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More "Illiterate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "neutrality," began secretly exchanging views with the genuinely Republican South. The group of Tientsin generals and "politicals," confused by these developments, remained inactive; and this was no doubt responsible for the mad coup attempted by the semi-illiterate General Chang Hsun. In the small hours of July 1st General Chang Hsun, relying on the disorganization in the capital which we have dealt with in our preceding account, entered the Imperial City with his troops by prearrangement with the Imperial Family and at 4 o'clock on the morning of the 1st ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... her pupil pushed her—that she didn't care for it herself. She was furiously jealous, she said; and that weakness was but a new proof of her disinterested affection. She pronounced Mrs. Wix's effusions moreover illiterate and unprofitable; she made no scruple of declaring it monstrous that a woman in her senses should have placed the formation of her daughter's mind in such ridiculous hands. Maisie was well aware that the ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... This is shown sufficiently by the fact that illiterates are much more liable to commit crime than those who have a fair education. The prison census of 1904 showed that 12.6 per cent of the prisoners were illiterate, while only 10.7 per cent of the general population were illiterate; and of the major offenders not less than 20 ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... walls. Opposite the house, far out at sea, the familiar lightship winked from the sandbank, and all at once there came to him a wild wish—that, instead of having an artist's reputation, he could be living here an illiterate and unknown man, wooing, and in a fair way of winning, the pretty laundress ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... no uncommon thing to see priests carefully teaching illiterate voters the appearance of the name of the candidate for whom they are to poll, and also giving them printed cards merely containing his name, so that they can recognise ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... Ten hours a legal day's work. No woman to labour between 10 P.M. and 6 A.M. in any manufacturing establishment, nor between 6 P.M. and 6 A.M. in any textile works. No child under 14 and no illiterate under 16 and over 14 may be employed in any factory or mercantile establishment. No child under 14 may be employed between 7 P.M. and 6 A.M., or during the time when the public schools are in session. Seats must be provided for females. No woman or ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... a slight inquiry as to the effect of this prohibition. First, it did not in any way abridge or curtail the exercise of the suffrage by any person who enjoyed such right. Nor did it discriminate against the illiterate native and the illiterate foreigner. Being enacted for the good of the entire commonwealth, like all just laws, its obligations fell equally and impartially on all its citizens. And as a justification for such a measure, it ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... be so," said Lucia. "I hope she understood his English too, and his music. He had not an 'h' when he spoke English, and I have not the slightest doubt in my own mind that his Italian was equally illiterate. It does not matter; I do not see that Mr Cortese's linguistic accomplishments concern us. But his music does, if poor Miss Bracely, with her lovely notes, is going to study it, and appear as Lucretia. I am sorry if that ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... solid argument is against the extraordinary court, and that every one in its favor is specious only. It is a transfer from a judicature of learning and integrity, to one, the greatness of which is both illiterate and unprincipled. Yet such is the force of prejudice with some, and of the want of reflection in others, that many of our constitutions have copied this absurdity, without suspecting it to be one. I am glad to hear that our new constitution ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... you do, you illiterate old man. What do you know of literature? Aint all them gentlemen as I plays with chice sperits and writers? Isn't it a honour to jine 'em in the old English drammy, and to eat of the wittles and drink of ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... greatly prefer that your information should be rather circumscribed, provided it were correct, than that you should have a slight smattering of many things, and a thorough knowledge of none. You may impose upon the illiterate by this superficial information; but the really wise will soon discover your ignorance, and despise you for affecting a degree of knowledge you do not possess. Besides which, a mere smattering of learning is very ...
— Domestic pleasures - or, the happy fire-side • F. B. Vaux
... odor of springing grass, warm, brown earth, and oozing sap. Overhead, to the west, the stars were shining in the cloudless sky, dimmed a little in brightness by the faint silvery veil of moisture in the air. The man's soul grew very tender as he stood waiting for his bride. He was rough, illiterate, yet there was something fine about him after all, a kind of simplicity ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... sincerest girl in the world. She's braver than Molly Breckenridge, and I like her immensely. All the boys at Brentnor think she's fine, and we all hope some grand romance will come out of the facts of her parentage. She doesn't come of any illiterate, common stock, Mamma. You may be sure of that. So I hope you'll be nice and not—not too ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond
... enforced by a thousand purses of gold, he was enabled to produce a bowstring for his benefactor; and the sultan's "firmaun" appointed him to the vacant pachalik. His qualifications for office were all superlative: he was very short, very corpulent, very illiterate, very ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... have been written in an unaccustomed position, or when the testator was enfeebled by disease. It could not have been the infirmity of age, for he was but fifty-two when he died. It is impossible to look at these signatures without receiving the impression that they were written by an illiterate man. It is not merely their illegibility, but they have the scrawly curves and uncertain terminations of the penman who is not certain about the spelling of his own name. The great collections of London contain many manuscripts of celebrated authors, ancient and modern, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... that the idle and illiterate will complain that I have increased their labours by endeavouring to diminish them; and that I have explained what is more easy by what is more difficult— ignotum per ignotius. I expect, on the other hand, the liberal acknowledgements of the learned. He who is buried in scholastick retirement, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... being ignorant and unlearned. He felt these taunts bitterly, and again and again answered them in his writings. "I have been in my time pretty well master of five languages," he says in one place. "I have also, illiterate though I am, made a little progress in science. I have read Euclid's Elements. . . . I have read logic. . . . I went some length in physics. . . . I thought myself master of geography and to possess sufficient skill in astronomy." Yet he says ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... two-tenths of 1 per cent to less than 2 per cent in 10 of the foremost nations of Europe it rivets our attention to it serious problem when we are reminded of a 6 per cent illiteracy in the United States. The figures are based on the test which defines an Illiterate as one having no schooling whatever. Remembering the wide freedom of our public schools with compulsory attendance in many States in the Union, one is convinced that much of our excessive illiteracy comes to us from abroad, and ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... crowded out by the greater energy and enterprise of white settlers—that they could no longer depend on their means of livelihood in the past, when the buffalo and other game were plentiful, these restless, impulsive, illiterate people were easily led to believe that their only chance of redressing their real or fancied wrongs was such a rising as had taken place on the Red River in {394} 1869. It is believed that English settlers in the Prince ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... Pasha, who was an illiterate coffee-house keeper in Salonica, first came to Egypt at the head of a body of Albanians and co-operated with the English against the French. By his extraordinary vigour and intelligence he became the ruler of Lower Egypt, and succeeded in attaching the Mameluke ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... less exceptionable to me than before; and I cannot but pity her for her neglected education, as it is matter of so much regret to herself: else, there would not be much in it; as the low and illiterate are the most useful people in the common-wealth (since such constitute the labouring part of the public); and as a lettered education but too generally sets people above those servile offices by which the businesses of ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... feelings that distinguished the age immediately succeeding the reformation. This temper was fomented by the clerical disputants among their respective flocks; the pulpit became a stage for spiritual attack and defence, and the most illiterate congregations were crazed with discussions of metaphysical divinity, or inflamed with rancorous hatred against the opponents of their peculiar preacher, who might be truly said to preach his own doctrine and defend his own cause, and not the doctrine or cause of his master. ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... out forged letters to the illiterate people. A very judicious expedient, I must say. Village folks can be got to believe anything. But ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... popularity with Englishmen generally; and not only this, but his power of fascination extends all over Europe, and indeed in every country in which civilisation has obtained footing: not among the illiterate masses, though these are rapidly following the suit of the educated classes, but among experts and those who are most capable of judging. France, indeed—the country of Buffon and Lamarck—must be counted an exception to the general rule, but in England ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... subjects, mostly of a philosophical or literary nature, which Latin was adapted to express. The educated public was extremely small, and foreign travel altogether beyond the reach of all but the very few. The overwhelming mass of the people were illiterate, and fast tied to their native spot by lack of pence, lack of communications, and ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... were expounded, unless by an ordained clergyman, being under the ban as irregular—a printed sermon was read. When, after another hymn, the master of the house prayed, George Muller was inwardly saying: "I am much more learned than this illiterate man, but I could not pray as well as he." Strange to say, a new joy was already springing up in his soul for which he could have given as little explanation as for his unaccountable desire to go to that meeting. But so it was; and on the way home he could not ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... almost non-existent, and the vast majority of the populati(m, both Christian and Moslem, are totally illiterate. Instruction in the Albanian language is prohibited by the Turkish government for political reasons; a singleexception has been made in the caseof an American school for girls at Kortcha. There are ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... beauty. She not only wept, like Margot, at melodrama, but she noticed the pink of a cloud, the mauve of a flower, and, what was more important, she called her little daughter's attention to such things. This illiterate mother had therefore had some influence on Aurore and on her ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... burst upon their sight a view so wide and so wonderful that those who look upon it with the seeing eye and the understanding heart catch glimpses of the King in His beauty through the fairness of the land that is very far off. On past the mossy stone, like an overgrown and illiterate milestone, which marks the boundary between Mershire and Salopshire; and then through a typical English village, noteworthy because the rites of Mayday, with May-queen and May-pole to boot, are still celebrated there exactly as they were celebrated some three hundred ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... shall we see that Nature hath no end In her great works responsive to their worths; That she, that makes so many eyes and soules To see and fore-see, is stark blind her selfe; And as illiterate men say Latine prayers 5 By rote of heart and dayly iteration, Not knowing what they say, so Nature layes A deale of stuffe together, and by use, Or by the meere necessity of matter, Ends such a work, fills it, or leaves it empty 10 Of strength, ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... cent, just as it would in school. Men are only boys. As soon as the fellows got it into their heads we were trying to work out a republic in a jail, they were possessed by it. I wish you could see the letters that were sent in to the paper. You couldn't publish 'em, some of 'em. Too illiterate. But they showed you what was inside the fellows. Sometimes they were ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... reaching to the ankles—all standing and looking the picture of witless incapacity, and making no plea against tyranny! Is that a thing worth while to turn and look back upon? If the blow fell upon ourselves or our set, that would be different; but these illiterate and lowly ones—they are—you don't know—so dull and insensible. Yes, it may be true that it is only some of them who feel less acutely than some of us—we admit that generously; but when you insinuate that when we overlook parental and fraternal ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... five-act piece, represented for the first time on the metropolitan boards. Here the story rushed on, per fas aut nefas, and the audience went with it. Certes, some man who understood the stage must have put the incidents together, and then left it to each illiterate histrio to find the words,—words, my dear confreres, signify so little in an acting play. The movement is the thing. Grand secret! Analyze, practise it, and restore to grateful stars that lost Pleiad the British ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... selector is not taught to spare herself; and Ida was an untiring and conscientious worker. For the rest, she was a generous, patient, self-denying girl, transparently honest in word and deed; the gentle soul shining through its homely mask, like a candle in a bottle. Upon the whole, ugly, illiterate—and, above all, ill-starred, lowly, and defenceless—as she was, she would have made an admirable butt for the flea-power ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... finances, and had ridden his hunter Maraschino with immense dash and spirit for a young lady who had never done anything but pirouette till the last six months, and a total and headlong disregard of "purlers" very reckless in a white-skinned, bright-eyed, illiterate, avaricious little beauty, whose face was her fortune; and who most assuredly would have been adored no single moment longer, had she scarred her fair, tinted cheek with the blackthorn, or started as a heroine ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... sometimes, would never own himself either tired or amused. I think no praise ever went so close to his heart, as when Mr. Hamilton called out one day upon Brighthelmstone Downs, "Why Johnson rides as well, for aught I see, as the most illiterate fellow in England."' He wrote to Mrs. Thrale in 1777:—'No season ever was finer. Barley, malt, beer and money. There is the series of ideas. The deep logicians call it a sorites. I hope my master ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... well-nigh taken ground with Neef and Cardell, as above cited; and has not forborne to throw contempt, even on grammar as such, and on men of letters indiscriminately, by supposing the true principles of every language to be best observed and kept by the illiterate. What marvel then, that all his multifarious grammars of the English language are despised? Having suggested that the learned must follow the practice of the populace, because they cannot control it, he adds: "Men of letters may revolt at this suggestion, but if they will attend to the history of ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... particular, were the two girls with whom she shared a cheap room. Their common decency in attitude toward the other sex was the unique bond of union. In their association, she found no real companionship. Nevertheless, they were wholesome enough. Otherwise they were illiterate, altogether uncongenial. ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... great treasure of the village, and there the Indians all joined in a hymn which the Jesuit Fathers had composed for them in their own language. The strain was simple, the temple humble, the congregation illiterate and poorly clad, yet who shall say that colonnaded aisle or fretted dome of proud cathedral ever resounded with music sweeter in the ear of heaven, than was that unpretending hymn of the despised Indians! ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... sermons remarkable; in them can be discerned a certain effort to attain to literary dignity. The preacher tries his best to speak well. He takes all the more pains because he is slightly ashamed, being himself learned, to write in view of such an illiterate public. He does not know any longer Alfred's doubts, who, being uncertain as to which words best express the meaning of his model, puts down all those his memory or glossary supply: the reader can choose. The authors of these homilies purposely write prose which comes near the tone and forms ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... the most by them! for I will venture, (contrary to the custom of profound historians, who always assign deep causes to great events,) to ascribe the better half of the Duke of Marlborough's greatness and riches to those graces. He was eminently illiterate, wrote bad English, and spelled it still worse. He had no share of what is commonly called parts; that is, he had no brightness, nothing shining in his genius. He had, most undoubtedly, an excellent good plain understanding, with sound judgment. But these alone would ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... me that this person should have assurance, in the face of the sun, to go about persuading your Highness that our age is almost wholly illiterate and has hardly produced one writer upon any subject. I know very well that when your Highness shall come to riper years, and have gone through the learning of antiquity, you will be too curious to neglect inquiring into the authors of the ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... definite effect upon the worshippers who hear them. All of you must be aware that there are some kinds of music which have the remarkable effect upon you, of lifting you higher than you can rise by your own unassisted effort. Even the songs of illiterate Christian bodies do have some effect upon them, in raising them to a higher level, although they possess little of the true quality of the mantra. In Theosophy you find all these things dealt with scientifically—a ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... at an invitation. But there are other necessities of living—and here, too, I in my porcelain dish am one with Christopher Columbus, Lord Chesterfield, Chang the Chinese Giant, the Editor of the Atlantic, and the humblest illiterate who never heard of him—of which we are not so vividly conscious. Yet we seek them instinctively, each in his own manner and degree—amusement, useful experience, friends, and his own soul. So I read and accept Tagore when he says, 'Man's history is the history ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... all, I cannot help feeling very uncomfortably as to my ideas of human nature, when I find that there is no dependence to be placed upon its perseverance, and that, at least among the illiterate, the most promising appearances may ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... midshipman of the Salamis, is suddenly given the job of going aboard and taking command of the Mercury, an emigrant ship that they find drifting in mid-ocean, all her officers having died in various accidents, and the illiterate bosun and the ship's carpenter knowing full well that they had no idea how to navigate. He takes charge and all appears to be going well, when— But I will not spoil a good ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... needed by every Office Man, every School Teacher, every Stenographer every Tourist, every Letter Writer, every Pupil, every literate, and certainly every illiterate person throughout the length and breadth of our ...
— 1001 Questions and Answers on Orthography and Reading • B. A. Hathaway
... best to show no erudition at Paris before the rather illiterate society there. As the young men were all bred for and put into the army at the age of twelve or thirteen, only the women had any knowledge of letters. Stanhope would find at the academy a number of young fellows ignorant ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... as sunshine, for that must correct itself. You know I am homo unius linguae: in English, illiterate, a ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... of them illiterate and ignorant, all of them strong, taking with them law, order, society, the church, the school, anew were staging the great drama of human life, act and scene and episode, as though upon some great moving platform drawn by invisible cables beyond the ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... representative body of church and state (had they been upright and faithful in this cause) than for us, who, as we are called by others in contempt, must own ourselves in truth to be, but a handful of weak and most illiterate people, and but as babes in comparison of the first framers of our covenants; only that we might make them in some measure accomodable to the present lamentable circumstances, whereinto we are involved by our iniquities, we have annotated some few necessary alterations upon the margin, wherein the ...
— The Auchensaugh Renovation of the National Covenant and • The Reformed Presbytery
... Abraham White, in the ratification convention of Massachusetts, in 1788, "though every one of them should be a Moses." "These lawyers," cried Amos Singletary, "and men of learning and moneyed men that talk so finely and gloss over matters so smoothly to make us poor illiterate people swallow the pill, expect to get into Congress themselves! They mean to get all the money into their hands, and then they will swallow up all us little folk, like the Leviathan, Mr. President; yea, just as ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... follow, public opinion. They hang upon the applause of the rabble, and succeed or fail in their efforts to administer the affairs of Government in proportion as they interpret the wishes of the rabble. Not alone do parties defer to the wishes of the illiterate, the "great unwashed" majority, but individuals as well, who prefer to ride upon the wave of success as the champions of great wrongs rather than to go into retirement as the champions of just principles. The voice of the Charmer is all too ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... school and church and dispensary and household?" She did not pretend that she worked her station properly, and she pointed out how necessary settled, steady, persevering teaching was. "These infant churches," she said, "need so much to be instructed. The adults are illiterate, and the young need systematic teaching of the Bible. They are an emotional people, and are fain to keep to speaking and singing and long prayers, and the sterner practical side of Christianity is set aside. They are children in everything ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... the illiterate," says another ecclesiastical historian, Dr. W. R. W. Stephens, "was in many respects merely a survival of the old paganism thinly disguised. There was a prevalent belief in witchcraft, magic, sortilegy, spells, charms, talismans, which mixed itself up in strange ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... his return to Peking, 'that there is here more than I can do, and writing must go to the wall.' And as late in his life as 1890 he added, 'I could have made, and could now make, I believe, money by writing, but I do not write. I settle down to teach illiterate Chinamen and Mongols, heal their sores, and present ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... of my office." That eminent lawyer's remark did me more service than any month's study in the Seminary. It taught me that cultivated audiences relished plain, simple scriptural truths as much as did the illiterate, and that down-right earnestness to save souls hides a multitude of sins in ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... present a faithful likeness. But they are crudely executed, and are posthumous sketches largely depending on the artist's memory. The sculptor would be compelled to work in the spirit of the historian, who recreates a past event from the indication given him by an illiterate or fragmentary chronicle or inscription. He would be bound to endow with artistic life those features in which the authentic portraits agree, but the highest effort of the imagination would be needed to create an impression ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... the Congress for the benefit of the most illiterate and humble of our people, and with the intention of encouraging in them industry and thrift. Most of its branches were presided over by officers holding the commissions and clothed in the uniform of the United States. These and other circumstances reasonably, I think, led these simple ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... day when he had first come to the city to work out his dreams among men. In the human tide that ebbed and flowed through this world gateway, he saw men of wealth and men of poverty—people of culture and position who had come or were going in Pullman or private cars and illiterate, stupid, animal looking, emigrants who were crowded, much like cattle, in the lowest class. There were business men of large affairs; countrymen with wondering faces; shallow, pleasure seekers; artists and scholars; idle fools; vicious ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... learning. Priests wrote the books, copied them, had charge of such meager libraries as there were, and taught the people. There were neither schools nor libraries like ours. What wonder that the public was ignorant and illiterate?" ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... hostility from beginning to end." Tecumseh began in a low voice and spoke for about an hour. "As he warmed with his subject his clear tones might be heard, as if 'trumpet-tongued' to the utmost limits of the assembled crowd who gathered around him." The interpreter Barron, was an illiterate man and the beauty and eloquence of the chief's oration was in great part lost. He denounced with passion and bitterness the cruel murder of the Moravian Indians during the Revolutionary War, the assassination of friendly chieftains and other outrages, ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... them could sign their names, and a contemporary well acquainted with them declares that he knew but a single Acadian who could read and write. [Footnote: Moise des Derniers, in Le Canada Francais, I. 118.] This was probably the notary, Le Blanc, whose compositions are crude and illiterate. Ignorant of books and isolated in a wild and remote corner of the world, the Acadians knew nothing of affairs, and were totally incompetent to meet the crisis that was soon to come upon them. In activity and enterprise they were far behind the Canadians, who looked on them ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... visited 'the Cradle of Art' cannot fail to recognize, as hit off with no sparing hand, more than one American notoriety. Art quackery as it exists, is well shown up in 'Americans in Rome;' the author having little in common with those amiable romancers who glorify every illiterate picture-maker, though he never fails to do justice to true genius. We believe, in short, that these sketches form a very peculiar, piquant, and earnest work, as truthful as it is amusing, and as such commend it ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... other Tartar chiefs, he visited various parts of central Asia. But as he had not an opportunity of writing down at the time what he saw and learnt, his narrative is neither full, nor altogether to be depended upon for its accuracy. He was, besides, illiterate, And therefore it is often extremely difficult to ascertain, from his orthography, what places he actually means to name or describe. With all these drawbacks and imperfections, however, there are a few points on which he gives credible and curious information. He particularizes the ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... when she discovered traces of what struck her as insanity—or a morbid desperation, bordering on that dire calamity—in the earlier letters of that ill-fated woman. The answers of Hovey were coarse and illiterate, though they manifested a sufficient desire to obtain the hand of a woman of singular personal attractions, and whose great error he was willing to overlook for the advantage of possessing one every way so much his superior, and who it also appeared was not altogether destitute ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... such. Some idea of their tasks and problems, and of the tact and ability they had to use in meeting them, may be gained by a contemplation of the classes with which they had to deal. The selective draft assembled the most remarkable army the world has ever seen. Men of all grades from the most illiterate to the highly trained university graduate messed together and drilled side by side daily. There were men who had grown up under the best of influences and others whose environment had been 370TH or vicious, all thrown together in a common cause, ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... demanding his immediate removal, and hinting at suspension. In lieu of that satisfaction, he would immediately institute proceedings in the Court of Queen's Bench for assault and battery, and place the damages at several thousand pounds. I listened to him patiently, then hinted that an illiterate fellow like him should not be making treasonable speeches. He bridled up at the word "illiterate," and repudiated the vile insinuation. He could read and write as well as any priest ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... among the illiterate populace, both Greek and Roman, even from the age of Eumolpus to that of Augustus, a good deal of firm faith in a future life, according to the gross scheme and particulars preserved to us still in the classic mythology. A ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... publisher did not know who was the author. Dr. Johnson characterized it as "A production so new and strange that it filled the reader with admiration and amazement. It was read by the high and low, the learned and the illiterate." In this work, Jonathan Swift appears as one of the greatest masters of English we have ever had; as endowed with an imaginative genius inferior to few; as a keen and pitiless critic of the world, and a bitter misanthropic accounter of humanity at large. Dean Swift ...
— Gulliver's Travels - Into Several Remote Regions of the World • Jonathan Swift
... CLAIRON, the great French tragic actress, who seems to have been an actress before she saw a theatre, deserves attention. This female, destined to be a sublime tragedian, was of the lowest extraction; the daughter of a violent and illiterate woman, who, with blows and menaces, was driving about the child all day to manual labour. "I know not," says Clairon, "whence I derive my disgust, but I could not bear the idea to be a mere workwoman, or to remain inactive in a corner." ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... general notion, by abstracting from particulars in the manner aforesaid—which last are the two proper acceptations of ABSTRACTION. And there is ground to think most men will acknowledge themselves to be in my case. The generality of men which are simple and illiterate never pretend to ABSTRACT NOTIONS. It is said they are difficult and not to be attained without pains and study; we may therefore reasonably conclude that, if such there be, they are ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... often regretted that the sculptured marble of Greece and Egypt,—classic urns, to whose keeping the ashes of the dead had been consigned, and antique sarcophagi, roughened with hieroglyphics,—should have been so often condemned to the lime-kiln by the illiterate Copt or tasteless Mohammedan; and I could not help experiencing a somewhat similar feeling here. The urns and sarcophagi, many times more ancient than those of Greece and Egypt, and that told still more wondrous stories, lay thickly ranged in this strange ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... Denys in his cell at Mount Athos? Or Cennini, who spread the pious teaching of the Giotteschi? Or one of the old painters of Sienna, who in their profession of faith called themselves "by the grace of God, those who manifest marvellous things to common and illiterate men, by the virtue of the holy ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... Carmichael concluded that she was still under the glamour of an ancient superstition, and took the veil after a very commonplace and squalid Protestant fashion. This particular "fruit" against whom Carmichael in his young uncharitableness especially raged, because he was more self-complacent and more illiterate than his fellows, married the daughter of a rich self-made man, and on the father's death developed a peculiar form of throat disease, which laid him aside from the active work of the ministry—a mysterious ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... etc.; or according to their age, as formerly languages used to be divided into ancient and modern; or according to their respective dignity, as languages used to be treated as sacred or profane, as classical or illiterate. Now you know that the Science of Language has sanctioned a totally different system of classification; and that the Comparative Philologist ignores altogether the division of languages according to their locality, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... Nonsuch, frigate. As Phips was his parishioner, owed to him his office, and was necessarily thrown into close intimacy, during the long voyage, he fell naturally under his influence, which, all things considered, could not have failed to be controlling. The Governor was an illiterate person, but of generous, confiding, and susceptible impulses; and the elder Mather was precisely fitted to acquire an ascendency over such a character. He had been twice abroad, in his early manhood and in his later years, had knowledge of the world, been conversant with learned men in ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... atom in the most renowned of the savage races known to history, a people that, according to the white man's standard, is uncivilized, uneducated, illiterate, and barbarous. Yet the upbringing of every Red Indian male child begins at his birth, and ends only when he has acquired the learning considered essential for the successful man to possess, and which has been predetermined through many ages by ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... has gusto always at command, and mystery also. We feel in it a kind of reality not often associated with professional literature, but rather with the letters of men who are not writers and with the speech of illiterate men of character. The great difference between them and Borrow is that their speech can rarely be represented in print except by another genius, and that their letters only now and then reach the level which Borrow continues at and ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... is involved in a degree of obscurity which can only be attributed to the illiterate character of the originators, the Squire Westerns, who rode all day, and drank all the evening. We need the assistance of the ingenious correspondent of ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... jutting into the sea, on the summit of one of which is a large single mass of stone, weighing about sixty tons, resting on a sort of pivot, so near the centre that the whole block may be easily made to oscillate or log, to and fro. This logging stone has created astonishment amongst the illiterate, and given rise to many fabulous stories: whilst others have imagined it was placed here by the Druids, to overawe and ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... leg, supported by an aged footstool. Clothes and garments were hanging on nails, pans lay about the hearth, a sewing-machine stood on a bare deal table. Over the bed was hung an oleograph, from a Christmas supplement, of the birth of Jesus, and above it a bayonet, under which was printed in an illiterate hand on a rough scroll of paper: "Gave three of em what for at Elandslaagte. S. Hughs." Some photographs adorned the walls, and two drooping ferns stood on the window-ledge. The room withal had a sort of desperate tidiness; ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... have been systematically collected; it stretched pretty equably through two centuries,—namely, from about 1600 to 1800,—and might, perhaps, amount to seventeen thousand volumes. Lord Massey was far from illiterate; and his interest in books was unaffected, if limited, and too often interrupted, by defective knowledge. The library was dispersed through six or seven small rooms, lying between the drawing-room in one wing, and the dining-room in the opposite wing. This dispersion, however, already furnished ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... that might not have transpired in a parlor, if there had not been so many people in the house, and yet these illiterate and ungodly saw mill hands went off and told a story that would make angels blush. It is possible that the elder did wrong in not offering to go with them and look for the mooley cow, but we should not chide him for that. ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... was rough in appearance and illiterate in speech, but his manner impressed Harry in an extraordinary manner. It was direct and wonderfully convincing. The boy recognized at once a mind that would steer straight through things toward ...
— The Guns of Bull Run - A Story of the Civil War's Eve • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Mafeus, who wrote the history of the Indies, which has always been a model of veracity as well as elegant composition, mentions a native of Bengal, named Numas de Cugna, who died 1566, at the age of 370. He was a man of great simplicity and quite illiterate; but of so extensive a memory, that he was a kind of living chronicle, relating distinctly and exactly what had happened within his knowledge in the compass of his life, together with all the circumstances attending it. He had four new sets of teeth; and the color ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... wayside inns, the aspiring vil[a]o, the peasant who complains bitterly of the ways of God, the lavrador with his plough who did not forget his prayers and was charitable to tramps but skimped his tithes, the illiterate but not unmalicious beir[a]o shepherd who had led a hard life and whose chief offence was to have stolen grapes from time to time, the devout bootmaker who had industriously robbed the people during thirty years, the card-player blasphemous as the taful of King Alfonso's ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... that begets a nervous state of hesitation and mental timidity in most men, and paralyzes the will. No education will ensure this greatest and most essential quality. It is born in a man, not communicated. With it his acquired knowledge will be doubly useful, but without it an illiterate slave-trader like Forrest may far outshine him as a soldier. Nor does success as a subordinate give any certain assurance of fitness for supreme command. Napoleon's marshals generally failed when trusted with an independent ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... Rome. Others, however, boldly denied that the Pope had any authority in this realm of England, while they as bravely asserted the Protestant doctrine for which they had been cast into prison. Many of them, of all ranks, some poor and illiterate, did in no wise shrink from the abuse heaped on them by Gardiner ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... subject, "that the people who violently disapprove of Burne's radicalism are distinctly the Pharisee class—I mean they're the best-educated men in college—the editors of the papers, like yourself and Ferrenby, the younger professors.... The illiterate athletes like Langueduc think he's getting eccentric, but they just say, 'Good old Burne has got some queer ideas in his head,' and pass on—the Pharisee class—Gee! they ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... for their good. May this morsel of sandwich choke me if I have ever been swayed by anything but sympathy with their wrongs. And yet you saw that malicious pamphlet that was circulated against me in Yiddish—silly, illiterate scribble." ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... provided necessaries for our livelihood, rear'd convenient places for God's worship, and settled the Civil Government, one of the next things we longed for and looked after was to advance learning and perpetuate it to Posterity, dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the Churches when our present ministers ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... She is illiterate, but clever. Her understanding is quick, and her perceptions keen. I think, with education she might have been a remarkable person. She is not particularly masculine in her appearance, and her manners are gentle and cheerful. ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... instructed. In other words, only eleven per cent. of the males and a little more than one-half of one per cent. of the females were in any sense literate. In Madras, we find the greatest progress; but even there eighty-five per cent. of the male and ninety-nine per cent. of the female population are illiterate. In Oudh, on the other hand, corresponding figures are ninety-four and very nearly one hundred per cent. When it is remembered that the Brahmans, who constitute only five per cent. of the total population, include seventeen ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... Lincoln, the beloved one is seen to be clothed with genius and beauty and truth indeed, but also to be crowned with self-sacrifice. Society makes haste to forget him who remembers only himself. As there can be no illiterate sage, no ignorant Shakespeare, so history knows no selfish hero. For the mercenary forehead memory has no wreath. A sentinel with a flaming sword guards the threshold of the temple of fame against those aspirants ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... of this man, Charles Edward, of whom so much in later years has been said and written, was a worthless ignorant youth, and a profligate and illiterate old man. When young, the best that can be said of him is, that he had occasionally springs of courage, invariably at the wrong time and place, which merely served to lead his friends into inextricable difficulties. When old, he was loathsome ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... professions. The good artist should expect no recognition of his toil and no admiration of his genius, because his toil can with difficulty be appraised and his genius cannot possibly mean anything to the illiterate who, even from the dreadful wisdom of their evoked dead, have, so far, culled nothing but inanities and platitudes. I would wish him to enlarge his sympathies by patient and loving observation while ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... cent. of the men and nearly 65 per cent. of the women in Lorraine, to 13 per cent. of the men and nearly 6 per cent. of the women in the Nivernois. The central provinces and Brittany were the most illiterate parts of the country. L'Ecole, 3 n. 187. Le Village, 282 ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... age 15 and over can read and write total population: 82% male: 87% female: 77% note: over two-thirds of the world's 785 million illiterate adults are found in only eight countries (India, China, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Egypt); of all the illiterate adults in the world, two-thirds are women; extremely low literacy rates are concentrated ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... seceded in considerable numbers, and became Joanna's followers. This gave her a nucleus to work upon, and between 1790 and 1800, she managed to make herself known throughout Britain, proclaiming that she was to be the destined Mother of the Second Messiah, and although originally quite illiterate, picking up enough general information and Bible lore, to facilitate her publication of several very curious, though sometimes incoherent works. One of the earliest and most startling of these was her "Warning to the whole ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... of May in New France, the king and queen of St. Philip, the rejoicings of a frank, loyal peasantry—illiterate in books but not unlearned in the art of life,—have wholly disappeared before the levelling spirit ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... is a symbol that provides excellent material for clues to tricks and mannerisms. It varies in form from a mere v-shaped tick of almost indeterminate character to an ornate thing of loops and flourishes. It is very sparingly employed by illiterate persons, and some educated writers avoid its use under the impression that, like the abbreviation of words, it is vulgar. In a few high-class ladies' schools its use is sternly repressed, and there are many fluent and habitual writers who never employ this sign. This in itself ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... then thought so ample, had since taught me that I was in imminent danger of being reduced to beggary. I had no profession, nor any means of subsistence till a profession could be secured; at least no adequate means, unless by retiring to some humble garret, and confining myself to the society of the illiterate, the boorish, and the brutal, between whose habits and mine there was no congeniality. The very day before, Olivia, ecstatic vision, had risen in full view of my delighted hopes, and, forgetting the tormenting distance which malignant ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... the author of this amusing little book, who was born at Dijon in 1549 and died in 1590, is said to have written the tales in ridicule of the inhabitants of Franche Comte, who were then the subjects of Spain, and reputed to be stupid and illiterate. From a manuscript translation, entitled Bizarrures; or, The Pleasant and Witlesse and Simple Speeches of the Lord Gaulard of Burgundy, purporting to be made by "J.B., of Charterhouse," probably about the year 1660, in the possession of Mr. Frederick William Cosens, London, fifty copies, ...
— The Book of Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston
... introduced, the adoption of which would be prejudicial to society, as there are of those which would be beneficial to it. The well-informed, though by no means exempt from error, have an unquestionable advantage over the illiterate, in judging what is likely or not to prove serviceable; and therefore we find the former more ready to adopt such discoveries as promise to be really advantageous, than the latter, who having no other test of the value of a novelty but time and experience, at first oppose its ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... and her lips more compressed; her eyes seemed wider open and lying deeper in her sockets. She looked shrunken and contracted, very much like my mother on the eve of the Ninth of Av, when she read aloud the Lamentations for the benefit of her illiterate women-friends. ...
— In Those Days - The Story of an Old Man • Jehudah Steinberg
... have not only been noticed by the illiterate, but by philosophers and learned characters, who have advanced two opinions respecting them. Some, among whom are Dr. Priestly and Mr. Jessop, upon practical and scientific observations, attributed them to lightning, but their experiments ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 481, March 19, 1831 • Various
... me made a deep impression upon the illiterate Mexicans in that remote part of the world, who in consequence of it looked upon me with suspicion and shunned me. Not knowing anything better, they invented all kinds of wild charges against me: I was surveying the lands for Porfirio Diaz, ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... answer this description exactly. They must be able to sign their names, but they are not obliged to know how to read, and eighty per cent. of them are totally illiterate. Their work is done for them very usually by the local schoolmaster. The Senate, therefore, was quite sure of finding among them men absolutely incompetent for the post of juge de paix, and it has found what it wanted. ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... and Parcels.—Very few money orders are received. The interned Turks are chiefly illiterate; those whose wives are interned at Cairo, and who are allowed to occasionally visit them, seldom write, as they know them to be well treated. Parcels are seldom sent to the camp, and hitherto no philanthropic society has busied itself ...
— Turkish Prisoners in Egypt - A Report By The Delegates Of The International Committee - Of The Red Cross • Various
... used to make,' but as the hour of death approaches, he regains his appetite, and, just before the solemn moment, partakes of a hearty breakfast. His whole life may have been a record of flagrant cowardice, yet he walks steadily to the scaffold and dies 'like a man'; he may have been illiterate to a degree, yet in the very shadow of the gallows he writes a statement for publication the depth and power of which astonishes the world. From the sentence to the finish, the murderer's life is one bed of roses. ...
— Said the Observer • Louis J. Stellman
... in which there is no pretence that the signs are other than artificial or conventional. The language of signs may be used either to instruct those who cannot understand words, or to baffle those who can. Thus, a crucifix may be as good as a sermon to an illiterate peasant; while the sign of a fish was used by the early Christians because it was unintelligible to their enemies. This is not symbolism in the sense which I have given to the word in this Lecture.[344] But it is otherwise when ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... who preordained in his own flesh to bear the last and heaviest stroke at the hands of retributive justice, should, rightly bearing it, bring salvation both to himself and to his race? Behind the coarse and illiterate presentiment of the chap-book, Julius began dimly to apprehend a somewhat majestic moral and spiritual tragedy, a tragedy of vicarious suffering crowned by triumphant emancipation. Thus has God, as he reflected with a self-condemnatory emotion ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... course was easy and the tuition light, though its equipment was a farce and its laboratory too meagre to deserve the name; one of the commercial medical colleges turning out each year by the hundreds, for a few dollars, illiterate graduates, totally unfitted by temperament and education for a profession that calls for the highest and best, sending them out in hordes like licensed murderers to prescribe and operate among the ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... an energetic administrator, a firm and upright character, if he is not on Augustin's level, is at any rate capable of understanding and supporting him. The others are decent men, like that Samsucius, Bishop of Tours, very nearly illiterate, but full of good sense and experience, and on this ground consulted respectfully by his colleague of Hippo. Or else they are plotters, given to debauch, engaged in business, like Paulus, Bishop of Cataqua, who became involved in risky speculations, ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... passionately devout, my mother. Being absolutely illiterate, she would murmur meaningless words, in the singsong of a prayer, pretending to herself that she was performing her devotions. This, however, she would do with absolute earnestness and fervor, often with tears of ecstasy ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... fearful offences. Monastic buildings held their dark secrets, as the world was just beginning to know; and only a short while back he had heard a whisper that it was not wise for a monk to be too strict in his hours and in his living. Then again, Brother Fabian was a coarse, illiterate man, utterly unfit to be the guide and instructor of youth. Sir Oliver had not dined at the prior's table and spent hours in his company for nothing, and he knew many of the monks tolerably well. Brother Fabian was the one he liked ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green
... burning. Antiquaries have often regretted that the sculptured marble of Greece and Egypt,—classic urns, to whose keeping the ashes of the dead had been consigned, and antique sarcophagi, roughened with hieroglyphics,—should have been so often condemned to the lime-kiln by the illiterate Copt or tasteless Mohammedan; and I could not help experiencing a somewhat similar feeling here. The urns and sarcophagi, many times more ancient than those of Greece and Egypt, and that told still more wondrous stories, lay thickly ranged in this strange catacomb,—so ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... disturb the solemn harmony HERE they must prelude by a defiance, not only to common sense, but what is infinitely more appalling, to common usage. They must at once rank themselves with the low and the illiterate, for only such prefer the eloquence of the tub to that of the pulpit. The aristocracy must ever, as a body, belong to the established Church, and it is but a small proportion of the influential classes who would be willing to allow that they do not belong ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... rivals, the 18th-century Hertfordshire vendor of the Cordial warned in the Weekly Journal (London), December 23, 1721: "I do advise all Persons, for their own Safety, not to meddle with the said Cordial prepared by illiterate and ignorant Persons, as Bakers, Malsters, [sic] and Goldsmiths, that shall pretend to make it, it being beyond their reach; so that by their Covetousness and Pretensions, many Men, Women, and especially Infants, may fall as Victims, whose ...
— Old English Patent Medicines in America • George B. Griffenhagen
... lane, by-path, shortcut and trail, is a familiar way to him. His practice, he declares, has well-nigh ruined him financially, and totally wrecked his temper. He can curse a man and cry over a baby; and he would go as far and work as hard for the illiterate and penniless backwoodsman in his cabin home as for the president of the Bank of Corinth or even Judge ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... am myself, although, as a student of philology, I ought to know better. The greatest of Englishmen was so careless in the matter as to sign himself Shakspe, a fact usually emphasized by Baconian when speaking of the illiterate clown of Stratford-on-Avon. Equally illiterate must have been the learned Dr. Crown, who, in the various books he published in the latter half of the seventeenth century, spelt his name, indifferently Cron, Croon, Croun, ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... not born, or originally a resident, in the Hartz Mountains; he was the serf of an Hungarian nobleman, of great possessions, in Transylvania; but, although a serf, he was not by any means a poor or illiterate man. In fact, he was rich and his intelligence and respectability were such, that he had been raised by his lord to the stewardship; but, whoever may happen to be born a serf, a serf must he remain, even though he become a wealthy man: ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... give no idea of the strong impression it made on my mind, though conveyed to it through the medium of an illiterate interpreter, Even in this mangled form, I saw the disjecta membra of a regular and splendid oration." [Footnote: Col. Stone's Life ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... our day that there is nothing really "fine" in Gray's "Churchyard." However conscious Gray was in limiting his address to "the common reader," we may be certain he was not writing to the obtuse, the illiterate or the insensitive. He was to create an evocation of evening: the evening of a day and the approaching night of life. The poem was not to be perplexed by doubt; it ends on a note of "trembling hope"—but on "hope." There are perhaps ...
— An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751) and The Eton College Manuscript • Thomas Gray
... Lord, I know very well, will pass for nothing with those who wish that the Popish clergy should be illiterate, and in a situation to produce contempt and detestation. Their minds are wholly taken up with party squabbles, and I have neither leisure nor inclination to apply any part of what I have to say to those who never think of religion or of the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... oak or laurel; but then Rome never produced a Rev. Seasholes, nor Greece a Senator Bowser. The Imperial City did manage to breed a Brutus and a Cato, but never proved equal to a Culberson. Think of a Texas legislature, composed chiefly of illiterate jabber- whacks who string out the sessions interminably for the sake of the $2 a day—imagine these fellows, each with a large pendulous ear to the earth, listening for the approach of some Pegasus to carry him to Congress—teaching the aesthetics of civilization to the divine ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the adoption of various dialects as the basis of separate literatures, to the break-up of China's cultural unity. In the last years, the unification of the spoken language has made great progress. Yet, alphabetic script is used only in cases in which illiterate adults have to be enabled in a short time to read very simple informations. More attention is given to a simplification of the script as it is; Japanese had started this some forty years earlier. ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... Negroes, and illiterate persons of all complexions, set up as doctors. Old Joe Pye and Sabbatus were famous Indian healers. Indian squaws, such as Molly Orcutt, sold many a decoction of leaves and barks to ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... that you are accusing Anaxagoras, my dear Melitus, and thus you put a slight on these men, and suppose them to be so illiterate as not to know that the books of Anaxagoras of Clazomene are full of such assertions. And the young, moreover, learn these things from me, which they might purchase for a drachma, at most, in the orchestra, and so ridicule ...
— Apology, Crito, and Phaedo of Socrates • Plato
... sanction of an illiterate, ignorant, self-sufficient, and most contemptible old man; and much good may it ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... reading were gloomed by the necessity of studying long lessons that no emancipated child of to-day would endure. Misguided people sometimes came to the school and told childish stories, at which we all laughed, but which even the most illiterate despised. To have known George Warrington, to have mingled familiarly in the society of George Washington, to remember the picture of Beatrix Esmond coming down the stairs—I am not speaking of Du Maurier's travesties of that delightful book—to have seen the old ladies in "Cranford," ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... of persons interested in the ruin of the Rajah, others were made by persons who then received pensions from him, the said Hastings; and several of the affidavits were made by persons of mean condition, and so wholly illiterate as not to be able to ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... down from his chair, and he ran eagerly to his blackboard, upon which he wrote, "This is illiterate, this is unscholarly." ...
— How Doth the Simple Spelling Bee • Owen Wister
... pronounced him whose name was written by the larger number, banished for ten years, with the enjoyment of his estate. As, therefore, they were writing the names on the sherds, it is reported that an illiterate clownish fellow, giving Aristides his sherd, supposing him a common citizen, begged him to write Aristides upon it; and he being surprised and asking if Aristides had ever done him any injury, "None ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... report which the governor of Samoa had been clamouring for and which Walker, with his usual dilatoriness, had neglected to prepare. Mackintosh as he made his notes reflected vindictively that Walker was late with his report because he was so illiterate that he had an invincible distaste for anything to do with pens and paper; and now when it was at last ready, concise and neatly official, he would accept his subordinate's work without a word of appreciation, ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... chief ornament, as well as the great treasure of the village, and there the Indians all joined in a hymn which the Jesuit Fathers had composed for them in their own language. The strain was simple, the temple humble, the congregation illiterate and poorly clad, yet who shall say that colonnaded aisle or fretted dome of proud cathedral ever resounded with music sweeter in the ear of heaven, than was that unpretending hymn of the despised Indians! Who would not envy the ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... that Cavour once said, that no great change would be accomplished in Italy till the Italians introduced the public-school system of England. So long as the youth of the country were given up for education to the priests—the most illiterate, narrow-minded, and bigoted class in Europe—so long would they carry with them through life the petty prejudices of their early days; or, in emancipating themselves from these, fall into a scepticism whose baneful ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... conscious and self-disciplined—but so long as this mystic faith in the crowd, this vague, emotional, uncritical way of evading the immense difficulties of organizing just government and a collective will prevails, so long must the Socialist project remain not simply an impracticable but, in an illiterate, badly-organized community, even a dangerous suggestion. I as a Socialist am not blind to these possibilities, and it is foolish because a man is in many ways on one's side that one should not call attention to his careless handling of a loaded ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... assigns to them the gifts of prophecy and divination. The habit that the mantis has of first stretching out one fore leg, and then the other, and of preserving such a position for some little time, has also led to the belief among the illiterate that it is in the act, in such cases, of pointing out the road ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... upon him. The loose stride is contracted; the swing of the vigorous shoulders is restrained, and, instead of an honest fellow tramping sturdily after his own fashion through the paths of literature, we are treated to an imitation of Dr. Johnson, done by an illiterate butcher's son. We are afraid that the Cantabs have been at the bottom of John Brown's fine writing. How valuable, for instance, are the following philosophical reflections upon Napoleon, which John Brown makes when he beholds the dethroned Emperor ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... like a drop to the ocean: and yet we find Dryden declared himself his open enemy; for which, the best reason that can be assigned is, that Otway was a retainer to Shadwell, who was Dryden's aversion. Dryden was often heard to say, that Otway was a barren illiterate man, but 'I confess, says he, he has a power which I have not;' and when it was asked him, what power that was? he answered, 'moving the passions.' This truth was, no doubt, extorted from Dryden, for he seems not to be very ready in acknowledging the merits ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... deliberate and sober judgment. His genius is able to make beautiful what he pleases: Yet, as he has been too favourable to me, I doubt not but he will hear of his kindness from many of our contemporaries for we are fallen into an age of illiterate, censorious, and detracting people, who, thus ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... which is merely one of his exaggerations for the sake of point. She had not a fine understanding: though she was neither silly nor stupid, her sense was altogether inferior to her sensibility. Although living in a most bookish circle she was, as Macaulay himself admits, almost illiterate: and (which he does not say) her comparative critical estimates of books, when she does give them, are merely contemptible. This harsh statement could be freely substantiated: but it is enough to say that, when a girl, she preferred some forgotten rubbish called ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... years from any fixed epoch in constant succession, the number denoting the years is necessarily always on the increase. But rude nations and illiterate people seldom attach any definite idea to large numbers. Hence it has been a practice, very extensively followed, to employ cycles or periods, consisting of a moderate number of years, and to distinguish and reckon the years by their number in the cycle. The ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... penniless, illiterate, has done so well? For every Afro-American agitator, stirring the strife in which alone he prospers, I can show you a thousand negroes, happy in their cabin homes, tilling their own land by day, and at night taking from the lips of their children the helpful message their State sends ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... the tell-tale day! The light will show, character'd in my brow, The story of sweet chastity's decay, The impious breach of holy wedlock vow: Yea, the illiterate, that know not how To cipher what is writ in learned books, Will quote my ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... so instantaneously prompt. Will these ladies say that we are nothing to them? Oh, no; they will not say that. They cannot deny—they do not deny—that for this night they are our sisters: gentle or simple, scholar or illiterate servant, for twelve hours to come—we on the outside have the honor to be their brothers. Those poor women again, who stop to gaze upon us with delight at the entrance of Barnet, and seem, by their air of weariness, to be returning from labor—do you mean to say ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... Catholic, which finds the great majority of its priests among the lower orders; and we have had the opportunity of making an analogous comparison in England, where many of us can remember country districts in which the great mass of the people were christianized by illiterate Methodist and Independent ministers, while the influence of the parish clergyman among the poor did not extend much beyond a few old women in scarlet cloaks and ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... seemed to me that her face had become longer and her lips more compressed; her eyes seemed wider open and lying deeper in her sockets. She looked shrunken and contracted, very much like my mother on the eve of the Ninth of Av, when she read aloud the Lamentations for the benefit of her illiterate women-friends. ...
— In Those Days - The Story of an Old Man • Jehudah Steinberg
... threw the shadow of Mr Boulnois quite gigantically across its pages. By the paradox already noted, articles of valuable intelligence and enthusiasm were presented with headlines apparently written by an illiterate maniac, headlines such as "Darwin Chews Dirt; Critic Boulnois says He Jumps the Shocks"—or "Keep Catastrophic, says Thinker Boulnois." And Mr Calhoun Kidd, of the Western Sun, was bidden to take his butterfly tie and lugubrious visage down to the little house outside Oxford where Thinker Boulnois ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... instructed in the first principles of religion, and in the popish controversy, though for the rest on a level with the parish clerks, or the school-masters of charity-schools, may not be fit to mix with and bring over our poor illiterate natives to the Established Church? Whether it is not to be wished that some parts of our liturgy and homilies were publicly read in the Irish language? And whether, in these views, it may not be right to breed up some of the better sort of children in the charity-schools, ...
— The Querist • George Berkeley
... illiterate fellow, you know. Retrogressive, now! Come, that's capital. He thinks it means destructive: they want to make me out a destructive, you know," said Mr. Brooke, with that cheerfulness which is usually sustained by an ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... their own particular professions. The story of the peasant's sneer at a physician, "But what can he know when he does not even know how to sow oats?'' is more than a story, and is true of others besides illiterate boors. Such an attitude recurs very frequently, particularly among people of engrossing trades that require much time,—e. g., among soldiers, horsemen, sailors, hunters, etc. If it is not possible to understand these human vanities and to deal with these ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... arrived at the beach, the darkness of the night was illumined by the light of an immense fire. Ordering his boat's crew (with the intrepid though illiterate William at their head) to keep close and be upon their guard, Boldheart bravely went on, arm ...
— Holiday Romance • Charles Dickens
... born at Genoa on the night of February 18, 1784, of parents in humbly prosperous circumstances, his father being a ship-broker, and, though illiterate in a general way, a passionate lover of music and an amateur of some skill. The father soon perceived the child's talent, and caused him to study so severely that it not only affected his constitution, ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... what Messrs. Hobhouse and Leigh Hunt wish to make him appear. A man of his birth, a man of his taste, a man of his talents, a man of his habits, can have nothing in common with such miserable creatures as we now call Radicals, of whom I know not that I can better express the illiterate and blind ignorance and vulgarity than by saying that the best informed of them have probably never heard of Lord Byron. No, no, Lord Byron may be indulgent to these jackal followers of his; he may connive ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... title of "Mr. Yellowplush, my lord's body-servant," began in the same Vol. IX. (1845) his immortal "Diary." One of the successes of this epistle was what, to Thackeray's delight, was seriously complained of as the "deplorable" inaccurate orthography of the illiterate flunkey. Thackeray was certainly not the first to use the device, but he was the first to achieve great success with it, and Arthur Sketchley, Artemus Ward, Mr. Deputy Bedford ("Robert"), and all the American humorists who have adopted the ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... drama in the Middle Ages is one of the strikingly significant deficiencies of the period. The illiterate condition of the people, and even of the nobility, the fragmentary state of governments, the centralizing of small and dependent communities around the feet of petty tyrants, the frequency of wars large and small, and the devotion of men to skill in the use of arms, made it impossible ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... a moment's reflection. I will go farther, and affirm that from the sublimity, excellence, and purity of his doctrine and precepts, unparalleled by all the aggregated wisdom and learning of many preceding ages, though, to appearance, he himself was the obscurest and most illiterate of our species; therefore Jesus Christ ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... notwithstanding the innate light, we are as much in the dark as if it did not exist; a rule that will warp any way is not to be distinguished amidst its contraries. If these rules are so liable to vary, through adventitious notions, we should find them clearest in children and in persons wholly illiterate. He grants that there are many opinions, received by men of different countries, educations, and tempers, and held as unquestionable first principles; but then the absurdity of some, and the mutual contradiction of others, make it impossible that they ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... scientific facts which the medium can not possibly comprehend. It is a matter of common knowledge that mediums are usually people without technical scientific knowledge. Some of them have some degree of education and some of them are illiterate. Some of the most celebrated belong to the peasant class ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... had not felt since that day when he had first come to the city to work out his dreams among men. In the human tide that ebbed and flowed through this world gateway, he saw men of wealth and men of poverty—people of culture and position who had come or were going in Pullman or private cars and illiterate, stupid, animal looking, emigrants who were crowded, much like cattle, in the lowest class. There were business men of large affairs; countrymen with wondering faces; shallow, pleasure seekers; artists and scholars; idle fools; vicious sharks watching for victims; mothers with flocks ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... Peace, neighbor Smug. You see this is a Boor, a Boor of the country, an illiterate Boor, and yet the Citizen of good fellows: come, let's provide; a hem, Grass and hay! we are not yet all mortall; we'll live till we die, and be merry, and ...
— The Merry Devil • William Shakespeare
... their assistants answer this description exactly. They must be able to sign their names, but they are not obliged to know how to read, and eighty per cent. of them are totally illiterate. Their work is done for them very usually by the local schoolmaster. The Senate, therefore, was quite sure of finding among them men absolutely incompetent for the post of juge de paix, and it has found what it wanted. Incompetence so colossal deserved an appointment, and an appointment ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... it," replied Woodward, "with contempt, as I do of everything that proceeds from the lips of an ignorant and illiterate Roman ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... of a problem in rural districts than urban. Evidence of this is found in the 1910 Census, which shows that for every illiterate person living in an urban community there are approximately two living in rural communities. The higher per cent of illiteracy in the rural districts is even more marked in the states where immigrants ...
— A Stake in the Land • Peter Alexander Speek
... literature, and to argue from the history of Europe to that of the East. Uncontrolled by external testimony, critical scepticism played havoc with the historical narratives that had descended to it, and starting from the assumption that the world of antiquity was illiterate, refused to credit such records of the past as dwarfed the proportions of Greek history, or could not be harmonised with the canons of the critic himself. It was quite sufficient for a fact to go back to the second millennium B.C. for it to be peremptorily ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... gaining fast upon the white ignorance, and the despised Negro is found to be living above many of his illiterate white neighbors. This makes it easy work for designing men to sharpen race prejudices, which by force and fear shall keep the ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889 • Various
... learned subjects, mostly of a philosophical or literary nature, which Latin was adapted to express. The educated public was extremely small, and foreign travel altogether beyond the reach of all but the very few. The overwhelming mass of the people were illiterate, and fast tied to their native spot by lack of pence, lack of communications, and the general ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... we see that Nature hath no end In her great works responsive to their worths; That she, that makes so many eyes and soules To see and fore-see, is stark blind her selfe; And as illiterate men say Latine prayers 5 By rote of heart and dayly iteration, Not knowing what they say, so Nature layes A deale of stuffe together, and by use, Or by the meere necessity of matter, Ends such a work, fills it, or leaves it empty 10 Of strength, or vertue, error, or cleare truth, Not knowing what ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... friends, which was shown me at the time by Mr. McCreary, Commissioner of Immigration at that point. The cable read, "Arrived Canada safe are free." The change was a little too much for them, and they did not realize that they were not free to become nuisances to others. They were ignorant, illiterate, but had the merit of being conscientious and being willing to suffer for conscience' sake. This latter characteristic always prevented me from condemning them wholly. Once their ignorance was removed they would become industrious and ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... interest of his parent, and becomes her most inveterate enemy and persecutor. Speculative dogmas of religion, the present occasions of such furious dispute, could not possibly be conceived or admitted in the early ages of the world; when mankind, being wholly illiterate, formed an idea of religion more suitable to their weak apprehension, and composed their sacred tenets of such tales chiefly as were the objects of traditional belief, more than of argument or disputation. After the ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... same tale, a series of incidents and plot, with the monstrous element modified, which survived in the oral traditions of illiterate peasantry. ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind. When the illiterate and perhaps scornful trader has earned by enterprise and industry his coveted leisure and independence, and is admitted to the circles of wealth and fashion, he turns inevitably at last to those still higher but yet inaccessible circles of intellect and genius, and is sensible only of the imperfection ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... wealth are not in fields and forests and mines, but in the free schools, churches, and printing presses. Ignorance breeds misery, vice, and crime. Mephistopheles was a cultured devil, but he is the exception. History knows no illiterate seer or sage or saint. No Dante or Shakespeare ever had to ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... amount of reckoning involved seems somewhat inadequate to the occasion. The Russian clergy, it is said—those, at any rate, of the lowest class, designated as "white priests," many of them peasants by birth and marvellously illiterate—have ever been averse to any change being made in the calendar, in order that their seasons of fasting and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... the prototype of Stevenson's "Weir of Hermiston," was known as the "hanging judge"—the Judge Jeffreys of Scotland; but he was a sound judge. He argued a point in a colloquial style, asking a question, and himself supplying the answer in his clear, abrupt manner. But he was illiterate, and without the least desire for refined enjoyment, holding in disdain natures less coarse than his own; he shocked the feelings of those even of an age which had less decorum than prevailed in that which ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... his Ecclesiastical History; Vol. 4, part 2, chap. 1, says: "It is certain that the greatest part both of the bishops and presbyters were men entirely destitute of learning and education. Besides, that savage and illiterate party, who looked upon all sorts of erudition, particularly that of a philosophical kind, as pernicious, and even destructive of true piety and religion, increased both in number and authority. The ascetics, ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... cultivated man, Vespasian, by his hardy virtues, restored the vigor of the Roman government, and gave peace and prosperity to his subjects; while he who founded a library and established schools of rhetoric can not have been so wholly illiterate as some writers ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... this way. He had read little, but had studied the dictionary with considerable diligence. His ideas were few and far between, but his words were many and diversified, long and hard, sometimes connected in the most absurd and ludicrous manner. Most of the illiterate who heard him thought he was highly educated and intelligent, while men of taste and judgment considered him greatly deficient in the first rudiments ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... the Navy, who raided them when it needed seamen or stokers for its ships, they were "dry-land sailors." To the Army, they were just a bunch of "so-called salts" or "Winston's Own." But their instructors soon recognised that in these grousing, middle-aged stokers, and in these silent stolid illiterate miners and ironworkers from the North Country, they had the raw material of soldiers as fine ...
— Some Naval Yarns • Mordaunt Hall
... see. You read out forged letters to the illiterate people. A very judicious expedient, I must say. Village folks can be got to believe anything. But how about ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... inhabitants of Porto Rico, only about 100,000 can read or write; 85 per cent. of the adult population are illiterate. Of the 200,000 children from five to sixteen years of age, all the schools, public and private, can accommodate about thirty thousand. The average daily attendance in all the schools of the island during the past year has been not more than ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 54, No. 3, July, 1900 • Various
... not so confident. As her strength began to return she took a growing interest in all that went on around her, asking eager, intelligent questions and noting with wistful curiosity the speech and manners of the nurses who served her. She was a raw recruit from Nature, unsophisticated, illiterate. Under a bondage of poverty and drudgery she had led her starved life in the mountain fastnesses; but now she had opened her eyes on a ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... statement that he was her father naturally raised the question in the Hon. Morison's mind as to precisely what the girl's attitude toward escape might be. It seemed, of course, preposterous that this fair and beautiful young woman should prefer to remain in the filthy douar of an illiterate old Arab rather than return to the comforts, luxuries, and congenial associations of the hospitable African bungalow from which the Hon. Morison had tricked her. The man flushed at the thought of his duplicity ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... with the family, and a few other persons, and the conversation in general was agreeable enough. I was obliged to tell them many wonderful stories (for who are so illiterate or insensible as not to be delighted with the marvellous!) concerning Germany and the King of Prussia. They could not sufficiently admire my courage in determining to travel on foot, although they could ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... affection? Did the beautiful Spanish maiden dream, when the brilliant English General wooed her, that he was doing her and another woman the greatest wrong? Little did the fascinating Spaniard think that the so-called "nobleman" would compel her to marry another; and that other a rough, illiterate man, who would bring her to this wild, strange, far-away country, and that here she should be laid to rest "after life's fitful fever." Is it to be wondered at that her fiery Southern spirit rebelled, ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... The man, being quite illiterate, had not reckoned on such damning evidence, but he recovered himself and replied with dignity: "Very well, Senor; if it is yours, take it; but don't call ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various
... who appreciated her cakes and ale, would agree with everything she said. The Kensington house was called "The Shrine of the Muses!" and this title was stamped on her envelopes and writing-paper, to the bewilderment of illiterate postmen. It sounded like the name of a public-house ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... supported by an aged footstool. Clothes and garments were hanging on nails, pans lay about the hearth, a sewing-machine stood on a bare deal table. Over the bed was hung an oleograph, from a Christmas supplement, of the birth of Jesus, and above it a bayonet, under which was printed in an illiterate hand on a rough scroll of paper: "Gave three of em what for at Elandslaagte. S. Hughs." Some photographs adorned the walls, and two drooping ferns stood on the window-ledge. The room withal had a sort of desperate tidiness; in a large cupboard, slightly ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... it is easy to guess to what a degree of perfection I might have brought this great work, had it not been nipped in the bud by some illiterate people in both Houses of Parliament, who envying the great figure I was to make in future ages, under pretence of raising money for the war,[169] have padlocked all those very pens that were to celebrate the actions of their heroes, ...
— English Satires • Various
... leaves on the tree respond to the slightest breeze. The muscles of your face, the light of your eyes, should respond to the slightest change of feeling. Emerson says: "Every man that I meet is my superior in some way. In that I learn of him." Illiterate Italians make gestures so wonderful and beautiful that Booth or Barrett might have sat at their feet and been instructed. Open your eyes. Emerson says again: "We are immersed in beauty, but our eyes have no clear vision." ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... body, of their own accord, combine a plan for asserting their freedom, and rest their safety on success alone. The difference is, that then they sought freedom merely as a good; now they also claim it as a right. * * * Ignorant and illiterate as they yet are, they have maintained a correspondence, which, whether we consider its extent ...
— An Account of Some of the Principal Slave Insurrections, • Joshua Coffin
... when his ordinary correspondents failed him, he would send in a spy disguised as a farmer driving a small load of provisions, and who would bring out some family supplies, as tea, sugar, and calico, the better to conceal his real object. Often the spy was a farmer, and sometimes quite illiterate. As it was unsafe for him to have any written paper upon his person, he was required to learn by heart the precise message which he was to deliver in the city, as also the information which he ...
— Revolutionary Heroes, And Other Historical Papers • James Parton
... intimate, in fact, as it was possible for anybody to become with her. Mary found herself drawn strangely and inexplicably toward the woman. The fascination which Miss Woppit exercised over her was altogether new to Mary; here was a woman of lowly birth and in lowly circumstances, illiterate, neglected, lonely, yet possessing a charm—an indefinable charm which was distinct and potent, yet not to be analyzed—yes, hardly recognizable by any process of cool mental dissection, but magically persuasive in the subtlety of its presence and influence. Mary had sought ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... the house up and shut his door, after the ticking of the clock had ceased to be incidental and become portentous, Hazel lay and tried to think. But she only heard two voices in endless contradiction, 'I munna go. I mun go.' At last she got up and fetched the book of charms, written in a childish, illiterate hand, ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... stories of earls and lords marrying governesses and ladies' maids after a swift and very eventful courtship. Already she saw herself Peter's wife, her carriage coming at her order, everyone serving her and she the queen of all the district. Illiterate but romantic, she was swept off her feet at the first touch of passion, and the flattery ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... complexity of ornamentation and design that overload the palaces and temples of Uxmal. When gazing on the structures of that city, and comparing them with those of Chichen, it seemed that I was contemplating a low-born, illiterate man, on whom Fortune, in one of her strange freaks, has smiled, and who imagines that by bedecking himself with gaudy habiliments and shining jewelry he acquires knowledge and importance. All in Uxmal proclaims the decadency of art, the relaxation of morals, the depravity of customs, the lewdness ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... of Art' cannot fail to recognize, as hit off with no sparing hand, more than one American notoriety. Art quackery as it exists, is well shown up in 'Americans in Rome;' the author having little in common with those amiable romancers who glorify every illiterate picture-maker, though he never fails to do justice to true genius. We believe, in short, that these sketches form a very peculiar, piquant, and earnest work, as truthful as it is amusing, and as such commend it to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... sight a view so wide and so wonderful that those who look upon it with the seeing eye and the understanding heart catch glimpses of the King in His beauty through the fairness of the land that is very far off. On past the mossy stone, like an overgrown and illiterate milestone, which marks the boundary between Mershire and Salopshire; and then through a typical English village, noteworthy because the rites of Mayday, with May-queen and May-pole to boot, are still celebrated there ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... surveyed the remains of antiquity at this place, accompanied by an illiterate fellow, as cicerone, who called himself a descendant of a cousin of Saint Columba, the founder of the religious establishment here. As I knew that many persons had already examined them, and as I saw Dr Johnson inspecting and measuring several ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... population, would have more representatives in the international parliament than we would have. They, with the support of representatives from Latin America and Africa, could easily vote to lay a tax on "surplus" incomes for the benefit of all illiterate and hungry people everywhere; and outvoted Americans would be the only people in the world with incomes high enough to meet ...
— The Invisible Government • Dan Smoot
... attainder which had been passed against his father; and immediately afterwards the young lord emerged from the hiding place, where he had been brought up in ignorance of his rank, and with the manners and education of a mere shepherd. Finding himself more illiterate than was usual even in an illiterate age, he retired to a tower, which he built in the beautiful forest of Barden, and there, under the direction of the monks of Bolton Abbey, gave himself up to the forbidden studies of alchemy and astrology. His son, who was ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 354, Saturday, January 31, 1829. • Various
... served to make irresistible. But Puerto Rico did not aspire to emancipation. It never had been a colony, there was no creole class, and the only indigenous population—the "jibaros," the mixed descendants of Indians, negroes, and Spaniards—were too poor, too illiterate, too ignorant of everything concerning the outside world to look with anything but suspicion upon the invitations of the insurgents of Colombia and Venezuela to join them or imitate their example. They, nor the great majority of the masses whom Bolivar, San Martin, Hidalgo, and others liberated ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... the whipping salt gales which sped past the walls. Opposite the house, far out at sea, the familiar lightship winked from the sandbank, and all at once there came to him a wild wish—that, instead of having an artist's reputation, he could be living here an illiterate and unknown man, wooing, and in a fair way of winning, the pretty laundress in the ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... same time active preparations for holding the election of members to the Constituent Assembly were actually under way. The Socialist parties were making special efforts to educate the illiterate voters how to use their ballots correctly. The Provisional Government, on its part, was pushing the preparations for the elections as rapidly as possible. All over the country special courts were established, in central places, to train the necessary workers so that the elections might ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... parishioners no voice in the choosing of their pastors. This matter was left to Lord Baltimore's whim. Hence it was that he sent among us so many fox-hunting and gaming parsons who read the service ill and preached drowsy and illiterate sermons. Gaming and fox-hunting, did I say? These are but charitable words to cover the real characters of those impostors in holy orders, whose doings would often bring the blush of shame to your cheeks. Nay, I have seen ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... ambition than that of printing correctly acts of Parliament and new editions of law-books. In 1739 the publishers, Rivington and Osborne, urged him to compose for them a volume of Familiar Letters, afterward actually produced as an aid to illiterate persons in their correspondence. Richardson set about this work, gave it a moral flavor, and at last began to write what would serve as a caution to young serving-women who were exposed to temptation. At this point he recollected a story he had heard long before, of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... refrain from smiling at the droll way in which his companion handled a subject, he had learned before, and therefore to-day's experience was nothing new to him, that direct questions will never get direct answers from an illiterate Irishman, and so he resigned himself beforehand to the ordeal he was ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... people who were in power believed that "progress" was a very undesirable invention of the Evil One and ought to be discouraged, and as they hap-pened to occupy the seats of the mighty, it was easy to enforce their will upon the patient serfs and the illiterate knights. Here and there a few brave souls sometimes ventured forth into the forbidden region of science, but they fared badly and were considered lucky when they escaped with their lives and a jail ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... its first publication, just one hundred and twenty years since. 'It was received,' says Dr. Johnson, 'with such avidity, that the price of the first edition was raised before the second could be made—it was read by the high and the low, the learned and the illiterate. Criticism was lost in wonder. Now, on the contrary, Schlosser wonders not at all, but simply criticises; which we could bear, if the criticism were even ingenious. Whereas, he utterly misunderstands Swift, ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... others. Violent antipathies are always suspicious, and betray a secret affinity. The difference between the 'Great Vulgar and the Small' is mostly in outward circumstances. The coxcomb criticises the dress of the clown, as the pedant cavils at the bad grammar of the illiterate, or the prude is shocked at the backslidings of her frail acquaintance. Those who have the fewest resources in themselves naturally seek the food of their self-love elsewhere. The most ignorant people find most ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... aforesaid—which last are the two proper acceptations of ABSTRACTION. And there is ground to think most men will acknowledge themselves to be in my case. The generality of men which are simple and illiterate never pretend to ABSTRACT NOTIONS. It is said they are difficult and not to be attained without pains and study; we may therefore reasonably conclude that, if such there be, they are confined only to ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... the east would, according to my scouts, have led us right into the English camp. But it was not with one camp only that we had to deal: the English were everywhere: a whole army lay before us—an army so immense that many Englishmen thought that it would be a task beyond the stupid and illiterate Boer to count it, much less to understand its significance. I will pander to the English conception of us and say, "We have seen them: they are a ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... with two young women, who, however civil they might be, were obviously underbred. Miss Steele was a plain girl about thirty, whose whole conversation was of beaux; while Miss Lucy Steele, a pretty girl of twenty-three, was, despite her native cleverness, probably common and illiterate. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... translated into French, and which were fragments of a most ancient ecclesiastical process. He has believed that nothing would be more amusing than the actual resurrection of this antique affair, wherein shines forth the illiterate simplicity of the good old times. Now, then, give ear. This is the order in which were the manuscripts, of which the author has made use in his own fashion, because the language was ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... seem a greater hardship that the perfectly illiterate were excluded. But this was a necessary requirement of our programme. We wished to transfer the right of the absolute free self-control of the individual to the domain of labour from that of the relation of servitude which had existed ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... his book] Here: youd better let me write the names down for you: youre sure to get them wrong. That comes of belonging to an illiterate profession, with no qualifications and no public register. [He ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • George Bernard Shaw
... shall! One thing puzzles me about you, Sergeant. I don't think I've mentioned it before. Sometimes you speak almost like an educated man; at others your speech is, well, illiterate." ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... army officer with new respect. He had always been inclined to think of the Frontier Guards as a gang of scientifically illiterate dirk-and-pistol bravos. He fiddled for a while with instruments on the panel; an automatic computer figured the distance to the planet, the boat's velocity, and the time ...
— Genesis • H. Beam Piper
... State; and though, even for the State's sake, you would not willingly be closely allied with those whom you think dishonest, the outward manners and fashions of life need create no barriers. I should not turn up my nose at the House of Commons because some constituency might send them an illiterate shoemaker; but I might probably find the illiterate shoemaker an unprofitable companion for ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... past experience, but it is doubtful whether the Seik soldiery ever seriously thought, although they often hauntingly boasted of fighting with the greatest power in Hindostan, until within two or three months of the first battle, and even then the rude and illiterate yeoman considered that they were about to enter upon a war purely defensive, although one in every way congenial to their feelings of pride and national jealousy. To the general impression of the Seiks, in ...
— Vellenaux - A Novel • Edmund William Forrest
... and self-confidence, I made the effort, and failed miserably, as might have been expected. Instead of being a gifted and brilliant man, as I supposed, that had been suddenly brought under a cloud as much through misfortune as fault, I have discovered myself to be a weak, commonplace, illiterate fellow, strong only in bad passions and bad habits. Can I escape these passions and habits by going elsewhere? You have told me, in a way that excited my hope, of God's power and willingness to help such as I am. If he will not help me here, ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... Durham, there is the record of the hanging and quartering in 1590 of "Duke, Hyll, Hogge and Holyday, iiij Semynaryes, Papysts, Tretors and Rebels for their horrible offences." "Burials, 1687 April 17th Georges Vilaus Lord dooke of bookingham," is the illiterate description of the Duke who was assassinated by Felton and buried at Helmsley. It is impossible to mention all the gleanings from parish registers; each parish tells its tale, its trades, its belief in witchcraft, its burials of soldiers killed in war, its stories of persecution, ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... the progress is still greater. As you all know, at the close of the war the whole race was practically illiterate. It was a rare thing, indeed, to find a man of the race who even knew his letters. In 1880 the illiteracy had fallen to 70 per cent. and rapid strides along that line have ...
— Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days • Annie L. Burton
... the great Anthony, who was illiterate, showed admirable knowledge in his controversy with the heretical Arians, and in his replies to pagan philosophers who strove to puzzle him. So also, according to the testimony of Sulpicius Severus, no one explained the Holy Scriptures more clearly than the celebrated ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... who wrote the history of the Indies, which has always been a model of veracity as well as elegant composition, mentions a native of Bengal, named Numas de Cugna, who died 1566, at the age of 370. He was a man of great simplicity and quite illiterate; but of so extensive a memory, that he was a kind of living chronicle, relating distinctly and exactly what had happened within his knowledge in the compass of his life, together with all the circumstances attending it. He had ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... taking rapid surveys of the country through which they passed, was extremely useful to his general; and his integrity made it safe to trust him as a secretary. His commanding officer, though a brave man, was illiterate, and a secretary was to him a necessary of life. Basile was not only useful, but agreeable; without any mean arts, or servile adulation, he pleased, by simply showing the desire to oblige, and the ability ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... Skyeman was very illiterate; witless of Salamanca, Heidelberg, or Brazen-Nose; in Delhi, had never turned over the books of the Brahmins. For geography, in which sailors should be adepts, since they are forever turning over and over the great globe of globes, poor Jarl ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... There are few authentic facts, however, recorded concerning him; for it seems that as soon as he had emerged from the hiding-place where he had been brought up in ignorance of his rank, finding himself more illiterate than was usual, even in an illiterate age, he retired to a tower, which he built in a beautiful and sequestered forest, where, under the direction of the monks of Bolton Abbey, he gave himself up to the forbidden studies of alchemy ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... feature of the Liberator in its seventeenth number, in the shape of a slave auction, where the slaves are chattels, and classed with "horses and other cattle," and where the tortures of the whipping-post are in vigorous operation. Here was a message, which every slave, however ignorant and illiterate could read. His instinct would tell him, wherever he saw the pictured horror, that a friend, not an enemy, had drawn it, but for what purpose? What was the secret meaning, which he was to extract from a portrayal of his woes at once so real and terrible. ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... intellectual activity, people thinking more of ease and luxury and the power of wealth than of actual accomplishment. The internal disorganization, unjust taxation, and unjust rule of the empire had also a tendency to undermine education. The coming of the barbarians, with their honest, illiterate natures, had its influence, likewise, in overthrowing the few ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... of the gentleman who, in the vulgar language, had struck, or taken him in for a guinea with so much ease and dexterity. Booth answered, he did not know his name; all that he knew of him was, that he was the most impudent and illiterate fellow he had ever seen, and that, by his own account, he was the author of most of the wonderful productions of the age. "Perhaps," said he, "it may look uncharitable in me to blame you for your generosity; but I am convinced the fellow hath ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... entertaining when read aloud: the voice gives life and character to a humdrum narrative, and the gestour would know how to make the best of incidents which he knew from experience to be specially interesting to an audience. Such yarns would be most attractive to "lewd" or illiterate men— ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... Goldstein in the last century, and was published by the Academy of Sciences, and also fully illustrated by a German named Jacobi, who applied it to breeding trout and salmon. This seems to have been forgotten until in 1842 two obscure and illiterate fishermen rediscovered and practised this process. The French government was attracted by the success of these fisherman, Gehin and Remy, and thus ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, December 1887 - Volume 1, Number 11 • Various
... to-day is, that men and women shall be urged into positions of conviction and activity against this most colossal evil of our time. In our country the responsibility for drunkenness rests not with the illiterate, blasphemous, ex-prison convicts who operate the 250,000 saloons of our Nation, nor yet with the 250,000 finished products of the saloon who go down into drunkards' graves every year, but with the sober, ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... Febo with the following title, "A Febo (di Poggio)." This proves that he at any rate knew it had been answered by some one signing "Febo di Poggio." The autograph, in an illiterate hand and badly spelt, is preserved among the Buonarroti Archives, and bears date January 14, 1534. Febo excuses himself for not having been able to call on Michelangelo the night before he left Florence, and professes to have come the next day and found him already gone. ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... in the papers, got up balls and entertainments for them. Andrey Yefimitch knew that with modern tastes and views such an abomination as Ward No. 6 was possible only a hundred and fifty miles from a railway in a little town where the mayor and all the town council were half-illiterate tradesmen who looked upon the doctor as an oracle who must be believed without any criticism even if he had poured molten lead into their mouths; in any other place the public and the newspapers would long ago have torn ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Then highest rate, when fury-factions roar, And folly's choicest fools the most despise:— —O happy Poet! laid in peace before Rival intolerants each 'gainst other flamed, And flames were slaked in blood, and all the grace Of life before that sad illiterate gloom Puritan, fled ashamed: While, as the red moon lifts her turbid face, Titanic ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... mustard-pot collector in sight. The weather was getting hot. Salmon would not keep in a troller's hold. Part of the old guard stuck tight to MacRae. But there were new men fishing; there were Japanese and illiterate Greeks. It was not to be expected that these men should indulge in far-sighted calculations. But it was a trifle disappointing to see how readily any troller would unload his catch into a mustard pot if neither of MacRae's carriers happened to be ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... complaint arrived in England denouncing the outrages inflicted on the friends of the apostolic see. It is hard to dissociate the pope's feeling in this matter from his rejection of the nomination of the king's chancellor, Ralph Neville, Bishop of Chichester, to the see of Canterbury, as an illiterate politician. ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... but their Church policy was charged with far-reaching consequences. In that, they were superior to the people about them, and they introduced certain moderate reforms, literary rather than dogmatic, in the externals of ritual, and in the liturgical books. An illiterate clergy had allowed abuses to take root, and were excessively intolerant of change. A schism arose between the established church with its rectified texts and improved ceremonial, and the large minority who ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... the sacred fire in his veins. Only little Paul, of all the household, lent me the aid of his nimble hand to seize the fugitives. I have already stated that the entomologist has need of simplicity of mind. In this important business of the Necrophori, my assistants were a child and an illiterate. ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... the worst enemies of society, the anarchists, are recruited among the prize-winners of schools; while in a recent work a distinguished magistrate, M. Adolphe Guillot, made the observation that at present 3,000 educated criminals are met with for every 1,000 illiterate delinquents, and that in fifty years the criminal percentage of the population has passed from 227 to 552 for every 100,000 inhabitants, an increase of 133 per cent. He has also noted in common with his colleagues ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... of fortune and had carried the knapsack, was corporal in Africa, sergeant in the Crimea, and after Solferino had been made lieutenant, having devoted fifteen years of laborious toil and heroic bravery to obtaining that rank, and was so illiterate that he had no chance of ever ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... I was sent to school. I could read before I went there. How I picked up this knowledge I never could discover: both my foster-parents were grossly illiterate. Perhaps old Ford taught me—but this is one of the mysteries I could never solve; and it is strange that I should have so totally forgotten all about an affair so important, as not to remember a single ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... the corruption of taste and language, still preserves the majesty of the Roman laws. In some respects, the office of the Imperial quaestor may be compared with that of a modern chancellor; but the use of a great seal, which seems to have been adopted by the illiterate barbarians, was never introduced to attest the public acts of the emperors. 4. The extraordinary title of count of the sacred largesses was bestowed on the treasurer-general of the revenue, with the intention perhaps of inculcating, that every payment flowed from the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... bourgeois habitation in the Rue Meslay, afterwards transferred to the Rue Grange-Bateliere, Aurore Dupin's infancy passed tranquilly away, under the wing of her warmly affectionate mother who, though utterly illiterate, showed intuitive tact and skill in fostering the child's intelligence. "Mine," says her daughter, "made no resistance; but was never beforehand with anything, and might have been very much behindhand ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... awld Joannah Martin; [Footnote: This Lady, who was for many years known in Somersetshire as an itinerant dealer in earthenware, rags, &c., and occasionally a fortune-teller, died a few years since at Huntspill, where she had resided for the greater part of a century. She was extremely illiterate, so much so, as not to be able to write, and, I think, could scarcely read. She lived for some years in a house belonging to my father, and while a boy, I was very often her gratuitous amanuensis, in ...
— The Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire • James Jennings
... also, has equal power with every other, to decide who shall be his superior as a ruler. The weakest, the poorest, the most illiterate, has the same opportunity to determine this question, as the richest, the most learned, and ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... census only one in 10,000 could not read or write, and these dunces were all Slavs. But how even a Slav born under the eye of the Eagle can remain illiterate is a mystery. In 1905 there were 59,348 elementary schools in the empire, and their organisation is as elaborate and well planned as the organisation of the army. In Berlin alone there are 280. All the teachers at these schools ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... Romans invaded it, was a barbarous country; and although subjugated and long held by that people, they seem to have left it nearly as uncultivated and illiterate as they found it. 'No magnificent remains,' says Macaulay, 'of Latian porches and aqueducts are to be found in Britain. No writer of British birth is to be reckoned among the masters of Latin poetry and eloquence. It is not probable that the islanders were, at any time, generally familiar ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... to observe, how it was not flesh and blood that had revealed it to him, but God: for if this knowledge were dependent on natural causes or means, how came it to pass that they, a company of poor fishermen, illiterate men, and persons of low education, attained to the knowledge of the truth; while the scribes and Pharisees, men of vastly higher advantages and greater knowledge and sagacity in other matters, remained in ignorance? This could be owing only to the gracious distinguishing influence and ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... academical career. He who does not allow that it passed creditably to my teachers, profitably to myself, and beneficially to the world, is a narrow-minded and illiterate man, who knows nothing of the advantages of ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... precocious, Abraham Lincoln soon learned his letters and drank in all the learning that his few books could supply. Hence at an early age he became the oracle on the rude frontier, where even a smattering made him handy and valuable to the illiterate backwoodsmen. Besides, as working at any place and at any work, he rarely abided long in any one spot, and had not what might be called a ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... directed ridicule—was a man of honour. Little had he to do with the world; even its good opinion was scarcely of any importance to him. What to him was the fastidiousness of virtue—to him whom poverty excluded from the refined portion of society, and knowledge and education from the vulgar and illiterate? What could he profit by it? Nothing, absolutely nothing. And yet there was no power on earth could have made this man false to his honour. Partly, perhaps, from his very estrangement from the business of the world, his sense of virtue had retained its fresh and youthful susceptibility. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... Academies of the Arts were placed at Amsterdam and Antwerp, which were to bear good fruit. His attention was also given to the much-needed improvement of primary education, which in the south was almost non-existent in large parts of the country. Here the presence of a number of illiterate dialects was a great obstacle and was the cause of the unfortunate effort to make literary Dutch into a national language ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... periods of the influx, of an Irish association. It was in like manner inevitable, from the fact that the immigrant class are preponderantly poor and of low social rank, that it should for two or three generations be looked upon as a church for the illiterate and unskilled laboring class. An incident of the excessive torrent rush of the immigration was that the Catholic Church became to a disproportionate extent an urban institution, making no adequate provision for the ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... the consolation of hope where crime is the result of ignorance or misdirected patriotism.... If I sinned in pardoning a sinner then sin must be an unpardonable crime!... Nathan treated David as I treated Rasputin, although both were guilty of the same offense.... He was grossly illiterate,—the only schooling he ever got was in the Monastery Abalaksky and what he acquired from the lips of monks while making his rounds as a barefoot pilgrim from place to place.... His claims of having visions ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... highest degree the most cultivated, and to the widest extent the less cultivated. Lear and the Divine Comedy exhaust the thinking of the profoundest student, yet subdue to hushed and breathless attention the illiterate minds that know not what study means. The "Last Judgment," the "Transfiguration," the "Niobe," and the "Dying Gladiator" excite alike the intelligent rapture of artists, and the unintelligent admiration of those to whom art and its principles are a sealed book. Handel's Israel in Egypt—the wonder ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... Mr. Careless, if a person that is wholly illiterate might be supposed to be capable of being qualified to make a suitable return to those obligations, which you are pleased to confer upon one that is wholly incapable of being qualified in all those circumstances, I'm sure I should rather ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... with those whom you think dishonest, the outward manners and fashions of life need create no barriers. I should not turn up my nose at the House of Commons because some constituency might send them an illiterate shoemaker; but I might probably find the illiterate shoemaker an unprofitable ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... among the smugglers I should be sent to prison. I felt that the magistrate would be too angry to listen to my story, and that they would perhaps send to me prison at once if they ever got hold of me. Magistrates in those days had a great deal of power. They were often illiterate, and they bullied and hectored the people whom they tried. I had seen one or two bad magistrates at home, and I knew how little chance I should stand if I told my unlikely story to a bench in a court-house before such men as they were. So I turned up ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... seemed wider open and lying deeper in her sockets. She looked shrunken and contracted, very much like my mother on the eve of the Ninth of Av, when she read aloud the Lamentations for the benefit of her illiterate women-friends. ...
— In Those Days - The Story of an Old Man • Jehudah Steinberg
... disgust is often excited, and not seldom tardiness of belief. And hence it is that the life of the most glorious priest Patrick, the patron and apostle of Ireland, so illustrious in signs and miracles, being frequently written by illiterate persons, through the confusion and obscurity of the style, is by most people neither liked nor understood, but is held in weariness and contempt. Charity therefore urging us, we will endeavor, by reducing them to order, to collect what ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... partake of the Eucharist, it was with difficulty that he could refrain from imprecating destruction on his brethren while the cup was passing from hand to hand. After he had been some time a member of the congregation, he began to preach; and his sermons produced a powerful effect. He was indeed illiterate; but he spoke to illiterate men. The severe training through which he had passed had given him such an experimental knowledge of all the modes of religious melancholy as he could never have gathered from books; and his vigorous genius, animated by a fervent spirit of devotion, enabled him, not ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... in speech of which the pronunciation does not correspond with the letters with which the word is written, we instinctively image the written or printed word in the mind, and others apprehend the sense intended. I am aware of a certain answer that may be made to this—namely, that illiterate persons are able to understand a word only from its sound as it falls on their ears; but I am speaking now of a civilized language as used by a civilized people, and illiterates and their language do not come under ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... I found poorly qualified for their business. Bradford had not been bred to it, and was very illiterate; and Keimer, though something of a scholar, was a mere compositor, knowing nothing of presswork. He had been one of the French prophets, and could act their enthusiastic agitations. At this time he did not profess any particular religion, but something of all on ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... men of letters have developed wonderful feats of memory; and among illiterate persons, by means of points of association, the power of memory has been little short of marvelous. At a large hotel in Saratoga there was at one time a negro whose duty was to take charge of the hats and coats of the guests as they entered the dining-room and return ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... his own profit, were it at the expence of his employer's ruin. He is continually insinuating new plans to my father, whom he Sir Arthurs, and Honours, and Nobles, at every word, and then persuades him the hints and thoughts are all his own. The illiterate fellow has a language peculiar to himself; energetic but half unintelligible; compounded of a few fine phrases, and an inundation of proverbial wisdom and uncouth cant terms. Of the scanty number of polite words, which he has endeavoured to catch, he is very bountiful to Sir ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... showed itself to have been systematically collected; it stretched pretty equably through two centuries,—namely, from about 1600 to 1800,—and might, perhaps, amount to seventeen thousand volumes. Lord Massey was far from illiterate; and his interest in books was unaffected, if limited, and too often interrupted, by defective knowledge. The library was dispersed through six or seven small rooms, lying between the drawing-room in one wing, and the dining-room ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... anyone reads it!"—she answered—"But what are we to read? If low-minded and illiterate scavengers are employed to write for the newspapers instead of well-educated men, we must put up with the mud the scavengers collect. We know well enough that every journal is more or less a calendar of lies,—all the same we cannot blind ourselves to the great change that has come ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... 18. An illiterate patchwork of lifeless and uninteresting scribbling appeared under my byline day after day in the Intelligencer. Not a word, not a thought of my own was left. I was not restrained from protest ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... did these come? Whence had this man his wisdom? Was our Saviour, in fact, a well instructed philosopher, whilst he is represented to us as an illiterate peasant? Or shall we say that some early Christians of taste and education composed these pieces and ascribed them to Christ? Beside all other incredibilities in this account, I answer, with Dr. Jortin, that they could ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... Peter he was succeeded by his wife Catherine, an amiable but illiterate woman, who was wholly under the influence of Menshikov, one of Peter's chief favourites. After a short reign of two years, she was succeeded by Peter II., son of the unfortunate Alexis, in whose time Menshikov and his family were banished to ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... raised in Sulaco for the defence of the Five-Year Mandate of regeneration. The petition, like everything else, had found its way into Don Jose's hands. He had showed to Mrs. Gould these pages of dirty-greyish rough paper (perhaps looted in some village store), covered with the crabbed, illiterate handwriting of the old padre, carried off from his hut by the side of a mud-walled church to be the secretary of the dreaded Salteador. They had both bent in the lamplight of the Gould drawing-room over the document containing the fierce and yet humble appeal of the ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... Thomas Walker, who with other gentlemen had made a hunting and exploring-tour through it as early as 1748. They were mostly from the farming population, somewhat uncouth in manner, and not much acquainted with books, but not illiterate, for in a document subscribed soon afterward by upward of a hundred of them only two names are signed with a cross. They had but little wealth; but they had what in a new community is far better,—frugal and industrious habits, enterprise, firm self-reliance, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... from the ecclesiastical profession, and to become a definite vocation in its various branches. Crowds of students flocked to the seats of learning, and, as travelling scholars, earned a precarious living by begging or "professing" medicine, assisting the illiterate for a small fee, or working wonders, such as casting horoscopes, or performing thaumaturgic tricks. The professors of law were now the most influential members of the Imperial Council and of the various Imperial Courts. In Central Europe, as elsewhere, ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... opened your letter too," said Kitty, handing him an illiterate letter. "It's from that woman, I think, your brother's..." she said. "I did not read it through. This is from my people and from Dolly. Fancy! Dolly took Tanya and Grisha to a children's ball at the Sarmatskys': ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... rich man, it is true, but he was entirely illiterate, and all his money had been made in trade. As a lad his education had been neglected, for his early life had been spent in the mere struggle for existence. He had been more than successful, but the honours of the student never could be his, and never could he act as one of the officials of the ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... his life long he had made it a rule, after supper was over, to call out his family to dance and rejoice; believing, he said, that a cheerful and contented mind was the best sort of thanks to heaven that an illiterate ...
— A Sentimental Journey • Laurence Sterne
... Ali Pasha, who was an illiterate coffee-house keeper in Salonica, first came to Egypt at the head of a body of Albanians and co-operated with the English against the French. By his extraordinary vigour and intelligence he became the ruler of Lower Egypt, and succeeded in attaching ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... The chief justice of Louisiana was convicted of fraud. A supreme court judge of South Carolina offered his decisions for sale, and Whipper and Moses, both notorious thieves, were elected judges by the South Carolina Legislature. In Alabama there were many illiterate magistrates, among them the city judge of Selma, who in April 1865, was still living as a slave. Governor Chamberlain, a radical, asserted that there were two hundred trial judges in South Carolina who could ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... royal Rishis of meritorious deeds had undertaken journeys to tirthas. Indeed, a trip to them is capable of dispelling all fear, O king! They that are crooked-minded, they that have not their souls under control, they that are illiterate and perverse, do not, O Kauravya, bathe in tirthas. But thou art ever of a virtuous disposition and conversant with morality and firm in thy promises. Thou wilt surely be able to free thyself from the world. For, O son of Pandu, thou art even as king Bhagiratha, or Gaya, or Yayati, or any ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Bibles ordered to be kept in churches for general use chiefly survive in crumbling fragments, or at best woefully dilapidated copies, we cease to be surprised at the easy prey which more fugitive compositions have formed to a succession of careless and indifferent owners. The illiterate inscriptions on many books, which have thus become valuable, point to the hands through which they have passed, and tell a story of prolonged neglect, too often culminating in appropriation to ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... revived, as we know, the almost lost idea of beauty, and the serious and successful pursuit of it. Cardinal Antonelli,[461] speaking to me about the education of the common people in Rome, said that they were illiterate, indeed, but whoever mingled with them at any public show, and heard them pass judgment on the beauty or ugliness of what came before them,—"e brutto," "e bello,"—would find that their judgment agreed admirably, ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... not immediately plant churches and school-houses, as the settlers of New England did. Still they were not altogether illiterate. A public document still in existence has the signature of 112 out of 114 of their number who signed the paper, two ...
— The American Missionary, Volume XLII. No. 10. October 1888 • Various
... the whole crew including the skipper were apprentices and under twenty-one years of age. Even after that they were fitted for no other calling but to follow the sea, and had to accept the master's terms. There were no fishermen's unions, and the men being very largely illiterate were often left victims of a peonage system in spite of the Truck Acts. The master of a vessel has to keep discipline, especially in a fleet, and the best of boys have faults and need punishing while on land. These skippers themselves ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... written and uttered since then. There were pigmies in the old days, too. I had a friend who, as a stenographer some years ago, made a fortune by knocking bad grammar out of the speeches of Congressmen and Senators, who were illiterate. They said to him haughtily, "Stenographer, here are a couple of hundred dollars; fix up that speech I made this morning, and see that it gets into the Congressional Record all right. If you can't fix ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind. When the illiterate and perhaps scornful trader has earned by enterprise and industry his coveted leisure and independence, and is admitted to the circles of wealth and fashion, he turns inevitably at last to those still higher but yet inaccessible circles of intellect and genius, and is sensible ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... where the slaves are chattels, and classed with "horses and other cattle," and where the tortures of the whipping-post are in vigorous operation. Here was a message, which every slave, however ignorant and illiterate could read. His instinct would tell him, wherever he saw the pictured horror, that a friend, not an enemy, had drawn it, but for what purpose? What was the secret meaning, which he was to extract from ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... this special rule, Harvard College was founded in the early days of the Colony. It was the pet and pride and hope of the colonists. They gave to it of their abundance and their poverty. To what end? "Dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches," says the author of "New England First-Fruits." The first Constitution of the College declares one of its objects to be "to make and establish all such orders, statutes, and constitutions as they shall see necessary for the instituting, guiding, and ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... investigate the matter; but some, in the present day, support the monstrous delusion that enlightened and well-trained intellects, the most glorious of all the earthly gifts of God, should bow to canting and illiterate fanaticism. . . ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... occurred as they are narrated, and Dr Bataille is exploiting the ignorance of that class of readers to whom his mode of publication appealed. As products of imagination his marvels are crude and illiterate; in other words, they belong to precisely that type which is characteristic of romances published in penny numbers, and when he pledges his rectitude regarding them he does not enlist our confidence but indicates the slight value which he sets on ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... comes news of Captain Winstanley, who has married a Jewish lady at Frankfort, only daughter and heiress of a well-known money-lender. The bride is reported ugly and illiterate; but there is no doubt as to her fortune. The Captain has bought a villa at Monaco—a villa in the midst of orange-groves, the abandoned plaything of an Austrian princess; and he has hired an apartment in one of the new avenues, just outside the Arc de Triomphe, where, as his ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... regarded as injurious, and cannot be trusted to the daughters until mamma has read them. Mamma never has time to read them, and so they are condemned by default. Fernan Caballero, in one of her sleepy little romances, refers to this illiterate character of the Spanish ladies, and says it is their chief charm,—that a Christian woman, in good society, ought not to know anything beyond her cookery-book and her missal. There is-an old proverb which coarsely conveys this idea: A mule that whinnies and a woman ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... a poor, uneducated, defrauded Japanese, torn from his field and taught that Buddhism consists not in compassion to all that lives, but in sacrifices to idols, and how a similar poor illiterate fellow from the neighborhood of Toula or Nijni Novgorod, who has been taught that Christianity consists in worshipping Christ, the Madonna, Saints, and their ikons—one could understand how these unfortunate men, brought by the violence and deceit of centuries to recognize ...
— "Bethink Yourselves" • Leo Tolstoy
... we may go so far as to assert, that a painter stands in need of more knowledge than is to be picked off his pallet, or collected by looking on his model, whether it be in life or in picture. He can never be a great artist who is grossly illiterate. ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... and their assistants answer this description exactly. They must be able to sign their names, but they are not obliged to know how to read, and eighty per cent. of them are totally illiterate. Their work is done for them very usually by the local schoolmaster. The Senate, therefore, was quite sure of finding among them men absolutely incompetent for the post of juge de paix, and it has found what it ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... and the vast majority of the populati(m, both Christian and Moslem, are totally illiterate. Instruction in the Albanian language is prohibited by the Turkish government for political reasons; a singleexception has been made in the caseof an American school for girls at Kortcha. There are Turkish primary and ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the story of their ancient Epics. The Hindu scarcely lives, man or woman, high or low, educated or ignorant, whose earliest recollections do not cling round the story and the characters of the great Epics. The almost illiterate oil-manufacturer or confectioner of Bengal spells out some modern translation of the Maha-bharata to while away his leisure hour. The tall and stalwart peasantry of the North-West know of the five Pandav brothers, and of their friend the righteous Krishna. The people of ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... look at the woman, and think of the man, I can scarcely believe her to be his wife. Why, she is illiterate and ill bred to the ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... the greatest zeal military glory and eloquence in debate. [23] His notice of the Ligurians is far from complimentary. "They are all deceitful, having lost every record of their real origin, and being illiterate, they invent false stories and have no recollection of the truth." [24] He hazards a few etymologies, which, as usual among Roman writers, are quite unscientific. Graviscae is so called from its unhealthy climate (gravis aer), Praeneste from its conspicuous position on the mountains (quia montibus ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... Bartholomew Sharp (notes 1 and 3, ibid.), and very brief accounts in William Dampier's New Voyage around the World (London, 1697) and in Lionel Wafer's A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America (London, 1699). The present narration is by still another participant, illiterate but not incapable of telling an interesting story, ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various
... Genoa on the night of February 18, 1784, of parents in humbly prosperous circumstances, his father being a ship-broker, and, though illiterate in a general way, a passionate lover of music and an amateur of some skill. The father soon perceived the child's talent, and caused him to study so severely that it not only affected his constitution, but actually made him a tolerable ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... narrative, and the gestour would know how to make the best of incidents which he knew from experience to be specially interesting to an audience. Such yarns would be most attractive to "lewd" or illiterate men— ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... an absurdity it was that the spirit of truth should have anything to communicate to illiterate and vulgar persons except through the mouths of those to whom had been committed the dispensation of the means of grace! Whatever wind might blow, except from their bellows, was, to Mr Cairns at least, not even of doubtful origin. Indeed the priests of every religion, taken ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... philosophy! Do you remember it? But that is now far away. Will that happy time ever return? Shall we one day meet again? Here my life is restless, uncertain, precarious, and, what is worse, indolent, illiterate, and vagrant. I do no work, I live in idleness, I ramble about; I do not read, I no longer study; my books are forsaken; now and then I glance over a few metaphysical works, and after a days walk through dirty, filthy, crowded streets. I lie down with empty head and ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... have associated to any extent with the people in the rural districts, especially those of American or Dutch-American descent, they, no doubt, have observed that a great many of the older and more illiterate ones among them are very superstitious, being implicit believers in signs, charms, apparitions, etc.; and most of them, also, entertain the opinion that the moon exerts an occult influence over many things of vital importance to the residents of this mundane ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... attributes of chivalry, we incline towards the erroneous view that it was confined entirely to the upper classes. That the manuscript volumes of the romantic tales which were so eagerly purchased and treasured by the educated classes could never possibly come into the hands of the rude illiterate peasants is a fallacious argument. Scanty indeed would be our folk-lore had it all been transmitted graphically. Chaucer bears evidence of the widespread popularity of these heroic tales in ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... dread of the vengeance of the Yorkists caused his widow to conceal his son and heir under the lowly disguise of a shepherd-boy, in which condition he grew up among the fells of Westmorland totally illiterate, and ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... AN illiterate person, who always volunteered to "go round with the hat," but was suspected of sparing his own pocket, overhearing once a hint to that effect, replied, "Other gentlemen puts down what they thinks proper, and so do I. Charity's a private ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... ignorance, and the nearer relation into which the two countries are now brought by means of the excellent system of railroads is rapidly dispelling the misconception on both sides of the Rio Grande. The masses, especially the peons, are far more illiterate than in this country, and are easily led by the higher intelligence of the few; nor have the Mexicans yet shown much real progress in the purpose of promoting general education, though incipient steps ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... ignore almost any crime which is just a matter of common knowledge. In fact, they are mildly grateful. It gives them something to talk about. But when detraction is printed in the morning paper you can't overlook it without incurring the suspicion of being illiterate and virtueless. That's Lichfield." ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... corruption of taste and language, still preserves the majesty of the Roman laws. In some respects, the office of the Imperial quaestor may be compared with that of a modern chancellor; but the use of a great seal, which seems to have been adopted by the illiterate barbarians, was never introduced to attest the public acts of the emperors. 4. The extraordinary title of count of the sacred largesses was bestowed on the treasurer-general of the revenue, with the intention perhaps of inculcating, that every payment flowed from the voluntary ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... see you: he is a sparkling draught in person; probably illiterate, if I may judge from one interruption of my discourse when he sat opposite me, but lettered enough to respect Learning and write out his prescription: I do not ask more of men or of physicians." Dr. Middleton said this rising, glancing at the clock and at the back of his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... trifle light as air is magnified, as the poet says, 'into confirmation strong as holy writ.' Now, consider, somebody calls at the Foundling to ask after you—which I acknowledge to be a satisfactory point—his name is taken down by an illiterate brute, as Derbennon; but how you can decide upon the real name, and assume it is De Benyon, is really more than I can imagine, allowing every scope to fancy. It is in the first instance, therefore, you are at fault, as there are many other names which may have been given by the party who ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... October. When the cattle bunched at night I simply rolled up in a blanket where they were and watched the stars until I forgot them; the next thing I knew it was morning. I had hours to read in though, hours and hours; and that was another thing I was after. For I could read, I wasn't quite illiterate, and I was dead in earnest at last. When the Fall round-up came I quit and went to Denver, and portered in a big hotel ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... Conscious that they might be crowded out by the greater energy and enterprise of white settlers—that they could no longer depend on their means of livelihood in the past, when the buffalo and other game were plentiful, these restless, impulsive, illiterate people were easily led to believe that their only chance of redressing their real or fancied wrongs was such a rising as had taken place on the Red River in {394} 1869. It is believed that English settlers in the Prince Albert district secretly fomented the ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... fellow-citizens? I think you will find, in investigating this subject, that every solid argument is against the extraordinary court, and that every one in its favor is specious only. It is a transfer from a judicature of learning and integrity, to one, the greatness of which is both illiterate and unprincipled. Yet such is the force of prejudice with some, and of the want of reflection in others, that many of our constitutions have copied this absurdity, without suspecting it to be one. I am glad to hear that our new Constitution is pretty sure of being accepted by States enough to secure ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... sufferer:—nineteen persons, "members of the Church", were executed, and one hundred and fifty persons were put in prison. It was sometime before the conviction began to spread, that even men of sense, education, and fervent piety could entertain the madness and infatuation of the weak, illiterate, and unprincipled. A disbeliever in witchcraft was an 'obdurate sadducee.' That conviction did at last possess men. The disease which affected the supposed bewitched children somewhat resembled St. Vitus' Dance. It was an involuntary motion of the ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... surrendered his commission as chaplain in the army. He had fought to win the freedom of a race. To make that race true free men was a task much more vast than to emancipate them. The parting of the ways had come. An illiterate people must be taught. No longer should it be a crime to instruct them. The rather was he the criminal who should deny them an education. It was an hour for the voice of a prophet. With the ken of a seer, Chaplain Cravath, representing the American Missionary Association, ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 54, No. 01, January, 1900 • Various
... literary merit. Usher, notwithstanding his being a bishop, received a pension from him. Marvel and Milton were in his service. Waller, who was his relation, was caressed by him. That poet always said, that the protector himself was not so wholly illiterate as was commonly imagined. He gave a hundred pounds a year to the divinity professor at Oxford; and an historian mentions this bounty as an instance of his love of literature.[*] He intended to have erected a college at Durham for the benefit ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... said Lucia. "I hope she understood his English too, and his music. He had not an 'h' when he spoke English, and I have not the slightest doubt in my own mind that his Italian was equally illiterate. It does not matter; I do not see that Mr Cortese's linguistic accomplishments concern us. But his music does, if poor Miss Bracely, with her lovely notes, is going to study it, and appear as Lucretia. I am sorry if that is so. ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... besides, the mysterious Rasputin to contend with! This extraordinary man seems to exercise a malign influence over everyone, and people are powerless to resist him. Nothing seems too strange or too mad to recount of this man and his dupes. He is by birth a moujik, or peasant, and is illiterate, a drunkard, and an immoral wretch. Yet there is hardly a great lady at Court who has not come under his influence, and he is supposed by this set of persons to be a reincarnation of Christ. Rasputin's figure is one of those mysterious ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... colloquialism, were overwhelming in their effect on such an audience. "The first discovery," he says himself, "of their being affected was to see the white gutters made by their tears, which plentifully fell down their cheeks, black as they came out of the coal-pits." It was not only miners and other illiterate men whom Whitefield impressed by the fervor and passion of his eloquence. Hume, Benjamin Franklin, Horace Walpole, and other men as well qualified to judge, and as little likely to fall under the spell of religions or sentimental enthusiasm, have borne willing testimony to the irresistible power ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... letter written next day to his father and mother clearly shows. He went to the house of the printer, where he did not receive the warm welcome he had expected. Deborah Franklin was a fat, hard-working, illiterate, economical housewife. She had a great pride in her husband, but had fallen hopelessly behind him. She regarded with awe and slight understanding the accomplishments of his virile, restless, on-pushing intellect. She did not know how to enjoy the prosperity that had come to them. ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... distinguished sire had won. There are few authentic facts, however, recorded concerning him; for it seems that as soon as he had emerged from the hiding-place where he had been brought up in ignorance of his rank, finding himself more illiterate than was usual, even in an illiterate age, he retired to a tower, which he built in a beautiful and sequestered forest, where, under the direction of the monks of Bolton Abbey, he gave himself up to the forbidden studies of alchemy and astrology. His descendant Anne Clifford, Countess ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... that his father's grandfather was a humble private soldier at the storming of Stony Point. This great-grandfather's name was Miller. Dutch or German neighbors had called him Millerd by some confusion with other names having a similar termination, and as he was tolerably illiterate, and rarely wrote his name, the change came to be accepted. A new schoolmaster who spelled it Millerd in the copy-book of Charley's grandfather fixed the orthography and pronunciation in the new form. About the time that Millard Fillmore became President by succession, ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... of making this provision for the officers I am ready to declare that I do most religiously believe the salvation of the cause depends upon it, and without it your officers will moulder to nothing, or be composed of low and illiterate men, void of capacity for this or ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... a great deal too full of the market to think of any thing else—which is just as it should be, for a thriving man. What has he to do with books? And I have no doubt that he will thrive, and be a very rich man in time—and his being illiterate and coarse need not ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... renowned now living. Though only an illiterate peasant woman, she has been able for more than twenty years to baffle every scientist who has studied her. Her organism remains the most potent mystery on ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... condescends to an intimacy with a simple son of sea and shore who is not only practically illiterate but is entirely ignorant of his patron's prowess, the opinions of the illiterate concerning the personal characteristics of the genius obtain a very remarkable value as being honest criticism by man of man, uninfluenced by the ...
— Edward FitzGerald and "Posh" - "Herring Merchants" • James Blyth
... don't know where the reform is to begin. I've seen a perfectly capable, honest man, time and again, run against an illiterate trickster, and get beaten. I suppose if the people wanted decent members of congress they would elect them. Perhaps," continued Philip with a smile, "the women will have ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... C represents the boundary of the disturbed area, so far as known, for about one-third of the area lies in regions from which no information was procurable, while another third is inhabited by ignorant and illiterate tribes. But, notwithstanding this, the shock is known to have been felt over an area of at least 1,200,000 square miles. If we include the detached region to the west, near Ahmedabad, the portion of the Bay of Bengal in which the shock ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... triumphs over matter and have not some of you with only a few months' preparation stood fearless at your post in Mesopotamia and won recognition by your calm collectedness and true heroism? They may say that you are but a small handful, what of the vast illiterate millions? Illiterate in what sense? Have not the ballads of these illiterates rendered into English by our Poet touched profoundly the hearts of the very elect of the West? Have not the stories of their common life appealed to the ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... of oak or laurel; but then Rome never produced a Rev. Seasholes, nor Greece a Senator Bowser. The Imperial City did manage to breed a Brutus and a Cato, but never proved equal to a Culberson. Think of a Texas legislature, composed chiefly of illiterate jabber- whacks who string out the sessions interminably for the sake of the $2 a day—imagine these fellows, each with a large pendulous ear to the earth, listening for the approach of some Pegasus to carry him to Congress—teaching the aesthetics of civilization to the divine philosophers ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... delicacy and magnificence of taste which would have made the houses and manners of modern stock-jobbers intolerable to them. Renaissance millionaires could be vulgar and brutal, but they were great gentlemen. They were neither illiterate cads nor meddlesome puritans, nor even saviours of society. Yet, if we are to understand the amazing popularity of Titian's and of Veronese's women, we must take note of their niceness to kiss and obvious willingness ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... symbol that provides excellent material for clues to tricks and mannerisms. It varies in form from a mere v-shaped tick of almost indeterminate character to an ornate thing of loops and flourishes. It is very sparingly employed by illiterate persons, and some educated writers avoid its use under the impression that, like the abbreviation of words, it is vulgar. In a few high-class ladies' schools its use is sternly repressed, and there are many fluent and habitual writers who never employ this sign. This in itself ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... and caused great tumult and alarm. From the foundation of New England it had been the custom of the inhabitants, in matters of doubt and difficulty, to look to their ministers for counsel. So they did now; 10 but unfortunately the ministers and wise men were more deluded than the illiterate people. Cotton Mather, a very learned and eminent clergyman, believed that the whole country was full of witches and wizards who had given up their hopes of heaven and signed a covenant with ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... deeds were drawn in accordance with them. When the day for signing arrived, the bridegroom-elect demurred at first to the stringency of the provisions of the marriage-contract; but as upon this point Mr Dutton was found to be inflexible, the handsome, illiterate clown—he was little better—gave up his scruples, the more readily as a life of assured idleness lay before him, from the virtual control he was sure to have over his wife's income. These were the thoughts which passed across his mind, I was quite sure, as taking the pen awkwardly in his ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... before the public. The necessity of the library, its great value to the community, should be urged by the local press, from the platform, and in personal talk. Include in your canvass all citizens, irrespective of creed, business, or politics; whether educated or illiterate. Enlist the support of teachers, and through them interest children and parents. Literary, art, social, and scientific societies, Chautauqua circles, local clubs of all kinds should be ...
— A Library Primer • John Cotton Dana
... wholesale or retail for the punctual delivery of unadulterated moonshine. Such a dealer, such a contractor, is the Anti-Corn-Law Association; and for such it has always been known amongst intelligent men. But its character has now diffused itself among the illiterate: and we believe it to be the simple truth at this moment, that every working man, whose attention has at any time been drawn to the question, is now ready to take his stand upon the following answer:—"We, that is our order, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... added a full hour to the business of the toilette. It was generally three before Miss Burney was at liberty. Then she had two hours at her own disposal. To these hours we owe great part of her Diary. At five she had to attend her colleague, Madame Schwellenberg, a hateful old toadeater, as illiterate as a chambermaid, as proud as a whole German Chapter, rude, peevish, unable to bear solitude, unable to conduct herself with common decency in society. With this delightful associate, Frances Burney had to dine, and pass the evening. The pair ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of her own savings,—savings which had been the secret result of secret labors with the pen and type-writer. As soon as the accident happened she quitted the High School, put aside her books, and divided her time between nursing her mother and keeping the books of a successful but illiterate milliner, who offered her a place; and she gave so many other evidences of good sense and determination that Mrs. Tarbell felt it would be hopeless to try to resist her. Her decision did not seem to have altered ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... accepted by them, with the gravest face; no story is too silly, no falsehood too glaring, for them to believe and to retail, in fullest confidence of its truth. Gross ignorance is one of their characteristics; they are superstitious, credulous, illiterate, to an almost incredible extent. Clement considers that "the Lord continually proves to us that there shall be a future resurrection" by the following "fact," among others: "Let us consider that wonderful sign which takes place in Eastern lands—that is, in Arabia and ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... the Gold Conspiracy to respectability and editorial law, but when he sent the manuscript on to the Quarterly, the editor of the Quarterly also refused it. The literary standard of the two Quarterlies was not so high as to suggest that the article was illiterate beyond the power of an active and willing editor to redeem it. Adams had no choice but to realize that he had to deal in 1870 with the same old English character of 1860, and the same inability in himself to understand it. As usual, when ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... also express agent, and the new volunteer who Clinch had suggested would be found among the stable-men. The nearest justice of the peace was ten miles away, and Hale had to abandon even his hope of being sworn in as a deputy constable. This introduction of a common and illiterate ostler into the party on equal terms with himself did not add to his satisfaction, and a remark from Rawlins seemed to ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... members of Parliament who spoke of public virtue and patriotism he would reply "you will soon come off that and grow wiser," the autocrat enamoured of power who could brook no colleague within measurable distance, the man of coarse habits and illiterate tastes, above all the man who induced his countrymen to place money before honour, and whose administration even an admirer describes as one of unparalleled stagnation—such a man must have roused intense antagonism in Fielding's generous ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... now call 'culture' certainly did not enter into the 'curriculum,' nor 'English,' nor modern languages, nor 'literature.'" {17a} Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps says that "removed prematurely from school, residing with illiterate relatives in a bookless neighbourhood, thrown into the midst of occupations adverse to scholastic progress—it is difficult to believe that when he first left Stratford he was not all but destitute of polished accomplishments." {17b} Mr. Greenwood adds the apprenticeship ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... perhaps, what I just said about the loves and friendships of illiterate persons,—that is, of the human race, with a few exceptions here and there. I like books,—I was born and bred among them, and have the easy feeling, when I get into their presence, that a stable-boy has ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... was born July 17, 1674, at Southampton, where his father, of the same name, kept a boarding-school for young gentlemen, though common report makes him a shoemaker. He appears, from the narrative of Dr. Gibbons, to have been neither indigent nor illiterate. ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... designations should be printed. Most practical politicians desire that the name "Republican" or "Democrat," or even that some party symbol like a star or flag, should be affixed, which can be understood by the most illiterate voter; also, that the voter should be allowed to make one cross opposite the word "Republican" or "Democrat" when he means to vote the whole of the ticket, "in order to give each candidate the benefit of the full party strength." On the other side it is argued that all ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... because of this many a time in later days his enemies taunted him with being ignorant and unlearned. He felt these taunts bitterly, and again and again answered them in his writings. "I have been in my time pretty well master of five languages," he says in one place. "I have also, illiterate though I am, made a little progress in science. I have read Euclid's Elements. . . . I have read logic. . . . I went some length in physics. . . . I thought myself master of geography and to possess sufficient skill in astronomy." Yet he says ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... own sort, in this single particular, were the two girls with whom she shared a cheap room. Their common decency in attitude toward the other sex was the unique bond of union. In their association, she found no real companionship. Nevertheless, they were wholesome enough. Otherwise they were illiterate, altogether uncongenial. ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... amazing to me that this person should have assurance, in the face of the sun, to go about persuading your Highness that our age is almost wholly illiterate and has hardly produced one writer upon any subject. I know very well that when your Highness shall come to riper years, and have gone through the learning of antiquity, you will be too curious to neglect inquiring ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... the death-bed of an illiterate woman, old and plain, dying away by inches? Is it only that she died with a hold of my hand, and that therefore I am interested in the story? I trust not. I was interested in HER. Why? Would my readers be more interested if I told ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... this is how she treated a work which she considered a world-masterpiece. First she skimmed it over, then she expurgated it, and finally she either typed it herself, [663] or, what is more likely, put it into the hands of a typist who must have been extremely illiterate or abominably careless. Then, without even troubling to correct the copy, she sent the manuscript of the Catullus up the chimney after that of The Scented Garden. The typewritten copy was forwarded to the unhappy and puzzled Mr. Leonard ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... such a student out of my office." That eminent lawyer's remark did me more service than any month's study in the Seminary. It taught me that cultivated audiences relished plain, simple scriptural truths as much as did the illiterate, and that down-right earnestness to save souls hides a multitude of sins in ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... what we must call religious erotics, in no way different, save for names of Christ and the Virgin, from their most impassioned secular ones. The Song of Solomon, therefore, is one of the few pieces of written literature of which we find constant traces in the works of these very literally illiterate poets. Yet the quality of their love, if one may say so, is very different from anything Hebrew, or, for the matter of that, Greek or Roman; their ardour is not a transient phenomenon which disturbs them, like that of the Shulamite, ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... was illiterate, and had no sympathy with his son's efforts to educate himself. Fortunately for him, however, his stepmother helped and encouraged him in every way possible. Shortly before her death she said to a biographer of Lincoln: "I induced my husband ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... the college. The religious motive predominated in the founding of Harvard, for though the colonists longed "to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity," they were actuated chiefly by dread "to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present Ministers ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... whatever about his work, as he had been in the Excise Duties Department, and had received the post of school inspector through influence. The School Council met very rarely, and there was no knowing where it met; the school guardian was an almost illiterate peasant, the head of a tanning business, unintelligent, rude, and a great friend of the watchman's—and goodness knows to whom she could ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Danger (the spurre of all great mindes) is ever The curbe to your tame spirits; you respect not (With all your holinesse of life and learning) 80 More then the present, like illiterate vulgars; Your minde (you say) kept in your fleshes bounds Showes that mans will must rul'd be by his power: When by true doctrine you are taught to live Rather without the body then within, 85 And rather to your God still then your selfe. To live to Him is to ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... ignorance, but the depravity of the doctors. Nothing could be more unjust or mischievous. Doctors, if no better than other men, are certainly no worse. I was reproached during the performances of The Doctor's Dilemma at the Court Theatre in 1907 because I made the artist a rascal, the journalist an illiterate incapable, and all the doctors "angels." But I did not go beyond the warrant of my own experience. It has been my luck to have doctors among my friends for nearly forty years past (all perfectly aware of my freedom from the usual credulity as to the miraculous ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... him, for most of his friends were unreasoning and uncritical enough to assert that the 'Poems on Rural Life and Scenery,' were less remarkable as poetic works, than as productions of a very poor and illiterate man. This statement was echoed far and wide, with the necessary result of getting 'the Northamptonshire Peasant' looked upon as but a nine-days' wonder. Quite as fatal to Clare's fame as a poet were the loud appeals made on his behalf for ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... hundred per cent, just as it would in school. Men are only boys. As soon as the fellows got it into their heads we were trying to work out a republic in a jail, they were possessed by it. I wish you could see the letters that were sent in to the paper. You couldn't publish 'em, some of 'em. Too illiterate. But they showed you what was inside the fellows. Sometimes they were as smug ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... the people that amuse me, and the other is the reading of French books. I didn't see how I was going to keep my circle here together, and my own mind in decent repair, unless I could find somebody to be eyes for me, and to read to me. And as I'm a bundle of nerves, and I never was agreeable to illiterate people, nor they to me, I was rather put to it. Well, one day these girls and their mother came over to tea, and, as you guess, of course, they brought Mademoiselle Le Breton with them. I had asked them to come, but when they arrived I was ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... reference, and had laid it down that if the human race became extinct the birds would stand the best chance of "evolving a primate"! Since that time other "scientists" have been encountered, with no better equipment, with no history, no poetry, no philosophy in any broad sense, men with no letters—illiterate, strictly speaking—yet with all the dogmatism in the world. Can any one be more dogmatic than your modern scientist? The reproach has passed altogether to him from ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... the beginning's of these various degenerate and illiterate attempts at book-work we have only to watch the last expiring gleams of classic art beneath the ruthless footsteps of the barbarian invaders of ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... strong mechanic skill. "That Gospel, Paul with zeal and love maintain'd, To others lost, to you is now explain'd; No worldly learning can these points discuss, Books teach them not as they are taught to us. Illiterate call us!—let their wisest man Draw forth his thousands as your Teacher can: They give their moral precepts: so, they say, Did Epictetus once, and Seneca; One was a slave, and slaves we all must be, Until the ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... office. Mr Chalk, a quiet-looking little man, with easy familiar manners, which won the confidence of his illiterate constituents, knowing Bob Fox well, received us graciously. His eyes glittered as he heard the money chink ...
— Peter Trawl - The Adventures of a Whaler • W. H. G. Kingston
... service of the will, is not of itself sufficient: there must be a real superfluity of power, set free from the service of the will and devoted to that of the intellect; for, as Seneca says, otium sine litteris mors est et vivi hominis sepultura—illiterate leisure is a form of death, a living tomb. Varying with the amount of the superfluity, there will be countless developments in this second life, the life of the mind; it may be the mere collection and labelling of insects, birds, minerals, coins, or the highest achievements of ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... enabled to produce a bowstring for his benefactor; and the sultan's "firmaun" appointed him to the vacant pachalik. His qualifications for office were all superlative: he was very short, very corpulent, very illiterate, very irascible, ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... of her. She was sentimental. I never gave her any money. When I had some, she refused to take it, but allowed me to spend a little in buying her a present. On the night before I left London she wept. She wrote me illiterate, but affectionate letters. One day she wrote to me that she was to be kept by a man, but that she had made it a condition with him that she should be allowed to have me. I had never been in love with her, because of her vulgarity. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... at his desk. He began to write, working on a report which the governor of Samoa had been clamouring for and which Walker, with his usual dilatoriness, had neglected to prepare. Mackintosh as he made his notes reflected vindictively that Walker was late with his report because he was so illiterate that he had an invincible distaste for anything to do with pens and paper; and now when it was at last ready, concise and neatly official, he would accept his subordinate's work without a word of appreciation, ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... different nations, Turcomans, Greeks, and Armenians. The Turcomans, who are Mahometans, are a rude, illiterate, and savage people, inhabiting the mountains and inaccessible places, where they can procure pasture, as they subsist only on the produce of their flocks and herds. In their country there are excellent horses, called Turkish ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... authority we learn that as a child Miss Mehetabel was so precocious that at the age of eight she could read the Greek Testament in the original; that she was from her earliest youth emotional and sentimental; that despite her intellectual tastes and attainments she gave her hand to an illiterate journeyman plumber and glazier; and that when the fruit of this union lay dying by her side she insisted on dictating to her husband a poem afterward published under the moving caption of "A Mother's Address to Her Dying Infant." Another of her ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... works of Genius perpetually criticized in our public Prints: "Passion has not sufficient coolness to pause for metaphor, nor has metaphor ardor enough to keep 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 ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... at least born in Flanders, notwithstanding that the Spanish Translation representeth him to be a Native of the Kingdom of France. His printing this History originally in Dutch, which doubtless must be his native Tongue, who otherwise was but an illiterate man, together with the very sound of his name, convincing me thereunto. True it is, he set sail from France, and was some years at Tortuga; but neither of these two Arguments, drawn from the History, are prevalent. For were he to be a French-man born, how came he to learn ...
— The Pirates of Panama • A. O. (Alexandre Olivier) Exquemelin
... every white man's religion? Can it be a matter of astonishment, that slaves often feel that there is no just God for the poor African? Nay, verily; and were it not for the comforting and sustaining influence that these poor, illiterate and suffering creatures feel as coming from an unearthly source, they would in their ignorance all become infidels. To me, that beautiful Sabbath morning was clouded in midnight darkness, and I retired to ponder on what ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... being quite illiterate, had not reckoned on such damning evidence, but he recovered himself and replied with dignity: "Very well, Senor; if it is yours, take it; but don't call ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various
... wranglings of the common sort, plebs, the rabble, duelloes with fists, proper to this island, at which the stiletto'd and secrete Italian laughs.) Withdrawing myselfe from these buzzing and illiterate vanities, with a bezo las manos to the city, I begin to inhale, draw in, snuff up, as horses dilatis naribus snort the fresh aires, with exceeding great delight, when suddenly there crosses me a procession, sad, heavy, dolourous, tristfull, melancholick, able to change mirth into ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... commenced in the reign of Charles I. The Puritans had the pulpit on their side, and found it a powerful instrument. The Cavaliers had the song writers on theirs, and found them equally effective. And the song and ballad writers of that day were not always illiterate versifiers. Some of them were the choicest wits and most accomplished gentlemen of the nation. As they could not reach the ears of their countrymen by the printed book, the pamphlet, or the newspaper, nor mount the pulpit and ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... accomplished an upright little letter to Mrs. Churchley—her eldest sister neither fostered nor discouraged the performance—to which Mrs. Churchley replied, after a fortnight, in a meagre and, as Adela thought, illiterate fashion, making no allusion to the approach of any closer tie. Evidently the situation had changed; the question of the marriage was dropped, at any rate for the time. This idea gave our young ...
— The Marriages • Henry James
... and address on the envelope as precisely and as legibly as you can. The post-office has enough to do in deciphering the letters of the illiterate, without being asked to do ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... against his father; and immediately afterwards the young lord emerged from the hiding place, where he had been brought up in ignorance of his rank, and with the manners and education of a mere shepherd. Finding himself more illiterate than was usual even in an illiterate age, he retired to a tower, which he built in the beautiful forest of Barden, and there, under the direction of the monks of Bolton Abbey, gave himself up to the forbidden studies of alchemy and astrology. His son, who was the first Earl of Cumberland, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 354, Saturday, January 31, 1829. • Various
... by George Bentinck,[13] who took the trouble. Besides, his fortune consists in great measure of wool, he lives in the country, is well versed in rural affairs and the business of the quarter sessions, has a certain calibre of understanding, is prejudiced, narrow-minded, illiterate, and ignorant, good-looking, good-humoured, and unaffected, tedious, prolix, unassuming, and a duke. There would not have been so much to say about him if they had not excited an idea in the minds of some people of making him Prime Minister and successor ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... "Which One of These Couples Will be the Happier in Five Years?" the implication being that the young people who buy Dr. Eliot's books will, by constant reading aloud to each other from the works of the world's best writers, cement a companionship which will put to shame the illiterate union of ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... Cosineus—or Gog and Magog, as the grotesque giants are designated by the unlearned, who know not the history of the two famous effigies, which originally figured in an Elizabethan pageant, stirring the wonder of the illiterate, and reminding scholars of two mythical heroes about whom the curious reader of this paragraph may learn further particulars by referring ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... contented that men of learning praise our actions, and thereby inspire us with additional courage in war. I wish I could employ more time in reading, and could expend some of that money on learned men which I must throw away on so many illiterate knights." ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... Driven from pillar to post by the relentless hatred of the Established Church, they sought refuge in America, where Janson planned a theocratic socialistic community. Its communism was based entirely upon religious convictions, for neither Janson nor any of his illiterate followers had heard of the politico-economic systems of French reformers. Over one thousand young and vigorous peasants followed him to America. The first contingent of four hundred arrived in 1846 and spent their first ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... that day our petulant demand for originality was not so much pressed. There was no literature for the million. The universal reading, the cheap press, were unknown. A great poet, who appears in illiterate times, absorbs into his sphere all the light which is anywhere radiating. Every intellectual jewel, every flower of sentiment, it is his fine office to bring to his people; and he comes to value his memory equally with his invention. He is therefore little solicitous whence his thoughts have ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... audiobook, if you can cope with the numerous words of unusual spelling, to represent the speech of illiterate seamen, and the Spanish words. The latter are also to be found in Reid's Wild-West novels. For some reason Reid often uses a few French phrases, but that was not unusual at the ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... or mob, in all ages, have been a set of blind, deaf, obstinate, senseless, illiterate savages. That no man of genius, in his senses, would be ambitious of pleasing such a capricious, ungrateful rabble. That the only legitimate end of writing for them is to pick their pockets, and, that failing, we are at full liberty to vilify and abuse ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... from past experience, but it is doubtful whether the Seik soldiery ever seriously thought, although they often hauntingly boasted of fighting with the greatest power in Hindostan, until within two or three months of the first battle, and even then the rude and illiterate yeoman considered that they were about to enter upon a war purely defensive, although one in every way congenial to their feelings of pride and national jealousy. To the general impression of the Seiks, ...
— Vellenaux - A Novel • Edmund William Forrest
... it was soon required of them that they should sign "Articles of War" before they could be enrolled. These Articles formed so simple and clear an expression of The Army's teachings and system, that the most illiterate in every land could at once take in ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... not object to the tell-tale day! The light will show, character'd in my brow, The story of sweet chastity's decay, The impious breach of holy wedlock vow: Yea, the illiterate, that know not how To cipher what is writ in learned books, Will quote my loathsome ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... things they wanted to communicate about were learned subjects, mostly of a philosophical or literary nature, which Latin was adapted to express. The educated public was extremely small, and foreign travel altogether beyond the reach of all but the very few. The overwhelming mass of the people were illiterate, and fast tied to their native spot by lack of pence, lack of communications, and the ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... England at this period,—and in the small provincial town where his final rupture with the illiterate theatrical manager had taken place, there was a curious, silent contest going on between the inhabitants and their vicar. The vicar was an extremely unpopular person,—and the people were striving against him, and fighting him at every ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... worst enemies of society, the anarchists, are recruited among the prize-winners of schools; while in a recent work a distinguished magistrate, M. Adolphe Guillot, made the observation that at present 3,000 educated criminals are met with for every 1,000 illiterate delinquents, and that in fifty years the criminal percentage of the population has passed from 227 to 552 for every 100,000 inhabitants, an increase of 133 per cent. He has also noted in common with his colleagues that criminality is particularly on the increase among young persons, for whom, as ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... Yet on their dark voices all depends. Would you promote or prevent some great measure that may affect the destinies of unborn millions, and the future character of the people,—take, for example, a system of national education,—the minister must apportion the plunder to the illiterate clan; the scum that floats on the surface of a party; or hold out the prospect of honours, which are only honourable when in their transmission they impart and receive lustre; when they are the meed of public virtue and public ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... inevitable. The successful men become egotistic, and it is a common, well-nigh universal, practise for all sorts and conditions of men to speak harshly of the authorities. In the loafers on the street corners, in the illiterate that use the country store as their club, in the very halls of congress, are heard the most unsparing criticisms and denunciations of the administration. These unwarranted comments fell thick and fast on Lincoln, because he was at the post of responsibility in a critical period, a time of general ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... with strict accuracy all the essential features which mark the character of this extraordinary epidemic, it is proper I should state that the opponents of Jansenism concur in bringing against the convulsionists the charge that many of them were not only ignorant and illiterate girls, but persons of bad character, occasionally of notoriously immoral habits; nay, that some of them justified the vicious courses in which they indulged by declaring these to be a representation of a religious tendency, emblematic of that degradation through which the Church ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... letter of the 29th, relates the following anecdote:—"Now I am talking of bishops, I must tell you that, not long ago, Bishop Warburton, in a sermon at court, asserted that all preferments were bestowed on the most illiterate and worthless objects; and, in speaking, turned himself about and stared at the Bishop of London: he added, that if any one arose distinguished for merit and learning, there was a combination of dunces to keep him down. I need not tell you that he expected the bishopric of London when ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... empirical routine which has sometimes been vaunted as the proper education for the industrial classes'—an absurd and shallow system which has been urged by quacks and dabblers in world-bettering, and which has been exhausted without avail in England—the system dear to single-sided Gradgrinds and illiterate men who grasp a twig here and there without knowing of the existence of the trunk and roots. It lays down a perfectly scientific and universal basis, believing that the most insignificant industry, to be perfectly understood and pursued, must proceed from a knowledge of the great principles ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... seem, the isolated Red River Colony was far from being an illiterate community. The presence of the officers of the Hudson's Bay Company, the coming of the clergy of the different churches, who established schools, and the leisure for reading books supplied by the Red River Library produced ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
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