendency to a marked individuality, for it betrays emptiness; while the effort towards ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... attractive, and rather vain young men who are endowed with so many talents that they never achieve distinction in any branch of art. He is remembered now only by the literary work of his later life, in which he shows himself as a voluminous pedant and an embittered critic. He made friends with Handel on the spot, and took him under his own protection, providing him with almost daily free meals at his father's house. He evidently regarded him as a very simple and provincial young musician, ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... mayn't agree With FECHNER'S pedant formulae, I don't complain of such disparity; Too flawless that perfection shows; For me a larger comfort flows From human failings (take your nose— I like its ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CLVIII, January 7, 1920 • Various
... removed from the jurisdiction of Boyer, we were near enough (as I have said) to understand a little of his system. We occasionally heard sounds of the Ululantes, and caught glances of Tartarus. B. was a rabid pedant. His English style was crampt to barbarism. His Easter anthems (for his duty obliged him to those periodical flights) were grating as scrannel pipes.[4]—He would laugh, ay, and heartily, but then it must be at Flaccus's ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... in the first instance, by its rich though neglected garden, a tangle of every kind of creeping, vine-like plant. Here, surrounded in abundance by the pleasant materials of his trade, the vine-dresser as it were turned pedant and kept school for the various artists, who learned here an art supplementary to their own,—that gay magic, namely (art or trick) of his existence, till they found themselves grown into a kind of aristocracy, like veritable gens fleur-de-lises, as they worked together for the decoration ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... A stranger to flatt'ry, a stranger to fear; Who scatter'd around wit and humour at will; Whose daily 'bons mots' half a column might fill; A Scotchman, from pride and from prejudice free; 155 A scholar, yet surely no pedant was he. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... first made by Gilbert Wakefield, in a Letter to Mr. Fox, which the latter read to Sheridan a few days before the Debate; and the only remark that Sheridan made, on hearing it, was, "What an odd pedantic fancy!" But the wit knew well the value of the jewel that the pedant had raked up, and lost no time in turning it to account with all his accustomed skill. The Letter of Wakefield, in which the application of the fable occurs, has been omitted, I know not why, in his published ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... Earl of Monteith. The Marquis of Argyll (leader of the parliamentary army) tried to tamper with him in prison, but Dugald siezed him, threw him down, and then made his escape, locking the marquis in the dungeon. After the battle, Captain Dalgetty was knighted. This "Ritt-master" is a pedant, very conceited, full of vulgar assurance, with a good stock of worldly knowledge, a student of divinity, and a soldier who lets his sword out to the highest bidder. The character is original and well drawn.—Sir W. Scott, Legend of Montrose ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... that bread which is the bitterest of all food, by those stairs which are the most toilsome of all paths, by that deferred hope which makes the heart sick. Through all these things the ill-dressed, coarse, ungainly pedant had struggled manfully up to eminence and command. It was natural that, in the exercise of his power, he should be eo immitior, quia toleraverat; that, though his heart was undoubtedly generous and humane, his demeanour in society should be harsh and despotic. For severe distress ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... to Lincolnshire, and had the happiness of finding my family well when I arrived at home. My father was quite satisfied with the letters I conveyed from Professor Von Slammerbogen; my mother delighted to receive me in any character, whether that of pedant or prodigal. Nicholas, my elder brother, I found as much attached, as when I left him, to practising "Dull Care", upon the violin. In Tom, however, there was a considerable modification, he having left his sinister arm at Hougomont, in exchange for a three months' campaign in country ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... Rochfort. George, his eldest son. Nim, his second son, John, so called from his love of hunting. Dan, Mr. Jackson, a parson. Gaulstown, the Baron's seat. Sheridan, a pedant and pedagogue. Delany, chaplain to Sir Constantine Phipps, when Lord Chancellor of Ireland. Dragon, the name of the boat on the canal. Dean Percival and his wife, friends of the Baron ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... was also a minor poet of ambition. In 1695 he reprinted and edited Vedel's text, adding 100 more kjaempeviser which had been unknown to Vedel. But his work was not so well done; Syv was something of a pedant, and unfortunately either too critical or not critical enough. He ventured to correct the irregularities of the ballads, and not seldom has spoiled them. He bore the proud title of Philologer Royal of Denmark, and he was above all things else a grammarian. But he added to our store ...
— Grimhild's Vengeance - Three Ballads • Anonymous
... writings only one passage can be cited which even faintly suggests a coincidence with any in Shakspere; and in that the suggestion is faint indeed. In Bruno's ill-famed comedy IL CANDELAJO, Octavio asks the pedant Manfurio, "Che e la materia di vostri versi," and the pedant replies, "Litterae, syllabae, dictio et oratio, partes propinquae et remotae," on which Octavio again asks: "Io dico, quale e il suggetto et il proposito."[131] So far as it goes this is something of a parallel ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... speaking of Brahms, who was ravaged with it, but of delightful geniuses like Schumann, or of powerful ones like Bach. "This unnatural art wearies one like the sanctimonious salon of some little provincial town; it stifles one, it is enough to kill one."[117] "Saint-Saens is not a pedant," wrote Gounod; "he has remained too much of a child and become too clever for that." Besides, he has always been too ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... France, the schoolmaster followed him, and, with reverence the most profound, began to address him in Latin; but, turning quick towards him, he gaily said, "Monsieur, j'ai l'honneur de representer Ciceron, le grand Ciceron, pere de sa patrie! mais quoique j'ai cet honneur-la, je ne suit pas pedant!—mon dieu, Monsieur, je ne parle que le Francois dans la bonne compagnie!" And, ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... wentest quietly about thy quiet Lea, and left him his roaring Brora and windy Assynt. How could this noisy man know thee—and know thee he did, having argued with thee in Stafford—and not love Isaak Walton? A pedant angler, I call him, a plaguy angler, so let him huff away, and turn we to thee and to thy sweet charm in fishing ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... hexameter verse in English. The genius of the Northern languages refuses this old heroic measure, which the Latins borrowed from the Greeks, and all the scholarship and finish of Longfellow has not been able to establish it in English. Harvey was a pedant so thoroughly tinctured with classical learning, that he would trammel his own language by ancient rules, instead of letting it grow into the assertion ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... will, as it were, get the gleam of its integument; in the insistence upon individuality, and the individual difference as the significance of life, you will feel the texture of its shaping body. Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain (except the mind of a pedant), perfection is the mere repudiation of that ineluctable marginal inexactitude which is the mysterious inmost quality of Being. Being, indeed!—there is no being, but a universal becoming of individualities, and Plato ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... in their exaggeration attributed to me. In this article it is said that the Poles will one day be as proud of me as the Germans are of Mozart, which is palpable nonsense. But that is not all, the critic says further: "That if I had fallen into the hands of a pedant or a Rossinist (what a stupid expression!) I could not have become what I am." Now, although I am as yet nothing, he is right in so far that my performance would be still less than it actually is if I had not studied ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... speech worked a pretty enough havoc with fine-spun rhetoric to raise the wig off a pedant's head, Jean and I thought we read some sense in his ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... 'Sacrifices' and 'Unhappy Ones,' but Italy would have added no new kind to the forms of dramatic art. Had it not been for the Aminta, the pastoral drama must almost necessarily have been stillborn, for Guarini was too much of a pedant to do more than to imitate and enlarge, while other ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... is fixed upon this excellent Character, and two or three others in the Play, I must confess I was moved with the utmost Indignation at the trivial, senseless, and unnatural Representation of the Chaplain. It is possible there may be a Pedant in Holy Orders, and we have seen one or two of them in the World; but such a Driveler as Sir Roger, so bereft of all manner of Pride, which is the Characteristick of a Pedant, is what one would not ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... recognise our conventional Irishman in the pedant who, on going abroad, was asked by a friend to buy him two slave-boys of fifteen years each, and replied, "If I cannot find such a pair, I will bring you one of thirty years;" and in the fellow who ...
— The Book of Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston
... was Seward of New York, a Northern Whig, whose speech in opposition to the Fugitive Slave clause in Clay's Compromise had given him the leadership of the growing Anti-Slavery opinion of the North. He was soon to be joined by Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, null in judgment, a pedant without clearness of thought or vision, but gifted with a copious command of all the rhetoric of sectional hate. The place of Calhoun in the leadership of the South had been more and more assumed by a soldier who had been forced to change his profession by reason of a crippling ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... could he politically have made a wiser choice; for it was Talleyrand who made the Concordat with the Pope, the Treaty of Luneville, and the Peace of Amiens. Napoleon wanted a practical man in the diplomatic post,—neither a pedant nor an idealist; and that was just what Talleyrand was,—a man to meet emergencies, a man to build up a throne. But even Napoleon got tired of him at last, and Talleyrand retired with the dignity of vice-grand elector of the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... all the world, the ignorant and the well-informed, the man of genius, the man of fashion, and the man of business, the pedant and the philosopher, should agree in their opinion upon any speculative subject; upon the wide subject of education they will probably differ eternally. It will, therefore, be thought absurd to require this union of ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... thou not die? "Explain" me all this, or do one of two things: Retire into private places with thy foolish cackle; or, what were better, give it up, and weep, not that the reign of wonder is done, and God's world all disembellished and prosaic, but that thou hitherto art a Dilettante and sandblind Pedant.' ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... thousand prayers; My mother was as mild as any saint, Half-canonized by all that looked on her, So gracious was her tact and tenderness: But my good father thought a king a king; He cared not for the affection of the house; He held his sceptre like a pedant's wand To lash offence, and with long arms and hands Reached out, and picked offenders from the mass For judgment. Now it chanced that I had been, While life was yet in bud and blade, bethrothed To one, a neighbouring Princess: she ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... upheld, may have been suggested by Ascham. It is in three books, and draws largely on Quintilian, the first two books being substantially little more than a compilation, but a very judicious one, from the Institutes of Oratory. But Wilson is no pedant, and has many excellent remarks on the nature of the influence which the classics should exercise on English composition. ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... wanted to see more of Willy [1] before I ventured to express a prediction, Till yesterday I had barely seen him,—Virgilium tantum vidi; but yesterday he gave us his small company to a bullock's heart, and I can pronounce him a lad of promise. He is no pedant nor bookworm; so far I can answer. Perhaps he has hitherto paid too little attention to other men's inventions, preferring, like Lord Foppington, the "natural sprouts of his own." But he has observation, and seems thoroughly awake. I am ill at remembering other people's bon mots, ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... eccentric grandfather. He was practised daily in talking Latin, to which afterwards he added a competent study of the Greek; and finally he became unusually learned for his rank, but the most absolute and undistinguishing pedant that perhaps literature has to show. He sneers continually at the regular built academic pedant; but he himself, though no academic, was essentially the very impersonation of pedantry. No thought however beautiful, no image however magnificent, ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... her father's tutor, who had remained in Madame Dupin's service as "intendant." The serio-comic figure of this personage, so graphically drawn by George Sand herself in the memoirs of her early life, will never be forgotten by any reader of those reminiscences. Pedant, she says, was written in every line of his countenance and every movement that he made. He was possessed of some varied learning, much narrow prejudice, and a violent, crotchety temper, but had proved during the troubles of the Revolution ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... the stoic lesson, got by rote, The pomp of words, and pedant dissertation, That can support us in the hour of terror. Books have taught cowards to talk nobly of it: But when the trial comes, they ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... good company. "They cannot have the easy manners and tournure of the world, as they do not live in it." And an engaging address, "an insinuating behaviour," was to be sought for early in life, and, at the same time, with the solid parts of learning. "The Scholar, without good breeding, is a Pedant: the Philosopher, a Cynic: the Soldier, a Brute: ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... him; but I reasoned with him on the harm he was doing me, and would you believe it, the poor lad burst into tears, and implored me to give him something to do, to save him from his own spirit. I set him to write out and translate a long roll of Latin despatches sent up by that pedant Court in Hungary, and I declare to you I had no more trouble with him till next he was left idle. I gave him tutors, and he studied with fervour, and made progress at which they were amazed. He learnt the High Dutch faster than any other of ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and there is a curious series of scenes entitled "L'Albero della Croce," by an Ignoto of the fourteenth century, with a Christ crucified in the midst and all Scripture in medallions around him, the tragedy of Adam and Eve at the foot (mutilated by some chaste pedant) being very quaint. And in Angelico's rooms there is a little, modest Annunciation by one of his school—No. 256—which shows what a good influence he was, and to which the eye returns and returns. Here also, on easels, ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... dark eyes were keen, quick, sympathetic; and there was even a certain careless ease about his dress—about the turned-down collar and French-looking neck-tie, for example—that had more of the air of the student than of the pedant about it. All this at the first glance. It was only afterward you came to perceive what was denoted by those heavy, seamed brows, the firm, strong mouth, and the square line of the jaw. These told you of the presence ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... Guesses' are well worth reading; nay, buying: very ingenious, with a good deal of pedantry and onesidedness (do you know this German word?), which, I believe, chiefly comes from the Trinity Fellow, who was a great pedant. I have just read Mrs. Austin's Characteristics of Goethe: which I will bring for you when I come. It is well worth knowing something of the mind of certainly a great man, and who has had more effect on his age than any one else. There ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... Englishman, one might say, "larks" into achievement, the German "grinds" into it. The one, accordingly, is free-living, genial, generous, careless; the other laborious, exact, routine-ridden. It is hard for an Englishman to be a pedant; it is not easy for a German to be anything else. For philosophy no man has less capacity than the Englishman. He does not understand even how such questions can be put, still less how anyone can pretend to answer them. The philosopher wants to know whether, how, and why life ought to be lived ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... serious,—deformations of the body (humpbacks), epithets and nicknames, slang and other abuses of language (like mispronunciation by foreigners), vituperation, caricature and burlesque of respectable types like the pedant, dandy, Puritan, imbecile, or the rich and great, always raise a laugh in the crowd and are relished by the crowd. They are constant elements of farce and fun. They have been so for three thousand years. Jugglery and feats of strength and skill excite ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... quiver lips, there glisten eyes, There throb young hearts with generous hope; Thence, playmates, rise for high emprize; For, though he fail, yet shall ye cope With worldling wrapped in silken lies, With pedant, hypocrite, and pope. ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... a pretty touch of the pedant (who exists, says M. De Banville, in the heart of the poet) ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... seen grounds so tastefully laid out, and it was done, as all good work in art must be done, by following Nature so closely that it only differed from her handiwork in its profusion in so narrow a compass. A few years later our healthy English taste was spoiled by the pedant gardening of the Dutch with their straight flat ponds, and their trees all clipped and in a line like vegetable grenadiers. In truth, I think that the Prince of Orange and Sir William Temple had much to answer for in working ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... men and women before he can use books to advantage. Life is varied, men and women many, while the individual life is short; wise men read books, therefore, to enrich their experience, not merely as the pedant does, to garner facts. "J'etudie les livres en attendant que J'etudie les hommes," writes Voltaire. "Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life," ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... slave stole the dainties, and drained a beaker of costly wine on the sly. Pisander, like Thales, who was so intent looking at the stars that he fell into a well, "was so eager to know what was going on in heaven that he could not see what was before his feet."[66] And consequently the poor pedant dined on the remnants left after his employer and her husband had cleared the board; and had rancid oil and sour wine given him, when they enjoyed the best. The slaves had snubbed him and made fun of him; the freedmen ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... laughingly, "as a punishment for having played the pedant you must drink with us. Edmee is now quite out of danger. The doctor has said that Bernard can get up and walk a few steps. We will have ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... of remark, that a thought which is often quoted from Francis Bacon, occurs in Bruno's Cena di Cenere, published in 1584; I mean the notion, that the later times are more aged than the earlier. In the course of the dialogue, the Pedant, who is one of the interlocutors, says, 'In antiquity is wisdom;' to which the philosophical character replies, 'If you knew what you were talking about, you would see that your principle leads to ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 58, December 7, 1850 • Various
... in any country, and a comedy of The Pedant, discovering the greedy humanity within the dusty scholar, would not bring it home to one in particular. I am mindful that it was in Germany, when I observe that the Germans have gone through no comic training to warn them of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... on the ignorance of those who surrounded her, and found herself isolated as a sort of pedant; and as time went on, the narrowness of interests chafed her, and in like manner left her alone. As she grew past girlhood, the cui bono question had come to interfere with her ardour in study for its own sake, and she felt the ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge |
