"Pedantry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... plucked, we add an artificial rose or two to the composition of the bouquet?" They take care, in a word, that there be plenty of relics, and their establishments are huge and active. They administer the antidote to pedantry, and you can complain of them only if you never cross their thresholds. If you take this step you are lost, for you have parted with the correctness of your attitude. Venice becomes frankly from such a moment the big depressing ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... (Dissert. iv. de Ducatu Beneventi, in the Script. Ital. tom. v. p. 172, 173) forcibly reckons the xxivth stadia, not from Rome, but from the limits of the Roman duchy, to the first fortress, perhaps Sora, of the Lombards. I rather believe that Gregory, with the pedantry of the age, employs stadia for miles, without much inquiry into the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... from our old Teuton monosyllables; therefore, if I find any elegant word in a classic author, I propose it to be naturalised by using it myself; and if the public approves of it, the bill passes. But every man cannot distinguish betwixt pedantry and poetry; every man, therefore, is not ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... they pretend to write works which they never wrote and actions which they never performed, celebrate virtues which they were never famous for and excuse faults which they were never guilty of? And does not Lamb, in this work, very happily ridicule the pedantry and conceit of certain grave and dignified biographers whose works are to be found in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... hands Dorothean or Wordsworthian-female, or Hutchinsonian, to inform us of your present state, or possible proceedings. I am ashamed that this breaking of the long ice should be a letter of business. There is none circum praecordia nostra I swear by the honesty of pedantry, that wil I nil I pushes me upon scraps of Latin. We are yours cordially: CHAS. & ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... with caution, unveils to the reader a portion of that past which usually is as deeply shrouded from us as the future. If at times we are reminded in reading Clarendon's Life of the old steward in Hogarth's plate, who lifts up his hands in horror over the extravagance of his master, if his pedantry often irritates, and his love of place displeases, we recognise these but as the shades of the character of a distinguished and accomplished public servant. But to Marvell Clarendon was rapacious, ambitious, and corrupt, a man who had sold Oliver's Dunkirk to the French, and shared the price; who ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... attain in discerning them, or to what extent their names were merely convenient handles for certain types which he had chosen aesthetically. To us to-day this classification is merely a trace of an obsolete pedantry, which it would be a vain curiosity to attempt to follow with the object of identifying ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... interest, which characterizes all his writings subsequent to that change, when compared with those of an earlier time. It was Wordsworth's wayward fate to be patronized and puffed into notice by the champions of old abuses, by the advocates of the pedantry of Oxford, and by the maintainers of the despotism not even of Pitt but of Castlereagh. It is already felt, however, that the poet whom these men were mainly instrumental in bringing into notice, will live in men's memories by exactly those of his writings ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... tears, satisfied with her lot despite her widowhood, she felt happy in being a princess, in being a mother, in being in France. Flattered by the homage addressed to her on all sides, but without haughty pride in it, she protected art and letters with out pedantry, rejuvenated the court, embellished the city, spread animation wherever she was seen, and appeared to the people like a seductive enchantress. Those who were at her receptions found themselves not in ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... called "old-fashioned," was not in the remotest degree intended to be modelled upon the diction of Swift, or Pope, or Addison, or Steele, or Dryden, or Defoe, or even Nash or Howel. Such a feat of elegant pedantry has already been accomplished by Mr. Thackeray in his noble story of Esmond; and I had no wish to follow up a dignified imitation by a sorry caricature. I simply endeavoured to make Captain Dangerous express ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... temper of the public of that day, that it responded to the appeal. It suffered the poet to transport it over wide intervals of space and time, and "with aid of some few foot and half-foot words, fight over York and Lancaster's long jars." Pedantry undertook, even at the very beginnings of the Elisabethan drama, to shackle it with the so-called rules of Aristotle, or classical unities of time and place, {102} to make it keep violent action off the stage and comedy distinct from tragedy. But the playwrights appealed ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... the delicate precision of a Th['e]ophile Gautier. In his hands it might have become in French a thing of beauty and a joy for ever, as it is in the original Portuguese. As to the text, without emulating the pedantry of the critic who added a fourth season to Shelley's three, and thereby provoked a splendid outburst of wrath from Swinburne, we may assume that in passages where Vicente appears to have gone out of his way to avoid a required rhyme, this is merely a case of ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... Our pedantry wants even the saving clause of Enthusiasm. The election is now matter of necessity and not of choice. Knowledge is now too broad a field for your Jack- of-all-Trades; and, from beautifully utilitarian ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... interruption from casual droppers-in. Here he kept the specimens which he went on collecting, some live—a large turtle and two or three harmless snakes, for instance—and some dead and stuffed. He was no "grind"; the gods take care not to mix even a drop of pedantry in the make-up of the rare men whom they destine for great deeds or fine works. Theodore was already so much stronger in his health that he went on to get still more strength. He had regular lessons in boxing. He took long ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... meeting Mrs. Arkwright, and hearing her sing. She is, I understand, quite a heaven-born genius, having scarce skill enough in music to write down the tunes she composes. I can easily believe this. There is a pedantry among great musicians that deprives their performances of much that is graceful and beautiful. It is the same in the other fine arts, where fashion always prefers cant and ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... means the poets, for many years past, were all overrun with pedantry. For, as I take it, the word is not properly used; because pedantry is the too frequent or unreasonable obtruding our own knowledge in common discourse, and placing too great a value upon it; by which definition, men of the court or ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... shall quote against me with a sneer Lilly's "Euphues" itself, I shall only answer by asking—Have they ever read it? For if they have done so, I pity them if they have not found it, in spite of occasional tediousness and pedantry, as brave, righteous, and pious a book as man need look into: and wish for no better proof of the nobleness and virtue of the Elizabethan age, than the fact that "Euphues" and the "Arcadia" were the two popular romances of the day. It may have suited ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... greatest and most admired institutors of youth, whose fine taste has been allowed clear from the least tincture of pedantry, Quintilian recommends especially the talent of dancing, as conducive to the formation of orators; not, as he very justly observes, that an orator should retain any thing of the air of a dancing-master, ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... pleasure. He was taught that the leaders of the people were henceforth to have their share with the crown in determining national policy. Common dangers were still to be met by measures deliberated in common, but the initiative was no longer exclusively reserved to the monarch. The sordid pedantry of the baronial leaders and the high-souled determination of the king compel our sympathy for Edward rather than his enemies. But all that made English history what it is, was involved in the issue, and the future of English freedom was assured ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... training, there is ample testimony that he appreciated the main classical authors whom he read in the gymnasium at Cassel; but it was refreshing to hear and to read various utterances of his against gerund-grinding and pedantry. He recognizes the fact that the worst enemies of classical instruction in Germany, as, indeed, elsewhere, have been they of its own household, and he has stated this view as vigorously as did Sydney Smith in England and Francis Wayland in America. Whenever he dwelt on ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... surmounting all formal considerations? And least of all can they fail to appear in War, where the personal character of the combatants plays such an important part, both in the cabinet and in the field. We limit ourselves to pointing this out, as it would be pedantry to attempt to reduce such influences into classes. Including these, we may say that the number of possible ways of reaching the ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... younger son of the vicar, noted for his greenness and pedantry. Being sent to sell a good horse at a fair, he bartered it for a gross of green spectacles, with copper rims and shagreen cases, of no more value than ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... defending her were senseless, if gallant, fanatics, but also that they had forfeited their technical legitimacy. To talk to-day of duty, civil or military, to such a perjured Government does not even deserve to be called constitutional pedantry, for it has not a splinter of constitutionalism to support it. Sedekiah held his vassal throne only by his oath to his suzerain of Babylon and when he broke that oath his legitimacy crumbled.(591) Of right Divine or human there was none in a government so forsworn and self-disentitled, ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... prison. It is true that it was on the side of Art alone that this enlightenment began, and that even on that side it progressed slowly enough at first—e.g. Sir Walter Scott feels himself obliged, as in the Antiquary, to apologize to pedantry for his instinctive love of Gothic architecture. And no less true is it that follies enough were mingled with the really useful and healthful birth of romanticism in Art and Literature. But at last the study ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... we never see the "Origin of Species" spoken of as "On the Origin of Species, &c.," or as "The Origin of Species, &c." (the word "on" being dropped in the latest editions). The distinctive feature of the book lies, according to its admirers, in the "&c.," but they never give it. To avoid pedantry I shall continue to speak of ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... vituperative epithets, and of the assumption of special and divine illumination. The issue of the conflict would not have been doubtful, had it been continued with these tactics. The Church would have been relegated to the limbo of superstition and the hide-bound pedantry of ecclesiasticism, if new defenders on new principles had not entered the lists. Reinforcement came from a band of philosophic thinkers of whom Wordsworth and Coleridge were the pioneers. The influence of both these men was underestimated at the time. ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... Restoration period. The idealists, who had aimed at marks it was not given to man to reach, were superseded by men with no ideal, whether in politics or religion. The extreme rigidity in morals enjoined by State authority in Cromwell's days, when theological pedantry discovered sin in what had hitherto been regarded as innocent, led, among the unsaintly mass of the people, to a hypocrisy even more corrupting than open vice, and the advent of the most publicly dissolute of ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... verse, except Milton.' Gray's Works, ed. 1858, v. 36. Goldsmith, in his Present State of Polite Learning (ch. xi.), wrote in 1759:—'From a desire in the critic of grafting the spirit of ancient languages upon the English have proceeded of late several disagreeable instances of pedantry. Among the number, I think, we may reckon blank verse. Nothing but the greatest sublimity of subject can render such a measure pleasing; however, we now see it used upon the most trivial occasions.' On the same page he speaks of 'the tuneless flow of our blank verse.' See ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... discrimination in science; but they are not great as originators. The French, notwithstanding the high pitch at which they have undoubtedly arrived in mathematical investigation, not withstanding the general accuracy of their experimental researches, have more of the pedantry of science; their papers are too professional—too much selon les regles; there are too many minutiae; the reader is tempted to exclaim with Jacques—"I think of as many matters as he; but I give Heaven thanks, and make no boast ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... They talked and laughed. The guests arrived. The conversation was revived By the coarse wit of worldly hate; But round the hostess scintillate Light sallies without coxcombry, Awhile sound conversation seems To banish far unworthy themes And platitudes and pedantry, And never was the ear affright By ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... instruction and research, in which science, pure and applied, should have an equal place with literature; in which the study of literature, ancient and modern, should be emancipated as much as possible from pedantry; and which should be free from various useless trammels and vicious methods which at that period hampered many, if not most, of the American ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... respects. His eldest brother was a very fine young man, and had taken high honours at Cambridge. He was an excellent specimen of an English gentleman of the nineteenth century. Free from all affectation and pedantry, still his whole nature seemed to revolt from anything slangish or low. No oaths, nor anything which would be considered one, nor any cant expressions, ever escaped his lips. Yet he was full of life and spirits, the soul of every society in which ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... other people have to say on a number of subjects. I do not wish to be always respiring the same confined atmosphere, but to vary the scene, and get a little relief and fresh air out of doors. Do all we can to shake it off, there is always enough pedantry, egotism, and self-conceit left lurking behind; we need not seal ourselves up hermetically in these precious qualities, so as to think of nothing but our own wonderful discoveries, and hear nothing but the sound of our own voice. Scholars, ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... in revolt against their world and the pedantry of its little inflexible laws; and all her old traditions had become odious to her, seeming, for the moment, deeply tainted with dishonour, and partly the cause of her disastrous plight. A great, ruining ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... change means toleration, for it is assumed that the vulgar can judge for themselves; intellectually, it means rationalism, that is, an appeal to the reason common to all men; and, in literature it means the hatred of pedantry and the acceptance of such literary forms as are thoroughly congenial and intelligible to the common sense of the new audience. The hatred of the pedantic is the characteristic sentiment of the time. When Berkeley looked ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... youthful temperament of those who by and by do the work of the world. This mixture of intellectual gravity with a passionate love of improvement in all the aims and instruments of life, made many intelligences alive who would otherwise have slumbered, or sunk either into a dry pedantry on the one hand, or a windy, mischievous philanthropy on the other. He showed himself so wholly free from the vulgarity of the sage. He could hope for the future without taking his eye from the realities of the present. He recognised the social destination of knowledge, and kept ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3) - Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography • John Morley
... itself, and yet become bad by being used at a wrong time, and in a way which produces harm. And it is shocking, to say the least, to see churches emptied and parishes thrown into war for the sake of such matters. The lightest word which can be used for such conduct is, pedantry; but I fear at times lest the Lord in heaven should be using a far more awful word, and when He sees weak brethren driven from the fold of the Church by the self- will and obstinacy of the very men who profess to desire to bring all ...
— Sermons for the Times • Charles Kingsley
... attract distinguished men. Tall, handsome, and finely-formed, she was a good musician, drew and painted, spoke several languages, and even knew something of science,—a dangerous advantage, which requires a woman to avoid carefully all appearance of pedantry. Blinded by mistaken tenderness, the mother gave the daughter false ideas as to her probable future; to the maternal eyes a duke or an ambassador, a marshal of France or a minister of State, could alone give her Celestine her due place in society. The young ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... to a young man in a doublet who holds a hound in a leash. They are evidently family portraits, taken from those who looked on at the artist, and on the other side he has introduced members of his own family who were helping him. These decorations have a gaiety, an absence of pedantry, a sound and sane sympathy with the spirit of the Renaissance which tell of a happy moment when art was at its height and in touch with its environment. From about 1563 we may begin to date his great supper pictures. ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... Theobald's shoes. Theobald walked off in his shoes into the shades. Samuel says, that by the substitution, Pope has "depraved his poem"—inasmuch as he has given to Cibber the "old books, the cold pedantry and sluggish pertinacity of Theobald." That is not true. Compare the places in the original Dunciad, in which Theobald figures at large, with that now filled by Cibber, and you will admire by what wizard power the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... There is a case of a judge who sentenced a man to death and allowed the execution to take place, notwithstanding that he—the judge—had actually seen the murder committed by another man. But that was carrying correctness of procedure to the verge of pedantry." ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... Italian thief utilized his questionable art to replace a loss in his family. "To General Villa" is a peculiar piece of verse written last summer for the purpose of defying those who had charged its author with pedantry and pomposity. It has suffered somewhat at the hands of the printer; "Intrepido" being spelled "Intrepedo", and the word "own" being dropped from the clause "your own name can't write" in the third line of ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... without the faintest disposition to descend to the level of his audience; eloquent, but with no trace of the empty rhetoric which so often does duty for that quality; full of a high seriousness, but with no suspicion of pedantry; lightened by an occasional epigram or flashes of caustic humour, but with none of the small jocularity in which it is such a temptation to a lecturer to indulge. As one listened to him one felt that comparative anatomy was ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... the only reformers. He will long be honored for his elegant, Latinity. In the republic of letters, his efforts to infuse a pure taste, a sound criticism, a love for the beautiful and the classic, in place of the owlish pedantry which had so long flapped and hooted through mediveval cloisters, will always be held in grateful reverence. In the history of the religious Reformation, his name seems hardly to deserve the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... conquest, how much more enlightened the world would have been now! We, alas, can only fight. France is unconquerable. We impose our narrow ideas, our prejudices, our obsolete institutions, our insufferable pedantry on the world by brute force—by that stupid quality of military heroism which shews how little we have evolved from the savage: nay, from the beast. We can charge like bulls; we can spring on our foes like gamecocks; when we are overpowered by reason, ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... paid no heed unto me— Nay, that graceless little boy Coolly plotted to undo me— With his songs of tender joy; And my pedantry o'erthrown, Eager was I to employ His ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... rests, bring up the first young men of the country as if they were all to keep grammar-schools in little country-towns; and a nobleman, upon whose knowledge and liberality the honour and welfare of his country may depend, is diligently worried, for half his life, with the small pedantry of longs ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... l. xii. p. 635. Such an anecdote was perfectly suited to the taste of Montaigne. He makes use of it in his agreeable Essay on Pedantry, l. i. c. 24.] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... has thinned out and fallen flat during the centuries. My hearers have smiled and tittered perhaps—with a pathetic wish to be kind, or a desire to show themselves not quite dull to these classic amenities—and between us we have, in a kind of chuckling pedantry, shuffled through the occasion; but it is not pleasant ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... imperceptibly the reader finds himself elevated from a trivial scene. He is borne upward to the harmony of the sphere. He bows before the great law of the universe—the young gallant is transformed into the mighty teacher; and this without one hard conceit —without one touch of pedantry. It is but a flash of light; and where glowed the playful picture ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... much was expected, Ariosto, who was then twenty-seven years old, and already known at the court of the Este and in the cultivated circles of Italy as a Latinist and a writer of comedies. He also wrote an epithalamium addressed to Lucretia. It is graceful, and not burdened with mythological pedantry, but it lacks invention. The poet congratulates Ferrara,—which will henceforth be the envy of all other cities,—for having won an incomparable jewel. He sympathizes with Rome for the loss of Lucretia, saying that it has again fallen into ruins.[163] ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... "the good old times," and fancies that they belonged to God, while this age belongs only to man, blind chance, and the evil one, let us cast them from us as the suggestions of an evil lying spirit, as the natural parents of laziness, pedantry, fanaticism, and unbelief. And therefore let us not fear to ask the meaning of this present day, and of all its different voices—the pressing, noisy, complex present, where our workfield lies, the most intricate of all states of society, and of all ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... ahead. I'm not speaking of that. My point is that we must wake up to two things. First of all, we must never make the mistakes that you did in the North when you built up your educational system. That means no pedantry, or classical snobbery. We mustn't go that way. Our way is plain though. I see it more clearly every time I think the matter over—we must train the intelligence of the ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... rustics and savages call wedge-shaped objects that fall from the sky, "axes": that scientific men, when it suits their purposes, can resist temptations to prolixity and pedantry, and adopt the simple: that they can be intelligible ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... days of universal knowledge, schoolmaster and scholars all abroad together, quotation is voted pedantry, and to interpret is accounted an impertinence; yet will I boldly proclaim, as a mere fact, clear to the perceptions of all it may concern, "This book deserves richly of the Sosii." And that for the best of reasons: it is not only a book, but a book full of ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... only to look over the lists of the Faculties and teachers of our Universities to see the subdivision of labor carried out as never before. The movement is irresistible; it brings with it exactness, exhaustive knowledge, a narrow but complete self-satisfaction, with such accompanying faults as pedantry, triviality, and the kind of partial blindness which belong to intellectual myopia. The specialist is idealized almost into sublimity in Browning's "Burial of the Grammarian." We never need fear that he will undervalue himself. To be the supreme ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Betterton, Garrick, Kemble, Kean, and Macready,[623] dedicate their lives to this genius; him they crown, elucidate, obey, and express. The genius knows them not. The recitation begins; one golden word leaps out immortal from all this painted pedantry, and sweetly torments us with invitations to its own inaccessible homes. I remember, I went once to see the Hamlet of a famed performer,[624] the pride of the English stage; and all I then heard, and all ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... anxiety to know what your objects really are—that anxiety will be satisfied when we meet. Never yet, my dear girl, did I long to administer a productive pecuniary Squeeze to any human creature, as I long to administer it to Mr. Noel Vanstone. I say no more. Verbum sap. Pardon the pedantry of a Latin ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... uncle most strongly was his blunt contempt of the modern pedantry in State, Church, and School, to which he gave vent with some humour. Despite the great moderation of his usual views on life, he yet produced on me the effect of a thorough free-thinker. I was highly ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... the recollections of a hundred petty feuds reaching back to the gloom of the Middle Ages, the national taste dominated by poor French models to an extent that now seems incredible, learning either dry pedantry or shallow cox-combry. We are indeed a young country, but we are young in hope; Germany was old, but it was old in weakness, in poverty, in despondency. Whoever doubts our ability to do as much as Germany did one hundred years ago, fails to profit by the teachings of history—overlooks the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... wrote the others from time to time during the year which followed, always very rapidly, and sometimes (as with 'What Mr. Robinson thinks') at one sitting. When I came to collect them and publish them in a volume, I conceived my parson-editor, with his pedantry and verbosity, his amiable vanity and superiority to the verses he was editing, as a fitting artistic background and foil. He gave me the chance, too, of glancing obliquely at many things which were beyond the ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... individual permits himself to be represented by a plural pronoun he must accept all the grammatical consequences. "I will even venture to assert," he continues in the same letter, "that two thirds of all the corruptions in our language have been introduced by learned grammarians, who, from a species of pedantry acquired in schools, and from a real ignorance of the original principle of the English tongue, have been for ages attempting to correct what they have supposed vulgar errors, but which are in fact established analogies.... In this country it is desirable that inquiries should be free, ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... of circles above circles approaching nearer to His presence—all of these conceptions appear once more and are confirmed by many witnesses. It is only the claims of infallibility and of monopoly, the bigotry and pedantry of theologians, and the man-made rituals which take the life out of the God-given thoughts—it is only this which has ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... as of love"; and a long string of that wonderful young lady's perfections must have been rather wearying to those who had not the felicity of being acquainted with her. Apparently the young Countess possessed deep knowledge without pedantry, and was of delicious naivete, laughing like a little child; though this did not prevent her from showing religious enthusiasm about beautiful things. Further, she was of angelic goodness, intensely observant, yet extremely discreet, most respectful to her adored mother, very industrious, and ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... colleges and schools; Her priests, her train, and followers, show As if they all were spectres too! They purchase knowledge at th'expense Of common breeding, common sense, And grow at once scholars and fools; Affect ill-manner'd pedantry, Rudeness, ill-nature, incivility, And, sick with dregs and knowledge grown, Which greedily they swallow down, Still cast it up, ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... to Bourdeaux, to Andrea Govea, the Portuguese principal of the College of Gruienne. As Professor of Latin at Bourdeaux, we find him presenting a Latin poem to Charles V.; and indulging that fancy of his for Latin poetry which seems to us now-a-days a childish pedantry; which was then—when Latin was the vernacular tongue of all scholars—a serious, if not altogether a useful, pursuit. Of his tragedies, so famous in their day—the 'Baptist,' the 'Medea,' the 'Jephtha,' and the 'Alcestis'—there is ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... social intercourse. With ninety-nine out of a hundred, such an education, so far as it made for either happiness or efficiency, would be a failure. But Browning was the hundredth man. He was profoundly learned without pedantry and without conceit; and he ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... examination closed, and the argument to the jury commenced. The solicitor very briefly adverted to the leading facts, deprecated any attempt to turn the case into ridicule, admitted that the witness was a man of eccentricity and pedantry, but harmless and inoffensive; a man, evidently, of conscientiousness and respectability; that he had shown himself to be a peaceable man, but when occasion demanded, a brave man; that there was a conspiracy to assassinate him upon no cause except an independence, which ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... the way, I judge it not impertinent to mention the many authors both of the Latin and Greek which, through his excellent judgment and way of teaching, far above the pedantry of common Public Schools (where such authors are scarce ever heard of), were run over within no greater compass of time than from ten to fifteen or sixteen years of age:—Of the Latin, the four grand authors ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... me, Brother, in three lines, what the determination of my friends was; only, that then you would not have had room to display your pedantry by so detestable an allusion or reference to the Georgic. Give me leave to tell you, Sir, that if humanity were a branch of your studies at the university, it has not found a genius in you for mastering it. Nor is either my sex or myself, though a sister, I see entitled to the least decency ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... both being still retained: what—wh[ich—t]hat; (which-that.) Anciently it appeared in the varying forms, tha qua, qua tha, qu'tha, quthat, quhat, hwat, and finally what."—Kirkham's Gram., p. 111. This bald pedantry of "tha qua, qua tha," was secretly borrowed from the grammatical speculations of William S. Cardell:[217] the "which-that" notion contradicts it, and is partly of the borrower's own invention. If what is a compound, it was compounded more than a thousand years ago; and, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... same tendency in all accustomed for a long while to absolute rule, even in petty matters;—in the old ship's captain, the old head of a factory, the old master of hounds; and we do not blame them for it. It is a disease incident to their calling, as pedantry is to that of a scholar, or astuteness to that of an attorney. But it is most dangerous in the greatest minds, and in the highest places; and only to be kept off by them, as by us, each in our place, by honest self-examination, diligent ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... attached to Jehane of the Forest (MELROSE) is not calculated to whet the appetite of the adult public, and the eulogy of a well-known author, appended on a printed slip, lacks the essential glow of the effective advertisement. It misses the point; it is pedantic, and pedantry is the one thing for which wary readers are on the look out in stories of antiquity. It is first important, then, to acquit Mr. L. A. TALBOT of every offence of which, in the blackness of the outward circumstances, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 18, 1914 • Various
... he hates you more bitterly for this, than if you had cheated him of his patrimony with your own discredit. He is always slighting the general opinion, and wondering why such and such men should be applauded. Commend a good divine, he cries postilling; a philologer, pedantry; a poet, rhiming; a school-man, dull wrangling; a sharp conceit, boyishness; an honest man, plausibility. He comes to publick things not to learn, but to catch, and if there be but one soloecism, that ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... not go beyond the bounds of the narrowest home relations. On top of this, an empty and hollow formality, meant as a substitute for education and culture, turned existence, that of woman in particular, into a veritable treadmill. Thus the spirit of the Reformation degenerated into the worst pedantry, that sought to smother the natural desires of man, together with his pleasures in life under a confused mass of rules and usages that affected to be "worthy," but ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... may seem rather a pleasant occupation for a married couple to reckon up a million of money as their joint property; but, in this concrete instance, to spend the wedding-night in a study, making pecuniary computation, is the pinnacle of pedantry. ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... with rectitude of articulation, and force of emphasis, of which I had entertained no conception previously to my knowledge of him. Notwithstanding the uncouthness of his garb, his manners were not unpolished. All topics were handled by him with skill, and without pedantry or affectation. He uttered no sentiment calculated to produce a disadvantageous impression: on the contrary, his observations denoted a mind alive to every generous and heroic feeling. They were introduced without parade, and accompanied with that ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... antidote the singular book which has given him fame. The Anatomy of Melancholy, in which he appears under the name of Democritus Junior, was pub. in 1621, and had great popularity. In the words of Warton, "The author's variety of learning, his quotations from rare and curious books, his pedantry sparkling with rude wit and shapeless elegance ... have rendered it a repertory of amusement and information." It has also proved a store-house from which later authors have not scrupled to draw without acknowledgment. It was a favourite ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... rules that bind the rest? Does the fact that a novel is well designed, well proportioned, really make a very great difference in its power to please?—and let us answer honestly, for if it does not, then it is pedantry to force these rules upon a novel. In other arts it may be otherwise, and no doubt a lop-sided statue or an ill-composed painting is a plain offence to the eye, however skilfully it may copy life. The same thing is true of a novel, perhaps, ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... it. Simple lines in a landscape are of the same value as the naked parts of a richly-clothed figure. They act both as contrasts and as indications of the original substratum of the figure; but to say that severe simplicity is the highest ideal is mere pedantry ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... auditors, Melchor Davalos, writes (July 3, 1584) to the king a letter which, withal containing some valuable information regarding matters in the islands, is a curious mixture of pedantry, bigotry, egotism, and vanity. He mentions the arrival and establishment of the Audiencia at Manila, complains that he cannot obtain the salary due him, and relates the services which, he thinks, entitle him to better treatment. He asks for instructions as to what shall ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume VI, 1583-1588 • Emma Helen Blair
... in his career. Besides the "Faust" symphony, he composed during this period the twelve symphonic poems, thus originating a new and highly important musical form, which may be said to bear, in their liberation from pedantry, the same relation to the set symphony that the music drama does to opera; the "Rhapsodies Hongroises;" his piano sonata and concertos; the "Graner Messe;" and the beginnings of his "Christus" and "Legend of the Holy Elizabeth." ...
— The Loves of Great Composers • Gustav Kobb
... when they came to the village, and every human creature, old and young, dropped its obsequious curtsey as they passed, she could first have beaten them for so degrading her, and the next moment felt a feverish pleasure in thus parading her petty power before a man who in his doctrinaire pedantry had no sense of poetry, or of the dear old natural relations ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... developed itself amidst the decaying Hellenic civilization of Asia Minor and Alexandria, which degraded everything beautiful and significant to the purpose of decoration and studied enjoyment with a laborious pedantry, a precise punctiliousness, rendering it equally nauseous to the man of fresh feeling as to the man of fresh intellect. As to the popular festivals, the importation of transmarine wild beasts prohibited in the time of Cato(48) was, apparently about the middle of this century, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... I had better explain that infare meant the bride's going home—to her new house, or at least her new family. This etymologically—the root is the Saxon faran, to go, whence come wayfaring, faring forth and so on. All this I am setting forth not in pedantry, but because so many folk had stared blankly upon hearing the word—which was to me as familiar as word could be. In application it had a wide latitude. Commonly the groom or his family gave the infare, but often enough some generous and well-to-do friend, or kinsman, ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... encumber the streets with preposterous marble. Lower and lower declines the level of abused intellect; the base school of landscape [Footnote: Appendix II, "Renaissance Landscape."] gradually usurps the place of the historical painting, which had sunk into prurient pedantry,—the Alsatian sublimities of Salvator, the confectionery idealities of Claude, the dull manufacture of Gaspar and Canaletto, south of the Alps, and on the north the patient devotion of besotted lives to delineation of bricks and fogs, fat cattle and ditchwater. ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... their efforts. Like a treble-stranded rope, it drags after it the triumphal car of Christian Art. But if either of the strands be broken, if either of the three elements be pursued disjointedly from the other two, the result is, in each respective case, grossness, pedantry, or weakness:—the exclusive imitation of Nature produces a Caravaggio, a Rubens, a Rembrandt—that of the Antique, a Pellegrino di Tibaldo and a David; and though there be a native chastity and taste in religion, which restrains those who worship it too abstractedly from Intellect and ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... should release himself by involving a trusting girl in his difficulties, and whether the girl should be Miss Milbanke or another, were not likely to distinguish between the cultivated ability of a sensible girl and the pedantry of a blue-stocking; and hence, because Miss Milbanke was neither ignorant nor silly, she was called a learned lady by Lord Byron's associates. He bore testimony, in due time, to her agreeable qualities as a companion,—her ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... poetized in the inflated and ornate style which has given the so-called second Silesian school its evil reputation. His work is decidedly vacuous as poetry, but has its interest as indicating the literary drift of the age of puffs, powder, and pedantry. The selections follow Bobertag's edition in Krschner's ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... wit, it happened about the time of the revival of letters; but as soon as it was once detected, it immediately vanished and disappeared. At the same time there is no question but, as it has sunk in one age and rose in another, it will again recover itself in some distant period of time, as pedantry and ignorance shall prevail upon wit and sense. And, to speak the truth, I do very much apprehend, by some of the last winter's productions, which had their sets of admirers, that our posterity will in a few years degenerate into a race ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... to begin wid the chronicles of Ciaran of Clonmacnoise, Corurac McCullenan and Cuan O'Lochain, the gr-r-reat Irish histhorians." The boy was evidently accustomed to the priest's Celtic pleasantries. A little, appreciative grin was all the attention the insinuation of pedantry received. ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... Melanchthon,[601] the name given by Reuchlin[602] to his little kinsman Schwartzerd, because the world has adopted it: but he will none of Capnio, the name which Reuchlin fitted on to himself, because the world has not adopted it. He calls the old forms pedantry: but he sees that the rejection of well-established results of pedantry would be greater pedantry still. The paradoxers assume the question that it is more correct to sound a man by lame imitation of his own countrymen than as usual in the country ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... that it is more important to know what socialist leaders, stump speakers, pamphleteers, think Marx meant, than to know what he said. For then you are dealing with living ideas: to search his text has its uses, but compared with the actual tradition of Marx it is the work of pedantry. I say this here for two reasons—because I hope to avoid the critical attack of the genuine Marxian specialist, and because the observation is, I believe, relevant ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... ought to be ashamed of yourself! God forbid that one should decry such a man as Alfred was. But the pedantry of Freeman and his sect, who tried to make 'English' a conterminous name and substitute for 'Anglo-Saxon,' was only by one degree less offensive than the ignorance of your modern journalist who degrades Englishmen by writing ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... lapidary erudition, elegant in itself, and throwing for ever little specks of light on the still ocean of the past, but not very favourable to comprehensive observation, and tending to bestow on an unprofitable pedantry the honours of real learning.'' s The Italian nobility, excluded as they mostly were from politics, and living in cities, found in literature a consolation and a career. Such academies were oligarchical in their constitution; they encouraged culture, but tended to hamper genius ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... majesty that noble oration of Demosthenes against AEschines." At a later time her Latin served her to rebuke the insolence of a Polish ambassador, and she could "rub up her rusty Greek" at need to bandy pedantry with a Vice-Chancellor. But Elizabeth was far as yet from being a mere pedant. She could already speak French and Italian as fluently as her mother-tongue. In later days we find her familiar with Ariosto and Tasso. The purity of her literary taste, ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... of a regeneration in German literature, unless either great political and social events should rouse the national mind from its languor, or the classical models of pure taste and true art should be studied again in a different spirit from that of professorial pedantry. Now, after the Thirty Years' War, there was no war in Germany in which the nation took any warm interest. The policy pursued in France during the long reign of Louis XIV. (1643-1708) had its chief aim in weakening the house of Hapsburg. When the ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... been proof against this infantile complaint' (which is not even a 'disease of language' of a respectable type), then 'the objection that a totem meant originally a clan-mark was treated as scholastic pedantry.' Alas, I fear with justice! For if I call Mr. Arthur Balfour a Tory will Mr. Max Muller refute my opinion by urging that 'a Tory meant originally an Irish rapparee,' or whatever the ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... edification of men. Poe's judgments are pretentious, spiteful, vulgar; but they contain a great deal of sense and discrimination as well, and here and there, sometimes at frequent intervals, we find a phrase of happy insight imbedded in a patch of the most fatuous pedantry. He wrote a chapter upon Hawthorne, and spoke of him on the whole very kindly; and his estimate is of sufficient value to make it noticeable that he should express lively disapproval of the large part allotted to allegory in his tales—in defence of which, ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... exquisite military combinations cannot remove, which the most perfectly served artillery cannot sweep away, before which all the bayonets, and gunpowder, and lines of fortification in the world are useless—and compared with which the science of the commander is pedantry, and strategy but a word. They will discover that something more than mechanical power, however great—something more than the skill of the practised officer, or the instinct of well-trained soldiers, are requisite for success—where ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... and write silly books, without finding his whole sex put under ban for his shortcomings, and so he works with a sense of individual power and responsibility which calls out his energies, and educates him even in spite of the foolish cosseting of a mother or the narrow pedantry ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... men, themselves, in a whole-page obituary (July 24th, 1880), bore graceful testimony to his personal worth. "That he is not with us," they said, "is hard to imagine.... A cultivated man of letters, an admirable scholar, he was as free from pedantry as he was incapable of idleness. From first to last he was, in the highest and best sense, 'Thorough.' ... Quick to detect and appreciate talent, he was ready in every way and on all occasions to hold out a helping hand to a beginner." Thus feelingly they spoke ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... young man who, destined to succeed in politics, would naturally make a figure in society. He was pliant, he struck the note of good-breeding, he was unsurpassed in phrasing; with ladies who chose to be 'superior,' he could find exactly the right tone, keeping clear of pedantry, yet paying her with whom he spoke the compliment of uttering serious opinions. With the more numerous class of ladies, who neither were nor affected to be anything but delightful chatterboxes, he could frolic on the lightest airs of society gossip. He was fast making ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... In one place she says that a man 'had a contemptible opinion' of some other man's understanding. Such a blunder is not of that class which usage sanctions, and an accuracy not much short of pedantry would be argued in noticing: it is at once illiterate and vulgar in the very last degree. I mean that it is common amongst vulgar people, and them only. It ranks, for instance, with the common formula of 'I am agreeable, if you ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... passed many an hour foraging among the old manuscripts. He has since, at different times, visited most of the curious libraries in England, and has ransacked many of the cathedrals. With all his quaint and curious learning, he has nothing of arrogance or pedantry; but that unaffected earnestness and guileless simplicity which seem to belong to ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... things have been noted, to hold a man to his formulae without reference to their special application, is pure pedantry. Burke was the last man to lay down any political proposition not subject to the ever varying interpretation of circumstances, and independently of the particular use which was to be made of it. Nothing universal, he had always said, can be rationally affirmed on any ...
— Burke • John Morley
... Mrs. Crawford most engaging. She was neither haughty nor full of the pedantry with which social leaders try to disabuse the mind of the ordinary citizen that the rich must necessarily be dubs. Twenty minutes later, Deacon Crawford came ...
— Skinner's Dress Suit • Henry Irving Dodge
... subject I think we should avoid pedantry; not to say to the pupil, you must play this piece a certain way; but rather say, I see or feel it in this way, and give the reasons underlying the conception. I believe the successful teacher should be a pianist. He should understand every point and be able to do the thing, ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... coarseness; art preponderating over nature begets pedantry; art and nature united make a ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... incumbent Parliaments, annual Parties, our attitude to Party Government, tends to enslave senates tends to misunderstanding of personal character establishes an incorrect standard for character Passive obedience Peace, the last legacy of Christ Pedantry, the fear of Pembroke, Lord Penn, William Penny, Rev. John Peter the Cruel Philip II. of Spain Philips, Ambrose Philosophy, classical unrevealed, imperfect fails to explain the Deity its failure to inculcate the doctrine of Providence defective in its ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... and Catullus. The chief characteristics of the literature of this period are freedom and vigour. In every author the bold spirit of the Republic breathes forth; and in the greatest is happily combined with an extensive and elegant scholarship, equally removed from pedantry and dullness. ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... of pedantry. He chooses harsh words by preference, liking unusual or insoluble rhymes, like 'haps' and 'yaps,' 'thick' and 'sick,' 'skin' and 'kin,' 'banks' and 'thanks,' 'skims' and 'limbs.' Two lines from The Woods of Westermain, published in 1883 in the Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... had no other accomplishment but that gorgeous cloak for all deficiency—an inimitable manner. Her remarks were always shrewd, and replete with good sense; her language was choice; her style of conversation varying, sometimes of that joyous nature that has all the effect, without the pedantry of wit, upon the hearer, and, at times, she could be really quite energetic. This is, after all, but an imperfect description of one who took upon herself the task of forming my address, revising my gait after the dancing-master, and making me to ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... beauties of the History of the World without at the same time acknowledging that the book almost wilfully deprives itself of legitimate value and true human interest by the remoteness of the period which it describes, and by the tiresome pedantry of its method. It is leisurely to the last excess. The first chapter, of seven long sections, takes us but to the close of the Creation. We cannot proceed without knowing what it is that Tostatus affirms of the empyrean ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... free in giving references for the statements in the text. The growing custom among historians of omitting to do this must be deplored in the interests of sound learning. It is better to risk the charge of pedantry than to leave at fault those who wish to test an author's accuracy or follow up the line of ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... knowledge, under most circumstances, is pedantry; an exercise of wisdom is always godlike. We cannot pardon the absence of knowledge, but itself must be hid. We can use a thing without absolutely showing it, we can be reasonable without boring people with our logic, and speak correctly without ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... a continual protest against the formalism, affectation, pedantry and despotism of the age of the Bourbons. His ideal of man was the unconventional, unconstrained, solitary, but harmless and easy-going savage. Hobbes was the growth of a sterner and more serious age. The only reality to him ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... a prodigy awakened my curiosity; I saw and loved. I found her learned without pedantry, lively in conversation, pure in sentiment, and elegant in manners; and the first sudden emotion was fortified by the habits and knowledge of a more familiar acquaintance. She permitted me to make her two or three visits at her ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... worthy of all repentance. The poem is imitative in its form, yet is not without traces of an individual thinking and feeling—the bird pecks through the shell in it. With this it has a pertness and pedantry which did not even then belong to the character of the author, and which I regret now more than ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... those many pleasing qualifications which domestic amusements and occupations betrayed. Much of his reserve was now banished; his manners were as easy and as free from pride or hauteur as his conversation, though chaste and intellectual, was from pedantry. To all the individuals of that happy circle he was the same; as kind and as gay to Emmeline and Ellen as to his own sisters; there might, perhaps, have been a degree of reserve in his demeanour towards Caroline, ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... intention of justifying Messrs. PITMAN'S confidence in entrusting me with the compilation of a Spanish Grammar to form part of the series of "Commercial Grammars," I set to work to produce a book which, while avoiding pedantry and the agglomeration of superfluous and intricate rules which puzzle the student, should equally avoid falling into the extreme of coarseness which debases the subject under study, or the scrappiness resulting in gaps that ...
— Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar (2nd ed.) • C. A. Toledano
... circumstance, and made the best of what they found. Their courage put new heart into desperate men, and their humanity (the greatest tradition of the British navy) added lustre to their courage. The half-witted pedantry of the German doctrine and practice of war, which uses brutality as a protective mask for cowardice, was far from them. It was against that doctrine and practice, as against an alien enemy, that they fought; and only those who have been guilty of inhuman practices ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... adequate words, from the tribute of Sir Walter Scott to that of Mr Austin Dobson. "The worthy parson's learning," wrote Sir Walter, "his simplicity, his evangelical purity of heart, and benevolence of disposition, are so admirably mingled with pedantry, absence of mind, and with the habit of athletic and gymnastic exercise, ... that he may be safely termed one of the richest productions of the Muse of Fiction." And to Mr Austin Dobson, this poor curate, compact as he is of the oddest contradictions, the most diverting ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... who so spoke of Christianity could have intended seriously to discredit it, and yet certainly could not possibly believe the absurd theory of it concocted out of German philosophy; ergo, that we must regard the whole book as a piece of prolonged irony,—a little too characteristic of German pedantry, it is true, but sincerely designed to expose that extravagance of historic criticism and Biblical exegesis which had so distinguished the author's countrymen, by which Homer had been annihilated, a great part of ancient history rendered doubtful, and the Bible turned into a riddle-book; that ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... the mastersingers are delighted, and Pogner rewards the singer with Eva's hand. Sachs, at the request of the presiding officer of the guild, also offers him the medal as the insignia of membership in the guild of mastersingers. Walther's experience with the pedantry which had condemned him the day before, when he had sung as impulse, love, and youthful ardor had prompted, leads him to decline the distinction; but the old poet discourses on the respect due to the masters ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... seat of innocence, Where nature guides and virtue rules, Where men shall not impose for truth and sense The pedantry of courts ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... elevation of sentiment, and moral purity, without harshness, and without misanthropy. He wrote three sevenths of that immortal production, and on every variety of subject, without any attempt to be eloquent or intense, without pedantry and without affectation. The success of the work was immense, and every one who could afford it, had it served on the breakfast table with the tea and toast. It was the general subject of conversation in all polite circles, and did much to improve the taste ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... ANNA's golden days;[44] What only learning's aggregated toil Slowly accomplish'd in each foreign soil.[45] Yet to the mine though the rich coin he trace, No current marks his early essays grace; For in each page we find a massy store Of English bullion mix'd with Latian ore: In solemn pomp, with pedantry combin'd, He vents the morbid sadness of his mind;[46] In scientifick phrase affects to smile, Form'd on Brown's turgid Latin-English style:[47] Too oft the abstract decorates his prose,[48] While measur'd ternaries the periods close: But all propriety ...
— A Poetical Review of the Literary and Moral Character of the late Samuel Johnson (1786) • John Courtenay
... declare with enthusiasm that ours is a beautiful language, a noble language even to the ear, when properly spoken; and imitate with disgust the short, snappy, inarticulate way in which many people utter it. There was no touch of pedantry or affectation in her own measured, careful speech, although I can well imagine that she might have been accused of both by those persons—unfortunately more numerous than could be desired—who seem to take ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... mental side, he was a typical academic product. Normally his conversation, both in subject-matter and in verbal form, bore towards pedantry. It was one curious effect of this crisis that he had reverted to the crisp Anglo-Saxon of his ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... too arbitrary institutions have too often made us forget nature; that we have been the dupes of our own handiwork, and that the savage who does not know how to consult nature knows how to follow her. Let her criticise our pedantry, for it is this that constitutes our education of the present day. Look at the Rudiments; they begin by insisting on stuffing into the heads of children a crowd of the most abstract ideas. Those whom nature in her variety summons to her by all her objects, we fasten up in a single ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... 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 of to-day. But I do not have to go further than my book shelves, I have only to look and ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... reader he was of every production of his contemporaries. The Banquet (Convito) is but an abstruse commentary on some of his minor poems; but the book on Monarchy (de Monarchia) is a compound of ability and absurdity, in which his great genius is fairly overborne by the barbarous pedantry of the age. It is an argument to prove that the world must all be governed by one man; that this one man must be the successor of the Roman Emperor—God having manifestly designed the world to be subject for ever to the Roman empire; and lastly, that this Emperor is equally designed by God to be ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... has collected his rough ore and has then smelted it all down in his fiery imagination. It is a good thing to have the industry to collect facts. It is a greater and a rarer one to have the tact to know how to use them when you have got them. To be exact without pedantry, and thorough without being dull, that should be the ideal of the ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... smaller; from thirty-eight lines to the page in "Waverley," he advances to between fifty and sixty in "Ivanhoe." The few alterations are usually additions. For example, a fresh pedantry of the Baron of Bradwardine's is occasionally set down on the opposite page. Nothing can be less like the method of Flaubert or the method of Mr. Ruskin, who tells us that "a sentence of 'Modern Painters' was often written four or five tunes over in my own hand, and ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... achievement would certainly not be worth the cost to the unhappy survivors and their posterity. It would indeed be a crime against humanity to eliminate the better part of the younger generation, the flower of human brains, in the monstrous pedantry of attempting to correct an intellectual error. For the risks of modern warfare are not ordinary. It is not sufficiently realised that in six months of offensive tactics under modern conditions no man in the front line has more than one ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... not calculated for a sick bed. Gives a short journal of what had passed relating to the lady since his last. Mr. Brand inquires after her character and behaviour of Mrs. Smith. His starchedness, conceit, and pedantry. ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... along, like a swimmer in a strong, clear stream, trusting one's self to every whirl and eddy, with a feeling of safety, of comfort, of delightful ease in the motion of the elastic water. He is a scholar, nay more, as Adams had his innocent vanity, Fielding has his innocent pedantry. He likes to quote Greek (fancy quoting Greek in a novel of to-day!) and to make the rogues of printers set it up correctly. He likes to air his ideas on Homer, to bring in a piece of Aristotle—not hackneyed—to show you that if he is writing about "characters and situations so wretchedly ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... hitherto no critical justice has been done to the character of Portia; it is yet more wonderful, that one of the finest writers on the eternal subject of Shakspeare and his perfections, should accuse Portia of pedantry and affectation, and confess she is not a great favorite of his—a confession quite worthy of him, who avers his predilection for servant-maids, and his preference of the Fannys and the Pamelas over the Clementinas and Clarissas.[7] Schlegel, ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... spirit which pervade them are worthy of the theme, and the style is excellent. There is nothing of either cant or pedantry in the treatment. There is simplicity, directness, and freshness of manner which strongly win and ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... first sight a mere farce, in which the author ridicules academic pedantry and the vapid formalism of logic as once taught at the University of Copenhagen. But it is much more than that. Holberg gives us a memorable series of genre paintings of Danish life of his day, and at the same ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg
... unless it be in music; and she can be trained into a cultivated refined woman, sufficiently conversant with the sciences to comprehend their contemporaneous development, without threatening us with pedantry, or adopting a style suitable to the groves of Crotona in the days of Damo, or the abstruse mystical diction that doomed Hypatia to the mercy of the monks. After all, why scare up a blue-stockinged ogre, ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... to the former, on the score even of probability. I well remember that, when the examples of former Jacobins, as Julius Caesar, Cromwell, and the like, were adduced in France and England, at the commencement of the French consulate, it was ridiculed as pedantry and pedants' ignorance, to fear a repetition of usurpation and military despotism at the close of the enlightened eighteenth century! Even so, in the very dawn of the late tempestuous day, when the revolutions ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... the early years of one of the most cultured and princely of the Popes. Born in 1398, he was himself one of the sons of the early Renaissance. Not altogether without pedantry, he yet by his learning, by his patronage of scholars and artists (and indeed he was perhaps the first Pope who preferred them to monks and friars), secured for the Renaissance the allegiance of the Church. ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... Religion which consists of worshipping the Ancients" (p.294). Fontenelle's phrase more nearly than that of the English translator describes Rapin. Though Rapin's erudition was great, he escaped the quagmire of pedantry. He refers most frequently to the scholiasts and editors in "The First Part" (which is so trivial that one wonders why he ever troubled to accumulate so much insignificant material), but after quoting them he does not hesitate to call their ideas "pedantial" ...
— De Carmine Pastorali (1684) • Rene Rapin
... Selenin as a student, he was a good son, a true friend, and for his years an educated man of the world, with much tact; elegant, handsome, and at the same time truthful and honest. He learned well, without much exertion and with no pedantry, receiving gold medals for his essays. He considered the service of mankind, not only in words but in acts, to be the aim of his young life. He saw no other way of being useful to humanity than by serving the ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... her last interview with him, when she descanted at length on that superfluity of naughtiness and Biblical pedantry which, she asserted, made Scottish ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... the large view, and we are most reasonable when we seek that which is most wholesome and tonic for our natures as a whole; and we know, when we put aside pedantry, that the great middle object in life—the object that lies between religion on one hand, and food and clothing on the other, establishing our average levels of achievement—the excellent golden mean, is, not to be learned, ...
— On Being Human • Woodrow Wilson
... than Schiller's "Robbers," that revolt of men of genius against every species of finical prescription, in literature and society, which ushered in the new age of Germany. And it expresses with uncalculating sincerity all the natural emotions which a century of pedantry and Gallic affectation had been crowding out of books and men. It was a charge at the point of the pen upon the dapper flunkeys who were keeping the door of the German future; the brawny breast, breathing deep with the struggle, and pouring out great ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... themselves, as the titles indicated. "Deer Creek" and "Mud"—"Coon" and "Cat"—"Big" and "Little Forky"—told that the pioneers, who first explored the hydrographic system of the Western Reserve, were not heavily laden with classic lore; and a pity it is that pedantry should be permitted to alter the simple, but expressive and appropriate, appellatives by them bestowed. Unfortunately, the system is followed up to this hour by the Fremonts and other pseudo-explorers of the farthest ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... the Campo Santo, to which in times of pest and sickness thou wast wont to carry so many, Gypsy and Gentile, in thy cart of the tinkling bell? Oft in the reunions of the lettered and learned in this land of universal literature, when weary of the display of pedantry and egotism, have I recurred with yearning to our Gypsy recitations at the old house in the Pila Seca. Oft, when sickened by the high-wrought professions of those who bear the cross in gilded chariots, have I thought on thee, thy calm faith, without pretence,—thy patience in poverty, and fortitude ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... inspiration and waft of feeling in the metre which lends him wings and helps him on. If Mr. Stern does not encumber his style with a betrayal of the difficulties he has got over—if he does not give us pedantry and double-epithets, so common in vulgar renderings from the German—he certainly shows no timidity in turning the polished familiarity of Heine's prose into our commonest vernacular. "What lots of pleasure I found on my arrival;" ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... Fermor?(914)-only Lord Carteret!-this very week!-a drawing-room conquest. Do but imagine how many passions will be gratified in that family! her own ambition, vanity, and resentment-love she never had any; the politics, management, and pedantry of the mother, who will think to govern her son-in-law out of Froissart.(915) Figure the instructions she will give her daughter! Lincoln is quite indifferent, and laughs. My Lord Chesterfield says, "It is only another of Carteret's vigorous measures." I am really glad of it; for her beauty ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... to, and interested in, all sorts of people, and truthful and helpful and hating concealment. To be that with any approach to perfection demands an intricate and difficult effort, introspection to the hilt of one's power, a saving natural gift; one has to avoid pedantry, aggression, brutality, amiable tiresomeness—there are pitfalls on every side. The more one thinks about other people the more interesting and pleasing they are; I am all for kindly gossip and knowing things about them, and all against the silly and limiting hardness of ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... they never loved, and breathed a spirit they never caught. It is stranger still, that in the long years of dispersion the very vices and limitations of the people subserved the same end, and that stiff pedantry and laborious trifling—the poorest form of intellectual activity—should have guarded the letter of the word, as the coral insects painfully build up their walls round some fair island of the Southern Sea. When one thinks of the great gulf of language between the Old and New Testaments, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... garden of the sage, "the philosopher's corner," as they called it, and jealously they stopped up all the holes through which the painful reality might have crept through to them. But where they differed from us, is that they had much less dryness of soul, with every bit as much pedantry—but such ingenuous pedantry! That's what saved them—their generosity of soul, the youth of their hearts. They loved each other, and they ended by growing fond of life and getting in contact with it again. Nebridius ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... and commentaries he had a profound contempt of those peddlers of pedantry who try to make the words of eternal truth become merely the lingo of things local and temporary. He was fond of utilizing all that the spade has cast up and out from the earth, as well as of consulting what the pen of genius has made ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... to avoid an ostentatious display of learning. By the idle and the frivolous indeed, any appearance of learning is called pedantry. But as I do not write for such readers, I pay no regard to their censures. Those by whom I wish to be judged, will I hope, approve of my adding dignity to Corsica, by shewing its consideration among ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... of scholastic jargon was much in vogue in the time of Lucian, and it is no wonder he should take every opportunity of laughing at it, as nothing can be more opposite to true genius, wit, and humour, than such pedantry. ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... indefeasible right, passive obedience, and non-resistance, on a people whom he was ill qualified to govern, and who had conceived an irreconcilable aversion from such political principles. The consequence was, he lost by his weakness and pedantry the affections of the nation, yet his reign is memorable for giving rise to many foreign settlements. From him the East-India Company received a new patent, which encouraged the corporation to enlarge ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt
... nearly fifty years, no pedantry, no loose manners, no questionable characters, no social or political intrigues, no discourtesies of any kind, were recorded; hers was a reign of dignity and grace, of purity of language, manners, and morals. She died in 1665, at the advanced age of seventy-seven, esteemed and mourned ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... systematizes them mechanically, and thus leads in the end to a system which, though marvelous for its completeness and perfection, is nevertheless, from a higher point of view, amere triumph of scholastic pedantry. ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... infallible Science to proceed by; to forsake his own natural judgement, and be guided by generall sentences read in Authors, and subject to many exceptions, is a signe of folly, and generally scorned by the name of Pedantry. And even of those men themselves, that in Councells of the Common-wealth, love to shew their reading of Politiques and History, very few do it in their domestique affaires, where their particular interest is concerned; having ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes |
