"Pedantical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the whole might be heightened, by an affecting description of the horrors that attend the wasting of kingdoms, and sacking of cities. But I do not write to the vulgar, nor to that which only governs the vulgar, their passions. I go upon a naked and moderate calculation, just enough, without a pedantical exactness, to give your lordship some feeling of the effects of political society. I charge the whole of these effects on political society. I avow the charge, and I shall presently make it good to your lordship's satisfaction. The numbers I particularized are about thirty-six millions. Besides ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... situation enable him to interpret it. Any lawyer could give numberless instances where an inability to write clear and simple English has caused litigation without end. Indeed, the bar is largely supported by errors in English composition! And as for conversation conducted—I will not say with pedantical correctness, for that is not an ideal, but with accuracy and transparency of thought—listen to the talk ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... there was "clearing of decks, lacing of nettings, making of bulwarks, fitting of waist-cloths, arming of tops, tallowing of pikes, slinging of yards, doubling of sheets and tacks," enough to satisfy even the pedantical soul of Richard Hawkins himself. Amyas took charge of the poop, Cary of the forecastle, and Yeo, as gunner, of the main-deck, while Drew, as master, settled himself in the waist; and all was ready, and more than ready, before the great ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... what the war-spirit can make of Shakespeare. It was interpreted in the pedantic historical vein, and was given as a bloody, brutal mediaeval piece without a thought or a smile or a tear. Richard was shown as a "Hun" of the worst kind. His murderous career was facilitated by his characterless victims. Anne was a "characteristic English hypocrite," pretending to mourn ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... minutes Cyril Vernon-Smith was nearer to the people and more their brother than he had been in his whole high-stepping pedantic existence; for if he did not love a poor man, he hated one. And you never really regard a labourer as your equal until you can quarrel with him. "Dirty cad!" he muttered. "Filthy fool! Mucking with snow like a beastly baby! When will they be civilized? Why, the very state of the street is a disgrace ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... Suppose that, every morning, when we tore the wrapper off our paper with fevered hands, a transmutation were to take place, and we were to find inside it—oh! I don't know; shall we say Pascal's Pensees?" He articulated the title with an ironic emphasis so as not to appear pedantic. "And then, in the gilt and tooled volumes which we open once in ten years," he went on, shewing that contempt for the things of this world which some men of the world like to affect, "we should read that the Queen of the Hellenes had arrived at Cannes, or that the Princesse de Leon had given a ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... security, "he wallows in the mud;"[3209] he declares "that he submits to the judgment of the revolutionary Tribunal," and swears to denounce "whoever shall oppose any obstacle to the execution of the decree."[3210] Has not Robespierre taught him a lesson, and in his most pedantic manner? What is more beautiful, says the great moralist, more sublime, than an Assembly which purges itself?[3211]—Thus, not only is the net which has already dragged out so many palpitating victims still intact, but it is enlarged and set again, only, the fish are now caught on the "Left" ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Pretensions of Poverty Thou dost presume too much, poor needy wretch, To claim a station in the firmament Because thy humble cottage, or thy tub, Nurses some lazy or pedantic virtue In the cheap sunshine or by shady springs, With roots and pot-herbs; where thy right hand, Tearing those humane passions from the mind, Upon whose stocks fair blooming virtues flourish, Degradeth nature, and benumbeth sense, And, Gorgon-like, turns active men ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... incurable bad taste, incomprehensible laziness, the ignorance of a savage, so much so that she regarded Doctor Derogis as a person of great celebrity, and she felt proud of entertaining himself and his wife, because they were "married people." She lectured with a pedantic air on the affairs of daily life to Mademoiselle Irma, a poor little creature endowed with a little voice, who had as a protector a gentleman "very well off," an ex-clerk in the Custom-house, who had a rare talent for card tricks. ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... Bagehot that to be perpetually haunted by the plush behind your chair is hardly a sign of lofty literary and moral genius; and they consider him narrow and vulgar in his view of humanity, limited in his outlook upon life, inclined to be envious, inclined to be tedious and pedantic, prone to repetitions, and apt in bidding for applause to appeal to the baser qualities of his readers and to catch their sympathy by making them feel themselves spitefully superior to their fellow-men. ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... instruction, and should be given when, by familiarity with concrete illustrations, they have come to be felt as the natural embodiment of visible fact. In this early stage proofs should not be given with pedantic fullness; definitely fallacious methods, such as that of superposition, should be rigidly excluded from the first, but where, without such methods, the proof would be very difficult, the result should be rendered acceptable by arguments and ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... most appalled to find that the man with whom I had spent a whole afternoon in the firm conviction that he was outwardly, as well as inwardly, my equal and a gentleman—(how the tears, half of shame, half of joy, rise to my eyes now as I think of my poor, pedantic little scruples then!) the man of whom I had assuredly thought and dreamed many and many a time and oft was—a professional musician, a man in a band, a German band, playing in the public orchestra of ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... profitable use of our Lord's parables does not depend on rare and difficult erudition. If a deficiency in this department infers the risk of baldness in the exposition, a redundance supplies a temptation to pedantic display. It is one thing to place some ancient eastern custom in such a position that a ray of light from its surface shall pleasantly illumine a feature of the parable that was lying in the shade, and all another thing to ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... meant to apply to the German language would have but little bearing upon one so different from it as English. This would be a just objection if Schopenhauer treated literature in a petty spirit, and confined himself to pedantic inquiries into matters of grammar and etymology, or mere niceties of phrase. But this is not so. He deals with his subject broadly, and takes large and general views; nor can anyone who knows anything of the philosopher suppose this ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Nature's perpetual and universal decay." [Footnote: An Apologie or Declaration of the Power and Providence of God in the Government of the World, consisting in an Examination and Censure of the common Errour, etc. (1627, 1630, 1635).] He and his pedantic book, which breathes the atmosphere of the sixteenth century, are completely forgotten; and though it ran to three editions, it can hardly have attracted the attention of many except theologians. The writer's object is to prove that the power and providence of God in ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... to feel a strong sympathy for the writer of these notices. She showed an orderly, almost pedantic, character, mingled with generosity of heart. He turned leaf after leaf until he finally came to the words, written in intentionally heavy ...
— The Case of The Pocket Diary Found in the Snow • Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner
... and has its due weight in his experience. These minor skills and accomplishments—for example, dancing—are tickets of admission to the dress-circle of mankind, and the being master of them enables the youth to judge intelligently of much on which otherwise he would give a pedantic squint. Landor said, "I have suffered more from my bad dancing than from all the misfortunes and miseries of my life put together." Provided always the boy is teachable, (for we are not proposing to make a statue out of punk,) football, cricket, archery, swimming, skating, climbing, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... something we know, and that he knows nothing of, such as the Creed, or the history of Little Bukleton, or some favourite book. Then, again, if one is alone with one's opponent, it is quite easy to pretend that the subject on which one has shown ignorance is unimportant, peculiar, pedantic, hole in the corner, and this can be brazened out even about Greek or Latin. Or, again, one can turn the laugh against him, saying that he has just been cramming up the matter, and that he is airing his knowledge; or one can begin ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... fascinations of disinterested inquiry are so great that they may lead to a kind of scientific intemperance. The abstracted scientific interest may become so absorbed in the working-out of small details that it becomes over-specialized, narrow, and pedantic. The pure theorist has always been regarded with suspicion by the practical man. His concern over details of flora or fauna, over the precise minutiae of ancient hieroglyphics, seems absurdly trivial in comparison with the central passions ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... own country, and that of Assyria, Greece and Rome; and all the written languages of the world were to her familiar. She had been educated by the philosophers, who had brought from Greece the science of Pythagoras and Plato. Her companions had been men—not women, or nurses, or pious, pedantic priests. ...
— The Mintage • Elbert Hubbard
... in Germany you hear stories of police interference and petty tyranny, and it is mere luck if you do not innocently transgress some of their fussy pedantic regulations. In South Germany I once put a cream jug on my window-sill to keep a little milk cool for the afternoon. The jug was so small and the window so high that it can hardly have been visible from the street, but my landlady came to ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... language. Let him not be negligent of this in his conversation; but be careful ever to select the best words, to avoid a slovenly style and drawling utterance, and to aim at neatness, force, and brevity. This may be done without formality, or stiffness, or pedantic affectation; and when settled ...
— Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching • Henry Ware
... divided into twelve books, but has no reference to astronomy, which we might naturally expect. He distinguished his twelve books by the twelve names of the celestial signs, and probably extended or confined them purposely to that number, to humour his fancy. Warton, however, observes, "This strange pedantic title is not totally without a conceit, as the author was born at Stellada or Stellata, a province of Ferrara, and from whence he called himself Marcellus Palingenius Stellatus." The work itself is a curious satire on the Pope and the Church of Rome. It occasioned Bayle to commit a ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... when they had been clearly pointed out by Miyoshi Kiyotsura. The usurpations of the Fujiwara; the prostitution of Buddhism to evil ends; the growth of luxurious and dissipated habits, and the subordination of practical ability to pedantic scholarship—these four malignant growths upon the national life found no healing treatment at ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... substituted criticism and literature for faith. His first position was that of tutor in Harvard. Instinctively a humanist, he had little patience with the narrow curriculum of Harvard in his day and the rather pedantic spirit with which classical studies were there pursued. Moreover, he had brought from Europe a new manner, full of the affections of ardent youth, and this he wore without ease in a society highly satisfied with itself; ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... sovereign, bombastical carmina on occasion of the birth, wedding, accession, victories, fetes, treaties of peace, and burial of potentates, love-couplets equally strained, twisted compliments to female beauty, with pedantic, often indecent, citations from ancient mythology, chiefly characterized this school of poetry. Martin Opitz, A.D. 1639, the founder of the first Silesian school,[1] notwithstanding the insipidity of the taste of the day, preserved the harmony of ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... reigns the people that will be like to put you to death for not being a vagrant, for not being a robber, for not being armed and houseless. There is comfort in that—health, comfort, and strength to one who is dying from very weariness of that poor, dear, middle-aged, deserving, accomplished, pedantic, and ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... put up with the vicar's antiquities, but not with the young vicar's pedantic Oxonianism. He does think so well of himself, and quite rules every ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... That pedantic charge of inaccuracy, with which I have already dealt in another place, in connection with another and perhaps a greater man, is not applicable to Froude. He was hasty, and in his historical work the result certainly was that he put down things upon insufficient evidence, or upon ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... of the rhymes, whilst Thomson, revolting more or less consciously against the canons of his time, too often falls into mere pompous mouthing. Shaftesbury, in the previous generation, trying to write poetical prose, becomes as pedantic as Johnson, though in a different style; and Gibbon's mannerism is a familiar example of a similar escape from a monotonous simplicity into awkward complexity. Such writers are like men who have been chilled by what Johnson would ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... having leisure to dart on its chosen morsels, without any flattering eagerness. Men's future upon earth does not attract it; their honesty and shapeliness in the present does; and whenever they were out of proportion, overthrown, affected, pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic, fantastically delicate; whenever it sees them self-deceived or hoodwinked, given to run riot in idolatries, drifting into vanities, congregating in absurdities, planning shortsightedly, plotting dementedly; whenever they are at variance with ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... Strictly speaking they were not English; the two ladies were Inglesi Americane, which Turiddu said he understood because his mother had acted in the Argentina and, though South America is not North America, it appeared pedantic to insist on the distinction. The two gentlemen, again, were really Inglesi Irlandesi, and here also we were in trouble because he mistook Irlandesi for Olandesi and thought they were what ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... coming young from lands and scenes romantic, Where lives, not lawsuits, must be risked for Passion And Passion's self must have a spice of frantic, Into a country where 't is half a fashion, Seemed to him half commercial, half pedantic, Howe'er he might esteem this moral nation: Besides (alas! his taste—forgive and pity!) At first he did not think ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... more delicately and happily both the weakness and the strength of Germany; pedantic, simple, enslaved, free, ridiculous, ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... that reverend mummer, who is neither true priest nor true soldier. But I will fetch one who shall confront him either in casque or cowl." So saying, she went hastily out of the chapel, while the monk, after some pedantic circumlocution, acquainted the Lady Eveline with what he had overheard betwixt Jorworth and Wilkin; and proposed to her to draw together the few English who were in the castle, and take possession of the innermost square tower; a keep ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... RUSSEL,—What am I expected to do with the Cat Stane? Not to review it, I hope. I have had a sniff of it already in the proceedings of the Antiquarian Society. It is a brilliant specimen of the pedantic pottering of the learned body which enables me to append to my name the A.S.S., fraudulently inverted into S.S.A. Such twaddle always excites me into feverishness. I ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... see how ridiculous this young girl, by the betrayal of such ignorance, made herself in conversation with a cultured young gentleman whose good opinion she was most anxious to win. And yet, to talk too much about books is not well; it often marks the pedantic and egotistic character. It is safe to say that unless one happens to meet a very congenial mind among conversers in general society, to introduce the subject of books is liable to be misconstrued. It is not very long since another popular modern novelist held up to scorn and ridicule the young ...
— Letters to a Daughter and A Little Sermon to School Girls • Helen Ekin Starrett
... teachers. At the same time, in the matter of fingering, he endeavors to choose the one which can be most easily accomplished by the player. The Von Buelow editions, while very erudite, are apt to be laborious and pedantic; they show the German tendency to over-elaboration, which, when carried too ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... entertaining Wittmore in the garden they are surprised by Sir Patient, and she is obliged to pass her visitor off under the name of Fainlove as a suitor to her step-daughter, Isabella, in which role he is accepted by Sir Patient. But Isabella has betrothed herself to Lodwick, a son of the pedantic Lady Knowell: whilst Lucretia Knowell loves Leander, the alderman's nephew, in spite of the fact that she is promised by her mother to Sir Credulous Easy, a bumpkinly knight from Devonshire. Lodwick, who is a close friend of Leander, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... he did awake again. Three more days passed wearily away, and the patient was delirious most of the time. DeGolyer's acquaintance with Spanish was but small, and he could comprehend but little of what a pedantic doctor might say, yet he learned that there was not much encouragement to be drawn from the fact that the sick man's mind sometimes returned ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... was wont to style it, Slaughterhouse, no doubt from the cruel tyranny of another educational D.D., the Rev. Dr. Russell. For this man and the school he so despotically drilled into passive servility and pedantic scholarship, I have less than no reverence, for he worked so upon an over-sensitive nature to force a boy beyond his powers, as to fix for many years the infirmity of stammering, which was my affliction until past middle life. As for tuition, ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... should retain the entire composition, the constant habit of recital, the constant exercise of memory, would render such a task by no means impracticable or unprecedented. As for the unity of the poem, thus composed, it would have been, as it is, the unity, not of technical rules and pedantic criticism, but the unity of interest, character, imagery, and thought—a unity which required no written references to maintain it, but which was the essential quality of one master-mind, and ought to be, ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... his features and so drab in his attire, that it was hard to associate him with the stirring scenes of yesterday and with the repulsive part which he had played in them. Now in the fresh morning sunlight he presented rather the appearance of a pedantic schoolmaster, an impression which was increased by the masterful, and yet benevolent, smile with which he regarded me. In spite of his smile, I was more conscious than ever that my whole soul shrank from him, and that I should not ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... against suicide, with some casuistic illustrations, but it also contains an account of Dr. Donne's vindication of Suicide, called Bia-thanatos, 1651, in which these remarks of Holbach occur verbatim. Hallam found Donne's book so dull and pedantic that he declares no one would be induced to kill himself by reading such a book unless he were threatened with ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... brought Jacob Flanders to read Marlowe in the British Museum? Youth, youth—something savage—something pedantic. For example, there is Mr. Masefield, there is Mr. Bennett. Stuff them into the flame of Marlowe and burn them to cinders. Let not a shred remain. Don't palter with the second rate. Detest your own age. Build a better one. And to set that ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... Macaulay was always for employing the tools which came to hand. A warm and consistent advocate of appointment by competitive examination, wherever a field for competition existed, he was no pedantic slave to a theory. In the dearth of schoolmasters, which is a feature in every infant educational system, he refused to reject a candidate who mistook "Argos for Corinth," and backed the claims of aspirants of respectable character who could "read, ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... Chapter of digression and anecdotes, as an interlude preceding that on the nature and genesis of the Imagination or Plastic Power—On Pedantry and pedantic expressions— Advice to young authors respecting publication—Various anecdotes of the Author's literary life, and the progress of his ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... has been said upon this point. If Pope erred, he was certainly unfortunate in the objects of his youthful hero-worship. Cromwell seems to have been but a pedantic hanger-on of literary circles. His other great friend, Wycherley, had stronger claims upon his respect, but certainly was not likely to raise his standard of delicacy. Wycherley was a relic of a past literary epoch. He was nearly fifty years older ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... into the same snare before they were aware of it. We wonder at the eccentricities of the priesthood, at the conceit of the hereditary nobility, at the affectation of majestic stateliness inherent in royalty. But the pedantic display of learning, the disregard of the real wants of the people, the contempt of all knowledge which does not wear the academic garb, show the same foible, the same conceit, the same spirit of caste among those who, from the sixteenth ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... it, I suppose, intended for a corruption of Custos Rotulorum. The mistake was hardly designed by the author, who, though he gives Shallow folly enough, makes him rather pedantic than illiterate. ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... an excellent conversationalist; humorous without being cynical, scholarly without being pedantic, and showing especial familiarity with history and ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... keep pace with them. Constant and eager watchfulness, and portfolios filled with actual statements of water-effect, drawn on the spot and on the instant, are worth more to the painter than the most extended optical knowledge; without these all his knowledge will end in a pedantic falsehood. With these it does not matter how gross or how daring here and there may be his violations of this or that law; his ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... his valise in his hand, his black wig adjusted, and footing it on the ice with a sort of sober doggedness of manner, my enemy was changed almost beyond recognition: changed in everything but a certain dry, polemical, pedantic air, that spoke of a sedentary occupation and high stools. I observed, too, that his valise was heavy; and, putting this and that together, hit upon ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... lines to comprehend the sense of one of Juvenal's. According to the falsity of the proposition was the success. He was forced to crowd his verse with ill-sounding monosyllables (of which our barbarous language affords him a wild plenty), and by that means he arrived at his pedantic end, which was to make a literal translation. His verses have nothing of verse in them, but only the worst part of it—the rhyme; and that, into the bargain, is far from good. But, which is more intolerable, by cramming his ill-chosen ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... glad to see the national mind beginning to effervesce on art subjects. The most opposite views, the new and the old, the conventional and the truly imaginative, the severely real and the more latitudinarian, the earnest and the flippant, the pedantic and the broad, far reaching—will continue to clash for a season, while a school of American Landscape is, we think, destined to rise steadily through the chaotic elements, and to reach a height of excellence to which the conscientious efforts of all advocates ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... man, "Pedantic rot!—the tree's me, I repeat. Every tree has its gnome or elf; they used to call us dryads in old times; but nowadays people are getting so cock-sure of knowing everything, that they can't see what is going on right under their noses. Trees are ...
— Fairy Tales from the German Forests • Margaret Arndt
... Mery Talys was one of the popular tracts described by the pedantic Laneham, in his Letter from Kenilworth, 1575, as being in the Library of ...
— Shakespeare Jest-Books; - Reprints of the Early and Very Rare Jest-Books Supposed - to Have Been Used by Shakespeare • Unknown
... flamboyant interviews. Even a complimentary luncheon at the Voyagers' Club was courteously declined. Indeed, it began to be felt that the self-effacement of the returned pressmen was being carried to a pedantic length. Foreman compositors, advertisement clerks, and other members of the non-editorial staff, who had, of course, taken no part in the great trek, found it as impossible to get into direct communication with the editor and his satellites ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... with their incessant flutter, and bluster, and twitter, and twaddle; with their perpetual strain after effect; with their deathless desire to get one rung of the ladder higher than they ever can get; with their preposterous affectations, their pedantic unrealities, their morbid dread of remark, their everlasting imitations, their superficial education, their monotonous commonplaces, and their nervous deference to opinion;—it is your middle classes that have utterly destroyed good manners, and have made the prevalent mode ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... Republicanism was in the air. Chesterfield was thinking of the France of his youth; but France had changed. In 1765, Horace Walpole was depressed by the solemnity and austerity of French society. Their style of conversation was serious, pedantic, and seldom animated except by a dispute on some philosophic subject.[375] In fact, Chesterfield was admiring the France of Louis the Fourteenth long after "Le Soleil" had set, and the country was sombre. It was the ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... pedantic demonstration of the derivation of the name from a compound Sanskrit word, signifying "Diamond City." And the document concludes with a characteristic explosion of impatience, at once critical, royal, and anecdotal: ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... powder-barrels found among wood and faggots, but also one of the conspirators, Guy Fawkes, who was busy with the last preparations for the execution of the plot. With a smiling countenance he confessed his purpose, which he seemed to regard as the fulfilment of a religious duty. The pedantic monarch thought himself in the presence of a ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... be the coarsest flattery, will give more offence, in the end, than to treat ladies as mere playthings or children. On the other hand, do not become pedantic, and lecture them on difficult subjects. They readily see through all this. Neither is it good manners or policy to talk much of yourself. They can penetrate this also; and they despise the vanity which produces it. ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... enthusiasm of the greeting the candidate received every place he spoke, nor the response his thrilling speeches evoked all over the state. Those who had gathered the idea that the head of the great university would appear pedantic and stand stiff-necked upon an academic pedestal from which he would talk over the heads of the common people were forced, by the fighting, aggressive attitude of the Doctor, to revise their old estimates. ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... pigskin? Surely a male biped need not dwell In a prejudiced pedantic prig's skin, Not to like that prospect passing well. CARLYLE, who scoffed at Man, had deemed it caddish To picture Woman ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 22, 1890 • Various
... tell you this will you think me some little girl who cultivates a garden-full of illusions? You, who are witty and wise, have you not guessed that when Mademoiselle d'Este received your pedantic lesson she said to herself: "No, dear poet, my first letter was not the pebble which a vagabond child flings about the highway to frighten the owner of the adjacent fruit-trees, but a net carefully and prudently thrown ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... principles of constitutional liberty, both nations so wisely combined in their constitutions. Why tear down the noble edifice you cannot rebuild? why blight the cheering prospects of thousands to gratify the vain ambition of pedantic politicians? ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... pedantic volumes to Sir Walter Besant's delightful sketch, there are any number of versions of the story of Cook's life and work. Let us assume that everyone knows how James Cook, son of a superior farm labourer in Yorkshire, at thirteen years of age apprenticed to a fishing village ...
— The Naval Pioneers of Australia • Louis Becke and Walter Jeffery
... of youthful attractions, essentially of the nervous type. She was not without pride in her Cavalier stock and the dash of Cavalier blood it brought. The elder sister had none of her mother. Aspiring socially, she was reserved, pedantic, platitudinizing, thoroughly self-sufficient. She finished well up in her class in a small, woman's so-called "college" and lived with such prudence and exercised such foresight that, in spite of her Methodist rearing, she wedded the young, local, Episcopal rector, and, childless but still ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... had received more than one long and rambling letter from a man who was as unlike the rest of mankind as he was unlike them himself. This was the Marquis of Mirabeau (1715-89), the violent, tyrannical, pedantic, humoristic sire of a more famous son. Perhaps we might say that Mirabeau and Rousseau were the two most singular originals then known to men, and Mirabeau's originality was in some respects the more salient of the two. There is less of the conventional ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... determine the existence of such a contingency, and moral courage to assume the responsibility of acting on it. Such a crisis is the severest test of character. To dare to disobey from a paramount sense of duty, is a paradox that a little soul can hardly comprehend. Unfortunately, Blasco Nunez was a pedantic martinet, a man of narrow views, who could not feel himself authorized under any circumstances to swerve from the letter of the law. Puffed up by his brief authority, moreover, he considered opposition to the ordinances as treason to himself; and thus, identifying ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... Lane, by the too strict an adherence to Oriental forms of expression, and somewhat pedantic rendering of the spelling of proper names, is found to be tedious to a very large number of readers attracted by the rich imagination, romance, and humour ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... becoming a force within the body politic as well as in religion. Ulster was 'planted' with Englishmen and Lowland Scots. In the midst of all these changes the great Queen, grown old and very lonely, died in 1603; and with her ended the glorious Tudor dynasty of England. James, pusillanimous and pedantic son of Darnley and Mary Queen of Scots, ascended the throne as the first of the sinister Stuarts, and, truckling to vindictive Spain, threw Raleigh into prison under suspended sentence ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... had been very extensive, so was he very happy in a memory, tenacious of every thing that he had read. He was not more possessed of knowledge than he was communicative of it. But then his communication of it was by no means pedantic, or imposed upon the conversation; but just such, and went so far, as, by the natural turns of the discourse in which he was engaged, it was necessarily promoted or required. He was extreme ready and gentle in his correction of the errors of any writer, who thought fit to consult him; and ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... asked. Sid does like to put every moment to use when the performance-fire is in people, but this project seemed pretty far afield—hyper-pedantic. Yet at the same time I felt my scalp shivering as if my mind were jumping with speculations ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... course, and not in that desultory and unmethodical manner, in which many people read scraps of different authors, upon different subjects. Keep a useful and short commonplace book of what you read, to help your memory only, and not for pedantic quotations. Never read history without having maps and a chronological book, or tables, lying by you, and constantly recurred to; without which history is only a confused heap of facts. One method more I recommend to you, by which I have found great benefit, ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... severely drilled in the classics and mathematics, for he never could become a specialist in anything. But perhaps, even in this, fate was dealing with him according to his capacities. And, indeed, he had a greater respect for the scholarship of his wayside tutor than for the pedantic acquirements of many men he came to know afterwards. It was from him that Philip learned about books and how to look for what he wanted to know, and it was he who directed Philip's taste to the best. When he went off to college ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... on the mythology of India. Here we have myths that were perhaps originally popular tales, and are probably old; here again, we have later legends that certainly were conceived in the narrow minds of a pedantic and ceremonious priesthood. It is not possible, of course, to analyse in this place all the myths of all the periods; we must be content to point out some which seem to be typical examples of the working ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... yet impassioned, is a fundamental defect of his. It is the very impetuosity of this mental energy to which is due the miscalled obscurity of much of Browning's work—miscalled, because, however remote in his allusions, however pedantic even, he is never obscure in his thought. His is that "palace infinite which darkens with excess of light." But mere excess in itself is nothing more than symptomatic. Browning has suffered more from intellectual ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... felt when she had the good fortune to give pain to any of her dependants; a horrid grin then distorted her features, and her before lifeless eyes glistened with malice and rancorous joy. She had read just enough to make her pedantic, and too little to give her any improving knowledge. Her understanding was naturally small, and her self-conceit great. In her person she was tall and meagre, her hair black, and her complexion of the darkest brown, with an additional ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... thou from Nature, not the Schools Distorted by pedantic rules, With patience wrought, such logic vain Had ne'er perverted thus thy brain: For Genius never gave delight By means of what offends the sight: Nor hadst thou deem'd, with folly mad, Thou could'st to Nature's beauties add, By taking from her that ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... indeed, massive, thorough and severe. But it was not in the least degree stiff and pedantic. It was, on the contrary, an intellect of marvelous flexibility. There was no material to which it could not adapt itself and no feat which it could not perform. You may observe this, for example, ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... personage of a very different stamp—a most interesting specimen of the genus Yankee, contrasting in a striking manner with the rough-hewn sons of Anuk who surrounded him. He was a man of some thirty years of age, as dry and tough as leather, of grave and pedantic mien, the skin of his forehead twisted into innumerable small wrinkles, his lips pressed firmly together, his bright reddish-grey eyes apparently fixed, but, in reality, perpetually shifting their restless glances from the men by whom he was surrounded, to some ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... I. confronted and confuted the Puritan divines whom he invited to lay their complaints before him, and there in his pedantic brow-beating so hammered their hard metal that he tempered it to the sword soon to be unsheathed against his son; it was there that Charles began the famous quarrel with his queen which ended in his deporting ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... happy-starred; for God, When He with inkpot and with rod Endowed you, bade your fortune lead For ever by the crooks of Tweed, For ever by the woods of song And lands that to the Muse belong; Or if in peopled streets, or in The abhorred pedantic sanhedrin, It should be yours to wander, still Airs of the morn, airs of the hill, The plovery Forest and the seas That break about the Hebrides, Should follow over field and plain And find you at the window-pane; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Uncle Philip admitted. "It is not always easy to say the right word to a little fellow who has the right on his side and needs to have the other side shown to him, too; he is terribly pedantic besides, and says that one can't sing a morning song in the evening, and when he began to wail in his helplessness, it made me miserable. How should one always just be able to ...
— Maezli - A Story of the Swiss Valleys • Johanna Spyri
... "come on" with equal regularity. But the amateur, with his limited assortment, misses every bloom. He has no need for anxiety with this genus. It is their instinct to flower in spring, of course, but they are not pedantic about it in the least. Some tiny detail overlooked here and there, absolutely unimportant to health, will retard florescence. It might very well happen that the owner of a dozen pots had one blooming every month successively. And ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... then Esmond has it, which from first to last in conception and execution is an altogether lovely book; and if it go by heroes—Esmond and Butler—then again there is no comparison, for the grandson of Cromwell's trooper was a very wearisome, pedantic, grey-coloured Puritan in whom one cannot affect the slightest interest. How poorly he compares with Henry Esmond, who was slow and diffident, but a very brave, chivalrous, single-hearted, modest gentleman, such as Thackeray loved to describe. Were it not ...
— Books and Bookmen • Ian Maclaren
... cheek of Venus—sure evidence of a paucity of ideas. A trite proverb, a non-translatable phrase from a foreign tongue may be permissible; but the writer who jumbles two languages together indiscriminately is but a pedantic prig. It were bad enough if Du Maurier mixed good English with better French; but he employs in his bilingual book the very worst of both—obsolete American provincialisms and the patois of the quartier latin side by ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... past year, been aroused by the fame of Martin Luther's "heresy," and they were ready to resent any attempt at innovation, however slight, either in doctrine or in practice, as evidence of heretical proclivities. Natalis Beda, the ignorant but pedantic syndic of the theological faculty, entered the lists as Lefevre's opponent, and an animated dispute was waged between the friends of the two combatants. Of so great moment was the decision regarded by Poncher, Bishop of Paris, that he induced Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... Arthur St. Clair. Before the close of the year Congress sold one million acres between the two Miamis to Judge Symmes of New Jersey; and three little towns were at once laid out. To one of them a pedantic schoolmaster gave the name L-os-anti-ville, "the town opposite the mouth of the Licking." The name may have required too much explanation; at all events, when, in 1790, the Governor transferred the capital thither from Marietta, he ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... great violence on the person of the prosecutor, who had done nothing to provoke it, and that the attempt to effect it was followed by severe injury to him. The prosecutor was an original. He had been an old-field school-master, and was as conceited and pedantic a fellow as could be found in a summer's day, even in that profession. It was thought the policy of the defense to make as light of the case as possible, and to cast as much ridicule on the affair as they could. J.E. and W.M. led the defense, and, although the talents of the ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... knowledge of the subjects of the day; and Mr. Henry Lennox and the sprinkling of rising men who were received as his friends, brought the wit, the cleverness, the keen and extensive knowledge of which they knew well enough how to avail themselves without seeming pedantic, or burdening the ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... influence upon all, but it actually leads to false views of life, and an unsound philosophy such as transcendental idealism, pessimism, indolence, and the pursuit of visionary falsehoods which a well-balanced mind would intuitively reject. These follies are cultivated by a pedantic system of education, and by the accumulated literature which such education in the past has developed, feeble and faulty in style, superficial in conception, and sadly misleading as to the principles and purposes ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... available. Chief among these always is the dictionary, and to get pupils to use this ponderous volume effectively is one of the important steps in teaching them how to study. Here, too, it is easy to be pedantic. As I shall insist strenuously a little later, the chief factor in insuring a transfer of training from one subject to another is to leave in the pupil's mind a distinct consciousness that the method that he has been trained to follow is worth while,—that it ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... couch. He was a man "of small learning," says Murimuth; "passably literate," writes Chambre; at the best, according to Petrarch, "of ardent temperament, not ignorant of literature, with a natural curiosity for out-of-the- way lore": an antiquarian, not of the lovable kind, but unscrupulous, pedantic, and vain, indulging an inordinate taste for collecting and hoarding books, perhaps to satisfy a craving for shreds and patches of knowledge, but more likely to earn a reputation as a great clerk.[1] For De Bury was something of a humbug; the Philobiblon, if it is his work, reaches the ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... uninstructed, untaught, uninitiated, untutored, unschooled, misguided, unenlightened; Philistine; behind the age. shallow, superficial, green, rude, empty, half-learned, illiterate; unread, uninformed, uneducated, unlearned, unlettered, unbookish; empty-headed, dizzy, wooly-headed; pedantic; in the dark; benighted, belated; blinded, blindfolded; hoodwinked; misinformed; au bout de son latin, at the end of his tether, at fault; at sea &c (uncertain) 475; caught tripping. unknown, unapprehended, unexplained, unascertained, uninvestigated^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... accepted the Newtonian astronomy despite the outcries against its "atheistic tendency"; he took ground against the time-honoured dogma that comets are "signs and wonders." He had, indeed, some of the defects of his qualities, and among them pedantic vanity, pride of opinion, and love of power; but he was for his time remarkably liberal and undoubtedly sincere. He had thrown off a large part of his father's theology, but one part of it he could not throw off: he was one of the best biblical scholars of his time, and he could not break ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... the discussion of probabilities there emerge four principal cautions as to their use: Not to make a pedantic parade of numerical probability, where the numbers have not been ascertained; Not to trust to our feeling of what is likely, if statistics can be obtained; Not to apply an average probability to special classes or individuals ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... still weightier objections to calling the said people by any other name. One misnomer is as good as another; and to refer to old Greeks and Romans in a private letter as the old Hellenes from Hellas or Magna Graecia, and the Latins as from Latium, would have been, besides looking pedantic, just as incorrect as the use of the appellation noted, though it may have sounded, perchance, more "historical." The truth is that, like the ancestors of nearly all the Indo-Europeans (or shall we say Indo-Germanic ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... when Vitruvius began to dominate the Italian imagination, that Michelangelo was called upon to build. The genial adaptation of classical elements to modern sympathies and uses, which had been practised by Alberti, Brunelleschi, Bramante, yielded now to painful efforts after the appropriation of pedantic principles. Instead of working upon antique monuments with their senses and emotions, men approached them through the medium of scholastic erudition. Instead of seeing and feeling for themselves, they sought by dissection ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... friends, who have exhibited no pedantic anxiety to remain and behold the result of their labours, are lying upon their stomachs in a convenient fold in the ground, waiting patiently until such time as it shall be feasible to complete their ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... would, unroof'd, old Granta's halls, Pedantic inmates full display; Fellows who dream on lawn or stalls, The price of venal votes to ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron |
