"Pedant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Haydn, Albrechtsberger and Salieri were for a time his teachers, but Beethoven got on no better with them, and Albrechtsberger said, "Have nothing to do with him; he has learnt nothing, and will never do anything in decent style." Perhaps not in your pedant's ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... child of George's uncle, who was a recluse living at Tunbridge. He was a scholar and a pedant, and concerned himself but little about his only child, whose fortune ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... worked a pretty enough havoc with fine-spun rhetoric to raise the wig off a pedant's head, Jean and I thought we read some sense in his ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... faithful men, in which," etc. But how does it define the "Invisible" one? And what does "faithful" mean? What if I thought Cromwell and Pierre Leroux infinitely more faithful men in their way, and better members of the "Invisible Church," than the torturer-pedant Laud, or the facing ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... "Pedant!" he cried, with quivering lips, "prate not to me of thy vain legends and gossip's tales! think not to snatch from me my possession in another, when thine own life is in my hands. Unhand the maiden! throw down ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... has more availed to secure him immortality than all his verse? They call him the English Bayard, and the Frenchman need not be displeasured by the comparison. But when you come to read his poetry you find that our Bayard had in him a strong dash of the pedant and a powerful leaven of the euphuist. Subtle, delicate, refined, with a keen and curious wit, a rare faculty of verse, a singular capacity of expression, an active but not always a true sense of form, he wrote for the few, ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... their doings, and of some of their contemplated doings. These kindergarten pictures I will endeavor to paint, not in that "over-the-head" verbosity or "under-the-feet" profundity and intricacy of the political economy pedant, which are as the canvases of the Whistler school to the masses; but rather will I use the brush of the artisan who in giving us our white fences, our gray cottages, and our green blinds sets off those things which make up the pictures ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... relish'd a joke, and rejoic'd in a pun; 150 Whose temper was generous, open, sincere; A stranger to flatt'ry, a stranger to fear; Who scatter'd around wit and humour at will; Whose daily 'bons mots' half a column might fill; A Scotchman, from pride and from prejudice free; 155 A scholar, yet surely no pedant ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... the pitchfork employed against gentlemen who have doomed such innumerable caravans to hell. In Nietzsche they found, after many long years, a foeman worthy of them—not a mere fancy swordsman like Voltaire, or a mob orator like Tom Paine, or a pedant like the heretics of exegesis, but a gladiator armed with steel and armoured with steel, and showing all the ferocious gusto of a mediaeval bishop. It is a pity that Holy Church has no process for the elevation of demons, like its process ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... Holofernes, a pedant schoolmaster, are introduced into the play by William to illustrate the asinine pretensions of ministers and pedagogues, who are constantly introducing Latin or French words in their daily conversation, for the purpose ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... the reformer of comedy, exclaimed, "Take courage, Moliere, this is true comedy." The learned Menage was the only member of the society who had the good sense to detect the drift; he perceived the snake in the grass. "We must now," said this sensible pedant (in a remote allusion to the fate of idolatry and the introduction of Christianity) to the poetical pedant, Chapelain, "follow the counsel which St. Remi gave to Clovis—we must burn all that we adored, and adore what we have burned." The success of the comedy was universal; the ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... a rich and varied experience of men and women before he can use books to advantage. Life is varied, men and women many, while the individual life is short; wise men read books, therefore, to enrich their experience, not merely as the pedant does, to garner facts. "J'etudie les livres en attendant que J'etudie les hommes," writes Voltaire. "Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... angry the light in her fine hazel eyes, so anxious and perturbed her entire being, that she appeared almost ugly. Not only so, but added to impatience and anger there seemed something like repugnance, disgust, directed at the miserable pedant who under the fires of womanly wrath blinked and smiled, but had ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... society of women than of men. In his case this choice was not due, as it so often is, to a love of procuring deference cheaply. It was not deference that he sought, but a sympathy that he could make sure of, and that put him at his ease. Nobody that ever lived was less of a pedant, academic don, or loud Sir Oracle. He was easy to live with, a gay and appreciative companion, and the most amiable of friends, but nothing was further from his thoughts than to pose as guide and philosopher. His conversation was particularly neat and ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... rustics. It is not difficult to imagine the discomfiture suffered by many a village Hercules at the hands of this lithe young man, who could behead a bull at a single stroke of a spadoon and break a horseshoe in his fingers. The diary in question, you will have gathered, is that of a pedant, prim and easily scandalized. So much being obvious, it is noteworthy that Cesare's conduct should have afforded him no subject for graver strictures than these, Cesare being such a man as has been represented, and the time being that of ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... as writers then were paid, was very liberal; but half-a-crown had a mean sound. He was employed in promoting the principles of his party, by epitomising Hacket's "Life of Archbishop Williams." The original book is written with such depravity of genius, such mixture of the fop and pedant, as has not often appeared. The epitome is free enough from affectation, but has ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... gleam of its integument; in the insistence upon individuality, and the individual difference as the significance of life, you will feel the texture of its shaping body. Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain (except the mind of a pedant), perfection is the mere repudiation of that ineluctable marginal inexactitude which is the mysterious inmost quality of Being. Being, indeed!—there is no being, but a universal becoming of individualities, and Plato turned ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... be truly said that Emerson is one of the writers who make their way more easily into our minds by virtue of style. That his writing has quality and flavour none but a pure pedant would deny. His more fervent votaries, however, provoke us with a challenge that goes far beyond this. They declare that the finish, charm, and beauty of the writing are as worthy of remark as the truth and ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... author of several poetical tragedies, wished {95} to follow the example of Sir Frederick Gorges, one of the promoters of the colonisation of New England. He had no difficulty in obtaining from James, as great a pedant as himself, a grant of Acadia, which he named Nova Scotia. When Charles the First became king, he renewed the patent, and also, at the persuasion of the ambitious poet, created an order of Nova Scotia baronets, who ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... leader in a barring out. (Johnson's Works, vii. 419.) Garrick entered the school about two years after Johnson left. According to Garrick's biographer, Tom Davies (p. 3), 'Hunter was an odd mixture of the pedant and the sportsman. Happy was the boy who could slily inform his offended master where a covey of partridges was to be found; this notice was a certain pledge of his pardon.' Lord Campbell in his Lives of the Chief Justices, ii. 279, says:—'Hunter is celebrated for having flogged seven boys ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... melancholy mood, Some lurking envious fear intrude, To check my bosom's fondest thought, And interrupt the golden dream, I crush the fiend with malice fraught, And still indulge my wonted theme. Although we ne'er again can trace In Granta's vale the pedant's lore; Nor through the groves of Ida chase Our raptured visions as before, Though Youth has flown on rosy pinion, And Manhood claims his stern dominion, Age will not every hope destroy, But yield some hours ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... the fortunate and the successful, are manifestations of this type of superiority seeking. Half the humor of the world is the pleasure, produced by a technique, of feeling superior to the boor, the pedant, the fool, the new rich, the pompous, the over-dignified, etc. Half, more than half, of the conversation that goes on in boudoir, dining room, over the drinks and in the smoking room, is criticism, playful and otherwise, of others. There are people in whom the adversely critical spirit is ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... a pedant, whose name was Boubekir Muezin, a vain, haughty, and envious person: he hated the rich, only because he was poor, his misery making him angry at his neighbour's prosperity. He heard talk of Zeyn Alasnam, and of the plenty ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... of a pedant is so formidable to young men when they first sally from their colleges, and is so liberally scattered by those who mean to boast their elegance of education, easiness of manners, and knowledge of the world, that it seems ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... Lanrezac's Headquarters believing that the Commander-in-Chief had over-rated his ability; and I was therefore not surprised when he afterwards turned out to be the most complete example, amongst the many this War has afforded, of the Staff College "pedant," whose "superior education" had given him little idea of ...
— 1914 • John French, Viscount of Ypres
... being stranded on the ignorance of those who surrounded her, and found herself isolated as a sort of pedant; and as time went on, the narrowness of interests chafed her, and in like manner left her alone. As she grew past girlhood, the cui bono question had come to interfere with her ardour in study for its own sake, and she ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Nihilist. He it is that mocks and cries, "Go up, thou bald head! go up, thou bald head!" Mankind does not curse him in the name of the Lord, but invites him to play with another small boy, named Obstruction, and whose other names are Vested Interest, Reactionary, and Pedant. This one, whenever Mankind will lead him, digs in his heels or lies down in his tracks; until, pricked and goaded by his playfellow, he at length gets up and scrambles after. And so these two keep ever by ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... thoughts which the woman's placid exterior concealed. But for the child, he well knew that her problem had been met and solved, and that she had laid it aside with a trust in immanent good which he did not believe all the worldly argument of pedant or philosopher ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... revival of our own time sought for one mind on which to lay the burden of its anger, one hard master or pedant who could be made responsible for the drying up of the wells, Malherbe again was found. He became the butt of Hugo's splendid ridicule. He was the god of plaster that could not hear or speak or feel, but which fools had worshipped; a god easy to break to pieces. His austerity—for ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... the individual men so exceptionally formidable as soldiers, could very readily have been spoiled. Any weakness in the commander would have ruined it. On the other hand, to treat it from the stand-point of the martinet and military pedant would have been almost equally fatal. From the beginning we started out to secure the essentials of discipline, while laying just as little stress as possible on the non-essentials. The men were singularly ...
— Rough Riders • Theodore Roosevelt
... Lodge, Spenser, were poets who incidentally wrote on the technic of their art or in defence of its value. Sidney, the poet, courtier, and soldier, wrote not from the musty alcoves of libraries. Webbe, it is true, was a pedant, but certainly not a scholar. Puttenham was a bad poet, a well-read man, and a courtier. Jonson's scholarship was thorough, but sweetened and ventilated by his activities as poet and dramatist. Bacon was a scholar, but even more a philosopher and a statesman. Milton, our most ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... first, by the schoolmaster of Alloway-mill, near the Doon; secondly, by John Murdoch, student of divinity, who undertook to teach arithmetic, grammar, French, and Latin, to the boys of Lochlea, and the sons of five neighboring farmers. Murdoch, who was an enthusiast in learning, much of a pedant, and such a judge of genius that he thought wit should always be laughing, and poetry wear an eternal smile, performed his task well: he found Robert to be quick in apprehension, and not afraid to study when knowledge was the reward. He taught him to turn verse into its natural prose order; ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... itself!' he cried, from the depths of his heart. 'I feel as if I had been the merest pedant and blunderer—the most ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... remaining figures in this "model of human life," to quote Fielding's own descriptive phrase of his book, those which tell us most of their author are that worthy, authoritative, humourous clergyman, Dr Harrison; the good Sergeant Atkinson; and that fiery pedant Colonel Bath, with his kind heart hidden under a ferocious passion for calling out every man whom he conceived to have slighted his honour. Dr Harrison does not win quite the same place in our hearts as the man whom Thackeray calls 'dear Parson Adams'; his ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... shall sit and tell us anecdotes? The secret history of his own times, And fashions of the world when he was young: How England slept out three and twenty years, While Carr and Villiers rul'd the baby king: The costly fancies of the pedant's reign, Balls, feastings, huntings, shows in allegory, And Beauties of the court ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... profess to take lofty views of life—that I leave to the philosophers. But I must say it seems to me to be a finer thing to work for a future in which one knows one will not participate oneself than for one in which one's personal happiness is involved. I have always sympathized with Comte, pedant as he was, in the remark he made ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... "Because I was a pedant. I tried to ignore you, as pedants always do try to ignore any fact they cannot fit into their pet system. The basis of my pet system was celibacy. I don't mean the mere state of being a bachelor. I mean celibacy of the soul—egoism, in fact. You have converted ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... elephantine everywhere but here (tapping her forehead), And Man, whose brain is to the elephant's As Woman's brain to Man's - (that's rule of three),— Conquers the foolish giant of the woods, As Woman, in her turn, shall conquer Man. In Mathematics, Woman leads the way; The narrow-minded pedant still believes That two and two make four! Why, we can prove, We women — household drudges as we are— That two and two make five — or three — or seven; Or five and twenty, if the case demands! Diplomacy? ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... que j'ai composee. Elle a pour titre les jeunes amours de Muley Bergentuf Roi de Moroi." "Disciples" is a translation of "discipulos." A French writer would have said "eleves." Again, the title of the Pedant's play is thoroughly Spanish. It was intended to ridicule the habit which prevailed in Spain, after the expulsion of the Moriscoes in 1610, of adapting for the stage Moorish habits and amusements, by making a stupid pedant in an obscure village, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... preparation at the quiet country home at Down. New species of animals and plants were being described by naturalists at an alarming rate. The bulk of knowledge of specific characters and the necessity of specialisation bade fair to make every species-monger a dry and narrow pedant; and the pedants quarrelled about the characters and limits of ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... pedant fool, Meting beauty by a rule: Pallas? Juno? Venus?—he Should have chosen all ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... Artium Baccalaureus[Lat][obs3], Artium Magister[Lat]. learned man, literary man; homo multarum literarum[Lat]; man of learning, man of letters, man of education, man of genius. antiquarian, antiquary; archaeologist. sage &c. (wise man) 500. pedant, doctrinaire; pedagogue, Dr. Pangloss; pantologist[obs3], criminologist. schoolboy &c. (learner) 541. Adj. learned &c. 490; brought up at the feet of Gamaliel. Phr. "he was a scholar and a ripe and good one" [Henry VIII]; "the manifold linguist" ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... back and making the best of her adventure. He, on his part, had acquired a kind of right to consider himself her adviser, and had begun to take a pleasure in the thought that he, the worn-out and useless old pedant, as he had been in the way of considering himself, might perhaps do something even more important than his previous achievement to save this young girl from the dangers that surrounded her. He loved his ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... I am no pedant that I should cavil at Mr. JUSTIN HUNTLY MCCARTHY'S re-adjustment of history. It was all for our delight that Claude Duval, instead of perishing on the scaffold, should escape from prison, have his freedom confirmed by the KING'S pardon, confound everybody ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 5, 1916 • Various
... Grenville, though not less ready than the king to meet opposition with violent measures, was imbued with whig theories. While George sought to rule by securing the support of parliament, Grenville tried to use that support to enable him to rule the king. He was a pedant, and lectured the king on his duty like a schoolmaster. Bute stood in his way as the king's ally and secret counsellor. His victory over him was partial and short-lived. While Bute was in the country the king corresponded with him, ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... to avoid pedant or puerile humour, re-examination of my material showed me how near I had been to crashing into a pitfall of another sort. Of the ladies with whose encounters with the law I propose to deal several were ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... may find something in life. She may! It won't be love. She has sacrificed that chance to the integrity of your life—heroically. Do you remember telling her once that you meant to live your life integrally—oh, you lawless young pedant! Well, she is gone; but you may be sure that whatever she finds now in life it will not be peace. You understand me? Not even ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... off on grievances of his own connected with the washing of his shirts, which somehow led to the frequent visits of Hughling Elliot, who was a bore, a pedant, a dry stick of a man, and yet Ridley couldn't simply point at the door and tell him to go. The truth of it was, they saw too many people. And so on and so on, more conjugal talk pattering softly and unintelligibly, until they were both ready to ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... had set one living man Beyond the pedant's tether,— His virtues, frailties, HE may scan, ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... fame of a statesman and of an author), at first made a deep impression on his mind; and at the present day he owes his reputation principally to those pursuits which, as Plutarch tells us, exposed him to the ridicule and even to the contempt of his contemporaries as a "pedant and a professor."[111] But his love of popularity overcame his philosophy, and he commenced a career which gained him one triumph and ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... like a pedant that keeps a school i' th' church. I have dogg'd him, like his murderer. He does obey every point of the letter that I dropp'd to betray him; he does smile his face into more lines than is in the ...
— Twelfth Night; or, What You Will • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... on the harm he was doing me, and would you believe it, the poor lad burst into tears, and implored me to give him something to do, to save him from his own spirit. I set him to write out and translate a long roll of Latin despatches sent up by that pedant Court in Hungary, and I declare to you I had no more trouble with him till next he was left idle. I gave him tutors, and he studied with fervour, and made progress at which they were amazed. He learnt the High Dutch faster than any other of my people, ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Wolfius behelde with great content upon the Venetian Rialto, as he describes diffusedly in his book the World's Epitome, which Sannazar so bepraiseth, e contra our Polydore can see nothing in it; they call me singular, a pedant, fantastic, words of reproach in this age, which is all too neoterick and light for ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... general than a novel, and perhaps is little more than a ponderous dissertation on Johnson's favourite theme, the "vanity of human wishes." As to its actual merits, Johnson's contemporaries differed widely, some proclaiming him a pompous pedant with a passion for words of six syllables and more, others delighting in those passages in which weighty meaning was ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... man a prig at all? Was he a pedant? have those who have sedulously spread that report of him in the West told the truth about him? Or—hath a pleasant little lie or twain served ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... and I would be searching about in my mind for the right words, like a pedant, for was I not college-bred—"to me," said I, "they aye look just grandly contemptuous," and, mind you, my heart went out to the great strong man at my side because of the soft place in his warm heart for the grim old hills, ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... and a nervous parlance, short and compact, not so much refined and finished to a hair as impetuous and brusque, difficult rather than wearisome, devoid of affectation, irregular, disconnected, and bold, not pedant-like, not preacher-like, not pleader-like." That fixity which Montaigne could not give to his irresolute and doubtful mind he stamped upon the tongue; it came out in his Essays supple, free, and bold; he had made the first decisive step towards the ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... to London. My sister shall likewise be of the party; for it is prudent to use all precautions with a man who, with a great deal of merit, on such occasions is not over scrupulous, if we may credit your philosopher." "Do not pay any attention to that pedant," replied the Chevalier de Grammont: "but tell me what put it into your head to form a design upon that inanimate statue, Miss Stewart?" "How the devil should I know?" said Hamilton: "you are acquainted with all her childish amusements. ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... heard before, A font of holy water of which all Partook with fear and longing! We forgot With thee the book and laughed thy merry laughter; Thou didst tear lifeless readings from our minds Together with the pedant's torpid mullen, And didst sow deep into our hearts the seed Of the gold tree that dazzles with its light, And charms, and ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... strictly speaking, even an accurate master of literary English. He would slip, as it were, unconsciously, into foreign idioms and obsolete words. In America, where his name arouses no political prejudice, he is better judged. To the Englishman, at least to the pedant, he is ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... against him; nor does this imposing display of learning indicate a pedant. Lyly had nothing in common with the spirit of his old friend Gabriel Harvey, whom indeed he laughed at. There is a story that Watson and Nash invited a company together to sup at the Nag's Head in Cheapside, and to discuss the pedantries of Harvey, ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... of Neapolis, to whose assistance no Gothic army had marched, and the unhindered conquest of Southern Italy crowned the already towering edifice of Theodahad's unpopularity. It is not likely that this selfish and unwarlike pedant—a "nithing", as they probably called him—had ever been aught but a most unwelcome necessity to the lion-hearted Ostrogoths, and for all but the families and friends of the three slain noblemen, the imprisonment and the permitted murder of his benefactress ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... dear Casey's estimate had the arid accuracy of the pedant, but she had a rich and helpful imagination. In rare moments of depression and unhappiness I have found that by reading one of her testimonials I can always recover my tone. And they were effective ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... of them adds Whist to accomplishments which would have made their possessor an Admirable Crichton, if genius had not elevated him into a far loftier category than Crichtons belong to. Rechberg plays well, and likes his game; but he is in Whist, as are all Germans, a thorough pedant. I remember an incident of his whist-life sufficiently amusing in its way, though, in relation, the reader loses what to myself is certainly the whole pungency of the story: I mean the character and nature of the person who imparted the anecdote to me, and who is about the most perfect ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... Lord Chief Baron Rochfort. George, his eldest son. Nim, his second son, John, so called from his love of hunting. Dan, Mr. Jackson, a parson. Gaulstown, the Baron's seat. Sheridan, a pedant and pedagogue. Delany, chaplain to Sir Constantine Phipps, when Lord Chancellor of Ireland. Dragon, the name of the boat on the canal. Dean Percival and his wife, friends of ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... desire for power, or of any capacity for exercising it; but since he had been placed on the throne he had displayed great activity and energy, though he was still, in the opinion of many, more of a philosopher—a detractor might said more of a pedant—than of a statesman. He studied theories of government, and was extremely fond of giving advice; and as both Louis and Marie Antoinette were persons who in many respects stood in need of friendly counsel, Mercy and Maria Teresa had both looked ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... him," muttered King Aetes to himself, "and the four-footed pedant, his schoolmaster, into the bargain. Why, what a foolhardy, self-conceited coxcomb he is! We'll see what my fire-breathing bulls will do for him. Well, Prince Jason," he continued, aloud, and as complaisantly as he could, "make yourself comfortable for ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the heavy artillery of theology, and in a long series of elaborate propositions demonstrated that any other doctrine than that of the fixity and persistence of species is absolutely contrary to Scripture. The Abbe Desorges, a former Professor of Theology, stigmatized Darwin as a "pedant," and evolution as "gloomy". Monseigneur Segur, referring to Darwin and his followers, went into hysterics and shrieked: "These infamous doctrines have for their only support the most abject passions. Their father is pride, their ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... a father" is certainly like a father; and although a man may be surly in his "countenance," I do not well see how he could be surly in his "gait;" besides, what had occurred to make the pedant surly? This appears to me the best reason for rejecting surly in favour of "surely;" but I have another, which can hardly be refused to an editor who professes to follow the old copies, where they are not contradicted. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 195, July 23, 1853 • Various
... and it was done, as all good work in art must be done, by following Nature so closely that it only differed from her handiwork in its profusion in so narrow a compass. A few years later our healthy English taste was spoiled by the pedant gardening of the Dutch with their straight flat ponds, and their trees all clipped and in a line like vegetable grenadiers. In truth, I think that the Prince of Orange and Sir William Temple had much to answer for in working this change, ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... fastidious person could possibly desire. He was a gentleman, in the highest sense of that often misused term; and although his conversation subsequently, during dinner, evidenced that he was a most erudite and finished scholar, there was nothing of the pedant about him. Information exuded from him naturally and simply because he could not help it; it seemed impossible to broach a topic upon which his knowledge was not complete, and he was brilliant without the ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... between two different ranks of society must ever be subjected." "To play the lion under such circumstances must," as the knowing Lockhart observes, "be difficult at the best; but a delicate business indeed, when the jackals are presumptuous. The pedant could not stomach the superior success of his friend, and yet—alas for poor human nature!—he certainly was one of the most enthusiastic of his admirers, and one of the most affectionate of all his intimates." It seems that the ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... tasks imposed by the pedant upon the form to which our two companions belonged, they were one evening ordered to translate a chapter of Caesar's Commentaries. Accordingly the young Count went to work, and performed the undertaking with great elegance ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... hardly know but by report, that knowledge of modern literature is called novel-reading; a commodious name, invented by ignorance and applied by envy, in the same manner as men without learning call a scholar a pedant, and men without principle call a Christian a Methodist. To me the attacks of such men are valuable as compliments. The man whose friend tells him that he is known to be extensively acquainted with elegant literature may suspect that he is flattering him; but he may feel real and secure satisfaction ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... ravaged with it, but of delightful geniuses like Schumann, or of powerful ones like Bach. "This unnatural art wearies one like the sanctimonious salon of some little provincial town; it stifles one, it is enough to kill one."[117] "Saint-Saens is not a pedant," wrote Gounod; "he has remained too much of a child and become too clever for that." Besides, he has always been too much ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... relation of students to classical professors. The majority of the average class looked on such a professor as generally a bore and, as examinations approached, an enemy; they usually sneered at him as a pedant, and frequently made his peculiarities a subject for derision. Since that day far better relations have grown up between teachers and taught, especially in those institutions where much is left to the option of the students. The students ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... peace,' during recent years at any rate, is not manifested in disuse of arms, but in mistaken methods. For a quarter of a century the civilised world has tended more and more to become a drill-ground, but the spirit dominating it has been that of the pedant. There has been more exercise and less reality. The training, especially of officers, becomes increasingly scholastic. This, and the deterioration consequent on it, are not merely modern phenomena. They appear in all ages. 'The Sword of the Saracens,' says Gibbon, 'became ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... "Unwieldy pedant, let thy awkward muse, With censures praise, with flatteries abuse. To lash, and not be felt, in thee's an art; Thou ne'er mad'st any but thy schoolboys smart. Then be advis'd, and scribble not agen; Thou'rt fashioned for a flail, and not a pen. If B——l's ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... balcony. Gazing with hollow eyes, he tracks the swallows in their flight, and notes that winter is at hand. This is the last Duke of Urbino, Francesco Maria II., he whose young wife deserted him, who made for himself alone a hermit-pedant's round of petty cares and niggard avarice and mean-brained superstition. He drew a second consort from the convent, and raised up seed unto his line by forethought, but beheld his princeling fade untimely in the bloom of boyhood. Nothing is ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... every natural fact. The depth of his perception found likeness of law throughout Nature, and I know not any genius who so swiftly inferred universal law from the single fact. He was no pedant of a department. His eye was open to beauty, and his ear to music. He found these, not in rare conditions, but wheresoever he went. He thought the best of music was in single strains; and he found poetic suggestion in the ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... to busy himself idly about her; and after him your Diogenes Laertius, the biographer, and your Theodorus Gaza, the philosopher, and your Argiropilus, the emperor, and your Bessario, the cardinal, and your Politian, the pedant, and your Budaeus, the judge, and your Lascaris, the ambassador, and the devil and all of those you call lovers of wisdom; whose number, it seems, was not thought great enough already, but lately your Scaliger, Bigot, Chambrier, Francis ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... extremes to avoid: the youth may, in his effort to prove his individuality, become vain and conceited, and fall into an attempt to appear interesting; or he may become slavishly dependent on conventional forms, a kind of social pedant. This state of nullity which contents itself with the mechanical polish of social formalism is ethically more dangerous than the tendency to a marked individuality, for it betrays emptiness; while the effort towards ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... comparing the foregoing words, or any of the "many others" of which this author speaks, is to be determined according to their meaning, and according to the usage of good writers, and not by the dictation of a feeble pedant, or upon the supposition that if compared they would ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... He is an old boar, and honest; he wears his tushes outside, for a warning to all men. But for the rest!—Whited sepulchres! and not one of them but has half persuaded himself of his own benevolence. Of all cruelties, save me from your small pedant,—your closet philosopher, who has just courage enough to bestride his theory, without wit to see whither it will carry him. In experience, a child: in obstinacy, a woman: in nothing a man, but in logic-chopping: instead ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... chamber to bring the hand-mirror, and when in an instant she returned and, at her bidding, he held the shining glass before her, she patted his cheeks with their thin, fair, pointed beard, and called him her faithful little Wolf, her clear, stupid pedant and Satan in person, who would fill ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... ship capturing the yacht is a happy extension of a hint from the famous galley scene (Que diable allait-il faire a cette galere?), Act ii, 7, Les Fourberies de Scapin. This, however, is not original with Moliere, being entirely borrowed from Le Pedant Joue, Act ii, 4, of Cyrano de Bergerac (1654). What is practically a translation of Les Fourberies de Scapin by Otway, was produced at the Duke's Theatre in 1677, and in the same year Ravenscroft included a great ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... remark, that a thought which is often quoted from Francis Bacon, occurs in Bruno's Cena di Cenere, published in 1584; I mean the notion, that the later times are more aged than the earlier. In the course of the dialogue, the Pedant, who is one of the interlocutors, says, 'In antiquity is wisdom;' to which the philosophical character replies, 'If you knew what you were talking about, you would see that your principle leads to the opposite result of that which ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 58, December 7, 1850 • Various
... not necessary to be anything but compliant. Lie, cheat, make every word a snare, and every act a forgery; but never contradict. Agree with people, and they make a couch for you in their hearts. You know the story of Dante and the buffoon. Both were entertained at the court of the vain pedant, who called himself Prince Scaliger,—the former poorly, the latter sumptuously. 'How comes it,' said the buffoon to the poet, 'that I am so rich and you so poor?' 'I shall be as rich as you,' was the stinging and true reply, 'whenever ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... abundant supply, he used without arrogance and without excusing himself; so that when he had them, he enjoyed them without affectation, and when he had them not, he did not want them. No one could ever say of him that he was either a sophist or a [home-bred] flippant slave or a pedant; but every one acknowledged him to be a man ripe, perfect, above flattery, able to manage his own and other men's affairs. Besides this, he honored those who were true philosophers, and he did not reproach those who pretended to be philosophers, nor yet was he easily led by them. ...
— The Thoughts Of The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius
... avoiding contention, thou didst never answer this blustering Franck, but wentest quietly about thy quiet Lea, and left him his roaring Brora and windy Assynt. How could this noisy man know thee—and know thee he did, having argued with thee in Stafford—and not love Isaak Walton? A pedant angler, I call him, a plaguy angler, so let him huff away, and turn we to thee and to thy sweet charm ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... tremendous force is paralysed by the inactivity of most of the generals; those in the West, however, forming a bright and truly honorable exception. But, to be candid, how can activity and dash be expected from generals who have at their head, a shallow brained pedant like Halleck? Napoleon had about 500,000 men, when, in between four and five months, he marched from the Rhine to Moscow. Yet he had the aid of no railroad, on land, no steam, that practical annihilator of distance, no electric telegraph, with which to be in all but instantaneous ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... violently into the scurrilous quarrels of the day, and as he was matched with wittier and more popular antagonists, he has come down to us as a foolish pretender, or at least as a dull and stupid scholar who knew little of the real value of the books he was always ready to quote, like the pedant of the comedies, or Shakespere's schoolmaster Holofernes. Further, he was one who, with his classical learning, had little belief in the resources of his mother tongue, and he was one of the earliest and most confident supporters of a plan then fashionable, for reforming English verse, by casting ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... of the strangest types is presented in Bruckner,—a pedant who by persistent ingenuity simulates a master-work almost to perfection. By so much as genius is not an infinite capacity for pains, by so much is Bruckner's Ninth not a true symphony. Sometimes, under the glamor of his art, we are half ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... liberal, and at the same time useful to mankind? Nothing would so much tend to bring classical literature within proper bounds as a steady and invariable appeal to these tests in our appreciation of all human knowledge. The puffed-up pedant would collapse into his proper size, and the maker of verses and the rememberer of words would soon assume that station which is the lot of those who go up unbidden to the upper ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... caricature of his ancestor—the gray-haired farmer whom hatred and anger made an orator, who wielded in masterly style the plough as well as the sword, who with his narrow, but original and sound common sense ordinarily hit the nail on the head—was this young unimpassioned pedant from whose lips dropped scholastic wisdom and who was everywhere seen sitting book in hand, this philosopher who understood neither the art of war nor any other art whatever, this cloud-walker in the realm of abstract morals. Yet he attained ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... disliking him than for liking him. After his death there was a war of pamphlets about him; the one side, led by Lebrun, holding him up as a model for all painters to come, the other side, under de Piles, calling him a mere pedant compared with Rubens. Here is a passage from a ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... countrymen pronounce the letters? Shall we insist on the French pronouncing Newton without that final tong which they never fail to give him? They would be wise enough to laugh at us if we did. We remember that a pedant who was insisting on all the pronunciations being retained, was met by a maxim in contradiction, invented at the moment, and fathered upon Kaen-foo-tzee,[612] an authority which he was challenged to dispute. Whom did you speak of? said the ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... rosy-cheeked, bearded, and taciturn, he produced a strange impression on his companions; they did not suspect that this austere man, who came so punctually to the lectures in a wide village sledge with a pair of horses, was inwardly almost a child. He appeared to them to be a queer kind of pedant; they did not care for him, and made no overtures to him, and he avoided them. During the first two years he spent in the university, he only made acquaintance with one student, from whom he took lessons in Latin. This student Mihalevitch by name, an enthusiast ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... ...—he could see him so clearly! somber, jovial, a little absurd, with his head stuffed full of allegories and symbols, Gothic and rococo, choleric, obstinate, serene, with a passion for life, and a great longing for death ...—he saw him in his school, a genial pedant, surrounded by his pupils, dirty, coarse, vagabond, ragged, with hoarse voices, the ragamuffins with whom he squabbled, and sometimes fought like a navvy, one of whom once gave him a mighty thrashing ...—he saw him with ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... charming girl with a hanap of "extravagant" wine. These agreeable if satiric experiences—for the Decretals do no harm beyond exciting the bile of Master Epistemon (who, it is to be feared, was a little of a pedant)—are followed by the once more almost universally known passage of the "Frozen Words" and the visit to "Messer Gaster, the world's first Master of Arts"; by the islands (once more mysterious) of Chaneph (hypocrisy) and Ganabin ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... endowed with so many talents that they never achieve distinction in any branch of art. He is remembered now only by the literary work of his later life, in which he shows himself as a voluminous pedant and an embittered critic. He made friends with Handel on the spot, and took him under his own protection, providing him with almost daily free meals at his father's house. He evidently regarded him as a very simple and provincial ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... best friend outside of Shakespeare is D'Artagnan—the elderly D'Artagnan of the "Vicomte de Bragelonne." I know not a more human soul, nor, in his way, a finer; I shall be very sorry for the man who is so much of a pedant in morals that he cannot learn from the Captain of Musketeers. Lastly, I must name the "Pilgrim's Progress," a book that breathes of every beautiful ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... all the world, the ignorant and the well-informed, the man of genius, the man of fashion, and the man of business, the pedant and the philosopher, should agree in their opinion upon any speculative subject; upon the wide subject of education they will probably differ eternally. It will, therefore, be thought absurd to require this union of opinion amongst the individuals of a family; but, let there be ever so ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... Jejune, la Fontaine a poor Teller of Tales; and even the Divine Boileau, little better than a Plagiary. As for the English Poets, he treats almost with the same Freedom; Shakespear with him has neither Language nor Manners; Ben. Johnson is a Pedant; Dryden little more than a tolerable Versifier; Congreve a laborious Writer; Garth, an indifferent imitator of Boileau. He traduces Oldham, for want of Breeding and good Manners, without a grain of either, and steals his own Wit ...
— The Present State of Wit (1711) - In A Letter To A Friend In The Country • John Gay
... no attempt to correct the tags of Latinity in this play. Mrs. Behn openly confessed she knew no Latin, and she was ill supplied here. I do not conceive that the words are intentionally faulty and grotesque. Lady Knowell is a pedant, but not ignorant. ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... somewhat disturbed over Lowell's scholarship. He once said of Longfellow: "Mr. Longfellow is not a scholar in the German sense of the word—that is to say, he is no pedant, but he certainly is a scholar in another and perhaps a higher sense. I mean in range of acquirement and the flavor that comes with it." Those words might have been written of himself. It is sixty-five ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... did, and acquit my cousin. But yet, such is the spirit by which the rest of my relations are governed, that they run away with the belief of the worst it insinuates, and the dear creature has had shocking letters upon it; the pedant's hints are taken; and a voyage to one of the colonies has been proposed to her, as the only way to avoid Mr. Belford and you. I have not seen these letters indeed; but they took a pride in repeating ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... occasion, when appealing to a German Brigadier-General on behalf of some homeless women and children, the Prussian martinet—half pedant and half poltroon—answered her with a quotation from Nietzsche to the effect that "Pity is a waste of feeling—a moral parasite injurious to the health." She early felt the cruel and iron will of the invader, but, nothing daunted, she proceeded in the arduous work, supervised ...
— The Case of Edith Cavell - A Study of the Rights of Non-Combatants • James M. Beck
... tales my immediate point is, not how near he was to hell, but how very far off he was from fairyland. That notion about the hero with a magic sword being the superman with a magic superiority is the caprice of a pedant; no child, boy, or man ever felt it in the story of Jack the Giant Killer. Obviously the moral is all the other way. Jack's fairy sword and invisible coat are clumsy expedients for enabling him ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... detachment of mind, and entire independence even of his closest associates. It was a matter to him not of taste but of principle. What mainly marked him out among men was the intense reality of his faith. This gave to all his studies their practical tone. He had none of the pedant's contempt for ordinary life, none of the aesthete's contempt for action as a "little vulgar," and no desire to make of intellectual pursuits an end in themselves. His scholarship was to him as practical ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... none. Little secret plans as to what they were to read about, and think about, and pray about on certain days of the week and at certain hours of the day and the night. You must not call the father an old pedant, for the fact is, it was the son who was the pedant if there was one in that happy house. The two intimate friends had a word between them they called agenda. And nobody but themselves knew where they had ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... father would have thought it a crime to keep books from a boy on the plea that he might injure the bindings or lose the volumes or get harm from unlicensed reading. I did exactly what I liked in the library and browsed about with a splendid incoherence which would have shocked a pedant, but delighted a true man of letters. Now I would open the folio edition of Ben Jonson, now Congreve's plays and poems printed by Baskerville; now a volume of "Counsel's Brief delivered in the defence of Warren Hastings Esqre. at his ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... "the prettiest pedant in the world," was thus paid out for his intrigues against La Bruyere in the ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... intensely though less widely, and Shakespeare (but Shakespeare had already felt the Renaissance spirit) fully and perfectly, on the broad ground of humanity, so that anachronisms, and faults of costume, matter not one jot to any one but a pedant or a fool. When he came to something in the story—something in sentiment, manners, religion, what not—which was out of the range of his own experience, he changed it into something within the range of his own experience. When the whole story did not lend itself to the treatment which ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... Sievers an interesting companion; nothing of the pedant and much of the philosopher. Their conversation was of course chiefly on topics of local interest, anecdotes of the castle and the country, of Vivian's friends, the drunken Johannisberger and his crew, and such matters; but there was a keenness of satire in some of Mr. Sievers' ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... VI. of Scotland, and I. of England, was the son of Mary Stuart and Darnley. Scotland and England were now united under one king. He was not wanting in acquirements, and plumed himself on his knowledge of theology. A conceited pedant, he was impatient of dissent from his opinions. In Scotland, among insubordinate nobles and the ministers of the Kirk,—who on one occasion went so far as to pull his sleeve when they addressed to ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... the pedant, the mother's boy, who looked eighteen but was probably older, pouted, and his heavy lips in his thin face moved. "Cores," Nelsen heard him whisper. He had the habit of talking to himself. Frank knew his interests. Drill cores withdrawn from the strata of another planet, and inspected ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... "intendant." The serio-comic figure of this personage, so graphically drawn by George Sand herself in the memoirs of her early life, will never be forgotten by any reader of those reminiscences. Pedant, she says, was written in every line of his countenance and every movement that he made. He was possessed of some varied learning, much narrow prejudice, and a violent, crotchety temper, but had proved during the troubles of the ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... unmixed with contempt. He and his sister Chichi had from childhood felt an instinctive hostility toward the cousins from Berlin. It annoyed him, too, to have his family everlastingly holding up as a model this pedant who only knew life as it is in books, and passed his existence investigating what men had done in other epochs, in order to draw conclusions in harmony with Germany's views. While young Desnoyers had great facility for admiration, ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... and practice what we teach. Let the grave pedant say as much—But now to business. The jewels are disposed of; and Beverley again worth money. He waits to count his gold out, and then comes hither. If my design succeeds, this night we finish with him. Go to your lodgings, and be busy. ...
— The Gamester (1753) • Edward Moore
... lips, there glisten eyes, There throb young hearts with generous hope; Thence, playmates, rise for high emprize; For, though he fail, yet shall ye cope With worldling wrapped in silken lies, With pedant, hypocrite, and pope. ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... influence was great. They were dominant at Oxford, powerful in the Inns of Court and in the College of Physicians, conspicuous in Parliament and in the literary and fashionable circles of London. Their unanimous cry was, that the honour of the college must be vindicated, that the insolent Cambridge pedant must be put down. Poor Boyle was unequal to the task, and disinclined to it. It was, therefore, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Betterton's days to Garrick's, and later, his plays were commonly acted from mangled versions. But these versions were of two distinct types. The one respected the rules of the classical drama, the other indulged the license of pantomime. The one was the labour of the pedant theorist, the other was rather the improvisation of the theatre manager. And if the former were truly representative of the taste of the century, as has sometimes been implied, it has to be explained how they were not so popular as the latter. "Our taste ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... injudiciously in each." The chronicle of this club was found in 'The Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus,' which is thought to have been written entirely by Arbuthnot, and which describes the education of a learned pedant's son. Its humor may be appreciated by means of the citation given below. The first book of 'Scriblerus' appeared six years after Arbuthnot's death, when it was included in the second volume of Alexander Pope's works (1741). Pope said that from the 'Memoirs of Scriblerus' Swift ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... parties, neither of which had it in its power to do much good or harm to the country; of philosophy and science (other than that of boxing) he knew about as much as the woman who swept his office. Privately, Mr. Kerchever opined that this young man was a conceited pedant, who stood no chance whatever of being elected to Parliament. When questioned by Lady Ogram, he inquired whether Mr. ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... the experience which he has gained. It is not uncustomary in those who have excelled in scholarship to despise those who have excelled merely in sympathetic understanding of the human race. But in the military services, though there are niches for the pedant, character is at all times at least as vital as intellect, and the main rewards go to him who can make other men feel ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... well informed as to the aims of kings and courts; to understand financial and diplomatic movements; briefly, as far as was then possible, to be an incarnate blue-book. He was to study literature and appreciate art, though he was carefully to avoid the excess which makes the pedant or the virtuoso. He was to cultivate a good style in writing and speaking, and even to learn German. Chesterfield's prophecy of a revolution in France (though, I fancy, a little overpraised) shows at least that he was a serious observer of political phenomena. But besides these solid ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... compensated by the risk of the penalty to which those who failed submitted, when no other choice was left. They did not always submit, as the old northern poem shows of Adam Bell, Clym of the Clough, and William of Cloudislee, with its most immoral moral; yet I suppose there was never pedant who could resist the spell of those ringing lines, or refuse with all his heart to wish the rogues success, and confusion to the ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... that the greatness of Dickens comes in; it is just here that the difference lies between the pedant and the poet. Dickens enters the social and political war, and the first stroke he deals is not only significant but even startling. Fully to see this we must appreciate the national situation. It was an age of reform, and even of radical reform; the world ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... most profound, began to address him in Latin; but, turning quick towards him, he gaily said, "Monsieur, j'ai l'honneur de representer Ciceron, le grand Ciceron, pere de sa patrie! mais quoique j'ai cet honneur-la, je ne suit pas pedant!—mon dieu, Monsieur, je ne parle que le Francois dans la bonne compagnie!" And, politely bowing, ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... Washington's letters and substituted for the originals words which he decided were more seemly. Again the public came to know George Washington, not by his own words, but by those attributed to him by an overzealous stylist-pedant. Well might the Father of his Country pray to be delivered from ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... Colonel Daniel Boon, formerly a hunter"; nominally written by Boon himself, in 1784, but in reality by John Filson, the first Kentucky historian,—a man who did history good service, albeit a true sample of the small hedge-school pedant. The old pioneer's own language would have been far better than that which Filson used; for the latter's composition is a travesty of Johnsonese in its most aggravated form. For Filson see Durrett's admirable "Life" in ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... "'Tis true," said he, "but neither was Priam unhappy at his years."—[Plutarch, Apothegms of the Lacedaemonians.]—In a short time, kings of Macedon, successors to that mighty Alexander, became joiners and scriveners at Rome; a tyrant of Sicily, a pedant at Corinth; a conqueror of one-half of the world and general of so many armies, a miserable suppliant to the rascally officers of a king of Egypt: so much did the prolongation of five or six months of life cost the great Pompey; and, in our fathers' ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... have often observed to me, that in paraphrasing Horace, my sex would be an unpardonable crime with every Pedant, whether within, or without the pale of professional criticism. It is not in their power to speak or write more contemptuously of my Horatian Odes than the Critics of Dryden's and Pope's time, in the literary journals of that Period, wrote ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... I forsooth in loue, I that haue beene loues whip? A verie Beadle to a humerous sigh: A Criticke, Nay, a night-watch Constable. A domineering pedant ore the Boy, Then whom no mortall so magnificent, This wimpled, whyning, purblinde waiward Boy, This signior Iunios gyant dwarfe, don Cupid, Regent of Loue-rimes, Lord of folded armes, Th' annointed soueraigne ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... from Shakspeare himself, who, of all authors, drew his portraits for all ages. With the whole sum of the idolatry which affects us at his name, the mass of readers peruse, without amusement, the characters formed on the extravagances of temporary fashion; and the Euphuist Don Armado, the pedant Holofernes, even Nym and Pistol, are read with little pleasure by the mass of the public, being portraits of which we cannot recognize the humour, because the originals no longer exist. In like manner, while the distresses of Romeo and Juliet continue to interest ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... prejudices will be removed by a candid perusal of this memoir. Cavour himself, as a statesman and a man, was of exactly that stamp which we flatter ourselves to be the exclusive growth of America and England. He was nothing of a visionary, nothing of a political pedant, nothing of a doctrinaire. Franklin himself had not a more practical understanding, or more of large, plain, roundabout sense. He had, too, Franklin's shrewdness, his love of humor, and his relish for the natural ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... let pomp and vain pretence My stubborn right abide; I set a plain man's common sense Against the pedant's pride. To-day shall simple manhood try The strength of gold and land; The wide world has not wealth to buy The power in ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... reverence to his sacred shade Whose scenes great Roscius and Aesopus played?" Perhaps with selfish prejudice they deem That nought but what they like deserves esteem, Or, jealous of their juniors, won't allow That what they learnt in youth is rubbish now. As for the pedant whose preposterous whim Finds poetry in Numa's Salian hymn, Who would be thought to have explored alone A land to him and me alike unknown, 'Tis not that buried genius he regards: No; 'tis mere spleen and spite to living bards. Had Greece but been as carping and as cold To new productions, ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... shepherd [writes Armstrong in "Of Taste"], who is acquainted with no language but what is spoken in his own county, may have a much truer relish of the English writers than the most dogmatical pedant that ever erected himself into a commentator, and from his Gothic chair, with an ill-bred arrogance, dictated false criticism to the ...
— Essays on Taste • John Gilbert Cooper, John Armstrong, Ralph Cohen
... eldest daughter. He gets it, and gives it to the "poor damsel," who is languishing, as he says, and who dies the next month,—all the sooner, I have little doubt, for this uncertain and violent drug, with which the meddlesome pedant tormented her in that spirit of well-meant but restless quackery, which could touch nothing without making mischief, not even a quotation, and yet proved at length the means of bringing a great blessing to our community, as we shall see by and by; so does Providence use our very vanities and infirmities ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... think him superior to Lewis Carroll. In one sense, indeed, Lewis Carroll has a great advantage. We know what Lewis Carroll was in daily life: he was a singularly serious and conventional don, universally respected, but very much of a pedant and something of a Philistine. Thus his strange double life in earth and in dreamland emphasizes the idea that lies at the back of nonsense—the idea of escape, of escape into a world where things are not fixed horribly in an eternal appropriateness, ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... and sixpences from all encouragers of learning—Montem in miniature. The Mosaic history was so successful, that the produce enabled Jem to purchase a bat and ball, which, besides adding to his natural arrogance (for the little pedant actually began to mutter against being eclipsed by a dunce, and went so far as to challenge Joe Kirby to a trial in Practice, or the Rule of Three), gave him, when compared with the general poverty, a most unnatural preponderance in the cricket state. He had the ways and means in ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... of demons, and no better than a pagan shrine. The monks, the nuns, and the populace publicly proclaimed their detestation of the union; and their opposition was inflamed by the bigotry of an ambitious pedant, who, under the name of Georgius Scholarius, acted as a warm partisan of the union at the Council of Florence, and under the ecclesiastical name of Gennadius is known in history as the subservient patriarch of Sultan Mahomet II. On returning from Italy, he made a great parade of his repentance ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... a prig; but Herbert was no prig. Nor yet was he a pedant; which word might, perhaps, more nearly have expressed his cousin's meaning. He liked little bits of learning, the easy outsides and tags of classical acquirements, which come so easily within the scope of the memory when ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... a pretty touch of the pedant (who exists, says M. De Banville, in the heart of the poet) in ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... a pedant nor yet a revolutionary: his theories were Utopian and he had an extraordinary ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Spain. In it he describes the election and coronation of Alexander VI, and quotes portions of the declarations of loyalty which the Italian envoys addressed to the Pope. Court flattery could not be carried further than it was in this case by Hieronymus, an affected pedant, an empty-headed braggart, a fanatical papist. Alexander made him Bishop of Andria and Governor of the Romagna. In 1497 Hieronymus, then in Cesena, composed a dialogue on Savonarola and his "heresy concerning the power of the Pope." ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... beetle and of bee Knell their melodious memory. Behind thee leave thy merchandise, Thy churches and thy charities; And leave thy peacock wit behind; Enough for thee the primal mind That flows in streams, that breathes in wind: Leave all thy pedant lore apart; God hid the whole world in thy heart. Love shuns the sage, the child it crowns, Gives all to them who all renounce. The rain comes when the wind calls; The river knows the way to the sea; Without a pilot it runs and falls, Blessing all lands with its charity; ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... prospect, for the failure of which these would not even in their abundance, be a compensation. He kept an unembarrassed eye on Downing Street, and while it may frankly be said for him that he was neither a pedant nor a prig he remembered that the last impression he ought to wish to produce there was that of a ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... Gondola. Granite. Grotto. Guitar. Incognito. Influenza. Lagoon. Lava. Lazaretto. Macaroni. Madonna. Madrigal. Malaria. Manifesto. Motto. Moustache. Niche. Opera. Oratorio. Palette. Pantaloon. Parapet. Pedant. Pianoforte. Piazza. Pistol. Portico. Proviso. Quarto. Regatta. Ruffian. Serenade. Sonnet. Soprano. Stanza. Stiletto. Stucco. Studio. Tenor. Terra-cotta. Tirade. Torso. Trombone. Umbrella. Vermilion. ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... the chance meeting with which it concluded had jarred unpleasantly. Confound the fellow! Was he the first man in the world who had been thrown over by a girl because he had been discovered to be a tiresome pedant? For even supposing Miss Boyce had described that little scene in the library at Mellor to her fiance at the moment of giving him his dismissal—and the year before, by the help of all the news that reached him about the broken engagement, by the help still more of the look, ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... ran the same course as in England earlier; one is almost tempted to hypostatize it and say that it took the bit between its teeth and ran away with its riders. Actually, the man cast for the role of Henry VIII was James VI; the slobbering pedant without drawing the sword did what his abler ancestors could not do after a life-time of battle. He made himself all but absolute, and this, demonstrably, as head of ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith |
