"Precocity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... child and often an invalid, I was a pet in the family and many tales were told of my infantile precocity. On one occasion I had a fight with a little colored boy of my own age and I need not say got the worst of it. My grandfather, who came up betimes and separated us, said, "he has blackened your eye and he shall ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... is by far the most promising young man who has appeared since—ahem—I appeared. He amazes me by his precocity and various endowments. But he alarms me by his copiousness and haste. He should shield his fire with both hands, 'and draw up all his strength and sweetness in one ball.' ('Draw all his strength and all his sweetness up ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... such as those serious times desired that a child should be; that is, she was as slightly a child, and for as brief a time, as might be. Childhood, as an age of progress, was not to be delayed, as an age of imperfection was to be improved, as an age of inability was not to be exposed except when precocity distinguished it. It must at any rate be shortened. Lucy Apsley, at four years old, read English perfectly, and was "carried to sermons, and could remember and repeat them exactly." "At seven she had eight tutors in several qualities." She outstripped her brothers in Latin, albeit ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... clergymen and the university curriculum in their days was regulated and limited by clerical ascendancy, and consisted of the Aristotelian and Butlerian philosophy, classics, and pure mathematics, without modern history or physical science. The remarkable precocity of Keble's intellect enabled him to graduate with the highest honours both in classics and mathematics at an age almost miraculously early even when allowance is made for the comparative youthfulness of students in general in those days. He was at once elected a Fellow of Oriel, and translated ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... as an unattainable luxury. A common Tradesman cannot afford to let his son spend a third of his life in abstract studies. The children of the poor are therefore allowed to "feel" from their earliest years, and they gain thereby a precocity and an early vivacity which contrast at first most favourably with the inert, undeveloped, and listless behaviour of the half-instructed youths of the Polygonal class; but when the latter have at last completed ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... him out,—and even his elder brother "Prosy" shows by his attitude the special notice to be taken of Hans,—it is clear that if this is a portrait-group either it was painted when the boys were actually older, or the younger had already given some astonishing proof of that precocity which his early works display; for in this group the younger boy cannot be more than eight ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... amorous nature—"Hallo, Hallo, Who's Your Lady Friend?"; "You're my Baby"; and the ungrammatical "Who Were You With Last Night?" Another great favourite is an involved composition which always appears to begin in the middle. It deals severely with the precocity of a youthful lover who has been detected wooing his lady in the Park. Each verse ends, with ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... the cathedral, whilst the long winter evenings were beguiled with fairy-tales and fables, his mother and nurse reading or reciting these, their little listener being always busy with pen or pencil. Something much more than mere precocity is shown in these almost infantine sketches. Exorbitant fancy is here much less striking than sureness of touch, outlined figures drawn between the age of five and ten displaying remarkable precision and point, each line of the silhouette telling. At six he celebrated his first school prize ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... who died by his own hand {197} in 1770, at the age of seventeen, is one of the most wonderful examples of precocity in the history of literature. His father had been sexton of the ancient Church of St. Mary Redcliff, in Bristol, and the boy's sensitive imagination took the stamp of his surroundings. He taught himself to read from a black-letter Bible. He drew charcoal sketches of churches, castles, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... western New York would as surely vote for Baldwin. But what variety would you—Mr. Lover-of-apples-and-apple products—vote for and plant if but a single variety and space for but a single tree were available? After twenty years observation and enjoyment of apple precocity, apple dependability and all-around apple excellence throughout a long season, the writer continues annually to cast his ballot ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... has been another story of his infant precocity generally circulated, and generally believed, the truth of which I am to refute upon his own authority. It is told[127], that, when a child of three years old, he chanced to tread upon a duckling, the eleventh of a brood, and killed it; upon which, it is said, he dictated to his ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... being found in the fields during a thunder storm, clapping his hands at each flash of lightning, and shouting "Bonny! Bonny!"—a bit of infantile intrepidity which makes more acceptable a story of another sort illustrative of his mental precocity. A lady entering his mother's room found him reading aloud a description of a shipwreck, accompanying the words with excited comments and gestures. "There's the mast gone," he cried, "crash it goes; they will all perish!" The lady entered into his agitation with tact, and on her departure, he ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... of childhood; perhaps her solitary condition and habits of constant intercourse with one so grave as Mordaunt, and who always, when not absent on his excursions of charity, loved her to be with him, had given to her mind a precocity of feeling, and tinctured the simplicity of infancy with what ought to have been the colours of after years. She was not inclined to the sports of her age; she loved, rather, and above all else, to sit by Mordaunt's ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... brilliancy, splendor, luster, luminosity, resplendence, radiance, refulgence, effulgence, glow; aptness, precocity, acuteness, sharpness, discernment; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... nearly as tall as young Paynter, whose slenderness, however, is like steel. I well remember when Dr. McGee took him to North Carolina and made him over—a weak, irritable little precocity of twelve or so. He never ate or slept in a house for three years, and I think that the birds and trees of that period got into his opera and made it what it is, the musical event of a decade. He works best in Paris, and ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... without the guitar." [50] In fact, no further apparatus was employed than that demanded for the exhibition of mysteries, or the pastoral dialogues which succeeded them. The Spaniards, notwithstanding their precocity, compared with most of the nations of Europe, in dramatic art, were unaccountably tardy in all its histrionic accompaniments. The public remained content with such poor mummeries, as could be got up by strolling players and mountebanks. ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... marriages. Intoxicated parents often produce offspring utterly demented. Children of healthy parents, with good constitutions, are usually healthy and intelligent. There are marked varieties of character in children of the same parents. One manifests great precocity, another is below the average in mental attainments; one is amiable, another irritable in disposition; indeed, there are often as great differences between children of the same, as of different families. This is due to the physical and mental ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... familiar. Here, however, is part of it. In early life Pope began writing letters, bits of pompous insincerity, as indeed the letters of clever boys generally are, to men old enough to be his grandparents, who had been struck by his precocity and anticipated his fame, and being always master of his own time, and passionately fond of composition, he kept up the habit so formed, and wrote his letters as one might fancy the celebrated Blair composing his ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... Mexican is grave, melancholic, silent, so long as he is not under the influence of intoxicating liquors. This gravity is peculiarly remarkable in Indian children, who at the age of four or five years display more intelligence and precocity than the children of whites. The Mexican loves to attach mystery even to his most trifling actions; the strongest passions do not display themselves in his countenance; the transition is frightful when it passes suddenly from a state of absolute repose to that of violent ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 372, Saturday, May 30, 1829 • Various
... need was come to Maggie, with her short span of thirteen years. To the usual precocity of the girl, she added that early experience of struggle, of conflict between the inward impulse and outward fact, which is the lot of every imaginative and passionate nature; and the years since she hammered the nails into her wooden ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... in person; pale, sandy-haired, and with eyes almost habitually cast down. When they looked up, they were very large, odd, and attractive. By the side of many tall and bouncing young ladies in the establishment Rebecca Sharp looked like a child. But she had the dismal precocity of poverty. Many a dun had she talked to, and turned away from her father's door; many a tradesman had she coaxed and wheedled into good-humour, and into the granting of one meal more. She had sat commonly with her ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... some rudiments of learning from the family priest; he was sent to a school at Twyford, where he is said to have got into trouble for writing a lampoon upon his master; he went for a short time to another in London, where he gave a more creditable if less characteristic proof of his poetical precocity. Like other lads of genius, he put together a kind of play—a combination, it seems, of the speeches in Ogilby's Iliad—and got it acted by his schoolfellows. These brief snatches of schooling, however, ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... that," said this musical prodigy; and taking the instrument, he played second violin with ease and accuracy. Such precocity seems almost incredible, and only in the history of music does it ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... talents for the entertainment of her Majesty's immediate circle, which held itself as far as possible aloof from the court, and was disposed to be self-reliant for its amusements. Daniel had entered upon the vocation of courtier with flattering auspices. His precocity while at Oxford has found him a place in the "Bibliotheca Eruditorum Praecocium." Anthony Wood bears witness to his thorough accomplishments in all kinds, especially in history and poetry, specimens of which, the antiquary ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... here the marvelous Jacob, whose physique supported a precocity that would have shattered a Gentile of his years, showed that he had been listening with much comprehension by saying, "You are coming again. Have you got any ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... run after me when I was sowing my hempseed this year; my nuts blazed away together very comfortably to the end of their lives, and when mamma put hers in which were meant for herself and papa they blazed away in the like manner.' Before he was ten he could write, with a really irritating precocity, that he had been 'making some pictures from a book called "Les Francais peints par euxmemes." . . . It is full of pictures of all classes, with a description of each in French. The pictures are a little caricatured, but not much.' Doubtless this was only ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... claimants to a divine protectorate? Are not the crowning glories of these grand figures of Hebrew imagery in their pathetic antitypes? Is not the progressive evolution of the ages more sublime than spontaneous precocity? Restoring to normal functions ear, eye, and tongue is not so miraculous as are continuous creations of auricular and visual senses, with all the wondrous resulting harmonies of speech, sound, and song. Healing an 'unclean' wretch of his foul ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... very young, was required daily to commit prescribed portions of the Word of God to memory; and the child soon became intensely interested in the study of the sacred oracles. The questions which he proposed to his father, as he repeated his appointed tasks, displayed singular precocity of intellect; and Leonides rejoiced exceedingly as he observed from time to time the growing indications of his extraordinary genius. But, before Origen reached maturity, his good parent fell a victim to the intolerance of the imperial laws. In the ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... Smith was marked out from his comrades by nothing. The marvellous precocity of the boy did not astonish his preceptors. Books were not a passion for him from his youth, neither did any old man put his hand on Smith's head and say, mark his words, this boy would some day become a man. Nor yet was it his father's wont to gaze on him with a feeling ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... himself all its manifold tendencies. Echoes only of the vaster, richer life of the remote past of the race they must remain, but just these are the murmurings of the only muse that can save from the omnipresent dangers of precocity. Thus we not only rescue from the danger of loss, but utilize for further psychic growth the results of the higher heredity, which are the most precious and potential things on earth. So, too, in our urbanized ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... Class according to the degree of its infant precocity was divided in three sections. Emmy Lou belonged to the third section. It was the last section and she was the last one in it though she had no idea what a section meant nor ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... reason of his vices. Fox was a loving husband, but he was an adoring father, and the extremest zeal and warmth of his adoration was given to his son Charles James. The child was from the first precocious, alert, and gifted beyond his years, and the father fostered and flattered the precocity with a kind of worship that proved, as it was bound to prove, disastrous. It seems to have been Henry Fox's deliberate belief that the best way to bring up a spirited, gifted, headstrong child was to gratify every wish, surrender to every whim, and pander to every passion that ebullient ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... have been surprised to hear him speak with all the deliberation of an older and experienced man, and to see him everlastingly charging his wooden pipe; but in the Province of Quebec the boys are looked upon as men when they undertake men's work, and as to their precocity in smoking there is always the excellent excuse that it afford some protection in summer against the attacking swarms of black-flies, ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... the child's disposition. Any other observer might have seen few but unamiable traits, and have given them a far darker colouring. But now the idea came strongly into Hester's mind, that Pearl, with her remarkable precocity and acuteness, might already have approached the age when she could have been made a friend, and intrusted with as much of her mother's sorrows as could be imparted, without irreverence either to the parent or the child. In the little chaos of Pearl's character there might be ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... you study curiously; and are quite amazed at the precocity of certain youths belonging to it, who are apparently about your own age. The Juniors you look upon with a quiet reverence for their aplomb and dignity of character; and look forward with intense yearnings to ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... species of dame-school, which, according to some of his biographers, he had apparently to leave because he was too clever to be tolerable. However this may be, he undoubtedly went afterwards to a school kept by Mr. Ready, at which again he was marked chiefly by precocity. But the boy's education did not in truth take place at any systematic seat of education; it took place in his own home, where one of the quaintest and most learned and most absurdly indulgent of fathers poured out in an endless stream fantastic recitals from the Greek epics and mediaeval chronicles. ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... having thus spoken, the senior demons were amazed at his precocity, and performed a pradakshina, exclaiming, "Truly thou art a highly superior young devil!" They then departed to prepare the new infernal chamber, agreeably ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... My father gave my precocity for science a very successful impetus and left me at his death fully in possession of the ideas and projects he cherished. Amongst these projects, one partially realized, was the acceleration of plant growth by means of electric light, ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... how generous nature has been in bestowing the gift of genius, the pursuit of art is nevertheless a long and continuous labour. Many artists have been precocious, but without diligence their precocity would have come to nothing. The anecdote related of West is well known. When only seven years old, struck with the beauty of the sleeping infant of his eldest sister whilst watching by its cradle, he ran to seek some paper and forthwith ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... children are encouraged to get bumptiousness; their parents delighted, and showed the children their delight, whenever a child did something sensible and clever; there was no unintelligent admiration of precocity. ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... impressions. Years afterward when I saw a copy of the music and read the translation, "The Dream" under the title, I felt a distinct shock of resentment as if the French language had been treacherous to my sacred ideas. Then there was the romantic name of "Ellerslie," which, notwithstanding considerable precocity in reading and spelling I carried off as "Elleressie" Yeas afterward when the actual syllables confronted me in a historical sketch of Wallace, the truth entered like a stab and I closed the book. O sacred first illusions of childhood, you are sweeter than a thousand year ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... The precocity of some youths is surprising. One is disposed to say on occasion, "That boy of yours is a genius, and he is certain to do great things when he grows up;" but past experience has taught us that he invariably becomes quite an ordinary ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... perfection of line his drawings were superior to anything we possess. But the curious thing about the boy was that he expressed the passions of pride and lust and cruelty more intensely even than Rops, more spontaneously than anyone who ever held pencil. Beardsley's precocity was simply marvellous. He seemed to have an intuitive understanding not only of his own art but of every art and craft, and it was some time before one realised that he attained this miraculous virtuosity by an absolute disdain for every ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... instance of precocity is related in the Third Book of the "Masnavi" (see ante p. 365), of which Mr. E. H. Whinfield gives an outline in his admirable and most useful abridgment of that work: The boys wished to obtain a holiday, and the sharpest of them suggested that when the master came into school ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton |
