"Anachronism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sprang to life a logical production of the times. Their authors seized on the character of a king and a warrior—their highest conception of greatness, in the persons of Charlemagne and Arthur. Regardless of anachronism, they represented their heroes as the centre of a chivalric court, accoutred in the arms, and practising the customs of later centuries; they created in fact a new Arthur and a new Charlemagne, adapted to the new times. They brought to light the almost forgotten ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... recent name; tradition has a knack of bringing forward its dates; stories of immemorial antiquity are related as though they were the experience of the narrator's father or grandfather, and are modernised to suit that supposition. Legend never sticks at absurdity or anachronism. From some versions of the story it would appear that Tregeagle could not have lived earlier than the seventeenth century, in actual accordance with the date on his tombstone; but in others certain of the early Cornish saints are introduced, carrying the history twelve centuries back ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... a noteworthy instance in the work of the much-abused Ibsen. The Pretenders is a historical drama amazingly rich in idea; whether the idea of kingship superbly handled in it is an anachronism it is hard to say, or to tell whether the dramatist chose his subject to illustrate his idea or the idea to embellish his subject; but in it, though obviously there is scope for magnificent mounting and interesting detail, one feels that the genius of the author has prevented him from making ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... "War has made mourning an anachronism in Europe. If it lasts long enough, it will do the same here and do the same with art. But you are very brave." He looked about. "I understood your father had ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... concluded and consecrated in the early part of the reign of Nectan. The church was dedicated to St. Brigid; and the Chronicon Pictorum (Innes' Inquiry, p. 778), in ascribing its foundation to Nectan I. (about A.D. 455) instead of Nectan II., commits a palpable anachronism, and very evident error, as St. Brigid did not die till a quarter of the next century had elapsed. (Annals of the Four Masters under the year 525; Colgan's Trias Thaumaturga, p. 619.) Again, according to the more certain evidence of Bede, another Pictish king, still of the name of Nectan (Naitanus ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... that the gilt-leather hangings in one room had hung there in the reign of Charles I., while those in another were supplied by a West-end upholsterer. Perfect taste had harmonised every detail; there was not so much as a footstool or a curtain that could have been called an anachronism. Clarissa looked at all these things with a strange sense of wandering somewhere in a dream. It was, and yet was not her old home. There was nothing incongruous. The place scarcely seemed new to her, though everything ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... barbarians are 'slaves by nature' and that it is for their own interest to be 'living tools'. This insistence upon the fundamental distinction between Greeks and barbarians must have seemed an anachronism to many of Aristotle's contemporaries and it had been expressly ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... said, "the Duke of Reist is an honest man, but—he will forgive me—he is an anachronism. He should have lived two centuries ago—or, better still, he would have made an excellent crusader. The necessities of modern diplomacy are unknown to him. He has passed all his days in a semi-civilized country. He is not a fitting judge of ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... that Marie Louise's people, who had made almost no impression on the life of the town, should have lapsed from its memory. But it was discouraging. Marie Louise felt as much of an anachronism as old Rip Van Winkle, though she looked no more like him than an exquisite, fashionable young woman could look like a gray-bearded sot who has slept in ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... some strange way to be dominated by the shade of Cleopatra. Now, if I believed in metempsychosis, I should think you were Mark Antony brought down to date. There, with that present sober air of yours, you'd pass anywhere for such an anachronism. But to be serious, and to give you advice which is positively bilious with gravity, I should say, investigate this thing fully; make a study of this ancient charmer. By the way, why not begin by going to see ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... by a sort of anachronism that I had ever mentioned contemporary Venetian Commerce; and I turned with exultation from the phantom transactions of the present to that solid and magnificent prosperity of the past, of which the ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... Christians when their peculiar Paraclete, a good-for-nothing Persian, made his appearance. What induced the Ebionites to reject all St. Paul's Epistles? Despair. For while those Letters kept their credit, the custom of circumcision, which these men had reintroduced, was set aside as an anachronism. What induced that crime-laden apostate Luther to call the Epistle of James contentious, turgid, arid, a thing of straw, and unworthy of the Apostolic spirit? Despair. For by this writing the wretched man's argument of righteousness consisting in faith alone ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... metaphysic creed, can at least raise his voice in protest against its disguising itself in 'scientific' plumes. I think that all who have had the patience to follow me thus far will agree that the spencerian 'philosophy' of social and intellectual progress is an obsolete anachronism, reverting to a pre-darwinian type of thought, just as the spencerian philosophy of 'Force,' effacing all the previous distinctions between actual and potential energy, momentum, work, force, mass, etc., which physicists have with so much agony achieved, carries ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... institution, such as the throne or the Church, had served some need, and had a rational idea at the bottom of it, to which it might be again recalled, and made once more a benefit to society, instead of a curse and an anachronism. ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... fecht!" he yelled; and, in spite of his being such an anachronism, there was something grand now in the wild old figure, as he stood there in full view, from crown to buckled shoon, claymore sheathed, the jewels in his dirk sparkling, and the sun flashing from his eyes as he yelled out, "Ta slogan of ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... pickax in hand, went at nightfall to a churchyard, to dig up the Middle Ages." The taste for medievalism, M. Ducoudray adds, has survived the revolution of 1830, and romanticism has even entered into the service of liberty and progress, where it is a manifest anachronism, "employing the style of Ronsard to celebrate railroads, and imitating Dante when it chants the praises of Washington and Lafayette." Dupuis was tempted to embrace M. Ducoudray's explanation, but Cotonet was not satisfied. He shut ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... subsidiary Deity designed to catch the overflow and surplus of the world's worship. This Divine Being in some of his smaller and silkier incarnations takes, in the affection of Woman, the place to which there is no human male aspirant. The Dog is a survival—an anachronism. He toils not, neither does he spin, yet Solomon in all his glory never lay upon a door-mat all day long, sun-soaked and fly-fed and fat, while his master worked for the means wherewith to purchase the idle wag of the Solomonic tail, seasoned with ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... that gulf that lies between ye Of fourscore years, as we skip ages In turning o'er historic pages? Thou dost not to this age belong: Thou art three generations wrong: Old Time has miss'd thee: there he tarries! Go on to thy contemporaries! Give the child up. To see thee kiss him Is a compleat anachronism. Nay, keep him. It is good to see Race link'd to race, in him and thee. The child repelleth not at all Her touch as uncongenial, But loves the old Nurse like another— Its sister—or its natural mother; And to the nurse a pride it gives To think ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... historians, not in the substantial inaccuracy of the narrative. Sir A. Alison, it may be remembered, brings Sir Peregrine Pickle to the Duke of Wellington's funeral, which must have occurred after Sir Peregrine's death; and Balzac's imaginary narrative may not be perfectly free from anachronism. But, if so, I have not found him out. Everybody must sympathise with the English lady who is said to have written to Paris for the address of that most ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... not only made a note of it, as this one has, but has taken the trouble to translate it into verse. He does, indeed, go a little out of his way in time, to introduce it; but he is a poet who is fond of an anachronism, when it happens to ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... regards himself as possessing that Spirit. We are not to read into this psalm the fully developed New Testament teaching of a personal Paraclete, the Spirit whom Christ reveals and sends. To do that would be a gross anachronism. But we are to remember that it is an anointed king who speaks, on whose head there has been poured the oil that designated him to his office, and in its gentle flow and sweet fragrance, symbolised from of old the inspiration of a divine influence ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... intelligent of the criticisms on this score. Unless a man writes in the exotic style of Brahms, Wagner, Dvorak and I know not what other Slav, Czech, Teuton or Hebrew, the critics are sure to accuse him of being an anachronism. The only man in England who is permitted to write in a style which is in the main of home growth is the Irish Jew, Sir Arthur Sullivan. If we may go to a foreign style why may we not go to one of an earlier period? But surely we may do whatever we like, and the better we like ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... Owlers—the aristocracy of export smugglers—and Jack had sunk a little in becoming the head of the Old Bourne Tap importers. But he was hard enough, tyrannical enough, and had nerve enough to keep Free-trading alive in our parts until long after it had become an anachronism. He ended his days on the gallows, of course, but that ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... of his labours at the university, he finally came to feel, did not warrant the expenditure of the vitality and time that he was devoting to them. He was, in a sense, an anachronism in the position in which he found himself. Both in his ideals and in his plans for bringing about their fulfilment he had reached beyond his day. The field was not yet ripe for his best efforts. It became clear to him that he could not make his point of view operative in what he ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... In this way visitors could make their advent known without violent exertion, the mermaid lost no visible whit of her Elizabethan virginity, and the spirit of Shakespeare wandering in his garden would not notice any anachronism. He could not in fact, for ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... accumulate. Klakee-Nah went back to his large house and proceeded to spend. Porportuk was known as the richest Indian in Alaska. Klakee-Nah was known as the whitest. Porportuk was a money-lender and a usurer. Klakee-Nah was an anachronism—a mediaeval ruin, a fighter and a feaster, happy ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... didactic quality of the 'De Rerum Natura' is unmistakable. Yet it would be uncritical to place this poem in the class which derives from Hesiod. It belongs really to the succession of Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Empedocles. As such it was an anachronism. The specific moment in the development of thought at which the Parmenidean Epic was natural has been already described. The Romans of the age of Lucretius had advanced far beyond it. The idealistic metaphysics of the Socratic school, the positive ethics of the Stoics, and the profound ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... particular celebrity in protestant England, as Luther had taught and written there shortly before, and the very name must have immediately suggested the idea of freedom in thinking. I cannot oven consider it an anachronism that Richard the Third should speak of Macchiavel. The word is here used altogether proverbially: the contents, at least, of the book entitled Of the Prince (Del Principe,) have been in existence ever since the existence of tyrants; Macchiavel was merely the ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... eighteenth year when he awoke to the glories of free thought, and knew himself a victim to the Moloch of the Sabbath, to which fathers sacrifice their children. The proprietor of the fancy goods was a Jew, and moreover closed on Saturdays. But for this anachronism of keeping Saturday holy when you had Sunday also to laze on, Daniel felt a hundred higher careers would have been open to him. Later, when free thought waned (it was after Daniel had met Bessie), although he never returned to his father's narrowness, he found the abhorred Sabbath ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... sobriety in his dress, coupled with his sedate bearing, he might have been taken, but that such a costume would be anomalous, for a Quaker in black. He looked still more like (what he really was) a literary Modern Antique, a New-Old Author, a living anachronism, contemporary at once with Burton the Elder, and Colman the Younger. Meanwhile he advanced with rather a peculiar gait, his walk was plantigrade, and with a cheerful "How d'ye do," and one of the blandest, sweetest smiles that ever brightened a manly countenance, held ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... Midsummer-Night's Dream is more of a masque than a drama—an entertainment rather than a play. The characters are mostly puppets, and scarcely any except Bottom has the least psychological interest for the reader. Probability is thrown to the winds; anachronism is rampant; classical figures are mixed with fairies and sixteenth-century Warwickshire peasants. The main plot is sentimental, the secondary plot is sheer buffoonery; while the story; of Titania's jealousy and Oberon's method of ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... since Mr. Chamberlain, in a celebrated speech at Islington, made the following remarkable declaration:—"I say the time has come to reform altogether the absurd and irritating anachronism which is known as Dublin Castle, to sweep away altogether the alien boards of foreign officials and to substitute for them a genuine Irish administration for purely Irish business." Change of opinions, no one can refuse to admit, in a statesman any more than in other men, and as regards ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... is why Queen Elizabeth was never married. Side-lights on Shakespeare's Sonnets were obviously cast. The young man whom Shakespeare admired so, and urged to marry, was—Darnley. This romance did not get the prize (the anachronism about Shakespeare is worthy of Scott), but I am conceited enough to think it ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... Leipzig, and still more so to hear of your renewed and intimate relations with him. He is the born prototype of progress, and noble-minded to a degree! Without his active co-operation as director and standard-bearer a Tonkunstler-Versammlung at the present time would at least be an anachronism. ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... this time, were looking forward to world-organization and a universal peace through the medium of a universal language, all this agitation had the appearance of an anachronism, not to say a heresy. It seemed a deliberate attempt to set up barriers, where progress demanded that they should be torn down. The success of such a movement, it seemed, must be to bring about a more ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... philosophical to decide of another age by the changes and the feelings through which our own has passed. There is a chronology of human opinions which, not observing, an indiscreet philosopher may commit an anachronism in reasoning. ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... "Yes, your husband's an anachronism. He might, if he chose, be one of the kings, the prophets, who lead the van in the fight for civilisation. But he will not; he despises his own powers, and one day he will start a revolution against himself. Mark my words. Your ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... diminished, while his personal distinction was not, in his opinion, increased by the promotion. He refused to accept it because "it was no addition to his dignity, as he was already Cardinal and Bishop of Arras," but in this statement he committed an important anachronism. He was not Cardinal when he refused the see of Mechlin; having received the red hat upon February 26, 1561, and having already accepted the archbishopric in May of the preceding year. He affirmed that "no man would more resolutely defend the liberty and privileges ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... sailor was a dog, a different human species from the landsman, without laws and usages to protect him. This was a tradition which, for centuries, had been fostered in the naval service, and it survived among merchant sailors as an unhappy anachronism even into the twentieth century, when an American Congress was reluctant to bestow upon a seaman the decencies of existence enjoyed by the poorest ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... upon and listened to with impatience. The time for Border feud and skirmish was already well-nigh past. Industry and knowledge and the pacific arts of life were making progress. The moss-trooper was already becoming an anachronism and a pestilent nuisance, to be put down by the relentless arm of the law, before the Union of the Crowns. Half a century or more before that event, this opinion had been formed of the reiving clans by their quieter and more thoughtful neighbours, as ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... less gruesome than his shop. The furniture looked as if its manufacture had been coeval with the time of the Meynells, and the ghastly glare of the gas seemed a kind of anachronism. After a few preliminary observations, which were not encouraged by Mr. Grewter's manner, I inquired whether he had ever heard the ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... smoking to non-smoking compartments? Very small. The Ladies will decide this question. But how about the Actors? In modern pieces they never lose an opportunity of smoking. Why shouldn't the cigar be introduced into Shakspearian revivals? Anachronism to the winds!—which is a polite way of expressing "Anachronism be blowed!" 'Baccy be blowed too. Sir WALTER RALEIGH would have approved its introduction in Elizabethan days. In Twelfth Night for example, the line, "Help me to some ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. March 7, 1891. • Various
... "I am an anachronism," said the dragon, "don't you know what that is?—well, I am one born out of my age. I am a survival of anything but the fittest. You are the masters now, you miserable floppy-looking race of mankind. You can shoot me, you can blow me up with ...
— Fairy Tales from the German Forests • Margaret Arndt
... been made to reconcile this obvious anachronism with justice and modern knowledge, but always without success, and courts have wriggled hard in their efforts to make the test adequate to the particular cases which they have been trying, but only with the result of ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... in the vicinity of the station. While we were taking this glance about us our hampers were deposited on the platform and the train rattled off again with great briskness, as if time were of any importance, and as if the whole arrangement were not an anachronism in this ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... account of the naming of the villages of Jair, which we find in Deuteronomy iii. 14, is quite inconsistent with another account in Judges x. 3, 4. One of them must be erroneous, and it is probable that the passage in Deuteronomy is an anachronism. ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... in the old patriarchal times, when kings were the uncontrolled "shepherds of the people," he would perhaps have been an admirable ruler; but in the nineteenth century he was a flagrant anachronism. His system of administration completely broke down. In vain he multiplied formalities and inspectors, and punished severely the few delinquents who happened by some accident to be brought to justice; the officials continued ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... pulled on their overalls and went to work, and in one corner of the yard—the corner opposite North's window—they began to build his scaffold. The thing took shape before his very eyes, a monstrous anachronism. ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... fitted out for slave-traffic could have thus openly and directly sailed out of a British port. But it is to be remembered that the period of which I am writing was many years ago; although so far as that goes, it would be no anachronism to lay the scene of my narrative in the year 1857. Many a slave-ship has sailed from British ports in this very year, and with all our boasted efforts to check the slave-trade it will be found that as large a proportion of British subjects are at present ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... he saw her not at all. For one thing, he climbed no more to the spring-sheltering altar rock among the cedars; and for another, among all the wild creatures of the mountain, your moonshiner is the shyest, being an anachronism in a world of progress. One bit of news, however, floated in on the gossip at Little Zoar. It related that Nan's mother was dead, and that the body had lain two days unburied while Tike was drowning his sorrow in a sea of his ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... speeches were all very well in the days of knee-breeches and periwigs, but in this age and in Chicago, they are an anachronism and the two young ladies started as if they had suddenly observed that Mr. Middleton had on a low-cut vest, or his trousers were two years behind the times, and somewhat curtly and coolly making their adieus, they sailed rapidly away, leaving Mr. Middleton—who was not the most obtuse ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... is wise; solicitude concerning it is an anachronism. Suppose one has accepted a certain position and finds himself in doubt of his fitness for that position. Nothing can be more important than for him to decide upon his next line of conduct. Shall he resign or continue? ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... explained yet.' Paula seated herself on a stone bench, and Charlotte went on: 'Miss Power thought of making a Greek court of this. But she will not tell you so herself, because it seems such dreadful anachronism. ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... secondary compilers into a curious blunder, by mistaking the king here alluded to for Alfred the Great: even Didbin, in his Bibliomania, falls into the same error although he suspected some mistake; he calls him our immortal Alfrid, p. 219, and seems puzzled to account for the anachronism, but does not take the trouble to enquire into the matter; Heylin's little Help to History would have set him right, and shown that while Alfrede king of Northumberland reigned in 680, Alfred king of ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... man. All these need the consideration which is made possible by the accumulated wisdom of centuries and the insight which eighteen hundred years' study of Christian principles have developed. But I shall never get over a sense of anachronism, of being out of time, in arguing at this late day a claim for so fundamental a thing as human freedom. I rub my eyes to make sure that I have not been in a Rip Van Winkle slumber for a few centuries, and am not coming before a nineteenth century audience with an untimely protest against a wrong ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... has taken to have the plays printed in a collected form during my lifetime, for I had always felt that they would be so printed after my death, so that their coming out now seems to me a sort of anachronism. The one certain pleasure that I shall derive from this arrangement will be, having my name and yours joined together in the American edition, for we reserve the early sheets. Nothing ever vexed me so much as the other book not being in your ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... drearily for our friends, the two pedestrians, at the 'Blue Goat.' A day of dull aspect and soft rain in midsummer has the added depression that it seems an anachronism. One is in a measure prepared for being weather-bound in winter. You accept imprisonment as the natural fortune of the season, or you brave the elements prepared to let them do their worst, while, if confined to house, you have that solace of snugness, that comfortable chimney-corner ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... in itself a most significant first step in the path of knowledge which his grandson has opened up for us, but to wish to revive it at the present day, as has actually been seriously attempted, shows a weakness of thought and a mental anachronism which no one ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... best. But, after the break-up of the empire, unity of this type became a delusive mirage, misleading all who, like the Holy Roman emperors, sought to enjoy it again. By the time of Napoleon it had become an anachronism of the most dangerous and reactionary kind. The world was then too vast, the freedom of men and nations too various and deeply rooted. Meanwhile a real unity, stronger than before, had been forming ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... interests among capitalists, among hand-workers, or, in a different way, among scholars and artists, all over the world, can fail to see that the apotheosis of the state, whether in the interest of war or of revolution, is an anachronism and an absurdity. ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... organization and efficiency, that the State has put into this war could be thrown into the cause of the Kingdom and of the eternal verities, the world would soon be won. If Christians would but follow Christ, war, as an unbelievably brutal and barbarous anachronism, like its former savage contemporaries of slavery, the burning of witches, and the torture of the Inquisition, would be forever done away. The message with which our Lord challenges the whole Church today is that with which He began His ministry when He faced His apostate nation, "Repent, for ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... up my mind to cart the blessed stuff myself." . . . This was what he required a steamer for, and I knew he was just then negotiating enthusiastically with a Parsee firm for an old, brig-rigged, sea-anachronism of ninety horse-power. We had met and spoken together several times. He looked knowingly after Jim. "Takes it to heart?" he asked scornfully. "Very much," I said. "Then he's no good," he opined. "What's all the to-do about? A bit of ass's skin. That never yet made a man. You must see things exactly ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... suggestion of improvement. It binds us to the letter of tradition, leads us to confound the accidental with the essential, and gives to certain notions and certain words a potency which must be described as an anachronism. We still use the language of the Revolutionary epoch, recognize no perils but those against which our ancestors had to guard, and put faith in the efficacy of methods that have no longer an object, and of phrases that have lost their original significance. Because George III. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... difficulty was only an incident. Already a party was forming itself in the House of Commons composed of intellectual and far-seeing men who recognized the fact that the Irish State Church was in its very principles an anomaly and an anachronism. On May 27, 1834, a debate on the whole question of the Irish State Church and its revenues was raised in the House of Commons by Mr. Henry Ward, one of the most advanced reformers and thoughtful politicians whom the new ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... axe in order more easily to get assistance, and yet they do not ask "how.'' Or again when somebody is asked if he knows the romance "The Emperor Joseph and The Beautiful Railway-signal-man's Daughter,'' the anachronism of the title does not occur to him, and nobody thinks of the impossibilities of the vivid description of a man walking back and forth, with his hands behind ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... the Molossians.—Ver. 226. The Molossi were a people of Epirus, on the eastern side of the Ambracian gulf. Ovid here commits a slight anachronism, as the name was derived from Molossus, the son of Neoptolemus, long after the time of Lycaon. Besides, as Burmann observes, who could believe that 'wars could be waged at such an early period between nations so distant as the Molossi and the Arcadians?' Apollodorus ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... celebrated writer flourished is A.D. 238 — that is, about 135 years before the birth of St. Patrick. To quote him as an authority on the subject of St. Patrick's Purgatory would therefore be a more absurd anachronism than any that has been pointed out in this curious list. This difficulty appeared to me so strong, that for a while I was led to believe that "Solino" was but a corrupted Spanish form of "Joceline," or "Joscelino," as it is sometimes given, ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... He had dawdled among men centuries older than himself. His whole being was out of harmony with the universe. Fate had held his soul fast during those Dark Ages when he might have striven nobly, and now had cast it forth, an anachronism. It was a soul misplaced in eternity. The dire realization grew and grew, and with it the tragic agony, until with a sudden and the bitterest of cries he flung up his arms and fell heavily ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... our time is, How to digest and assimilate the Newspaper? To complain of it, to desire its abolition, is an anachronism of the will: it is to complain that time proceeds, and that events follow each other in due sequence. It is hardly too bold to say that the newspaper is the modern world, as distinct from the antique and the mediaeval. It represents, by its advent, that epoch in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... like Tolstoi, a sacrifice to wasted, useless action, like Hamlet; he is a Moliere come too soon, a Bayard come too late, a John the Baptist of the stage, calling out in vain in the wilderness—of bricks and mortar; he is misunderstood;—an enigma, an anachronism, a premature ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... reader impute to us the gross anachronism of making an estimate for Shakspeare's days in a coin which did not exist until a century, within a couple of years, after Shakspeare's birth, and did not settle to the value of twenty-one shillings until a century ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... in the conversation, without the least respect to hist neighbour. The Baron of Bradwardine sang French CHANSONS-A-BOIRE, and spouted pieces of Latin; Killancureit talked, in a steady unalterable dull key, of top-dressing and bottom-dressing, [This has been censured as an anachronism; and it must be confessed that agriculture of this kind was unknown to the Scotch Sixty Years since.] and year-olds, and gimmers, and dinmonts, and stots, and runts, and kyloes, and a proposed turnpike-act; while Balmawhapple, in notes exalted above both, extolled his horse, his hawks, ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... to be the proud boast that every Englishman's home was his castle. But to-day it is an anachronism. The Ghetto folk have no homes. They do not know the significance and the sacredness of home life. Even the municipal dwellings, where live the better-class workers, are overcrowded barracks. They have no home life. The very language proves it. The father returning from ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... an anachronism and was probably inserted by the copyist. See vol. v. 169, for its first metnion. But "Kahwah" may have preserved its original meaning strong old wine (vol. ii. 261); and the amount of wine-drinking and drunkenness proves that the coffee ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... me make protest against over-elaboration, alike in food and the serving thereof. The very best decoration for a table is something good in the plates. This is not saying one should not plan to please the eye no less than the palate. But ribbon on sandwiches is an anachronism—so is all the flummery of silk and laces, doilies and doo-dads that so often bewilder us. They are unfair to the food—as hard to live up to as anybody's blue china. I smile even yet, remembering my husband's chuckles, after we had come home from eating delicatessen ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... a Tory of the 'Family Compact' school, which with changed conditions was fast becoming an anachronism. He was at the same time a loyal and faithful ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope
... futile the attempt of Schleiermacher and others to arrange the Dialogues of Plato into a harmonious whole. Any such arrangement appears to me not only to be unsupported by evidence, but to involve an anachronism in the history of philosophy. There is a common spirit in the writings of Plato, but not a unity of design in the whole, nor perhaps a perfect unity in any single Dialogue. The hypothesis of a general plan which is worked out in the successive Dialogues is an after-thought of the critics who ...
— Charmides • Plato
... the result of incompetence, or whether it is merely a smile gone wrong in the baking. It is amusing to find Marocco, who has not been strict about archaeological accuracy hitherto, complain here that there is an anachronism, inasmuch as some young ecclesiastics are dressed as they would be at present, and one of them actually carries a wax candle. This is not as it should be; in works like those at Oropa, where implicit reliance is justly placed ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... is to make a clean sweep of everything," he said. "Money is an anachronism, and in a perfectly ordered State would not ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 5, 1919 • Various
... Mary," cried my uncle, "I am old-fashioned enough to have principles—an anachronism, I know, in this lax age. One of them is never to allow my batterie de toilette out of my sight when I am travelling. I cannot readily forget the agonies which I endured some years ago through neglecting this precaution. ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a time when an individual is merged in the clan." And as the realistic writers perfected their art, the more acute readers began to perceive that the hero who is a doer of deeds can represent only the earlier stages of culture which we have long outgrown. This hero came to be recognized as an anachronism, out of place in a more modern social organization based on a full appreciation of individuality. He was too much a type and too little an individual to satisfy the demands of those who looked to literature ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... "Louise." The Italian disciples of verismo are in full cry after nationalism and local color. A generation ago the scenes, the characters, and the subject of an opera were of no concern to the composer. His indifference to anachronism was like that of Shakespeare, whose stage-folk, whether supposed to be ancient Greeks, Romans, or Bretons, were all sixteenth-century Englishmen. When Verdi wrote his Egyptian opera he was content with a little splash of ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... clothes), turned swiftly to her mother. "Nothing of the kind," she said, crisply. She looked about the hot, dusty, littered room. She included and then banished it all with one sweeping gesture. "Nothing of the kind. This is—this is an anachronism." ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... his translation of the 'AEneid' to Lord Normanby, near the middle; when speaking of the anachronism that made Dido ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... the Old World would catch their breath with envious amazement, if they could only enjoy the advantage of the conversation of these orthodox and erudite refugees from the nursery! The unfortunate men of this community are kept in pitiable terror lest they commit an anachronism, and if, after a careful reconnoissance of the slippery ground, they tremblingly venture an anecdote of Selwyn or Hood, or Beaumarchais, they are invariably driven back in confusion by the inquiry, if they remember ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... of the structure, which presents throughout a very ancient aspect, parts of the roof having evidently been renewed, and the gables showing traces of recent repairs, while the rickety pillars seem to protest with groans against the architectural anachronism that has piled so many young heads ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... I told him. "But look, Siddy, I was going to sayest that I do know the plays. Having Queen Elizabeth speak a prologue to Macbeth is as much an anachronism as if you put her on the gantry of the British moonship, busting a bottle of champagne over ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... Mr. Fox Bourne's 'English Merchants' furnished the tradition respecting Whittington. I am afraid the knighthood was really conferred on Henry's first return to England, after the battle of Agincourt; but human—or at least story-telling—nature could not resist an anachronism of a few years for such a story. The only other wilful alteration of a matter of time is with regard to the Duke of Burgundy's interview with Henry. At the time of Henry's last stay at Paris the Duke was attending the death-bed of his wife, Michelle ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... idiosyncracies was important. No gentleman should take without scrutiny what the hatter offered. Hats were individual things, and as the character changed and developed so should the hat. The hat that suited one at forty might be a sad anachronism at fifty. He himself had endeavoured not only to make his life correspond to his hats, but his hats correspond to his life. (Loud applause.) As the Master of the Buck-hounds he wore, as any visitor to the National Gallery at the present moment might see, at the head of the staircase on the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 18, 1919 • Various
... table (eighteen feet in diameter, of stout old English oak, cunningly bolted together) was made during the former king's reign and was never used by Arthur at all. What are such crude exactitudes to us? As well object to the heavy plate-armour worn by the knights—everybody knows this to be an anachronism of nigh a thousand years. Romantic phantasy and scientific data are as far apart as the poles, and none but a fool would try to reconcile them. King Arthur feasted in the castle hall, says Malory, and so far ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... f.m.c. (these initials could hardly have come into use until some months later, but the convenience covers the sin of the slight anachronism), Honore Grandissime, free man of color, entered from the rear room so silently that Joseph was first made aware of his presence by feeling him at his elbow. He handed the apothecary—but a few words in ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... and honoured more than all other philosophers together.' He may be supposed to have thought more than he said, or was able to express. And, although he could not, as a matter of fact, have criticized the ideas of Plato without an anachronism, the criticism is appropriately placed in the mouth of the ...
— Parmenides • Plato
... understand much of the aspect and arrangement of Egyptian life, and to follow it step try step through the details of religious, public, and private life, even of particular individuals. The same remark cannot be made in regard to their mental life, and here many an anachronism will slip in, many things will appear modern, and show the coloring of the Christian mode ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... play to the imagination that the mind loves to indulge in it. But the vision dissolves before historical truth; and Chamaeleon, and Hermesianax, who are the source of the supposition, are considered as having merely indulged in a poetical anachronism. ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... so, cautious and catlike, he stole from behind the veil and glided to the shelter of a post not ten feet from her. He peered around it eagerly. Still panting from her efforts, she was on her knees beside the case, fumbling a key in the Yale lock, a curious anachronism which Simpkins, in his cleaning, had found on all ...
— The False Gods • George Horace Lorimer
... easily reconciled to some other faults which are rather due to expectations raised by his critics than to positive errors. No one, for example, would care to notice an anachronism, if Landor did not occasionally put in a claim for accuracy. I have no objection whatever to allow Hooker to console Bacon for his loss of the chancellorship, in calm disregard of the fact that Hooker died some twenty years before Bacon rose to that high office. The fault can be amended ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... say, that such things could only be acted in the earlier period of our Indian settlements, when the check of the Directors was imperfect, and that of the crown did not exist. My friend Mr. Fairscribe is of opinion, that there is an anachronism in the introduction of Paupiah, the Bramin Dubash of the English ...
— The Surgeon's Daughter • Sir Walter Scott
... lights in all, and they constitute the lower part of five windows, a doorway taking the space of three lights. The eighth contains a mitre and a crozier, an initial E and the date 1022. This window is an anachronism, as Edric was not a mitred abbot. Abbot Froucester was the first to ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Gloucester [2nd ed.] • H. J. L. J. Masse
... obnoxious to the charge of a slight anachronism, in representing the activity of the Indians a year earlier than any were actually employed in the struggle of 1775. During the century of warfare that existed between the English and French colonies, the savage tribes were important agents ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... yet knew Iliad, Book VII, and admired Odysseus, whom the Ionian tradition abhors? Troilus and Cressida is indeed a mystery, but Somebody concerned in it had read Ficinus' version of the Alcibiades; {75a} and yet made the monstrous anachronism of dating Aristotle and Plato before the Trojan war. "That was his fun," as Charles Lamb said in ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... ceremony. To her dying day, half a century later, she kept up a prodigious stateliness of manner. Before meals she expected the whole company to assemble and remain standing till she had made her royal progress through the room. She was a living anachronism for many years before her death, with her high-heeled, gold-buttoned, scarlet-coloured shoes, her Marie-Antoinette coiffure raised high above her head and interlaced with ribbons, her elaborately gorgeous dress, her intricate array ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... Holm lifted his glass to Merle. "Tell me, dear lady, how does it feel to be married to an anachronism?" ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... many-handed, sinister and splendid, seemed moving through the gloom on a throne of gold, uplifted by a phalanx of elephants. Fudo I saw, shrouded and shrined in fire, and Maya-Fujin, riding her celestial peacock; and strangely mingling with these Buddhist visions, as in the anachronism of a Limbo, armored effigies of Daimyo and images of the Chinese sages. There were huge forms of wrath, grasping thunderbolts, and rising to the roof: the Deva-kings, like impersonations of hurricane power; the Ni-O, guardians of long-vanished temple gates. ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... the Philistine was an anachronism, a survival from an older world. The day of the Minoan, like that of his early friend the Egyptian, had passed away. The stars of new races were rising above the horizon, and new claimants were dividing the heritage of the ancient world. ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... gloved fists of a hundred foes that in affairs of the heart he was obliged to rely exclusively on moral worth and charm of manner. He belonged to the old school of fighters who looked the part, and in these days of pugilists who resemble matinee idols he had the appearance of an anachronism. He was a stocky man with a round, solid head, small eyes, an undershot jaw, and a nose which ill-treatment had reduced to a mere scenario. A narrow strip of forehead acted as a kind of buffer-state, separating his front hair from his eyebrows, and he bore beyond hope of concealment ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... uninterruptedly. When any one came, March found himself embarrassed and a little anxious. The visitors were usually young men, terribly respectful, but cherishing, as he imagined, ideals and opinions chasmally different from his; and he felt in their presence something like an anachronism, something like a fraud. He tried to freshen up his sympathies on them, to get at what they were really thinking and feeling, and it was some time before he could understand that they were not really thinking and feeling anything of their own concerning their art, but ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of an anachronism in a country whose inhabitants exhibit at least a trace of primitive and wholesome barbarity. One could have fancied him at home among men of leisure and cultivated tastes, but he seemed out of place in a log-built ranch ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... out the Divine ordinances; if Alexander Borgia's perjuries, poisonings and debaucheries "break not Heaven's design," but are "ordained of God for some purpose," morality itself becomes an exploded anachronism. ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... is not all as he is pictured. At a cursory glance he might appear to be a physiological, psychological, and political anachronism. At least he is sufficiently different from his colleagues to be, if not actually mysterious, not easily understandable. There is something fundamental about him. He inspires a certain awe which may not be magnetic but has the ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... were therefore entitled to elect a Synhedrin. This was in defiance of ceremonial law, for they knew full well that the formation of a Synhedrin and the right to try a capital charge had long been forbidden. But they were face to face with death, and hence the anachronism had been adopted, and they had fallen back on the custom of their fathers. So three-and-twenty judges they had appointed, without usurers, or slave-dealers, or gamblers, or aged men or ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... ceiling, curving into a dome. The walls were hung with a wonderful tapestry of a soft, rich colour, and every piece of furniture in the room was of the Louis Quinze period. There was scarcely a single anachronism. The Martin de Vaux of forty years ago had been an artist, and a man of taste; and when he had brought home his bride, a duke's daughter, he had spent a small fortune on this apartment. Since then it had always been her favourite, and she was always ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... have induced me to push my "Rienzi" at this time of day it would, as you will understand, have been the desire of deriving a good income from it, such as would have been welcome in my poor and uncertain condition. In itself I look upon this revival as an anachronism which, moreover, would be quite premature. After the recent great success of the opera at Dresden I was in hopes that the rapid sale of this opus would supply me with sufficient means for my present wants. That hope, however, has been deceived ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... of an anachronism, and had as lofty a disregard for convention as had the ladies thronging the Court of Merlin. Nor, it must be admitted, was she herself any pronounced stickler for exactitude. Thus, she lopped half a dozen years ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... who are conversant with the Works of the Old Masters this piece of anachronism will ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston |
