"Unlettered" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from the standpoint of the quarter-deck, the court room, and the department bureau. Here we have the artless journal of an unlettered sailor, written between decks, without the least notion that it would ever be read apart from his own family circle. The pages of his record give an insight into the mutual regard and confidence existing between the captain and his crew which made the ...
— The Voyage of the Oregon from San Francisco to Santiago in 1898 • R. Cross
... parts of that great whole, this, that whatever may be the differences in culture, outlook, social position, or the like, between two Christian men, they each, the rich man and the poor, the educated man and the unlettered one, the master and the servant, ought to feel that deep down in their true selves they are nearer one another than they are to the men who, differing from them in regard to their faith in Jesus Christ, are ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the mist. Not that life was to him aught but a tragedy at any time, on whichever road he took. What but a tragedy could it be to a man bred at Douay and reared on Greek, and now condemned to live in loneliness and squalor among unlettered, unwashed creatures; to one who, banned by the law, moved by night, and lurked in some hiding-place by day, and, waking or sleeping, was ever in contact with the lawless and the oppressed, the wretched and the starving—whose ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... voice of Fate Should call thee, studious, from the classic groves, Where calm-eyed Pallas with still footstep roves, And charge thee seek the turmoil of the state? What bade thee hear the voice and rise elate, Leave home and kindred and thy spicy loaves, To lead th' unlettered and despised droves To manhood's home and ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... awfully near, common life-and-death trials, of which she had known so little. Her own seemed to sink into insignificance beside them. St. Ambrose's and its intellectual lists and wordy contests, even its lofty abstruse thoughts—excellent things in their way, without which the unlettered world would become rude, sordid and narrow—faded into the background. She forgot everything but the poor man passing through a mortal crisis, with Annie able to succour him in his need, and his wife and children waiting to hear whether the ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... (otherwise known as German culture) be made easier—and cheaper. But the spirit of national freedom, which is as precious to humanity as is the spirit of individual freedom, cannot be driven out by words any more than it can be driven out by blows. The most unlettered Belgian soldier, fighting for a truth that is at the very heart and depth of all things true, puts the mere ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... The unlettered Tecumseh well knew the wrongs of the red men when he endeavoured, several years before the war, to induce the Osages to unite in a general Indian confederacy against the continued encroachments of the Americans, ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... of Liberty breathed upon them by the Revolution—eager young apprentices to the splendid trade of war, not old and broken men-at-arms, despairing survivors of an age-long accumulation of monotonous defeats; but Joan of Arc, a mere child in years, ignorant, unlettered, a poor village girl unknown and without influence, found a great nation lying in chains, helpless and hopeless under an alien domination, its treasury bankrupt, its soldiers disheartened and dispersed, all spirit torpid, all courage dead in ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... people, is received with deafening applause. Of the descendants of the Huguenots he says but little; they are few, rich, and very unpopular in this part of the little sovereign state. And he quite forgot to tell this unlettered mass of a sovereign constituency the true cause of their poverty and degradation. Mr. Scranton, however, in one particular point, which is a vital one to the slave-ocracy, differs with the ungovernable Romescos,—he would not ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... for each of the Latin terms caelo and terra. The same schoolmaster uses seven synonyms in describing the "fashion" of speech of the ignorant constable, —"undressed, unpolished, uneducated, unpruned, untrained, or, rather unlettered, or, ratherest, unconfirmed, fashion." When we remember that it was really Shakespeare who wrote this, we know that he had been led to study variety of expression. His large vocabulary could not have been acquired by ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... was John Bunyan, not so influential or learned, but equally worthy. He belonged to the sect of the Baptists, and stands at the head of all unlettered men of genius—the most successful writer of allegory that any age has seen. The Pilgrim's Progress is the most popular religious work ever published, full of genius and beauty, and a complete exhibition of the Calvinistic theology, and the ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... ages been unintelligible to the bulk of the laity, and was but partially intelligible to not a few of its ordinary priests. It had no catechisms or hymn books bringing down to the capacities of the unlettered the truths of religion, and freely circulated among them.[4] It did not, when the invention of printing put it in its power, make any effort to circulate among them the Holy Book, that they might read therein, in their own tongue, the ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... thought, like contact with mankind. The college-prisoned greybeard, who has burned The midnight lamp, and book-bound knowledge learned, Till sciences or classics hold no lore He has not conned and studied, o'er and o'er, Is but a babe in wisdom, when compared With some unlettered wand'rer, who has shared The hospitalities of every land; Felt touch of brother in each proffered hand; Made man his study, and the world his college, And gained this grand epitome of knowledge: Each human being has a heart ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... isolated life on account of the family poverty and pride. He was as sensitive as a poet to the boorish brutality, and his poor, unlettered, garrulous mother made it worse for him by her boasting of his parts. She never failed to let it be known that he had read the Bible through, "from back to back," and the Cottage Encyclopedia, and the Imitation of Christ, the three ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... still in being. I can assure you that many a Don Luis yet, bitterly poor and bitterly proud, starves and shivers, and hugs up his bones in his capa between the Bidassoa and the Manzanares; many a wild-hearted, unlettered Manuela applies the inexorable law of the land to her own detriment, and, with a sob in the breath, sits down to her spinning again, her mouldy crust and cup of cold water, or worse fare than that. Joy is not for the poor, she says—and then, with a ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... to encounter was the Reverend Father Adone Doni, who at the time was, like myself, working in the old Academy degli Intronati. I had taken an instant liking for the Cordelier in question, a man who, grown grey in study, still preserved the cheerful, facile humour of a simple, unlettered countryman. He was very willing to converse; and I greatly relished his bland speech, his cultivated yet artless way of thought, his look of old Silenus purged at the baptismal font, the play of his passions at once keen and refined, the strange, alluring personality that informed the ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... in learning is still, as it has been in all ages, a very attractive and effective element for the purpose of impressing, or even imposing upon, the unlearned; and the standing of the savant in the mind of the altogether unlettered is in great measure rated in terms of intimacy with the occult forces. So, for instance, as a typical case, even so late as the middle of this century, the Norwegian peasants have instinctively formulated their sense of the superior erudition of such doctors of divinity as Luther, Malanchthon, ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... These, it is said, are the remains of some of the rites of the primitive Church; but they are of still higher antiquity, having been observed among the Greeks and Romans, and frequently mentioned by their writers, and were no doubt the spontaneous tributes of unlettered affection, originating long before art had tasked itself to modulate sorrow into song or story it on the monument. They are now only to be met with in the most distant and retired places of the kingdom, where fashion ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... Milanese painter to adorn his banqueting-room at Donnaz. The lords of Donnaz had never been noted for learning, and Odo's grandfather was fond of declaring that a nobleman need not be a scholar; but the great Marquess Gualberto, if himself unlettered, had been the patron of poets and painters and had kept learned clerks to write down the annals of his house on parchment painted by the monks. These annals were locked in the archives, under Don Gervaso's ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... girls' benches, conspicuous among the school-girls of unlettered origin by that look which rarely fails to betray hereditary and congenital culture, was a young person very nearly of my own age. She came with the reputation of being "smart," as we should have called ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... would have felt a strong impulse to seize this "idolatrous" figure and dash it to pieces on the stone floor of the little church. But one must have lived awhile among simple-minded pious Catholics to know what this poor waxen image and the whole baby-house of bambinos mean for a humble, unlettered, unimaginative peasantry. He will find that the true office of this eidolon is to fix the mind of the worshipper, and that in virtue of the devotional thoughts it has called forth so often for so many years in the mind of that poor old woman ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the days flew by while Meriem waited the return of the head man and his party from the country of Kovudoo. They were short days, for into them were crowded many hours of insidious instruction of the unlettered child by the lonely woman. She commenced at once to teach the girl English without forcing it upon her as a task. She varied the instruction with lessons in sewing and deportment, nor once did she let Meriem guess that it was not all play. Nor was this difficult, since the girl was avid to learn. ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... that he was as kind as ever after the disclosure. She did not know that before his eyes he beheld as it were a galley, in which he, the fastidious urban, was chained to work for the remainder of his life, with her, the unlettered peasant, chained to ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... the common misconception that it is only the educated and Christian Indian who has contributed to the progress of his people and to the common good of both races. There are many men wholly unlettered, and some of whom have not proclaimed themselves followers of Christ, who have yet exerted great influence on the side of civilization. Almost every tribe has a hero of this type who arose at a critical juncture ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... artist, however, had sufficiently provided against the consequences of so embarrassing a blunder, by considerately writing beneath the offspring of his pencil, "This is the sign of the Whip-Poor-Will;" a name, that the most unlettered traveller, in those regions, would be likely to know was vulgarly given to the ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... scheme of the Second Army collapsed, it is true that confusion and panic began to spread through the Second Army like fire through dry grass. But it is not within the power of common soldiers, and especially of simple unlettered peasantry, such as most of these soldiers were, to repair the blunders of bad Staff work, and to make for themselves, on the spur of the moment and in face of deadly peril, plans which trained brains should have ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... time, obliged to share the palm of attractiveness with bear-fights, boxing matches, processions of strange beasts, foreign treasures, captives of uncouth aspect, and other curiosities, which passed sometimes for hours across the stage, feeding the gaze of an unlettered crowd, to the utter exclusion of drama and interlude alike. Thirty years later, Horace [7] declares that against such competitors no play could get a ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... debasing forms of superstition among the people, it is not inappropriate to consider the condition of that class of the population which is wont to exert the most potent influence in forming the moral sentiments and moulding the character of the unlettered masses. We have already touched upon the external relations of the clergy to the king and to the Pope; let us now look more narrowly into ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... language to the barbarian peoples of the West, as they had carried it to Italy. Their missionaries were colonists, merchants, soldiers, and public officials. The Latin spoken by them was eagerly taken up by the rude, unlettered natives, who tried to make themselves as Roman as possible in dress, customs, and speech. This provincial Latin was not simply the language of the upper classes; the common people themselves used it freely, as we know from thousands of inscriptions ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... a long sermon, historically important, as being the earliest Christian attempt to reduce to a science daemonology and the temptation of daemons: but its involved and rhetorical form proves sufficiently that it could not have been delivered by an unlettered man like Antony. Neither is it, probably, even composed by St. Athanasius; it seems rather, like several other passages in this biography, the interpolation of some later scribe. ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... less than no share of the noble metal which my companion Cameron and I went forth to find and found a failure), my task began in all possible earnest with ordering the old scraps of translation and collating a vast heterogeneous collection of notes. I was fortunate enough to discover at unlettered Trieste, an excellent copyist able and willing to decypher a crabbed hand and deft at reproducing facetious and drolatic words without thoroughly comprehending their significance. At first my exertions were but fitful ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... our dictionary, which is but short in words of dignity, and names of honour. There, on a Sunday, he sees a congregation of respectable farmers and their wives, all clad in neat homespun, well mounted, or riding in their own humble waggons. There is not among them an esquire, saving the unlettered magistrate. There he sees a parson as simple as his flock, a farmer who does not riot on the labour of others. We have no princes, for whom we toil, starve, and bleed: we are the most perfect society now existing in the world. Here man ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... Sandy was a farmer near the Reed water, in Northumberland, and as fine a specimen of the ancient Northumbrian farmer as could be met with—a distinct race, a few samples of whom were here and there to be found within the last thirty years—free, careless, hospitable, happy, boisterous, unlettered, and half-civilized. Sandy was one of these in their primitive state. He ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... supposing that, devoid of any higher ambition to approve himself to judicious critics and posterity, and wanting in that love of art which longs for self-satisfaction in the perfection of its works, he had merely laboured to please the unlettered crowd; still this very object alone and the pursuit of theatrical effect, would have led him to bestow attention to the structure and adherence of his pieces. For does not the impression of a drama ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... A man may be a very great man or a very good man without any literary culture; he may do his country and the world imperishable services in peace or war. But the older the world grows, the rarer must these unlettered geniuses become. Literature in one form or another—too often no doubt put to vile uses—has become so much part of the very texture of civilised life that a wide-awake mind can scarcely fail to take notice of ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... youthful genius. The custom has long since become obsolete, but even if the practice were still common, it would not apply to Aemilianus. It would not have been becoming to him to make any display of his eloquence, for he is rude and unlettered; nor to show a passion for renown, since he is a mere barbarian bumpkin; nor thus to open his career as an advocate, for he is an old man on the brink of the grave. The only hypothesis creditable to him would be that he is perhaps ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... more than another, after the possession of the thirteen classics, on which the Chinese specially pride themselves, it is politeness. Even had their literature alone not sufficed to place them far higher in the scale of mental cultivation than the unlettered barbarian, a knowledge of those important forms and ceremonies which regulate daily intercourse between man and man, unknown of course to inhabitants of the outside nations, would have amply justified the graceful and polished Celestial in arrogating to himself the proud position he now occupies ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... this exception, no one else knew anything of the girl's poetical essays, whose mild timidity made her often pass for a person of weak intellect. This soul must have been great and beautiful, for in all her unlettered strains there was not a word of murmuring respecting her hard lot: her note was sad, but gentle—desponding, but resigned; it was especially the language of deep tenderness—of mournful sympathy—of angelic charity for all poor creatures consigned, like her, to bear the ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... course of my experience as an occasional lecturer during the past twelve years, I have been much impressed by the keen interest evinced, even by the most unlettered persons, when astronomical subjects are dealt with in plain untechnical language which they can ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... Cassiodorus, who quotes Tacitus to the Aestians, the unlettered savages of the Baltic, (Var. v. 2,) describes the amber for which their shores have ever been famous, as the gum of a tree, hardened by the sun, and purified and wafted by the waves. When that singular substance is analyzed by the chemists, it yields a ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... as bitterly as they hated her. It was natural for unlettered saints, for the fair inspired, frank of mind, capricious, and enthusiastic to feel an antipathy towards doctors all inflated with knowledge and stiffened with scholasticism. Such an antipathy Jeanne had recently felt towards clerks, even when as at Poitiers they had ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... no word, for speech to them was grievous, With bovine eyes they supplicated me; "We wot not what ye will, but prithee leave us, Unlettered folk ...
— Briefless Ballads and Legal Lyrics - Second Series • James Williams
... mackinaws and a much-needed shave, trying to make a well-bred woman satisfied with a view consisting of rocks and stumps and socks on the line! Let me tell you that compared with a street canyon, a mountain canyon is simply dead, and yet these unlettered ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... his industrious companions, Faust and Schoffer, ever have believed that, by the division of labor, their sublime invention would fall into the domain of ignorance—I had almost said idiocy? There are few men so weak-minded, so UNLETTERED, as the mass of workers who follow the various branches of the typographic industry,— compositors, pressmen, type-founders, book-binders, and paper-makers. The printer, as he existed even in the days of the Estiennes, has become almost an abstraction. ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... afflictive birch, Cursed by unlettered youth, distills, A limpid current from her wounded bark, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... would have ranked only as a Christian heresiarch or schismatic; such as Nestorius or Marcian at one time, such as Arius or Pelagius at another. In his character of theologian, therefore, Mahomet was simply the most memorable of blunderers, supported in his blunders by the most unlettered of nations. In his other character of legislator, we have seen, that already the earliest stages of Mahometan experience exposed decisively his ruinous imbecility. Where a rude tribe offered no resistance to his system, for the simple reason that their barbarism suggested no motive for resistance, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... way the noise was, if mine ear be true, My best guide now. Methought it was the sound Of riot and ill-managed merriment, 172 Such as the jocund flute or gamesome pipe Stirs up among the loose unlettered hinds, When, for their teeming flocks and granges full, In wanton dance they praise the bounteous Pan, And thank the gods amiss. I should be loth To meet the rudeness and swilled insolence Of such late wassailers; yet, oh! where else Shall I inform my unacquainted feet 180 In the blind mazes ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... Italian peasants I feel the opposite: that such excellent picturesque effects should not be wasted on mere reality, but should be turned to real use upon the stage. So, too, it is difficult to take a roadside beggar seriously; he seems to ask, not for alms, but for a frame. Happy the unlettered and the inartistic, to whom even the picturesque person is a person, who can think of olive oil when he sees the olive-trees weaving their graceful patterns above the stone walls, and can watch the sun set in lurid splendour ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... a man, by examining a few castles and arms, know more of the peaceful and warrior life of the dead nobles and gentry of our island than from a library of books; and yet a man is stamped as unlettered and rude if he does not know and value such knowledge. Ware's Antiquities, and Archdall, speak not half so clearly the taste, the habits, the everyday customs of the monks, as Adare Monastery,[33] for ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... of John Bunyan, an unlettered artisan, to do more than one in a hundred millions of human beings, even in civilized society, is usually able to do. He has produced a work of imagination of such decided originality as not only to have commanded profound admiration ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... pace with passion."—Nothing can be less true. Metaphoric strength of expression will burst even from vulgar and illiterate minds when they are agitated. It is a natural effort of roused sensibility in every gradation, from unlettered simplicity to the highest refinement. Passion has no occasion to pause for metaphors, they rush upon the mind which it has heated. Similies, it is true, are not natural to strong emotion. They are the result of spirits that ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... 16th century brought forth no great German lyrist, it is exceptionally rich in good songs, mostly anonymous, that express the joys and sorrows of the general lot. Not all of them were the work of unlettered poets, but all were made to be sung; for lyric poetry as a branch of 'mere literature' had not yet come into being. The selections are from Tittmann's Liederbuch aus dem 16. Jahrhundert, Leipzig, 1881, which gives ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... water-gate, was regularly fortified by every precaution that the long experience of a vagabond could suggest, and he was permitted to pass forthwith. The poor Westphalian student presented an instrument fairly written out in scholastic Latin, and escaped further trouble by the vanity of the unlettered agent of the police, who hastily affirmed it was a pleasure to encounter documents so perfectly in form. But the Bernese was about to take his station by the side of the other two, appearing to think inquiry, in his case, unnecessary. While moving through the passage in stately silence, Nicklaus ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... exclusively for the gifted or the scientific; they are the property of all. They address themselves to our common nature. They are equally the delight of the innocent little prattler and the thoughtful sage. Even the rude unlettered rustic betrays some feeling for the beautiful in the presence of the lovely little community of the field and garden. He has no sympathy for the stars: they are too mystical and remote. But the flowers as they blush and smile beneath ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... bosom of the plain, Cared-for till cock-crow: Look out if yonder be not day again Rimming the rock-row! That's the appropriate country; there, man's thought, Rarer, intenser, Self-gathered for an outbreak, as it ought, Chafes in the censer. Leave we the unlettered plain its herd and crop; Seek we sepulture On a tall mountain, citied to the top, Crowded with culture! Air the peaks soar, but one the rest excels; Clouds overcome it; No! yonder sparkle is the citadel's Circling ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... as a city, may have many sins to answer for, but ingratitude is not one of them, or reverence for the great men she has produced, and as the years go by her greatest son Mark Twain, or S. L. Clemens as a few of the unlettered call him, grows in the estimation and regard of the residents of the town he made famous and the town that made him famous. His name is associated with every old building that is torn down to make way for the modern structures demanded by a rapidly growing city, and with every hill ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... age nor youth, nor conscience nor pity. We can not even say that education is a sufficient safeguard against this baleful evil,—for most of the wretches whose crimes have so shocked humanity in recent years were men not unlettered, who have gone from the common schools, ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... fine enough, taking her for a mile or two in his low basket-carriage either before or after his day's business in the shop. It was not exactly like being with her only other friend, Mr. Audley; but he was a thoroughly kind, polite, and by no means unlettered old man; and Geraldine enjoyed and was grateful, while the children were his darlings, and were encouraged to take all manner of liberties ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... And while in that vast solitude to which The tide of things has borne [19] him, he appears 165 To breathe and live but for himself alone, Unblamed, uninjured, let him bear about The good which the benignant law of Heaven Has hung around him: and, while life is his, Still let him prompt the unlettered villagers 170 To tender offices and pensive thoughts. [D] —Then let him pass, a blessing on his head! And, long as he can wander, let him breathe The freshness of the valleys; let his blood Struggle with frosty air and winter snows; 175 And let ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... by the complexities of the female mind, the mental processes of the unlettered male were quite familiar to him and he showed his comprehension ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... was feared she was also respected, for in days when books were few and readers scarce, a long memory and a ready tongue were of the more value; and where, save from Dame Ermyntrude, could the young unlettered Squires of Surrey and Hampshire hear of their grandfathers and their battles, or learn that lore of heraldry and chivalry which she handed down from a ruder but a more martial age? Poor as she was, there was no one in Surrey whose guidance would ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and robbers of Christians, slow-bellied monks, who have made escape from their cloisters, simoniacal and perjured shavelings, busy Sir John lack-Latins, thrasonical and unlettered chemists, shifting and outcast pettifoggers, light-headed and trivial druggers and apothecaries, sun-shunning night-birds and corner-creepers, dull-pated and base mechanics, stage-players, jugglers, peddlers, prittle-prattling barbers, filthy graziers, curious ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... supplanted by theology—a theology so incomprehensible that even the wonderful capabilities of the Greek language were scarcely enough to meet its subtle demands; the Latin and the barbarian dialects were out of the question. How was it possible that unlettered men, who with difficulty can be made to apprehend obvious things, should understand such mysteries? Yet they were taught that on those doctrines the salvation or damnation of the human race depended. They saw that the clergy had abandoned the guidance of the individual life of their flocks; ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... of the march, as recorded by Captain John Tipton, is exceedingly interesting. The militiamen of southern Indiana and Kentucky assembled from the frontier settlements, were men of simple habits, rough, unlettered, hard to teach the intricacies of military evolutions, but as General John C. Black has stated, they were also "insensible to fatigue, watchful as a catamount, resolute as men, heroic as martyrs." Some of their favorite sports were wrestling, shooting at a mark, and horse-racing. ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... boys of my age and station, water-carriers, labourers in the vineyards, and engaged in various menial occupations from which I was exempted, the knowledge that in something I was regarded as their superior, soon forced itself upon me; I felt a distaste for the society of little unlettered, and unmannered boors, and in silence and solitude made progress in studies, which, mere matters of amusement to me, would have been hailed by many youths as tasks more severe than daily ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 530, January 21, 1832 • Various
... 12mo, p. 15. Again: "The nations of unlettered men so adapted their language to philosophic truth, that all physical and intellectual research can find no essential rule to reject or change."—Ibid., p. 91. I have shown that "the nations of unlettered men" are among that portion of the earth's population, upon whose language the genius of grammar has never yet condescended to look down! That people who make no pretensions to learning, can furnish better models or instructions than "the most enlightened scholars," is an opinion ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... opinion. In fact, no man can be said to be thoroughly civilized or always civilized; the most refined, the most enlightened person has his moods, his moments of barbarism, in which the best, or even the second best, shall not please him. At these times the lettered and the unlettered are alike primitive and their gratifications are of the same simple sort; the highly cultivated person may then like melodrama, impossible fiction, and the trapeze as sincerely and thoroughly as a boy of thirteen or ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... scorned the bookworm vain, Who sword nor spear could raise; And Blanchflor scorned the unlettered brain Could ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... to be versed in the knowledge of books. But inasmuch as master and slave were instructed out of the same inspired writings Sabbath after Sabbath, the slave quite frequently was as familiar with the Bible as his master. Ignorance and illiteracy are not one and the same thing. An unlettered people may be learned in the word of God, and being made wise unto salvation, may present to the world no mean type of Christian life. Apart from the knowledge received through the regular preaching ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... requested, and sang several of the hymns she remembered. At times she glanced at her dusky companions. Their eyes shone with pleasure, mingled with admiration as they watched the reclining girl, and listened to the words of hope and comfort. They were but unlettered natives of the wild, yet their hearts responded readily to the concord of sweet sounds. Often the good lying in such hearts needs but a gentle fanning to burst forth in the beauty of love, service, ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... they know not how to avail themselves of its advantages. When Franklin had, at the age of forty-two, won a moderate competence, he could turn from business to science, and from science to the public service, using money as a means to the noblest ends. Strong-minded but unlettered men, like Girard, who cannot be idle, must needs plod on to the end, adding superfluous millions to their estates. In Girard's case, too, there was another cause of this entire devotion to business. His domestic sorrows had estranged ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... to be found in Paris. Wherever you see the two words "Ecrivain Public" written in a fine copy hand on a sheet of letter-paper stuck to the window pane of some low entresol or mud-splashed ground-floor room, you may safely conclude that the neighborhood is the lurking place of many unlettered folks, and of much vice and crime, the outcome of misery; for ignorance is the mother of all sorts of crime. A crime is, in the first instance, a defect of ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... again the key—it was to this I was indebted for ridding me of my fright, and once more giving me the advantage over my unlettered companion. In that book I remembered having read—of course in the same chapter that treated of the baobab—how a curious practice existed among some tribes of negroes, of hollowing out the great trunks of these trees ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... Healy, they see the incompetency which has reduced the party paper to so low an ebb, they see the misery and degradation which the Land League inflicted on the once thriving districts of Tipperary; they saw their neighbours, poor, unlettered men, dupes of unscrupulous lying eloquence, men whom it was murder to deceive—they saw these men sentenced to long terms of penal servitude, while the instigators of the crimes for which they had suffered, availing themselves of the liberal English ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... families of a few old pensioners. In these low- vaulted chambers, with their deep and narrow embrasures, once the scene of the rude alarum of war, often has he held a quiet religious service with the lowly and unlettered inmates, who knew little of the thrilling history of their ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow
... hospitality, since it was given at a time when grievances were as real as plenty; when unutterable resentment must have been rankling in many minds; and when those traditions were growing which have coloured the whole texture of Irish thought, until, with the poor and unlettered, to be 'agin the government' is an inherited instinct, to be obliterated only ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... paper, not only certifying to our having been in his employ, but also to our not being highwaymen, kidnappers, nor yet runaway seamen. Even written in English, a paper like this would answer every purpose; for the unlettered natives, standing in great awe of the document, would not dare to molest us until acquainted with its purport. Then, if it came to the worst, we might repair to the nearest missionary, and have ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... not in some way indebted; and the few Keepers of the Seal who neither cared for letters nor cultivated the society of students, are amongst the judges whose names most Englishmen would gladly erase from the history of their country. Jeffreys and Macclesfield represent the unlettered Chancellors; More and Bacon the lettered. Fortescue's 'De Laudibus' is a book for every reader. To Chancellor Warham, Erasmus—a scholar not given to distribute praise carelessly—dedicated his 'St. Jerom,' with cordial eulogy. Wolsey was a patron of letters. More may be said to have revived, ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... by an unlettered loyalty to the flag. They had no notion of the real purpose of these invaders. The white men had only contempt for the authority of a handful of red men calling them to account, and they foolishly fired into the Indian band. It was a fatal foolishness. ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... poor, and this cry against oppression, grew stronger and stronger till it culminated in "Bobby" Burns, who, more than any other writer in any language, is the poet of the unlettered human heart. ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... Gai-Orlov left their fields unfilled, and cultivated nothing save hymns and prayers. They seemed to be uplifted as by some wave of dreamy, poetic madness. Even the unlettered imitated Grigorieff in composing psalms and hymns, some specimens of which are to be found in Father Arsenii's collection. They breathe an ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... an august and learned assembly into which the unlettered girl was introduced, yet for two hours she answered all their questions with simple ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... this country, few names have excited a deeper interest, or have been more widely and familiarly known than that of RED JACKET. The occasion of this notoriety was the rare fact that, though a rude and unlettered son of the forest, he was distinguished for the arts and accomplishments of the orator. His life marks an era in the history of his nation and his name like that of Demosthenes, is forever ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... infinite wonders of creation, and meditates upon the equal wonders of his own mind, can be at a loss respecting the sources and causes of superstition. Let him transport himself back to the condition of a primitive and unlettered people, before whom the world appears in all its original and sublime mystery. Science has not lifted to their eyes the curtain behind which the secret operations of nature are carried on. They observe the tides ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... "Socrates," "Substance and Show," a lecture which ranks next to Wendell Phillips' "Lost Arts" in popularity. Not withstanding the academic titles King gave his lectures they seemed to have been popular with all classes. "Grand, inspiring, instructive, lectures," said the learned. "Thems' idees," said unlettered men of sound sense. It was thought to be a remarkable triumph of platform eloquence that King could make such themes fascinating to Massachusetts farmers and Cape Cod fishermen. In fine phrase it was said of him that he lectured upon such themes ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds
... used in the performance. But the music of the choral masses, the songs sung in the intimacy of the Czar Boris's household, the chants of the monks, needed not to be strange to any student of folk-song, nor could their puissance be lost upon the musically unlettered. In the old Kolyada Song "Slava" [Footnote: Lovers of chamber music know this melody from its use in the allegretto in Beethoven's E minor Quartet dedicated to Count Rasoumowski, where it appears thus:—] with which Boris is greeted ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... elder period in praise of wine and love, which forcibly illustrates the contempt felt by the student class for the unlettered laity and boors, shall be inserted here. It ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... coffee she found her sitting up in bed. On her white lap lay the old reticule of fawn-skin. She had broken the clasp of its inner pocket and held in her hand a rudely scrawled paper whose blue ink and strutting signature the unlettered maid knew at a glance was from her old-time persecutor, Cornelius. It was the letter her father had dropped under the chair when she was a child. Across its face were still the bold figures of his own pencil, and from its blue lines stared out ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... possess was to be learned, and which not to possess was to be ignorant; instead of considering that knowledge is infinite, and that the man most learned in human estimation is just as far from knowing anything as he ought to know it, as the unlettered peasant. Men are merely on a lower or higher stage of an eminence, whose summit is God's throne, infinitely above all; and there is just as much reason for the wisest as for the simplest man being discontented with his position, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... inspire poets and a voice that was all music and melody. When Count Drentell carried her off in the face of a hundred admirers, he was considered lucky indeed. Dimitri never confessed, even to himself, that he regretted his hasty choice. Louise was as capricious as she was beautiful, as unlettered as she was charming, as superstitious as she was fascinating. All that she did was done on impulse. She loved her husband on impulse, she deserted her child for weeks at a time on impulse, she succored the poor or neglected them on impulse. ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... chance to obtain California John's promised advice. The old man was unlettered, but his understanding was informed by a broad and gentle spirit and long experience of varied things. On this the head ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... the Diet. Imprisonment was not irksome, and the retreat was pleasant enough after the strife of years. He hunted in his character of gallant cavalier, and always wore a sword. Much of his time was spent in {59} translating the Scriptures into German, that knowledge might not be denied even to the unlettered. Constant study made his imagination very vivid, and the devil seemed to be constantly before him. He had long conversations with Satan in person, as he believed, and decided that the best way to get rid of him was by gibes and mockery. One night his bed shook ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... Happy, thrice happy, he who, when the world Is nodding to its ruin, knows the spot Where he himself shall, though in ruin, lie! No trumpet call shall break his sleep again: But in his humble home with faithful spouse And sons unlettered Fortune leaves him free From rage of party; for if life he owes To Caesar, Magnus sometime was his lord. Thus happy they alone live on apart, Nor hope nor dread the event of ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... closer and Dick, from his concealment in the snow, surmising his identity, saw him clearly, although himself unseen. He was fascinated by the stern, dark countenance. The face of the unlettered mountaineer was cut sharp and clear, and he had the look of one who knew and commanded. In war he was a natural leader of men, and he had already ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... least, is how Odoacer regarded the state in which, by the good pleasure of the emperor Zeno, he held the title of patrician. He was an unlettered man, an Arian, as were all the barbarians, and he held what he held by permission of Constantinople, though he had won it by his own strength in the weakness and misery of the time. He never aspired, it would seem, ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... father. Men and women in all nations and tribes are pretty nearly on a level as to common sense and forethought for the future good of the family. Indeed, the interests of the home, protection of the children, and the morals and behavior of the community make the standard of even unlettered women one notch higher than that of their ignorant husbands. Let us of this nation hesitate before we establish a sex supremacy that it may take long centuries ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... division of school taxes, the deprivation of the jury rights of Negroes, the peonage system, and the penal system. In 1905 twenty-nine men of the race launched what was known as the Niagara Movement. The aims of this organization were freedom of speech and criticism, an unlettered and unsubsidized press, manhood suffrage, the abolition of all caste distinctions based simply on race and color, the recognition of the principle of human brotherhood as a practical present creed, the recognition of the highest and best ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... to have a compartment to ourselves, and to travel in a manner becoming our position. We are quite willing to be healed, but we would like to be healed with due deference. You are an educated man, a student; you do not like to take the same place as the most unlettered, and to feel that the common fact of sin puts you, in a very solemn respect, upon the level of these narrow foreheads and unlettered people. And so some of you turn away because Christianity, with such impartiality and persistency, insists ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... interest and concern for its progress in Rome, should after all come to this. How happy was I in Syria, with this belief as my bosom companion and friend; and free, too, to speak of it, to any and to all. How needless is all the misery which this rude, unlettered tyrant is about to inflict! How happily for all, would things take their course even here, might they but be left to run in those natural channels which would reveal themselves, and which would then conduct to those ends which the Divine Providence has proposed. ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... know but little of ancient statuary can still brighten to intelligent recognition of the huntress with her quiver and her little stag when they meet with them in picture gallery or in suburban garden. That unlettered sportsman in weather-worn pink, slowly riding over the fragrant dead leaves by the muddy roadside on this chill, grey morning, may never have heard of Artemis, but he is quite ready to make intelligent reference to Diana to the handsome young sportswoman whom he finds by the covert side; and Sir ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... aggressive, domineering Romans, and the gentler cultured Greeks. He drew the half-breed Samaritans, who were despised by both Jew and foreigner, as not being either one thing or the other. The military men and the civilians, the cultured and the unlettered, the official class and those in private life, all alike felt the strong pull upon ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... old left an orphan to the care of an excellent but unlettered mother, he grew up without learning. Of arithmetic and geometry he acquired just knowledge enough to be able to practice measuring land; but all his instruction at school taught him not so much as the orthography or rules of grammar of his own ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... burdensome infancy, but transformed into a unique utility under the tutelage of Abner Sage. It was his boasting of his froward pupil, doubtless, that had suggested the idea, and Leander understood now that he was to do the work of the store and the post-office under the nominal incumbency of this unlettered lout. Had the whole transaction been open and acknowledged, Leander would have had scant appetite for the work under this master; but he revolted at the flimsy, contemptible sham; he bitterly resented the innuendoes against the piety ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... sacramentaries, there is the prayer for "refreshment, light, and peace," as it is now found in the missals used at the daily sacrifice, on the lips of the priest, in the prayers of the humblest and most unlettered petitioner. It is the "low murmur of the vale," changing, indeed, at times into the thunder on the mountain tops, amazing the unbelieving world which stands aloof and stares, as in the instances but lately quoted, or existing forgotten, and overlooked ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier |
