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More "Unlettered" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... him into the Pilgrim's Progress, and there go on to describe him as a very brisk lad and nickname him with the nickname of Ignorance? For, in knowledge of all kinds to be called knowledge, Gamaliel's gold medallist could have bought the unlettered tinker of Elstow in one end of the market and sold him in the other. And nobody knew that better than Bunyan did. And yet such a lion was he for the truth, such a disciple of Luther was he, and such a defender and preacher of the one doctrine of a standing or falling church, ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... "rugged elms" are outside the inclosure, but their outstretched arms overspread many a "narrow cell and frail memorial," where the "rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep," and where also "their name and years are spelt by th' unlettered muse." A singular error in spelling the name of one of those humble persons, was however committed by the poet himself in his "Long Story," very pardonable in him, however, as the party was then alive; but that the error should have ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... that wrote a book," said the Little Giant with the respect of the unlettered for the lettered, "an' I confess I ain't much of a hand at readin' 'em, but when I'm rich ez I expect to be a year or two from now, an' I build my fine house in St. Looey, I mean to have a room full of 'em, in fine leather ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... with a light step over the low wall of boundary, and crossed the wave-like mounds that heaved as a grassy sea, and beneath which lay the unlettered dead, the long grasses writhing and clinging to his feet, as though loath to let him escape the dust upon which they fed and grew so rank. Heedless of their greedy embrace, he walked with long stride towards the lower end of the yard, until he stood before a gray ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... vagabond could suggest, and he was permitted to pass forthwith. The poor Westphalian student presented an instrument fairly written out in scholastic Latin, and escaped further trouble by the vanity of the unlettered agent of the police, who hastily affirmed it was a pleasure to encounter documents so perfectly in form. But the Bernese was about to take his station by the side of the other two, appearing to think inquiry, in his case, unnecessary. ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... hospitality; in the summer they sailed far north to the mystical isles of the Western seas; to Orkney and Zetland and once even as far as the North Cape by the light of the midnight sun. So the time passed wonderfully away, until Jean was thirty-two years old. The simple, unlettered girl had then become a woman of great culture and of perfect physical charm. Wise in many ways, she yet kept her loving heart, and her uncle delighted in her. "You have made my auld age parfectly happy, Jean," he said to her on the last solemn night of his life; "and ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... died out among them the race lived on. They had even time to adapt themselves to the blind control of fire, which they made carefully in stoves of stone. They were a simple strain of people at the first, unlettered, only slightly touched with the Spanish civilisation, but with something of a tradition of the arts of old Peru and of its lost philosophy. Generation followed generation. They forgot many things; they devised many things. Their tradition of the greater world they came from ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... wit, its capacity for producing the illusion that the man is revealed in the utterance, its suggestion of something deeper than that which the mere words convey—a suggestion which all feel but only the learned understand—is equally pleasing to the trained and the unlettered mind. The polished weapon, which dazzled the eyes of the crowd, was viewed with respect even by the cultured nobles against whom ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... institutions, though these two laws were in all respects as opposite as could possibly be imagined. These indisputable monuments of our ancient rudeness are a very sufficient confutation of the panegyrical declamations in which some persons would persuade us that the crude institutions of an unlettered people had attained an height which the united efforts of necessity, learning, inquiry, and experience can hardly reach to in many ages. We must add, that, although as one people under one head there was some resemblance in the laws and customs of our Saxon ancestors throughput the kingdom, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... catnip to a considerable extent. Like many of its relatives, catnip was a popular medicinal remedy for many fleshly ills; now it is practically relegated to domestic medicine. Even in this it is a moribund remedy for infant flatulence, and is clung to only by unlettered nurses of ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains
... Shakespeare's plays must remain incomprehensible to a person knowing nothing either of Christian beliefs or of the beliefs which preceded them. The real mastery of any European tongue is impossible [4] without a knowledge of European religion. The language of even the unlettered is full of religious meaning: the proverbs and household-phrases of the poor, the songs of the street, the speech of the workshop,—all are infused with significations unimaginable by any one ignorant of the ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... may revel unfettered, And the heart never speak but in truth; And the intellect, wholly unlettered, Be bright with ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... on being asked how he distinguished his "ragged veterans" in their tattered and unlettered bindings, answered, "How does a shepherd know his sheep?" It has been observed that, "Touch becomes infinitely more exquisite in men whose employment requires them to examine the polish of bodies than it is ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... could be maintained in an outward appearance of peace. Then follows a description of their opinions. 'The Pope and all his officials they regard as Antichrist. They choose their own bishops, rude unlettered laymen, with wives and families. They salute one another as Brother and Sister; and recognize no authority but the Bible. Their priests celebrate mass without vestments, use leavened bread and only the Lord's Prayer. ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... feel the opposite: that such excellent picturesque effects should not be wasted on mere reality, but should be turned to real use upon the stage. So, too, it is difficult to take a roadside beggar seriously; he seems to ask, not for alms, but for a frame. Happy the unlettered and the inartistic, to whom even the picturesque person is a person, who can think of olive oil when he sees the olive-trees weaving their graceful patterns above the stone walls, and can watch the sun set in lurid splendour behind the purple mountains ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... if he were speaking to some ignorant and unlettered king, again attacks Empedocles for expressing the ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... monasteries of Western Europe by their monkish occupiers, without being struck by the influence of terror which such events as eclipses of the Sun and Moon and such celestial visitors as Comets and Shooting Stars exercised far and wide. And this influence overspread, not only the unlettered lower orders, but many of those in far higher stations of life who, one might have hoped, would have been exempt from such feelings of mental distress as they often exhibited. Illustrations of this fact will be ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... lessons would be learned. Fresh from the University halls of Jena, he had met the students of Oxford on equal footing, quickly winning their respect and admiration, but these soldiers and sailors, restless, eager for excitement, rude and unlettered, were a new thing to him, a book written in a language to which he had no key. Later he would learn to find some point of contact with the unlearned as well as the learned, with the negro slave and the Yorkshire ...
— The Moravians in Georgia - 1735-1740 • Adelaide L. Fries
... written in 1901 after the death of his favorite sister: "She was very dear to me, and I had no better friend. More than the rest of my people she aspired to understand and appreciate me, and with a measure of success. My family are plain, unlettered farmer folk, and the world in which you and I live iss a sealed book to them. The have never read my books. What they value in me is what I have in common with them, which is, no doubt, the larger part of me. But I love them all just the same. They are a part of ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... manner, at the time that the principles of the French revolution were most approved of here. Those principles were plausible, though flimsy, and founded on sophisms, and a species of reasoning, that plain unlettered men could not answer, and men who did give themselves the pains to reason might have answered; yet, three times in four, it was the man who could not answer it, who, guided by upright intentions, rejected it as bad, without ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... the epic poem is simply a narrative in verse. Historically it seems to have originated in the records of ancestral heroism, which passed from mouth to mouth in metre, as the natural form of oral communication in an unlettered age. In the Iliad and Odyssey we first find this outward form penetrated by a new spirit, which converts the narrative into the poem. There is no need to do violence to historical probability by supposing that Homer was a ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... intervals. Paine's rough and vigorous advocacy was of great service to the American patriots. His writings were popular and his arguments were of a kind easily understood by plain people, addressing themselves to the common sense, the prejudices and passions of unlettered readers. He afterward went to France and took an active part in the popular movement there, crossing swords with Burke in his Rights of Man, 1791-92, written in defense of the French Revolution. He {378} was one of the ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... the imperfection of our present state, incline us to estimate the advantages which are in the possession of others above their real value. Every one must have remarked, what powers and prerogatives the vulgar imagine to be conferred by learning. A man of science is expected to excel the unlettered and unenlightened even on occasions where literature is of no use, and among weak minds, loses part of his reverence, by discovering no superiority in those parts of life, in which all are unavoidably ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... to deliverance than intellect which innovates," is a phrase ascribed to a Mohammedan saint, and do not modern theologians report with enthusiasm, the unlettered condition of Jesus? ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... unlettered, old and broken with the burden of your disgrace, but loyal still to God and country. I have guarded those great virtues well, for God gave them to me, and I would have transmitted them to my posterity, and linked ...
— The City and the World and Other Stories • Francis Clement Kelley
... august and learned assembly into which the unlettered girl was introduced, yet for two hours she answered all their questions with simple ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... appreciated. But his own keen relish of life, and his delight in watching the lights and shades of human character, took him into that wider circle where witty and notable men are always eagerly sought after to grace the feasts or enliven the heavy splendour of the rich and the unlettered. He was still young, and happy in the animal spirits which make the exhausting life of a luxurious capital endurable even in spite of its pleasures. What ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... were the lying memoirs of some intriguing cardinal or the deluding apology of an exiled minister. To his surprise, he found that, without an exception, the collection consisted of poetry and romance. Somewhat surprised, Vivian looked with a curious eye on the unlettered backs of a row of mighty folios on a corner shelf. "These," he thought, "at least must be royal ordinances, and collected state papers." The sense of propriety struggled for a moment with the passion of curiosity; but nothing is more difficult ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... the unlettered," observed Colville, with the air of making a concession, "are always at a disadvantage—even ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... fellow, seconded her with a nod of the head, and nothing to him, too, seemed easier—to him, the unlettered man—than to come together and settle matters after a fair, honest talk; but Maurice, mindful of his scientific theories, reflected on the necessity of war—war, which is itself existence, the universal law. Was it not poor, pitiful man who conceived the idea of justice and peace, while impassive ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... alone, Johnie?" he said tauntingly. "Then must I tell thee a little story. I am an unlettered man, being but a poor fool, as thou knowest, but I try to do my duty, and every Sunday I go to church in Carlisle city with my betters. And at our church we have a right good preacher, though his sermons ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... Cote Dorion. Not alone because Charley had blasphemed against religion did they hate him at this moment, but because every heart was scorched with envy and jealousy—the black unreasoning jealousy which the unlettered, the dull, the crude, feels for the lettered, the able and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... holds her still, While comments of your praise richly compil'd, Reserve their character with golden quill, And precious phrase by all the Muses fil'd. I think good thoughts, whilst others write good words, And like unlettered clerk still cry 'Amen' To every hymn that able spirit affords, In polish'd form of well-refined pen. Hearing you praised, I say ''tis so, 'tis true,' And to the most of praise add something more; But that is in my ...
— Shakespeare's Sonnets • William Shakespeare
... trials, of which she had known so little. Her own seemed to sink into insignificance beside them. St. Ambrose's and its intellectual lists and wordy contests, even its lofty abstruse thoughts—excellent things in their way, without which the unlettered world would become rude, sordid and narrow—faded into the background. She forgot everything but the poor man passing through a mortal crisis, with Annie able to succour him in his need, and his wife and children waiting to hear whether the end were ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... dwelling, hitherto of "unlettered fame," was born, August 12, 1753, THOMAS BEWICK, the celebrated artist and engraver on wood; or more strictly speaking, the reviver of this branch of art. His whole life was one of untiring industry and ardent attachment to the object ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... that its noteworthiness is perhaps more evident and relative to us than to our forefathers. It cannot but startle us to find doubts that we hastily look upon as peculiarly "modern," set forth in their full strength and wrestled with and overthrown by an unlettered recluse of the fourteenth century. In some sense they are the doubts of all time, with perhaps just that peculiar complexion which they assume in the light of Christianity. Yet, owing to the modern spread ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... gone by, on my journey back from Italy into England, in order not to waste all the time that must needs be spent on horseback in dull and unlettered gossiping, I preferred at times either to turn over in my mind some topic of our common studies or to give myself over to the pleasing recollection of the friends, as learned as they are beloved, whom I had left behind me in England. ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... she was feared she was also respected, for in days when books were few and readers scarce, a long memory and a ready tongue were of the more value; and where, save from Dame Ermyntrude, could the young unlettered Squires of Surrey and Hampshire hear of their grandfathers and their battles, or learn that lore of heraldry and chivalry which she handed down from a ruder but a more martial age? Poor as she was, ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... vain And worthless deemed by me, Whate'er this sterile genius has produced, Expect at last, the rage of envy spent, An unmolested happy home, Gift of kind Hermes and my watchful friend, Where never flippant tongue profane Shall entrance find, And whence the coarse unlettered multitude Shall babble far remote. Perhaps some future distant age, Less tinged with prejudice, and better taught, Shall furnish minds of power To judge more equally. Then, malice silenced in the tomb, Cooler heads and sounder hearts, Thanks to ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... ought to entreat your pardon for addressing to you a work so wholly devoid of literary merit; but, as the production of an unlettered African, who is actuated by the hope of becoming an instrument towards the relief of his suffering countrymen, I trust that such a man, pleading in such a cause, will be acquitted of ...
— The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African - Written By Himself • Olaudah Equiano
... Mr. Cragg were only that—a simple, unlettered countryman, as I thought him—I should know how to win his confidence. But, do you know, sir, he is well educated and intelligent. Once he studied for the priesthood or ministry, attending ...
— Mary Louise in the Country • L. Frank Baum (AKA Edith Van Dyne)
... short and slight did not serve to satisfy him or to make his regret less continual. What availed the sharply cut, smoothly shaven face and the eyes that flashed when he was moved, or the bell-like voice, if every unlettered ranchman or ranger could place both hands on his shoulders and look down at him from heights above? But they forgot this and he forgot it before he had reached the peroration of his closing speech. They saw only the Harry Harvey they knew ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... in Venetian—they are named because in no other Italian dialect has work so popular as Goldoni's been done, nor so excellent as Signor Fogazzaro's—have left the unlettered local language in which they loved to deal, to its proper limitations. They have not given weighty things into its charge, nor made it heavily responsible. They have added nothing to it; nay, by writing it they might even be said to have made ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... more like the jumping Frog when he gets through with it than I am like a meridian of longitude. But my mere assertion is not proof; wherefore I print the French version, that all may see that I do not speak falsely; furthermore, in order that even the unlettered may know my injury and give me their compassion, I have been at infinite pains and trouble to retranslate this French version back into English; and to tell the truth I have well-nigh worn myself out at it, having scarcely rested from my work during five days and nights. I cannot ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... a group like this Sumner's great and eloquent speech on the Barbarism of Slavery, seemed almost cold and dead,—the mute appeals of these little ones in their mother's arms—the unlettered language of these young mothers, striving to save their offspring from the doom of Slavery—the resolute and manly bearing of these brothers expressed in words full of love of liberty, and of the determination to resist Slavery to the death, in defence of their wives and children—this was Sumner's ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... the elemental forces and human society, he was smitten by the one only to be thrust back by the other. Bound to the soil, he fell into a commercial serfdom to the cities well-nigh as complete as the feudal bondage had been. By reason of his isolated and unsocial life he was uncouth, unlettered, out of touch with culture, without opportunities for self-improvement, even if his bitter toil had left him energy or time for it. For this reason the dwellers in the towns looked down upon him as one belonging ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... the Gospel ministry is necessary in the Church, not only for instruction of the ignorant—such as the simple, unlettered people and the children—but also for the purpose of awakening those who know very well what they are to believe and how they are to live, and admonishing them to be on their guard daily and not to become indolent, disheartened or tired in the war they must wage ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... that it was England's cause which they were fighting for, and that they were upholding their country's true self against those who would alter the old systems under which she had led the nations. Three more years made all this very plain, and showed that our simple unlettered followers had seen and judged the signs of the times more correctly than those who called themselves their betters. There are, to my thinking, stages of human progress for which the Church of Rome ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... those protests were made in the name of neglected intellect, insulted art, forgotten heroism and desecrated religion. But already the Utilitarian citadel had been more heavily bombarded on the other side by one lonely and unlettered man ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... which he discusses so complacently and approvingly. The savant reposing in a palace-car, which is rushing through the midnight storm at a rate of fifty miles an hour, regards his situation with composure; but the unlettered engineer, whose eye is on the track,—who notes every slippery curve, swollen stream and overhanging bowlder,—who feels the motive power of that proud train swaying and plunging like a restless demon beneath his feet, is apt to ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... marvellous vista from the vantage-ground of the present, attention is fixed first upon a long succession of well- authenticated facts which are shaded off in the dim distance, and finally lost in the obscurity of unlettered antiquity. The flesh and blood heroes of the more modern times regularly and slowly pass from view, and in their places the unsubstantial worthies of dreamy tradition start up. The transition is so gradual, however, that it is at times ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... laid for a rebellion for the latter date. The plot was engineered by Lieut. Colonel Solomon G. Maritz and General Christian Frederick Beyers. Maritz is a brilliant though unlettered Colonel who won distinction in the Boer war, while Beyers was the Commandant General of the South African Union forces. Beyers is dead now; Maritz and some of the prominent men associated in the conspiracy are in ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... in the scenery, the art, the history and politics of Italy and Greece. He widened the horizon of his contemporaries, bringing within their ken wonders and beauties hitherto unknown or unfamiliar, and in so doing he heightened and cultivated, he "touched with emotion," the unlettered and unimaginative many, that "reading public" which despised or eluded the refinements and subtleties ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... think of, telling her that she must alter her way of life, put on armor and become a captain in the wars, for she was chosen by the King of Heaven to save France from its enemies. And they called her "Daughter of God." But Jeanne was filled with fear and grave misgiving, for how was she, a poor, unlettered girl and the daughter of peasants, to lead armies and wield the sword ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... new thing to seek to arrest the public attention with the vernacular applied to public affairs. Major Jack Downing and Sam Slick had been notable examples, and they had many imitators; but the reader who laughed over the racy narrative of the unlettered Ezekiel, and then took up Hosea's poem and caught the gust of Yankee wrath and humor blown fresh in his face, knew that he was in at the appearance of something new in American literature. The force which Lowell ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... for the most part marked by a common civilisation in which the West had but an almost inconsiderable share. Before the Roman conquest the nations and tribes of the West had been in general rude, unlettered, and unorganised. Except here and there in Spain, where the Phoenicians or Carthaginians had been at work, and in the Greek colonies sprung from Marseilles, they had hardly possessed such a thing as a town. ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... me were radiant with cheerfulness. Just such a throng, of course, attended upon the festival of god or goddess ere the old religion was transformed. Most of the Christian anniversaries have their origin in heathendom; the names have changed, but amid the unlettered worshippers there is little change of spirit; a tradition older than they can conceive rules their piety, and gives it whatever significance it may have ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... forms of superstition among the people, it is not inappropriate to consider the condition of that class of the population which is wont to exert the most potent influence in forming the moral sentiments and moulding the character of the unlettered masses. We have already touched upon the external relations of the clergy to the king and to the Pope; let us now look more ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... forth his growth under the inspiration of Nature,—but in a purely imaginary tale. Suddenly Burns appeared: and the ideal seemed incarnated in the living present. The Scottish bard was introduced to the world by his first admirers as "a heaven-taught ploughman, of humble unlettered station," whose "simple strains, artless and unadorned, seem to flow without effort from the native feelings of the heart"; and as "a signal instance of true and uncultivated genius." The real Burns, though indeed a genius of ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... 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 the world is carried on. Nor have I any doubt but there are, take the world through, twenty happy people among the unlettered, to one among those who have ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... peculations of his white clerk. When all the enfranchised are educated, and not until then, will the great source of evil be removed from our politics which to-day endangers our future liberty of self-government. We are floating in a sea of unlimited and unlettered enfranchisement, vainly tugging at the helm of our ship of state, while master-minds stoop to cater to the prejudices of hundreds of thousands of voters who cannot read the names upon the ticket they deposit in the ballot-box—the ballot-box which is the guardian of ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... "You see," he said, "it would be such a wonderful blindness, it would be so utterly inexcusable in a person like yourself, who had known what the Church of England was; not a Dissenter, not an unlettered layman; but one who had been at Oxford, who had come across so many excellent men, who had seen what the Church of England could be, her grave beauty, her orderly and decent activity; who had seen churches decorated as they should be, with candlesticks, ciboriums, faldstools, lecterns, ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... fourteen, lost his father. Charged, at this early age, with the care of a widowed mother, and children still younger than himself, neither the circumstances of his family, of the country, or his peculiar condition, allowed him the chances of education. Almost as unlettered as James Harrod, he was a memorable example of a self-formed man. Great natural acuteness, and strong intellectual powers, were, however, adorned by a disposition of uncommon benevolence. Under the eye of an excellent father, he commenced ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... had a delightful peasant woman, neat, clean, sturdy, unlettered; yet very intelligent, and full of interest in English inventions and English ways. What a treasure such a woman would be at home! but for the hindrance of husband and children, we should have felt sorely tempted to bring her away with ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... consultations; they gave each other mutual encouragement: but with this exception, no one else knew anything of the girl's poetical essays, whose mild timidity made her often pass for a person of weak intellect. This soul must have been great and beautiful, for in all her unlettered strains there was not a word of murmuring respecting her hard lot: her note was sad, but gentle—desponding, but resigned; it was especially the language of deep tenderness—of mournful sympathy—of angelic charity for all ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... to refute the common misconception that it is only the educated and Christian Indian who has contributed to the progress of his people and to the common good of both races. There are many men wholly unlettered, and some of whom have not proclaimed themselves followers of Christ, who have yet exerted great influence on the side of civilization. Almost every tribe has a hero of this type who arose at a critical ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... are keen to learn and they gladly send their children to the village schools, which have been greatly increased and improved in recent years. Another source of education is the army. Since the introduction of universal military service every unlettered recruit must learn to read and write. A third educational agency is the peculiar village organization. As every head of a family has a house of his own and a share of the communal land, he is a miniature farmer; and, unlike agricultural laborers, ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... received in England an appreciative reception of well-nigh national character. Whilst the literary and academic circles of America withheld their unstinted recognition of an author so primitive and unlettered, Great Britain received him with open arms. He was a welcome guest at the houses of the exclusive; the highest dignitaries of public life, the authoritative journals, the leaders of fashion, of thought, ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... the peasants of Gai-Orlov left their fields unfilled, and cultivated nothing save hymns and prayers. They seemed to be uplifted as by some wave of dreamy, poetic madness. Even the unlettered imitated Grigorieff in composing psalms and hymns, some specimens of which are to be found in Father Arsenii's collection. They ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... first decision, that a devise of lands to a person without words of inheritance, should carry an estate for life only, was an absurd decision, founded on feudal principles, after feudal ideas had long been lost by the unlettered writers of their own wills: and it has often been said, that were the matter to begin again, it should be decided that such a devise should carry a fee simple, as every body is sensible testators intend, by these expressions. ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... in learning is still, as it has been in all ages, a very attractive and effective element for the purpose of impressing, or even imposing upon, the unlearned; and the standing of the savant in the mind of the altogether unlettered is in great measure rated in terms of intimacy with the occult forces. So, for instance, as a typical case, even so late as the middle of this century, the Norwegian peasants have instinctively formulated their sense of the superior erudition of such doctors of divinity ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... noticed that many of those who were about the most unlikely, have, by the power of God's grace, become very eminent in His service. Look at the twelve apostles of Christ; they were all unlettered men. This ought to encourage all whose education is limited to give themselves to God's work. When our earthly work is ended, then, like our Master, we shall enter into glory. It has been well remarked: "Grace is glory militant; and ...
— Sovereign Grace - Its Source, Its Nature and Its Effects • Dwight Moody
... and a heart wholly given up to the life of the best religion of his religious day, and then, by sheer dint of his sanctified and soaring imagination and his exquisite style, he stands forth the peer of the foremost men in the intellectual world. And thus it is that the great unlettered religious world possesses in John Bunyan all but all that the select and scholarly world possesses in Dante. Both Dante and Bunyan devoted their splendid gifts to the noblest of services—the service of spiritual, and especially of personal religion; ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... great Caesar leads! Happy, thrice happy, he who, when the world Is nodding to its ruin, knows the spot Where he himself shall, though in ruin, lie! No trumpet call shall break his sleep again: But in his humble home with faithful spouse And sons unlettered Fortune leaves him free From rage of party; for if life he owes To Caesar, Magnus sometime was his lord. Thus happy they alone live on apart, Nor hope nor dread the ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... Church."28 Instead of regarding learning as an aid to faith, they regarded it as an hindrance and a snare. It led, they declared, to wordy battles, to quarrels, to splits, to uncertainties, to doubts, to corruptions. As long, they said, as the ministers of the Church of Christ were simple and unlettered men, so long was the Church a united body of believers; but as soon as the parsons began to be scholars, all sorts of evils arose. What good, they argued, had learning done in the past? It had caused the ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... districts intended to obliterate the old boundaries. But the old names are still familiarly used. Champagne was invaded in 1814 by an army of the powers allied against Napoleon. 18. S'ASSOIT, instead of the usual s'assied of cultivated speech, is in keeping with the unlettered condition and familar ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... taking her for a mile or two in his low basket-carriage either before or after his day's business in the shop. It was not exactly like being with her only other friend, Mr. Audley; but he was a thoroughly kind, polite, and by no means unlettered old man; and Geraldine enjoyed and was grateful, while the children were his darlings, and were encouraged to take all manner of ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Scenes and Studies of Savage Life, frankly admits that in Vancouver Island the trickery and hocus-pocus of Aht sorcery were so repugnant to him that he could not occupy himself with the topic. Some other travellers have been more inquisitive; unlettered sojourners among the wilder peoples have shared their superstitions, and consulted their oracles, while one or two of the old Jesuit missionaries were close and puzzled ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... of pure revelation. The philosopher-the theologian-the philologist-the historian, and the antiquarian, are utterly unable to grapple with that which is here so admirably handled by a poor unlettered prisoner for Christ, who, from the inexhaustible storehouse of God's Word, brings forth things new and old to comfort the pilgrim, whether in a prison or a palace, and to enliven his prospects on his way to this celestial city. The New Jerusalem is a sublime object, and we are bound humbly to ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... know but little of ancient statuary can still brighten to intelligent recognition of the huntress with her quiver and her little stag when they meet with them in picture gallery or in suburban garden. That unlettered sportsman in weather-worn pink, slowly riding over the fragrant dead leaves by the muddy roadside on this chill, grey morning, may never have heard of Artemis, but he is quite ready to make intelligent reference to Diana to the handsome young ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... good deal of feeling, sir, for the unlettered and the vulgar. They have their station, but they have also—though doubtless in smaller capacity ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... posterity. Pyrrhus made a great stir in the world whilst he lived. "He thought it," Plutarch says—we quote from Dryden's translation—"a nauseous course of life not to be doing mischief to others or receiving some from them." But he was in reality an unlettered soldier of fortune, probably very much of the same type as some of Napoleon's rougher marshals, such as Augereau or Massena. His manners were those of the camp, and his statesmanship that of the barrack-room. He blundered in everything he undertook except in the actual management of troops ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... bring that back as it really was. None may hope to tell those who never heard him what it was like. No one, perhaps among the numberless thousands who did hear him, ever knew what the power was, by which this unlettered backwoodsman swayed multitudes at his will. Perhaps David afterward described it as nearly as any one could, when he said that the mere sound of Peter Cartwright's voice that night—when he could not hear the ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... atoms of Epicurus. But supposing that, devoid of any higher ambition to approve himself to judicious critics and posterity, and wanting in that love of art which longs for self-satisfaction in the perfection of its works, he had merely laboured to please the unlettered crowd; still this very object alone and the pursuit of theatrical effect, would have led him to bestow attention to the structure and adherence of his pieces. For does not the impression of a drama depend in an especial ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... by his tones of proprietorship, and almost instinctively she compared him with the young fellow who had spoken so rudely to her the night before. Wilson was commonplace, unlettered; he had only the tastes of the ordinary common, money-making manufacturer, and for the first time a feeling amounting to revulsion came into her heart as she thought of the hopes ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... again, and all in a moment turned red with ire. "Do ye not blush to play with your book-craft on your unlettered friend, and throw dust in his eyes, evening the saints with ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... his native tongue Succath, was born A.D. 372, between the Scottish towns of Dumbarton and Glasgow, (then appended to England,) in the village of Bonaven, since named in honour of him, Kilpatrick. He was the son of a poor unlettered deacon of the village church. No particular care was bestowed on his education, and he lived on light-heartedly, from day to day, without making the religious truths taught him by his parents matters of personal interest, ...
— The Annual Monitor for 1851 • Anonymous
... Corey. He be verily an old man, he be over eighty years old, but there be somewhat of the first of him left. He hath never had much power of speech; his words have been rough, and not given to pleasing. He hath been a rude man, an unlettered man, and a sinner. He hath brawled and blasphemed with the worst of them in his day. He hath given blow for blow, and I trow the other man's cheek smarted sorer than old Giles's. Now he be a man of the covenant, but he be still stiff with his old ways, and hath no nimbleness to shunt ...
— Giles Corey, Yeoman - A Play • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... yellow-birds came back, their enemies were hidden in their own sight-proof bush. Several times their unconscious victims repaired damages, but at length, after counsel taken together, they gave it up. Perhaps, like other unlettered folk, they came to the conclusion that the Devil was in it, and yielded to the invisible persecution ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... sharpened in him a certain practical faculty for business—greedy, suspicious, and keen-eyed. He carried on his craft in disdain of theory. In course of time he had learned to estimate at a glance the cost of printing per page or per sheet in every kind of type. He proved to unlettered customers that large type costs more to move; or, if small type was under discussion, that it was more difficult to handle. The setting-up of the type was the one part of his craft of which he knew nothing; ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... the women of the North, and pluck in the chivalry before which Northern doughfaceism has ever cowered. But here, where the ruling class, the aristocracy, is "male," no matter whether washed or unwashed, lettered or unlettered, rich or poor, black or white, here in this boasted northern civilization, under the shadow of Bunker Hill and Faneuil Hall, which Mr. Phillips proposes to cram down the throat of South Carolina—here women of wealth and education, who ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... hath courteously and in a few words given us the sharpest rebuke in the world; for that, an you consider aright, these tombs are the houses of the dead, seeing they are laid and abide therein, and these, saith he, are our house, meaning thus to show us that we and other foolish and unlettered men are, compared with him and other men of learning, worse than dead folk; wherefore, being here, we are in our own house.' Thereupon each understood what Guido had meant to say and was abashed nor ever plagued him more, but held Messer Betto thenceforward ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... came back from the campaigns about Lake George a captain. He never went to school. Like so many other New England boys, he learned what is essential for the carrying on of business in the chimney-corner, by the light of the fire. He possessed one beautiful accomplishment: he was a grand reader. Unlettered as he was, he greatly enjoyed the more lofty compositions of poets and orators; and his large, sonorous voice enabled him to read them with fine effect. His sons read in his manner, even to his rustic pronunciation of some words. Daniel's calm, ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... taken place of late years in natural philosophy, the increasing diffusion of general knowledge from the extension of the art of printing, the ardent and unshackled spirit of inquiry that prevails throughout the lettered and even unlettered world, the new and extraordinary lights that have been thrown on political subjects which dazzle and astonish the understanding, and particularly that tremendous phenomenon in the political horizon, the French Revolution, which, like a blazing comet, ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... rude and unlettered a mountaineer he may have been, had a voice and ear, and Harry still listened with the keenest pleasure to the melodious note that came floating down the river. The spell was upon him. His imagination became so vivid ...
— The Guns of Bull Run - A Story of the Civil War's Eve • Joseph A. Altsheler
... lay upon your hearts, as individual parts of that great whole, this, that whatever may be the differences in culture, outlook, social position, or the like, between two Christian men, they each, the rich man and the poor, the educated man and the unlettered one, the master and the servant, ought to feel that deep down in their true selves they are nearer one another than they are to the men who, differing from them in regard to their faith in Jesus Christ, are like them in all these ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... thrice happy, he who, when the world Is nodding to its ruin, knows the spot Where he himself shall, though in ruin, lie! No trumpet call shall break his sleep again: But in his humble home with faithful spouse And sons unlettered Fortune leaves him free From rage of party; for if life he owes To Caesar, Magnus sometime was his lord. Thus happy they alone live on apart, Nor hope nor dread the event of ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... tied up for the night near other rafts, and its crew exchanged visits with theirs. The regular river raftsmen were generally powerful young giants, rough and unlettered, but a good-natured, happy-go-lucky lot, full of tales of adventure in the woods or on the river, to which the boys listened with a never-failing delight. Nor were the raftmates at all behindhand in this interchange of good stories; for they could tell of life on the Plains or in ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... prosperous farmer upon the positive danger, with reference to his ambitious views, of not at least so far cultivating the intellect and taste of so attractive a maiden as his daughter, that sympathy on her part with the rude, unlettered clowns, with whom she necessarily came so much in contact, should be impossible. He laughed my hints to scorn. 'It is idleness—idleness alone,' he said, 'that puts love-fancies into girls' heads. Novel-reading, jingling ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... 21:15): "I will give you a mouth and wisdom" which "all your adversaries will not be able to resist and gainsay." And this, in so far as the enlightenment was inward, is not to be reckoned as a miracle, but only as regards the outward action—namely, in so far as men saw that those who had been unlettered and simple spoke with such wisdom and constancy. Wherefore it is written (Acts 4:13) that the Jews, "seeing the constancy of Peter and of John, understanding that they were illiterate and ignorant men . . . wondered."—And though such like spiritual effects ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... through the earlier Victorian time, in so far as those protests were made in the name of neglected intellect, insulted art, forgotten heroism and desecrated religion. But already the Utilitarian citadel had been more heavily bombarded on the other side by one lonely and unlettered man of genius. ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... Carolina, were by this time comparatively little affected by immigration from without those States, and were on the whole homogeneous; but the Virginians and Carolinians of the seaboard considered them rough, unlettered, and not of very good character. One travelling clergyman spoke of them with particular disfavor; he was probably prejudiced by their indifference to his preaching, for he mentions with much dissatisfaction that the congregations he addressed "though small, behaved extremely ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... vulgar is not sufficiently cultivated to see, in the emblems which art typifies, those passions or sentiments which have moved generations with enthusiasm. A Gothic cathedral is infinitely more interesting to a man of sentiment or learning than to an unlettered boor. The ignorant cannot appreciate the historical fidelity and marvelous study of races which appear in such a statue as the African Sybil. We must comprehend the character of Moses before we can kindle with ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... "If I were altogether an unbeliever," he replied, "why should that give me any trouble? Have I not represented pagan divinities?—still, I don't believe in them." The life of this artist was one of consummate worldly success; the kings of Bavaria and Denmark were the personal friends of the unlettered son of the ship-carver, as were Horace Vernet, Walter Scott, Andersen, and Mendelssohn; his casket of decorations was the amusement of his lady visitors; and his invitations were so constant that he could not always remember ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... continued Eleanor, "that first sight of the great Earl. My brothers had teased me for going so far north, and told me the English were mere rude islanders—boorish, and unlettered; but, child as I was, scarce eleven years old, I could perceive the nobleness of the Earl. 'If all thy new subjects be like him,' said my brother to me, 'thou wilt reign over a race of kings.' And how good he was to me when I wept at leaving my home and friends! How he framed his tongue to speak ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... have little will to talk about: for we be poor men with no master to fleece us, and no lord to help us: also we be folk unlearned and unlettered, and from our way of life, whereas we dwell in the wilderness, we seldom come within the doors of a church. But whereas we have drunk with thee, who seemest to be a man of lineage, and thou hast been blithe ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... water-gate, was regularly fortified by every precaution that the long experience of a vagabond could suggest, and he was permitted to pass forthwith. The poor Westphalian student presented an instrument fairly written out in scholastic Latin, and escaped further trouble by the vanity of the unlettered agent of the police, who hastily affirmed it was a pleasure to encounter documents so perfectly in form. But the Bernese was about to take his station by the side of the other two, appearing to think inquiry, in his case, unnecessary. While ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... all artifice, this artlessness and spontaneity of appearance, is one of the greatest qualities in a composition, any analysis of which is futile. It is what occasionally gives to the work of the unlettered genius so great a charm. But the artist in whom the true spark has not been quenched by worldly success or other enervating influence, keeps the secret of this freshness right on, the culture of his student days being used ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... to him aught but a tragedy at any time, on whichever road he took. What but a tragedy could it be to a man bred at Douay and reared on Greek, and now condemned to live in loneliness and squalor among unlettered, unwashed creatures; to one who, banned by the law, moved by night, and lurked in some hiding-place by day, and, waking or sleeping, was ever in contact with the lawless and the oppressed, the wretched and the starving—whose existence ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... nothing either of Christian beliefs or of the beliefs which preceded them. The real mastery of any European tongue is impossible [4] without a knowledge of European religion. The language of even the unlettered is full of religious meaning: the proverbs and household-phrases of the poor, the songs of the street, the speech of the workshop,—all are infused with significations unimaginable by any one ignorant of the faith of ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... mutual encouragement: but with this exception, no one else knew anything of the girl's poetical essays, whose mild timidity made her often pass for a person of weak intellect. This soul must have been great and beautiful, for in all her unlettered strains there was not a word of murmuring respecting her hard lot: her note was sad, but gentle—desponding, but resigned; it was especially the language of deep tenderness—of mournful sympathy—of angelic charity for all poor creatures consigned, like her, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... placed, reflects upon the infinite wonders of creation, and meditates upon the equal wonders of his own mind, can be at a loss respecting the sources and causes of superstition. Let him transport himself back to the condition of a primitive and unlettered people, before whom the world appears in all its original and sublime mystery. Science has not lifted to their eyes the curtain behind which the secret operations of nature are carried on. They observe the tides rise and fall, but know not the attractive law that ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... a religious society of intellectual aristocrats. The Christian Church from the beginning included intellectual aristocrats side by side with the ignorant and unlettered. ...
— The Agony of the Church (1917) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... ancient Northumbrian farmer as could be met with—a distinct race, a few samples of whom were here and there to be found within the last thirty years—free, careless, hospitable, happy, boisterous, unlettered, and half-civilized. Sandy was one of these in their primitive state. He was ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... a program of social redemption. Some thinkers flatly deny that Christianity can provide a constructive plan for society. Mr. Lowes Dickinson makes his imaginary Chinese official write of the social teachings of Jesus: "Enunciated centuries ago, by a mild Oriental enthusiast, unlettered, untravelled, inexperienced, they are remarkable not more for their tender and touching appeal to brotherly love, than for their aversion or indifference to all other elements of human excellence. The subject of Augustus and Tiberius lived and died unaware of the history and destinies ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... melody and rhythms, in its style and shape. There are times when it stands in relation to other music as some being half giant, half day-laborer, might stand in the company of scholars and poets and other highly educated and civilized men. The unlettered, the uncouth, the humble, the men unacquainted with eloquence are in this music in very body. It pierces directly from their throats. No film, no refinement on their speech, no art of music removes them from us. As Moussorgsky originally wrote these scores, their forms are visible on ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... by the simplest of the unlettered age for whom it was intended. It was remembered by them... For almost five centuries it was appealed to as the decisive authority on behalf of the people... To have produced it, to have preserved it, to have matured it, constitute the immortal claim of England on the esteem of mankind. Her Bacons ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... Ignorant and unlettered, he had studied neither theology nor the Scriptures; he was, moreover, a man of bad life, heartless, cruel and greedy. His aim both as Patriarch and as pork-butcher was to make money—as much and as quickly as possible. This was the ...
— Saint Athanasius - The Father of Orthodoxy • F.A. [Frances Alice] Forbes
... abandon his fear, his betters their hope, that only the low class woman will vote—the unlettered wench of the slums, the raddled hag of the dives, the war-painted protegee of the police. Into the vortex of politics goes every floating thing that is free to move. The summons to the polls will be imperative ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... Written in a Country Churchyard, by Thomas Gray, is so superior as a poem to Spoon River Anthology. The rich were buried in the church; the poor in the yard; we are therefore given the short and simple annals of the poor. The curious thing is that these humble, rustic, unlettered folk were presented to the world sympathetically by a man who was almost an intellectual snob. One of the most exact scholars of his day, one of the most fastidious of mortals, one of the shyest men that ever lived, a born mental aristocrat, ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... "Come on, unlettered ignoramus," said his master, and, holding the wondering little foundling on his arm, with his rabbit still clutched by the ears, he proceeded down to the roadway, scored like a narrow gray streak through the brush, and plodded onward ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... began to be entertained. This woman like those of her sex and class was unlettered and superstitious. Her faith in spells and apparitions, was of the most lively kind. Could not her conscience be awakened by a voice from the grave! Lonely and at midnight, my aunt might be introduced, upbraiding ...
— Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist - (A Fragment) • Charles Brockden Brown
... the age of fourteen, lost his father. Charged, at this early age, with the care of a widowed mother, and children still younger than himself, neither the circumstances of his family, of the country, or his peculiar condition, allowed him the chances of education. Almost as unlettered as James Harrod, he was a memorable example of a self-formed man. Great natural acuteness, and strong intellectual powers, were, however, adorned by a disposition of uncommon benevolence. Under the eye of an excellent father, he commenced ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... form the epic poem is simply a narrative in verse. Historically it seems to have originated in the records of ancestral heroism, which passed from mouth to mouth in metre, as the natural form of oral communication in an unlettered age. In the Iliad and Odyssey we first find this outward form penetrated by a new spirit, which converts the narrative into the poem. There is no need to do violence to historical probability by supposing that Homer was a conscious artist, or that he imagined ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... oblivious of all but childish interests, but really recording life-facts which now in her hour of need stretched under her feet like a solid pathway across an oozing marsh. All those men and women whom she had seen in a thousand unpremeditated acts, those tired-faced, kind-eyed, unlettered fathers and mothers were not breathing poisoned air, were not harboring in their simple lives a ghastly devouring wild-beast. She recalled with a great indrawn breath all the farmer-neighbors, parents working together for the ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... the lights and shades of human character, took him into that wider circle where witty and notable men are always eagerly sought after to grace the feasts or enliven the heavy splendour of the rich and the unlettered. He was still young, and happy in the animal spirits which make the exhausting life of a luxurious capital endurable even in spite of its pleasures. What Victor ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... was all his guide; and it would not have been surprising, had he been called to bottle a cask of new wine, if he had refused to use old wine bottles; or had he cast a loaf into the neighbouring river Ouse, expecting to find it after many days. The astonishing fact is, that one so unlettered should, by intense thought, by earnest prayer, and by comparing one passage with another, arrive eventually at so clear a view both of the external and internal meaning of the whole Bible. The results of his researches were more deeply impressed upon his mind by the mistakes which he ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... learning is still, as it has been in all ages, a very attractive and effective element for the purpose of impressing, or even imposing upon, the unlearned; and the standing of the savant in the mind of the altogether unlettered is in great measure rated in terms of intimacy with the occult forces. So, for instance, as a typical case, even so late as the middle of this century, the Norwegian peasants have instinctively formulated their sense of the superior erudition of such doctors of divinity as Luther, ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... near here, but which I will not name, there recently occurred an incident which will furnish a short story. There lived there a good, simple, unlettered peasant, married to a nice, pleasant woman, and as long as he had plenty to eat and drink he cared for little else. He was accustomed to often go into the country to a house he had there, and stay, three, or four days—sometimes ...
— One Hundred Merrie And Delightsome Stories - Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles • Various
... the tutelage of Abner Sage. It was his boasting of his froward pupil, doubtless, that had suggested the idea, and Leander understood now that he was to do the work of the store and the post-office under the nominal incumbency of this unlettered lout. Had the whole transaction been open and acknowledged, Leander would have had scant appetite for the work under this master; but he revolted at the flimsy, contemptible sham; he bitterly resented the innuendoes against the piety of the Sudleys, not that he cared for piety, save ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... English. But there are many others which might with advantage be given a larger currency. This process of dialectal regeneration, as it is called, has been greatly aided in the past by men of letters, who have given a literary standing to the useful and picturesque vocabulary of their unlettered neighbours, and thus helped to reinforce with vivid terms our somewhat abstract and faded standard speech. We owe, for instance, words like lilt and outcome to Carlyle; croon, eerie, gloaming have become familiar to us from Burns's poems, and Sir Walter Scott added a large number of ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 3 (1920) - A Few Practical Suggestions • Society for Pure English
... pride was hurt; the idea of being beaten at his own business by a pack of unlettered Asiatics made him sad. 'It kinder destroys a man's faith in himself he said. As a result of his eloquence the miners knotted windlass-ropes together, and stole down upon the Chinese camp in the small and early hours of morning. There were twenty men on each cable, ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... is to be found in Shakespeare's own experience. Those who know England as she was in the days of Elizabeth, or as she is to-day, will hardly need to be told that when Shakespeare first came to London he was regarded as an unlettered provincial ("with little Latin and less Greek"), and had to bear the mocks and flouts of his beschooled fellows, who esteemed learning and gentility above genius. In his very first independent play he answered the scorners with scorn. But this disdain of study was not Shakespeare's real feeling; ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... heart, a nice sense of honesty and honour, and was, notwithstanding his humble lineage, an educated and accomplished youth. His father, the gardener, was a man of ambitious spirit, though quite unlettered; and, having himself often experienced the disadvantage of this condition, he resolved ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... them in my youth from a naked savage, in the indignant character of a prince surrounded by his subjects, addressing the Governor of a British colony, holding a bundle of sticks in his hand, as the notes of his unlettered eloquence. "Who is it," said the jealous ruler over the desert, encroached upon by the restless foot of English adventure—"who is it that causes this river to rise in the high mountains, and to empty itself into the ocean? Who ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... and grow them all under one climatic influence and in the one kind of soil we happen to possess. Certainly we cannot expect uniform success with all of them. You might as well bring into one room unlettered natives of distant climes and expect them all to enter into a general conversation. Even in gardens quite near each other, their permanence varies. I cannot grow, successfully, any of the boltonias, while ...
— Making a Garden of Perennials • W. C. Egan
... of the march, as recorded by Captain John Tipton, is exceedingly interesting. The militiamen of southern Indiana and Kentucky assembled from the frontier settlements, were men of simple habits, rough, unlettered, hard to teach the intricacies of military evolutions, but as General John C. Black has stated, they were also "insensible to fatigue, watchful as a catamount, resolute as men, heroic as martyrs." Some of their favorite sports were wrestling, shooting at a mark, and horse-racing. All were inured ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... and fro among the palms and poppies of Palestine, glorifying anew an accursed and degraded human nature, unlettered fishermen, who mended their nets and trimmed their sails along the blue waves of Galilee, were fit instruments, in his guiding hands, for the dissemination of his Gospel; but when the days of the ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... their allies to forget the use of arms, who valued their friends not for their strength but for their obedience, sent them word that the senate did not wish them to help the Athenians, and that the Roman people would take care of their own allies. The Alexandrians looked upon the proud but unlettered Romans only as friends, as allies, who asked for no pay, who took no reward, who fought only for ambition and for the glory of ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... surprise—my friend Mr. Carson of the Rockies. It seemed a little incongruous that the simple, unlettered Irishman should have found his way into the brilliant, many-countried company, where were men who made history and held the fate of nations in their hands and built or crumbled empires, and women to match, regally gowned, keen of ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... binding links which connects the sentiments and feelings of one country with another; although it may be, in other respects, these communities have little in common. Thus, as Mr. Ingram remarks in the introduction to his "Flora Symbolica" (p. 12), "from the unlettered North American Indian to the highly polished Parisian; from the days of dawning among the mighty Asiatic races, whose very names are buried in oblivion, down to the present times, the symbolism of flowers is everywhere and in all ages discovered permeating all strata of society. ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... the laughable outcome of a mountain's labour; the warning to be chary of bringing gods upon the stage; the occasional nod of Homer;—are commonplace citations so crisp and so exhaustive in their Latin garb, that even the unlettered scientist imports them into his treatises, sometimes with ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... Leave we the unlettered plain its herd and crop; Seek we sepulture On a tall mountain, citied to the top, Crowded with culture! All the peaks soar, but one the rest excels; Clouds overcome it; No! yonder sparkle is the citadel's ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... arbitrary, not merely an absence of all selfish ambition, but a rare discretion in seizing the mean between conflicting exigencies. In reading his poems we must always recollect that what now appears commonplace was once new, so that to his comparatively unlettered age the social pictures which he draws were still fresh, and his exhortations calculated to live in the memory. The poems composed on moral subjects generally inculcate a spirit of gentleness toward others and moderation in personal objects. They represent the gods as irresistible, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... the avarice of the illustrious[2] censor, that he never paid more than 15,000 drachmae for a slave. After the great conquests of the Romans, in Corsica, Sardinia, Spain, Greece, and the Orient, the market went down by reason of the multitude of human beings thrown upon it. An able-bodied, unlettered man could be bought for the price of an ox. Such were the men of Spain, Thrace, and Sardinia. Educated slaves from Greece and the East brought a higher price. We learn from Horace, that his slave Davus whom he has rendered so celebrated, cost him 500 drachmae.[3] Diodorus of Siculus says that ...
— Public Lands and Agrarian Laws of the Roman Republic • Andrew Stephenson
... progress, advance—those things perhaps lay in the vague ambitions of twice two hundred men who now lay in camp at the border of our unknown empire. They were all Americans—second, third, fourth generation Americans. Wild, uncouth, rude, unlettered, many or most of them, none the less there stood among them now and again some tall flower of that culture for which they ever hungered; for which they fought; for which ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... excellent work, Scenes and Studies of Savage Life, frankly admits that in Vancouver Island the trickery and hocus-pocus of Aht sorcery were so repugnant to him that he could not occupy himself with the topic. Some other travellers have been more inquisitive; unlettered sojourners among the wilder peoples have shared their superstitions, and consulted their oracles, while one or two of the old Jesuit missionaries were close and puzzled ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... and can read and write certain parts of the Koran, he is reckoned sufficiently instructed; and with this slender stock of learning commences his career of life. Proud of his acquirements, he surveys with contempt the unlettered negro; and embraces every opportunity of displaying his superiority over such of his countrymen as are not distinguished by the ...
— Travels in the Interior of Africa - Volume 1 • Mungo Park
... Jews, the cut-throats and robbers of Christians, slow-bellied monks, who have made escape from their cloisters, simoniacal and perjured shavelings, busy Sir John lack-Latins, thrasonical and unlettered chemists, shifting and outcast pettifoggers, light-headed and trivial druggers and apothecaries, sun-shunning night-birds and corner-creepers, dull-pated and base mechanics, stage-players, jugglers, peddlers, prittle-prattling barbers, filthy ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... solitary study, and entirely unacquainted with the conduct of the present ministry, must know that we have hitherto acted upon different principles. We have always regarded letters as great obstructions to our scheme of subordination, and have, therefore, when we have heard of any man remarkably unlettered, carefully noted him down, as the most proper person for any employments of trust or honour, and considered him as a man, in whom we could safely repose our ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... my experience as an occasional lecturer during the past twelve years, I have been much impressed by the keen interest evinced, even by the most unlettered persons, when astronomical subjects are dealt with in plain untechnical language which they ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... Western Europe by their monkish occupiers, without being struck by the influence of terror which such events as eclipses of the Sun and Moon and such celestial visitors as Comets and Shooting Stars exercised far and wide. And this influence overspread, not only the unlettered lower orders, but many of those in far higher stations of life who, one might have hoped, would have been exempt from such feelings of mental distress as they often exhibited. Illustrations of this fact will ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... of Goths were capable of preserving a faint tradition of their Scandinavian origin, we must not expect, from such unlettered barbarians, any distinct account of the time and circumstances of their emigration. To cross the Baltic was an easy and natural attempt. The inhabitants of Sweden were masters of a sufficient number ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... entered the world has abounded there ever since. God and the Son of God and the Church have always taught that there be certain things hidden, only to be revealed to man by God or through the ordinances of the Church, not to be sought after through curiosity by unlettered men themselves. Yet for as much as Satan is never at rest, and can transform himself on occasion into an angel of light, he is ever present with men urging them on to pry into these hidden mysteries and to make light of the ordinances of ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green
... break in the line was swiftly widened and the whole defensive scheme of the Second Army collapsed, it is true that confusion and panic began to spread through the Second Army like fire through dry grass. But it is not within the power of common soldiers, and especially of simple unlettered peasantry, such as most of these soldiers were, to repair the blunders of bad Staff work, and to make for themselves, on the spur of the moment and in face of deadly peril, plans which trained brains should have elaborated ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... the future as Ibsen is able to make us feel in "Ghosts." But we know something better than Ibsen, for Mrs. Pettingrew is no "Mrs. Alving." She is a plain, hard-featured woman who takes in sewing for a living, and she is quite unlettered, but she is a general in the army of spiritual forces. She does not despair, she does not give up like the half-hearted mother in "Ghosts," she does not waste her strength in concealments; she stands up to her enemy ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... president and at all times its ruling spirit, so he now established himself as dictator and proceeded to appoint a magnificent staff, most of whom contrived to escape as soon as they were out of reach of his bolo. Yet he drew considerable numbers about him, for this man, though almost entirely unlettered, seems to have been quite a personality among his own people, especially possessed of that gift of oratory in his native tongue to which the Malay is ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... remembered that Mr. Chisholm wrote only forty years after the event, and forty more had elapsed at the time of Mr. Hira Lal's investigation. [383] Of the Chamar Reformer himself Mr. Chisholm writes: [384] "Ghasi Das, like the rest of his community, was unlettered. He was a man of unusually fair complexion and rather imposing appearance, sensitive, silent, given to seeing visions, and deeply resenting the harsh treatment of his brotherhood by the Hindus. He was well known to the whole community, having travelled ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... produced the noise which had disquieted him. He writes in conclusion: "Thus many events which seem to defy all explanation have really come to pass by accident, or in the course of nature. Out of such manifestations as these the unlettered, the superstitious, the timorous, and the over-hasty make for themselves miracles."[274] Again, after telling a strange story of a boy who beheld the image of a thief in the neck of a phial, and of some incantations of Josephus Niger, he concludes: ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... under Nov. 29, 1777. Boswell wrote to Temple on May 22, 1775:—'Harry Dundas is going to be made King's Advocate—Lord Advocate at thirty-three! I cannot help being angry and somewhat fretful at this; he has, to be sure, strong parts, but he is a coarse, unlettered, unfanciful dog.' Letters of Boswell, p. 195. Horace Walpole describes him as 'the rankest of all Scotchmen, and odious for that bloody speech that had fixed on him the nick-name of Starvation! Journal of the Reign of George III, ii. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... language to the barbarian peoples of the West, as they had carried it to Italy. Their missionaries were colonists, merchants, soldiers, and public officials. The Latin spoken by them was eagerly taken up by the rude, unlettered natives, who tried to make themselves as Roman as possible in dress, customs, and speech. This provincial Latin was not simply the language of the upper classes; the common people themselves used it freely, as we know from thousands of inscriptions found in western and central Europe. In ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... culture) be made easier—and cheaper. But the spirit of national freedom, which is as precious to humanity as is the spirit of individual freedom, cannot be driven out by words any more than it can be driven out by blows. The most unlettered Belgian soldier, fighting for a truth that is at the very heart and depth of all things true, puts the ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... be found, and threatened with torture if they refused the information, they with great apparent reluctance directed their captors to a spot, at the distance of but a few leagues, where the precious metal could be obtained in great abundance. These unlettered savages executed their artifice with skill which would have done honor even to ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... through the streets of Philadelphia to-day, an appendage of the chariot wheels which proclaim the coming of her king, her lord, her master, whether he be white or black, native or foreign-born, virtuous or vile, lettered or unlettered. As the state-house bell, with its inscription, "Proclaim liberty—throughout the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof," pealed forth its jubilant reiteration,—the daughters of Jefferson, of Hancock, of Adams, and Patrick Henry, who have been politically outlawed ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... fear. How little she knew the real man! Could it be possible that this lonely, unlettered boy of the streets of lower New York, starved and stunted in childhood, had within him the soul of a great poet? How else could she explain the sudden rapture over the threatening silences and shadows of these mountain gorges which had depressed her? And yet his utter indifference ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... I stood in the little room where he breathed his last, that bleak day in Eighteen-Hundred Fifty-one. The unlettered but motherly old woman who took care of him in those last days never guessed his greatness; none in the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... time, two reasons debar me from laying further stress upon this line of argument. In the first place we must remember that his unlettered readers have been taught by their religious instructors to believe in the unlimited power of the devil, and they have probably found in the outrageous nature of the narratives a real incentive to accept them. In the second place my own position as a transcendentalist connects me less or more with ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... a few people then who had settled in this bleak region, and there was no funeral other than the assembling of a half dozen together, who dug a grave within fifty feet from the elms, and there laid the charred remains of the unfortunate victims. I had seen a small, rough, unlettered stone standing there, but did not before know ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 4 • Various
... are occupied by the families of a few old pensioners. In these low- vaulted chambers, with their deep and narrow embrasures, once the scene of the rude alarum of war, often has he held a quiet religious service with the lowly and unlettered inmates, who knew little of the thrilling history of their ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow
... 1891 I find among the students a healthy tone of scepticism in regard to certain forms of popular belief. Scientific education is rapidly destroying credulity in old superstitions yet current among the unlettered, and especially among the peasantry—as, for instance, faith in mamori and ofuda. The outward forms of Buddhism—its images, its relics, its commoner practices—affect the average student very little. He is not, as a foreigner may be, interested ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... 'Nains'). Other mythical personages are also credited with their erection, most frequently either the devil or Gargantua being held responsible for their miraculous creation. The phenomenon, well known to students of folk-lore, that an unlettered people speedily forgets the origin of monuments that its predecessors may have raised in times past is well exemplified in Brittany, whose peasant-folk are usually surprised, if not amused, at the question "Who built the dolmens?" Close familiarity with and contiguity ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... to enter into that world of books, whether he would not by so doing stunt his own mental growth. It may be that the decision of so momentous a question should have been postponed for a year—two years; to a time when his mind should have had further possibilities for unlettered expansion. However that may be, he decided now and finally. He walked to the table and climbed ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... entering public life as a means of winning glory for their youthful genius. The custom has long since become obsolete, but even if the practice were still common, it would not apply to Aemilianus. It would not have been becoming to him to make any display of his eloquence, for he is rude and unlettered; nor to show a passion for renown, since he is a mere barbarian bumpkin; nor thus to open his career as an advocate, for he is an old man on the brink of the grave. The only hypothesis creditable ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... The great collections of London contain many manuscripts of celebrated authors, ancient and modern, and some that are hard to decipher, but there is no chirography more hopelessly and irreclaimably unlettered and unscholarly than that of ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... into mere pop-gun weapons before the sword of the Spirit, which puts all such rabble to utter rout. Never was the homely proverb of Cobbler Howe more fully exemplified, than in this triumphant answer to the subtilities of a man deeply schooled in all human acquirements, by an unlettered mechanic, whose knowledge was drawn from one ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... example, he saw faults in Mozart and Beethoven where there are only beauties, and beauties which even an ignorant listener—if he is naturally musical—will see without trouble. He did not understand the vast difference between the unlettered person who commits a solecism and Pascal, the ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... her off in the face of a hundred admirers, he was considered lucky indeed. Dimitri never confessed, even to himself, that he regretted his hasty choice. Louise was as capricious as she was beautiful, as unlettered as she was charming, as superstitious as she was fascinating. All that she did was done on impulse. She loved her husband on impulse, she deserted her child for weeks at a time on impulse, she succored the poor or neglected them on impulse. Her army of servants set her commands at defiance, ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... plan, to have gone to Hungary. The Professorship must, therefore, have been in Hungary. But in 1422 no professor was wanted in that country, because it had no university: Hungary then was, and remained a wilderness of unlettered barbarism for nearly half a century after, it not being until 1465, half a dozen years from the death of Bracciolini, that Matthias Corvinus established in Buda the first Hungarian University, filling it with valuable works which ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... criticism. A picture or any other work of Art, is worth nothing except in so far as it has emanated from mind, and is addressed to mind. It should, indeed, be read like a book. Pictures, as it has been well said, are the books of the unlettered, but then we must at least understand the language in which they are written. And further,—if, in the old times, it was a species of idolatry to regard these beautiful representations as endued with ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... (De Civ. Dei x, 1) that "since in speaking Latin not only unlettered but even most cultured persons ere wont to speak of religion as being exhibited, to our human kindred and relations as also to those who are linked with us by any kind of tie, that term does not escape ambiguity when it ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... afoot on the arrival of drafts and there was a scramble for the best hands. Here at once was a palpable flaw in the system of assignment. The lot of the convict was altogether unequal. Some, the dull, unlettered and unskilled, were drafted up country to heavy manual labour at which they remained, while clever expert rogues found pleasant, congenial and often profitable employment in the towns. The contrast was very marked from the first, but it became the more apparent ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... for his dissertation for the degree of Candidate [1] the ignorant monk chose a sensational topic: "Concerning the Use of Christian Blood by the Jews." It was an unlettered and scurrilous pamphlet, in which the author, without indicating his sources, incorporated the contents of an official memorandum on the ritual murder legend from the time of Nicholas I., supplementing it by distorted quotations from talmudie ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... Pansy, child of plain, poor, farmer folk, immemorially dwelling close to the soil; unlettered, unambitious, long-lived, abounding in children, without physical beauty, but marking the track of their generations by a path lustrous with right-doing. For more than a hundred years on this spot the land had lessened around them; but the ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... the "family bible" shelf in my home along with Albrecht, McCarrison, and Howard. Price, a dentist with strong interests in prevention, wondered why his clientele, 1920s midwest bourgeoisie, had terrible teeth when prehistoric skulls of aged unlettered savages retained all their teeth in perfect condition. So he traveled to isolated parts of the Earth in the early 1930s seeking healthy humans. And he found them—belonging to every race and on every continent. And found out why ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... master, Glumdelick, careing him on market day for a show to a town called Lulbegrud. A young man of our company called Alexander Neely came to camp and told us he had been that day to Lulbegrud, and had killed two Brobdignags in their capital." Far from unlettered were pioneers who indulged together in such literary chat and gave to the near-by creek the name (after Dean Swift's Lorbrugrud) of Lulbegrud which name, first seen on Filson's map of Kentucky (1784), it bears to this day. From one of ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... encounter was the Reverend Father Adone Doni, who at the time was, like myself, working in the old Academy degli Intronati. I had taken an instant liking for the Cordelier in question, a man who, grown grey in study, still preserved the cheerful, facile humour of a simple, unlettered countryman. He was very willing to converse; and I greatly relished his bland speech, his cultivated yet artless way of thought, his look of old Silenus purged at the baptismal font, the play of his passions at once keen and refined, the strange, alluring personality that informed the whole man. ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... purple, rather than by the superiority of wisdom, or virtue, from the many thousands of his subjects who had embraced the doctrines of Christianity. Nor can it be deemed incredible, that the mind of an unlettered soldier should have yielded to the weight of evidence, which, in a more enlightened age, has satisfied or subdued the reason of a Grotius, a Pascal, or a Locke. In the midst of the incessant labors of his great office, this soldier employed, or affected to employ, the hours of the night in ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... application of the above remarks was made by a young fellow, answering to the name of John, who sits near me at table. A certain basket of peaches, a rare vegetable, little known to boarding houses, was on its way to me via this unlettered Johannes. He appropriated the three that remained in the basket, remarking that there was just one apiece for him. I convinced him that his practical inference was hasty and illogical, but in the mean time ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... spake no word, for speech to them was grievous, With bovine eyes they supplicated me; "We wot not what ye will, but prithee leave us, Unlettered ...
— Briefless Ballads and Legal Lyrics - Second Series • James Williams
... here given for each of the Latin terms caelo and terra. The same schoolmaster uses seven synonyms in describing the "fashion" of speech of the ignorant constable, —"undressed, unpolished, uneducated, unpruned, untrained, or, rather unlettered, or, ratherest, unconfirmed, fashion." When we remember that it was really Shakespeare who wrote this, we know that he had been led to study variety of expression. His large vocabulary could not have been acquired by any ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... always civilized; the most refined, the most enlightened person has his moods, his moments of barbarism, in which the best, or even the second best, shall not please him. At these times the lettered and the unlettered are alike primitive and their gratifications are of the same simple sort; the highly cultivated person may then like melodrama, impossible fiction, and the trapeze as sincerely and thoroughly as a boy of thirteen or ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... brought forth no great German lyrist, it is exceptionally rich in good songs, mostly anonymous, that express the joys and sorrows of the general lot. Not all of them were the work of unlettered poets, but all were made to be sung; for lyric poetry as a branch of 'mere literature' had not yet come into being. The selections are from Tittmann's Liederbuch aus dem 16. Jahrhundert, Leipzig, 1881, which gives full information as to the source ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... corroborate our honour and refute the empty blasphemy spattered on us. Only one hundred years have elapsed, my dear sirs, since Emperor Peter the Great launched decked barks on this river, and now thousands of steamships sail up and down the river. Who has built them? The Russian peasant, an utterly unlettered man! All these enormous steamers, barges—whose are they? Ours! Who has invented them? We! Everything here is ours, everything here is the fruit of our minds, of our Russian shrewdness, and our great love for action! Nobody has assisted us in anything! We ourselves exterminated ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... the self-interested movements of the few; and as a consequence of this truth, that the privileged minority is really the least important of the two classes in any community. In the infancy of government, when a rude and unlettered people are little able to take care of themselves, the establishment of class distinctions is undoubtedly conducive to progress, as it tends to unite the people, thereby counteracting the thousand petty jealousies and strifes ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... was born and christened Andrew Jackson. His father had died a few days before—one of those sturdy Scotch-Irish whom we have seen emigrating to America in such numbers in search of a land of freedom. The boy grew up in the rude backwoods settlement, rough, boisterous, unlettered; at the age of fourteen, riding with Sumter in the guerrilla warfare waged throughout the state against the British, and then, captured and wounded on head and hand by a sabre-stroke whose mark he bore till his dying day, a prisoner in the filthy Camden ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... extend their territories, and an ampler wall encompassed the city, and their genius was indulged on festivals by drinking wine in the day-time without censure; a greater freedom arose both, to the numbers [of poetry], and the measure [of music]. For what taste could an unlettered clown and one just dismissed from labors have, when in company with the polite; the base, with the man of honor? Thus the musician added now movements and a luxuriance to the ancient art, and strutting backward and forward, drew a length of train over the stage; thus likewise ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... this unlettered woman was being educated by her little boy in the same manner as Dora had been and still ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... was to courses vain, His companies unlettered, rude, and shallow, His hours filled up with riots, banquets, sports, And never noted in him any study, Any retirement, any sequestration From ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... spelt by th' unlettered Muse,[14] The place of fame and elegy supply: And many a holy text around she strews, That teach the rustic moralist ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... deprivation of the jury rights of Negroes, the peonage system, and the penal system. In 1905 twenty-nine men of the race launched what was known as the Niagara Movement. The aims of this organization were freedom of speech and criticism, an unlettered and unsubsidized press, manhood suffrage, the abolition of all caste distinctions based simply on race and color, the recognition of the principle of human brotherhood as a practical present creed, the ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... always struggled for command; but he was deeply susceptible of kindness, and, if feared by those who opposed, loved by those who served him. About his character was that mixture of tenderness and fierceness which belonged, of old, to the descriptions of the warrior. Though so little unlettered, Life had taught him a certain poetry of sentiment and idea—More poetry, perhaps, in the silent thoughts that, in his happier moments, filled his solitude, than in half the pages that his brother had read and written by the dreaming lake. A certain largeness of idea ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... conjectured that "the eastern and western empires afforded protection to the church!" Why, the empire, in both its wings, was the deadly enemy of the church, as we have already seen! (ch. xi. 7.) Alas! what absurdities result from political bias! The unlettered Christian will readily perceive under the emblem in the text, a plain allusion to the gracious interposition of the church's Redeemer in the days of old. "Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bare you on eagles' wings, and brought you unto myself." (Exod. xix. 4.) Thus ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... people living under similar conditions to the Southerners are exceedingly musical, and we owe the great majority of the sweetest compositions which delight the ear and subdue the senses to unlettered song-makers of the Swiss mountains, the Tyrolese valleys, the Bavarian Highlands, and the minstrels of Scotland, Ireland ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... Civilization made gradual encroachments. Quite a little cluster of log huts was reared in the vicinity, where the inmates in case of necessity could flee to the fort for protection. Christopher, at fifteen years of age, was an unlettered boy, small in stature, but very fond of the solitude of the forest, and quite renowned as a marksman. He was amiable in disposition, gentle in his manners, and in all respects a good boy. He had a strong character. Whatever he undertook, he quietly and without ...
— Christopher Carson • John S. C. Abbott
... defence as castles supplied to our ancestors, are no longer requisite. The towers, ramparts, and battlements that once awed the enemy, or struck terror into an oppressed people, are now mere objects of curiosity, The unlettered peasant gazes upon their ruins with idle wonder; the antiquary explores their flittering masses with admiration and delight. The breaches of the last siege are unrepaired; the courtyard is choked up ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 553, June 23, 1832 • Various
... put forth matter in harmony with the feelings of all. It is thus that we may explain, in part, that penetrating apprehension of human life and character, and that power of touching sympathies common to all ages and nations, which surprises us so much in the unlettered authors of the old epic. Such periodical intercommunion of brethren habitually isolated from each other was the only means then open of procuring for the bard a diversified range of experience and a many-colored audience; and it was to a great degree ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... occasion of the parting at Jerseyville nearly two years ago—hence we fully realized that this farewell might be the last. Nor did this manner spring from indifference, or lack of sensibility; it was simply the way of the plain unlettered backwoods people of those days. Nearly thirty-five years later the "whirligig of time" evolved an incident which clearly brought home to me a vivid idea of what must have been my father's feelings on this occasion. The Spanish-American ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... poem of his son, Mr. Hosea Biglow. It was no new thing to seek to arrest the public attention with the vernacular applied to public affairs. Major Jack Downing and Sam Slick had been notable examples, and they had many imitators; but the reader who laughed over the racy narrative of the unlettered Ezekiel, and then took up Hosea's poem and caught the gust of Yankee wrath and humor blown fresh in his face, knew that he was in at the appearance of something new in American literature. The force which Lowell displayed in these satires ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... made no reply. He and the other Democratic leaders thought the president uncouth, unlettered, and very weak. The phrase "please write me at least as long a letter as this" produced an impression upon the scholarly, cultured, cautious, and diplomatic Seymour which was most unfavorable to its author. Seymour acknowledged ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... course, accepted humbly by the unlettered Teutons; and did its work well, for centuries to come. It is said—I trust not truly—to be still enrolled among the decrees of the Canon law, though reprobated by all enlightened Roman Catholics. Be that as it may, on the strength of this ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... these metamorphoses, and their consequences, might well puzzle a wiser head than that of the many-named but unlettered Nimbus. ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... Bible and at times his Signs, but never compelled us to read them. His church did not believe in Sunday-schools or in any sort of religious training. Their preachers never prepared their sermons but spoke the words that the Spirit put into their mouths. As they were mostly unlettered men the Spirit had many sins of rhetoric and logic to answer for. Their discourses did more credit to their hearts than to their heads. I recall some of their preachers, or Elders, as they were called, very distinctly—Elder Jim Mead, ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... himself, for the hundredth time, a passage from Shakespeare which had recently come to his notice. He was not a Shakespearian scholar, nor indeed a student of literature at all; but these lines had been sent to him, cut out of a daily almanac, by an equally unlettered and very adorable confidante ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
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