"Didactic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... been said of "the loud laugh that speaks the vacant mind." Most of us, in this work-a-day world, find no small benefit from allowing our minds to lie fallow at certain times, as farmers do with their fields. In the following pages, however, I believe wisdom and wit, the didactic and the diverting, will be ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... second nature: justly are habits called so. Gentleness of tone and manner—attention to conventional proprieties—to people's little wants and feelings—are of these. This same politeness being a sort of summary of such, I will end this little didactic digression by advising all those who have the rearing of the young in their hands, carefully to form them in matters of this description, so that they shall attain habits—so that the delicacy of their perceptions, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... serious stumbling-block to the Froebelian that Dr. Montessori, while advocating freedom in words, has really set strict limits to the natural activities of children by laying so much stress on her "didactic apparatus," the intention of which is formal training in sense-discrimination. This material, which is an adaptation and enlargement of that provided by Seguin for his mentally deficient children, is certainly open to the reproach of having been "devised by adults." It is formal, ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... drama, epitomized somewhat at undue length, in order to show the reader how much the philosophy that had awakened in the age of Solon now actuated the creations of poetry. Not that Aeschylus, like Euripides, deals in didactic sentences and oracular aphorisms. He rightly held such pedantries of the closet foreign to the tragic genius [22]. His philosophy is in the spirit, and not in the diction of his works—in vast conceptions, not laconic maxims. He does not ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... preconception of the kind of interest intended to be excited in that admirable work. In its kind it is the most perfect poem extant, though its kind may be inferior in interest—being in its essence didactic—to that other sort, in which instruction is conveyed more effectively, because less directly, in connection with stronger and more pleasurable emotions, and thereby in a closer affinity with action. But might we not as rationally object to an accomplished woman's conversing, however agreeably, because ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... these was "Beauty and the Beast" in a long-winded style extending to more than 250 pages. In 1757, a greatly abridged form of this version was published by Madame de Beaumont, who was then living in England and who wrote many spirited tales designed for children. Her stories are full of the didactic element, and "Beauty and the Beast" is no exception to the rule. These "edifying commonplaces," however, are so sound and fit into the story so naturally that the reader does not suffer from their presence. The artificial character of the story is easily felt in contrast to ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... seventeenth century. I remember his calling my attention, in 1890, or thereabouts, to the delightful stylistic qualities of those worthies. Many of his colors are from their ink-horns, in which the pigments were of deep and varied hues. When he is sententious and didactic he seems to have caught something of Emerson's manner. And indeed there is in all his writings a flavor of optimism and a slightly dogmatic, even when thoroughly gentle and persuasive, tone which he has in common ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... the arch enemies of the hour, could speak without the intervention of seconds; but I hoped that the Baron's conversation might be diverting,—the Baron hoped that mine might be didactic. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... the poets of the sixteenth century to be struck by the prominence given to Nature in their writings. Nothing is more delightful than Ronsard's word-paintings of his sweet country of Vendome. Until the day of Malherbe, the didactic Regnier and the Calvinistic Marot are the only two who could be said to give colour to the preconceived and prevalent notion as to the dryness of French poetry. And even after Malherbe, in the seventeenth century, we find that La Fontaine, ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... his case. This was obvious—almost a truism; but the illustration by means of which he brought it home to his hearers was certainly born of poetic imagination. The life of the ordinary person he likened to that of the canary in its cage. And here, dropping his lofty didactic manner, and—if I may coin a word—smalling his deep, sonorous voice, to a thin reedy treble, in imitation of the tenuous fringilline pipe, he went on with lively language, rapid utterance, and suitable brisk movements and gestures, to describe ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... which appealed to cold intellect; and these were, for the most part, satirical, didactic, and argumentative. The two greatest poets of the period, John Dryden and his successor, Alexander Pope, usually chose such subjects. John Locke (1632-1704), a great prose writer of this age, shows in the very title ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... could not sleep. My blood made a tumult through my body. Before dawn I had written two poems on national themes; didactic verses, each with a moral of democracy tagged to it, and much about the worth of simplicity in it, and the ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... possible question as to which of them is likely to be best remembered a generation or two hence. Only in one particular does it seem quite safe to predict—namely, that whatever may be the future standing of one who is said to have never penned a story without a didactic purpose of some kind, Henry Kingsley is certain of a permanent place in the literature of the young country where he encountered both the best and the worst experiences ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... the same profound misconception of the principle working at the root of Didactic Poetry as operated originally to disturb the conduct of the 'Essay on Man' by its author, and to disturb the judgments upon it by its critics. This 'Essay on Criticism' no more aims at unfolding the grounds and theory of critical rules applied to poetic composition, than does the Epistola ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... wanders on from one topic to another, careless of the unity of his work, not fearing any 'judge, or spectator, who may recall him to the point' (Theat.), 'whither the argument blows we follow' (Rep.). To have determined beforehand, as in a modern didactic treatise, the nature and limits of the subject, would have been fatal to the spirit of enquiry or discovery, which is the soul of the dialogue...These remarks are applicable to nearly all the ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... pathos she has thrown into her work every now and then, as if to temper her brightness with a little shade. Her descriptions of scenery are specially vivid and delightful, and very often full of poetry. She is never didactic or goody-goody, neither does she revel in risky situations, nor give the world stories which, to quote the well-known saying of a popular playwright, 'no nice girl would allow her ...
— Mrs. Hungerford - Notable Women Authors of the Day • Helen C. Black
... ability, he found added joy in the freedom it opened up. He ceased to consider that by fate he was a Conservative, bound by traditional conventionalities: in that great moment he knew himself sufficiently a man to exercise whatever individuality instinct prompted. He forgot the didactic methods by which he had proposed to show knowledge of his subject—both as a past and a future factor in European politics. With his own strong appreciation of present things, he saw and grasped the vast present ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... joy in her loveliness and could spare no margin of consciousness for critical comment. She was so lovely, so young, so good; so jaded, too, with all the labor, the giving of herself, the long thoughts for others; why shouldn't she be dominant and assured? Why shouldn't she even be didactic and slightly complacent? If there was sometimes a triteness in her pronouncements, a lack of humor, of spontaneity, in her enthusiasms, surely no one who loved her could recognize them with any but the tenderest of smiles. He felt quite sure that Mrs. Upton ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... very near the land, and the Earth Breath, and the Earth Divinities, and the Italian soil,—and that southern laya center and gateway into the inner world which, I am persuaded, is in Italy. There are many didactic poems in world-literature,—poems dealing with the operations of agriculture;— and they are mostly as dull as you would expect, with that for their subject; but one of them, and one only, is undying poetry. That one is the Roman one. Its author was a Celt, and his models were Greek; and he was rather ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... of 'em, the more they must love one another," Mrs. Moss went on, looking at her children with a didactic purpose. But she turned toward her brother again to say, "Not but what I hope your boy 'ull allays be good to his sister, though there's but two of 'em, ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... In didactic poetry, Lucretius was preeminent, and is regarded by Schlegel as the first of Roman poets in native genius. [Footnote: Born B.C. 95, died B.C. 52. Smith's Dict.] He lived before the Augustan era, and died at the age of forty-two by his ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... This volume is designed, therefore, to portray in some degree their influence in the struggle of the Colonies to attain their independence. The narration of events takes the form of a story—a slight thread of romance being employed, rather than didactic narrative, to more vividly picture the scenes and the parts performed by the actors in the great historic drama. It will not be difficult for the reader to discern between the facts of history and the ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... any other cyclical epic. On the other hand, again, an old tradition tells of the contest between Homer and Hesiod, which proves that when these two names were mentioned people instinctively thought of two epic tendencies, the heroic and the didactic; and that the signification of the name "Homer" was included in the material category and not in the formal. This imaginary contest with Hesiod did not even yet show the faintest presentiment of individuality. From the time of Pisistratus onwards, however, with the surprisingly rapid development ...
— Homer and Classical Philology • Friedrich Nietzsche
... explained, shown to be obvious and useful. I am sated with Lesson and Allegory, weary of monitory ants, industrious bees, and preaching animals. The benefits of Civilization cloy me. I have seen enough shining of the didactic Sun. ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... gentleman of cataract" would have been, to a man of Jesus's intelligence, the proposition of an idiot. If it could be proved today that not one of the miracles of Jesus actually occurred, that proof would not invalidate a single one of his didactic utterances; and conversely, if it could be proved that not only did the miracles actually occur, but that he had wrought a thousand other miracles a thousand times more wonderful, not a jot of weight would be added to his doctrine. And yet the intellectual ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... rhythmic creation of the beautiful," exhaust your theory, and so perfectly is the theory illustrated by the poems. Natural bent, and reaction against the example of Mr. Longfellow, combined to make you too intolerant of what you call the "didactic" element in verse. Even if morality be not seven-eighths of our life (the exact proportion as at present estimated), there was a place even on the Hellenic Parnassus for gnomic bards, and theirs in the nature of the case must ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... enough of nature and truth to make the fortune of a dozen ordinary dramatists; and withal you feel as you read that he is writing, as Augier says of him, to amuse himself merely, and that he could an if he would be solemn and didactic with all the impressiveness that a perfect acquaintance with men and things and an admirable dramatic aptitude can bestow. The fact that he is always in a good temper has done him some wrong in that it has led him to be to all appearances amusing only, where he might well have ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... be said that, in making primary the universal contents and spiritual significance of type and plot, I have made literature didactic, as if the word should stop my mouth? If it is meant by this that I maintain that literature conveys truth, it may readily be admitted, since only thus can it interest the mind which has its whole life in the pursuit and its whole joy in the ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... impurities with disdain. From thenceforward they laboured upon the Grecian model; and though they were never able to rival their masters in dramatic composition, they soon surpassed them in many of the more soothing kinds of poetry. Elegiac, pastoral, and didactic compositions began to assume new beauties in the Roman language; and satire, not that rude kind of dialogue already mentioned, but a nobler ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... could do; but it is what the writer himself says that attracts far more than what he puts into the mouths of his characters. G. H. Lewes is, to my perception, decidedly the most original character in the book. . . . The didactic passages seem to me the best—far the best—in the work; very acute, very profound, are some of the views there given, and very clearly they are offered to the reader. He is a just thinker; he is a sagacious observer; there is wisdom in his theory, and, I doubt not, energy in his practice. ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... results. The peasants view with distrust and suspicion whatever comes to them from their social superiors, and the so-called "useful books," which were scattered broadcast over the land, were of a tediously didactic character, and, moreover, hardly adapted to the comprehension of those to whom they were ostensibly addressed. Wergeland himself, with all his self-sacrificing ardor, had but a vague conception of the real needs of the people, and, as far as results were concerned, wasted much of his valuable ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... didactic, he upheld his end in most discussions on applied sciences or philosophic arguments, putting forth his deep knowledge in an unobtrusive way. I found this trait to be an invariable rule with most of the Japanese with whom I came in contact. Once or twice during our lengthy and pleasant chats I tried ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... and he found at least a passing entertainment in the ARCADIA and the GRAND CYRUS. George Eliot he outgrew, finding her latterly only sawdust in the mouth; but her influence, while it lasted, was great, and must have gone some way to form his mind. He was easily set on edge, however, by didactic writing; and held that books should teach no other lesson but what 'real life would teach, were it as vividly presented.' Again, it was the thing made that took him, the drama in the book; to the book itself, to any ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... eyes to a good many disagreeable things in business, Mr. Gordon," he said, genially didactic. "Our problem in this day and generation is so to draw the line of distinction that these necessary concessions to human frailty will not debauch us; may be made without prejudice to that high sense of personal honor and integrity which must be the corner-stone of any successful business career. ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... this life, not by didactic description, but by example, by telling you the story of one who lived this life. He was born in the lowest social station, he battled against every disadvantage, the hospital was his sick-chamber, his funeral was at the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... sight, the time-worn, disfigured courtesan, half prostrate before the beautiful young creature proud and unassailable in the instinctive force of her own character. It was almost a didactic tableau, fraught with lessons for the vicious. Sophia was happier than she had been for years. She had a purpose in existence; she had a fluid soul to mould to her will according to her wisdom; and there was a large compassion to her credit. Public opinion ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... pin, repented of and confessed that crime, and then became a good and great man, I was as familiar as if I myself had invented that ingenious and instructive tale; I could lisp the moral numbers of Watts and the didactic hymns of Wesley, and the annual reports of the American Tract Society had already revealed to me the sphere of usefulness in which my grandmother hoped I would ultimately figure with discretion and zeal. And ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... Queen, and a privy councillor, Antonio de Fonseca, were the persons present; and, as I imagine, the latter addressed Ovando on the part of their Highnesses. As it is not often that we have an opportunity of hearing a didactic lecture on the modes and duties of government given in the presence of a great master of that art, and probably looked over, if not prepared, by him, we must enter the royal cabinet, and hear ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... impression of what he has actually seen. The greatest difficulties that he has to contend against are the ignorance and the previous misconceptions of his readers. He must give information without appearing didactic, and correct what he foresees as probable false conceptions, without ostentatiously pretending to know better. His language must be as concise as possible, or else important sentences will be skipped; and yet at the same time it must flow easily enough to be pleasantly readable. ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... therefore, to change my lodgings, drop my correspondence, and disappear altogether from the view of my village admirers. Besides, I was anxious to make one more poetic attempt. I was by no means disheartened by the failure of my first. My poem was evidently too didactic. The public was wise enough. It no longer read for instruction. "They want horrors, do they?" said I, "I'faith, then they shall have enough of them." So I looked out for some quiet retired place, where I might be out of reach of my friends, and ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... even those of the poems of Chaucer. The older fashions of instructing the people were still in vogue in the early part of Edward's reign. Richard Rolle, the hermit of Hampole, whose Prick of Conscience and vernacular paraphrases of the Bible illustrate the older didactic literature, was carried off in his Yorkshire cell in the year of the Black Death. The cycles of miracle plays, which edified and amused the townsfolk of Chester and York, crystallised into a permanent ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... bring him and his wife to her lodgings when she was too ill to go forth. They had read each other's writings and could compliment each other in all sincerity, for Mrs. Jameson had also an excellent narrative style; but Hawthorne found her rather didactic, and although she professed to be able "to read a picture like a book," her conversation was by no means brilliant. She had contracted an unhappy marriage early in life, and found an escape from her sorrows and regrets ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... supernatural scenes. The hero is young in years, but has no youthful ardour. The very ghost is manipulated in a half-hearted fashion and fails to produce the slightest thrill. The natural inclination of the authoress was probably towards domestic fiction with a didactic intention, and she attempted a "mediaeval" setting as a tour de force, in emulation of Walpole's Castle of Otranto. The hero, whose birth is enshrouded in mystery, the restless ghost groaning for the vindication of rights, the historical background, the archaic spelling ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... be understood, render unnecessary all further remarks on his writings. He was equally admired for the dignity and sublimity of his moral and philosophical works, the vivacity of his satirical, the clearness and propriety of his didactic, the richness and variety of his descriptive, and the elegance of all, added to an harmony of versification and correctness of sentiment and language, unknown to our former poets, and of which he has set an example which will be an example or a reproach to his successors. His prose-stile is as ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... Wordsworth, Walter Wilson, and Manning (principally with Manning) goes on. It is sometimes critical, sometimes jocose. He discusses the merits of various authors, and more than once expresses his extreme distaste for didactic writing. Now, he says, it is too directly instructive. Then he complains that the knowledge, insignificant and vapid as it is, must come in the shape of knowledge. He could not obtain at Newberry's shop any of the old "classics of the Nursery," he says; whilst "Mrs. Barbauld's and Mrs. ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... be didactic to the people, and that as their chief end. The structural arts, didactic in their manner; the graphic arts, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... to express that we become tired of the task before we can comprehend the beauty; that we learn by rote before we can get by heart; that the freshness is worn away, and the future pleasure and advantage deadened and destroyed by the didactic anticipation, at an age when we can neither feel nor understand the power of compositions, which it requires an acquaintance with life, as well as Latin and Greek, to relish or to reason upon. For the same reason, we never can be aware of the fulness ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... have the farm," remarked Polly, still a plump, rosy, and well-dressed Polly, albeit with an added air of importance and a slightly didactic enunciation. "How much do you ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... to the large and attractive class which some persons call "females," Mr. Hamerton abandons with ready grace his moral colors, and falls at once into the easiest tones proper to a man of the world. "You must not be didactic with ladies," he says; and in the capital story about the mother-in-law he appears to side with the polite French gendre who said to every proposition, "Yes, mother dear, you are quite right," and to have much sympathy with the learned Scotch ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... contact on the side of the lyric and the drama was, he declares, very slight[32], and the peninsular writings actually circulated in our country at this time, in translations, he divides into three classes; occasional literature, that is topical tracts and pamphlets on contemporary Spanish affairs; didactic literature, comprising scientific treatises, accounts of voyages such as inspired Hakluyt, works on military science, and, more important still, the religious writings of mystics like Granada; and lastly artistic prose. The last item, which alone concerns ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... a specimen in Bk. IV. It is of Syriac origin, undoubtedly introduced into Eastern Turkestan by the early Nestorian missions, probably in the 8th or 9th century. The oldest known example of this character so applied, the Kudatku Bilik, a didactic poem in Uighur (a branch of Oriental Turkish), dating from A.D. 1069, was published by Prof. Vambery in 1870. A new edition of the Kudatku Bilik was published at St. Petersburg, in 1891, by Dr. W. Radloff. Vambery ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... the pale walls of her sitting-room, seeking counsel of ancestral daguerreotypes and didactic samplers; but they seemed to ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... invisible on the map of the world, carried to perfection in a few short centuries every human art. Everything in Greece is art; because everything is finished, done perfectly well. In that garden of the world ripened the masterpieces of epic, tragic, comic, lyric, didactic poetry; the masterpieces in every school of philosophic investigation; the masterpieces of history, of oratory, of mathematics; the masterpieces of architecture, sculpture, and painting. Greece developed every ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... Phelim, squaring himself, and placing the index finger of his right hand in his left hand, after the manner of the didactic, "the great thing is the discard, and your discard should be governed by two considerations—first, to better your own hand, and second, to cripple your opponent's. Your moderate player never thinks of this latter consideration. ...
— The Turquoise Cup, and, The Desert • Arthur Cosslett Smith
... my admiration of the courage and calmness of Melville; but I could no more think of placing him, scholarly and bold, yet calm, as he generally was, nor the Book attributed to him, more logical and unimpassionately didactic though it be, before the eager, impetuous, yet sagacious Knox, with his wealth of rude eloquence and thrilling tenderness, and his Book in which these qualities of head and heart are so clearly mirrored, than I would think of placing Calvin, highly as I honour him, before Luther, or ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... a slightly disturbing element in the Form. When it was her turn to answer there would be an air of general expectancy in the room; the didactic language of the textbooks was often paraphrased by her lips into something of a more racy description, and even her mistakes were as delicious as her quaint methods of stating facts. Miss Farrar occasionally suspected her of intentionally giving wrong ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... love we have a record in the elegies of Theognis, in which the poet has embodied, for the benefit of Kurnus his friend, the ripe experience of an eventful life. The poems for the most part are didactic in character, consciously and deliberately aimed at the instruction and guidance of the man to whom they are addressed; but every now and again the passion breaks through which informs and inspires this virile intercourse, and in such a passage as the following gives us the key to this and to all ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... dull didactic mood, He quits the realms of dream, And like some pulpit-preacher rude, ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... variety in thought. But the aspiring and ardent nature of his intellect made him love to attempt also constant experiments in the theme and in the style. The romantic ballad, the classical tale, the lyric, the didactic, the epigrammatic—the wealth of his music comprehended every note, the boldness of his temper adventured every hazard. Yet still, (as in our Byron, in our Goldsmith, and as, perhaps, in every mind tenacious of its impressions,) some favourite ideas take possession of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... the Gita is clearly quite different in character from the Krishna of the milkmaids and, without some effort at reconciliation, the two must obviously present a baffling enigma. Indeed so great is the contrast that many Englishmen, entranced by the lover, might be astonished to hear of a more didactic role, while those who value the Gita might easily be disturbed on finding its author so daringly identified with the theory and practice of romantic love. The truth, if we are to admit it, is that despite considerable acquaintance with Krishna as a name, few educated people in the West ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... gaily at good Lady Fenimore's somewhat didactic reproof. "You know I'm not an absolute idiot. Fancy the poor dear coming home all over bandages and sticking-plaster. 'Where's your V. C?' 'I haven't got it.' 'Then go back at once and get it or I shan't love you.' Poor darling!" ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... them in letters and science; and employed every expedient to render those chains, which he had forged, both easy and agreeable to them." (Hume's Hist. vol. i. p. 9.) In this passage Mr. Hume has given a summary of the Life of Agricola. It is extended by Tacitus in a style more open than the didactic form of the essay on the German Manners required, but still with the precision, both in sentiment and diction, peculiar to the author. In rich but subdued colors he gives a striking picture of Agricola, leaving to posterity a portion of history ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... to transform this gay creature into a lackadaisical young lady; though, as she tried her very best to do so, none ought to blame her because she failed of success. All her stock of novels she lent to Laura, who read them, every one, in secret, skipping only the dull and didactic pages. That she was not spoiled by this experiment was due less to the strength of Laura's understanding than to the liveliness of her temper, which, in this strait, stood her in very good stead of more solid qualities and a wiser experience. As it was, she learned to talk ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... assert that the style and matter of most of his work is always tiresome, frequently childish, and the subject often morbid and unhealthy; and, further, that his method is tedious to the last degree of boredom; for, as a writer, if I may judge him fairly by his translators, he is didactic and prosy, and never more tedious than when his dialogue is intended to be at its very crispest. As a playwright his construction is faulty. Here and there he gives expression to pretty ideas, reminding me (still judging by the translation) ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 14, 1891. • Various
... condition to command the light to shine. I am sorry you have assumed the novel form. A series of letters addressed to a friend in London, taking for your model the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, would have secured you the most extensive reading. A matter-of-fact and didactic novel is neither one thing nor the other, and suits no class of readers. Certainly, however, Paul and Virginia would suggest a local plan; and it will be possible by writing three or four times over in six or eight months to produce what would command attention.' Sir ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... it seems to me, more of the divine fire in any half-dozen of his good letters than there is in the entire six books of The Task. One has only to read the argument at the top of the third book, called The Garden, in order to see in what a dreary didactic spirit it is written. Here ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... called a ballad, containing as it does a chronicle of a certain well-defined transaction; and the story of King Canute is a ballad,—one of the best that has been produced in our language in modern years. But such pieces as those called The End of the Play and Vanitas Vanitatum, which are didactic as well as pathetic, are not ballads in the common sense; nor are such songs as The Mahogany Tree, or the little collection called Love Songs made Easy. The majority of the pieces are not ballads, but if they be good of the kind we should be ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... Herbert that the didactic Tappington's method of inculcating a horror of slang in his sister's breast was open to some objection; but they were already on the steps of their house, and he was too much mortified at the reception of his last unhappy suggestion to make the confidential ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... Independence (February 4, 1899) precluded direct American intervention in favour of the Spanish prisoners. General Rios, whose importance was being overshadowed by Senor Fuset's productive activity, cabled to Madrid that he would attend to the matter himself. But the didactic tone of his letters to Aguinaldo was not conducive to a happy result, and having frankly confessed his failure, the general made an appeal to the consuls and foreign merchants to exercise conjointly their influence. A letter of appeal from them ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... is a subject for poetry that admits of a dispute. Poets are in general bad prose-writers, because their images, though fine in themselves, are not to the purpose, and do not carry on the argument. The French poetry wants the forms of the imagination. It is didactic more than dramatic. And some of our own poetry, which has been most admired, is only poetry in the rhyme, and in the studied ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... greatest educational work was undoubtedly his "Great Didactic," or the "Art of Teaching All Things to All Men." It was a thorough and comprehensive treatise on the whole science, method, scope and purpose of universal education. As this book has been recently translated into English, ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... fall into two groups according as they are didactic (technical or gnomic) or genealogical: the first group centres round the "Works and Days", the second round ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... retrospect, I observe that my long letter carries with it a quaint and magisterial air, and is very sententious; but when I recollect that you requested stricture and anecdote, I hope you will pardon the didactic manner for the sake of the information it ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... fairy tale there often appears a philosophy which is didactic and above and beyond the child's knowledge of the world. It remains a question how much this adult philosophy appeals to him. Although his tales were written for his grandchildren, so finished a telling of the tale ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... However, he consented to the employment of the bridge teacher for her and, thereafter, two hours of each alternate afternoon, Sundays excepted, were spent by Mrs. Dott and two other female students in company with a thin and didactic spinster who quoted Elwell and Foster and discoursed learnedly concerning the values of no-trump hands. The lessons were given at the Dott home and Mr. Hungerford was an interested spectator. Daniel, who was not interested, and felt himself in the way, moped in his own room or ...
— Cap'n Dan's Daughter • Joseph C. Lincoln
... the age of twenty-two. After being three years at practice he married his first wife, who died within two years afterward, plunging him into the deepest grief. During his courtship he dabbled (as almost every young lawyer does until he finds that clients are severe critics) in poetry, and wrote a didactic poem of two parts in heroic verse, entitled "The Power of Solitude." Adopting the criticism of the biographers—its prominent defects were exaggeration of feeling, confusion of imagery, want of simplicity of expression, stilted and artificial ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... in a didactic way; "it is a story, and it is complete. In fact, I consider it unique because it has none of the banalities of a solution and leaves the problem even more confused ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... uncomprehended by any class of readers, be used, it is simply for the sake of brevity; and because, as Kant says, "completeness must not be sacrificed to popularity," the attainment of which would be "a didactic triumph, attained only by omitting everything complicated, and saying only what exists already in the consciousness of ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... an earlier France. Some of his gay Fetes Champetres recall the influence of Watteau—a Watteau without the sweet elegiac strain. He has been called a Spanish Hogarth—not a happy simile. Hogarth preaches; Goya never; satirists both, Goya never deepened by a pen stroke the didactic side. His youth was not extraordinary in promise; his father and mother were poor peasants. The story of his discovery by a monk of Saragosela—Father Felix Salvador of the Carthusian convent of Aula Dei—is not missing. He studied ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... Advancement of Religion, he largely attributed the scandalous immorality everywhere prevalent to the insufficiency of religious instruction, and to the low character of the clergy, the result mainly of their ignorance and poverty. His Letter to a Young Clergyman is little more than a didactic adaptation of that portion of Eachard's work which deals with the character and education of the clergy. The Essay on the Fates of Clergymen is another study from the Contempt, while the fragment of the tract which he had begun, ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... of punch. Mr. Campbell left him, but Sir Walter thought he would dip into the manuscript before going to bed. He opened it, read, and read again—charmed with the classical grace, purity, and stateliness of that finest of all our modern didactic poems. Next morning Mr. Campbell again called, when to his inexpressible surprise, his friend on returning the manuscript to its owner, said he should guard well against piracy, for that he himself could repeat the poem from beginning ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 571 - Volume 20, No. 571—Supplementary Number • Various
... 1. A meta-thing. Used to stand for a real object in didactic examples (especially database tutorials). Legend has it that the original widgets were holders for buggy whips. "But suppose the parts list for a widget has 52 entries...." 2. [poss. evoking 'window gadget'] A user interface object ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... entered the house, her father and Mr. Heddegan immediately at her back. Her mother had been so didactic that she had felt herself absolutely unable to broach the subjects in the ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... (thrusting his hand into his waistcoat, and in his most didactic of tones).—"From a remote period, the choice of a title has perplexed the scribbling portion of mankind. We may guess how their invention has been racked by the strange contortions it has produced. To begin with the Hebrews. 'The ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... philosophical and theological student; in this respect it may be likened to Pater's "Marius the Epicurean," which vividly reproduces the Intellectual ferment of an earlier age. "Thorndale," however, is primarily didactic, and the philosophical dialogues (interesting as these are to the metaphysician) hardly atone to the general reader for an almost entire absence of plot. The above is, doubtless, an altogether extreme instance, but the exclusion of several other works ...
— A Guide to the Best Historical Novels and Tales • Jonathan Nield
... is a book of directions for gardening and cooking, it is not the least didactic but is written in a discoursive style and with a leisureliness and in a rhythm suited to the slow pace of a horse trotting through the winding lanes of the English countryside. As we read, we can almost see the butler bringing a fragrant pudding to the family assembled around ...
— Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets • John Evelyn
... intelligence than I. I only care to bring four or five pilgrims to the operas, pilgrims able to appreciate them and enjoy them. What I write about the performance to put in my odd time would be offered to the public as merely a cat's view of a king, and not of didactic value. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... More ingenious, more didactic, and altogether more meritorious than these is another series of designs belonging to the same period of time. They are not only as a rule conceived in better taste, but are, almost consequently, better in their execution. ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... Church, was decorative in scope; its purpose was illustration, its function was to teach. As painters, from generation to generation, went deeper into the secrets of their craft, they became less interested in the didactic import of their work, and they concerned themselves more and more with its purely artistic significance. Religious subjects were no longer used merely as symbols for the expression of piety and as incitements to devotion; they became inherently artistic motives, ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... their rights and duties as citizens from their orators, so they hung on the lips of the 'lofty, grave tragedians' for instruction touching their origin, duty, and destiny as mortal and immortal beings.... Greek tragedy is essentially didactic, ethical, mythological, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... that the poet shall versify scientific discoveries. The didactic poem is and will be, in its best form, always but a piece of mechanism, or wooden figure, which has not the true life. The sunlight of science must penetrate the poet; he must perceive truth and harmony in the minute and in the immensely ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... contemplative in tone, but inspired by a formed conviction, and, dramatically at least, by an instructive purpose; and thus becomes the centre of another small division of Mr. Browning's poems, which for want of a less ugly and hackneyed word we may call "didactic." ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... upon your subject, you must next consider the tone, or manner, of your narration. There is the tone didactic, the tone enthusiastic, the tone natural—all common—place enough. But then there is the tone laconic, or curt, which has lately come much into use. It consists in short sentences. Somehow thus: Can't be too brief. Can't be too snappish. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... right. As to conversation, there is no use in sending the bucket into the well when the well is dry—it only makes a rattling of windlass and chain. We do not wish to be understood to be an enemy of the light traffic of human speech. Deliver us from the didactic and the everlastingly improving style of thing! Conversation, in order to be good, and intellectually inspiring, and spiritually restful, need not always be serious. It must be alert and intelligent, and mean more by its suggestions and allusions than is said. There is the light touch-and-go ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... without sharp falsetto effort, throughout the entire passage of a play. In a few impersonations, where Kemble, with all his mannerisms and defective elocution, and Macready, notwithstanding his uninspired, didactic nature, were most at their ease and successful, this actor would be somewhat put to his mettle,—a fact of which he is probably ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... A Melodramatic Didactic Vaudeville, suggested by "The Wooden Doll and the Wax Doll." By the Misses Jane and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 8, 1890 • Various
... the merit at least of displaying and recommending it most effectually to the attention of mankind. Let us endeavor, in the first place, to ascertain his meaning on this point. The British Constitution was to Montesquieu what Homer has been to the didactic writers on epic poetry. As the latter have considered the work of the immortal bard as the perfect model from which the principles and rules of the epic art were to be drawn, and by which all similar works were to be judged, so this great ...
— The Federalist Papers
... his chair. They hardly knew his voice, emerging from its long silence; it was so didactic ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... by Arbuthnot. He points out that there are three great Persian didactic works, viz.:—The Gulistan, or Rose Garden, by Sadi; The Nigaristan by Jawini; and The Beharistan by Jami. The Nigaristan contains 534 stories in prose and verse. Some particulars of it are given in Arbuthnot's Persian Portraits (Quaritch, 1887), p. 106. "These three ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... means by which so tremendous an effort may be produced, we cannot refrain from the highest admiration. How happily the epic, lyric, and dramatic diction is interwoven, not compelling, but enticing us to sympathize with such cruel fates! And how well the scanty didactic reflection becomes the chorus as it speaks! All this cannot receive too ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... of genius that nothing that I can say can give you an idea of the intensity of admiration with which I read it. It seemed to me, as I told my nieces, that our English fiction writers had better shut up altogether and have done with it, for one will have no patience with any but didactic writing after yours. My nieces (and you may have heard that Maria, my nurse, is very, very clever) are thoroughly possessed with the book, and Maria says she feels as if a fresh department of human life had ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... full of "long-tailed words in osity and ation;" but his 'Lives of the Poets' is written in manly, vigorous, and idiomatic English. In verse, he occupies a place between Pope and Goldsmith, and is one of the masters in the "didactic school" of English poetry. His rhythm and periods are swelling and sonorous; and here and there he equals Pope in the terseness and condensation of his language. The following is ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... in any degree ever intruded by this least didactic of writers. It is the fact that teaches, and not any sermonizing drawn from it. Oliver Twist is the history of a child born in a workhouse and brought up by parish overseers, and there is nothing introduced that is out of keeping with ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... an Alexandrian didactic poet. The [Greek: theriaka] survives, is over 1,000 lines long, and deals with the bites of ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... Austen—is a sentence which at first sight suggests some relationship to the name of the book which, in the present series, inaugurated Miss Austen's novels. 'The whole of this unfortunate business'—says a certain didactic Dr. Lyster, talking in capitals, towards the end of volume three of Cecilia—'has been the result of PRIDE and PREJUDICE,' and looking to the admitted familiarity of Miss Austen with Madame D'Arblay's work, it has been concluded that Miss Austen borrowed from Cecilia, ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... worthy Authors,—in three Parts; containing, I. The notbrowne Mayde; Master Sackvile's Induction; and, Overbury's Wife: II. Edward the third, a Play, thought to be writ by Shakespeare: III. Those excellent didactic Poems, intitl'd—Nosce teipsum, written by Sir John ...
— Catalogue of the Books Presented by Edward Capell to the Library of Trinity College in Cambridge • W. W. Greg
... Judges with Ruth, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah with Lamentations, Ezekiel and the twelve minor prophets. It was not completed prior to 300 B.C., because the book of Jonah was not written before. This work may be called a historical parable composed for a didactic purpose, giving a milder, larger view of Jehovah's favor than the orthodox one, that excluded the Gentiles. Ruth, containing an idyllic story with an unfinished genealogy attached, meant to glorify the house ...
— The Canon of the Bible • Samuel Davidson
... of the assize of food; the laws respecting the sale of meat, bread, beer, wine, and other necessaries; while above and beyond all are a collection in various handwritten of ballads, songs, hymns, and didactic poems of a religious kind, some few of which have been met with elsewhere; but of the greater number of them no other copy, ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... adopted canons of French taste, narrative and didactic verse, or satire, took first place. Blank verse was tabooed as too prose-like; so, too, were the enjambed rhymes. A succession of rhymed pentameter couplets, with the sense complete in each couplet, was set forth as the proper vehicle for poetry; and this unenjambed distich fettered ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... Friedrich has already had 30 miles of driving,—rate 10 miles an hour, as we chance to observe. Notable things, besides the Spade-husbandries he is intent on, solicit his remembrance in this region. Of Freisack and "Heavy-Peg" with her didactic batterings there, I suppose he, in those fixed times, knows nothing, probably has never heard: Freisack is on a branch of this same Rhyn, and he might see it, to left a mile or two, if ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Appendix - Frederick The Great—A Day with Friedrich.—(23d July, 1779.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Surely it is a most potent egg, a gallinaceous Swift. After all, anything but pointless and childless, since it has this strange quality of being offensive and engendering thought. Food for the mind if not food for the body—didactic if not delightful—a bit of modern literature, earnest and fundamentally real. I must try and understand you, Ibsen Ovarum. Possibly it is a profound parable I have stumbled upon. Though I scarcely reckoned on a parable with my bread and butter. Frankly, I must ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... infer, good hearing extended to these unblushingly didactic Interludes attracted into authorship writers with purposes more aggressive and debatable than those pertaining to wise conduct. Zealous reformers, earnest proselytizers, fierce dogmatists turned to the drama as a medium through ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... in practical jokes. The objection, however, is not only false, but very much the reverse of the facts. The fairy-tales are at root not only moral in the sense of being innocent, but moral in the sense of being didactic, moral in the sense of being moralising. It is all very well to talk of the freedom of fairyland, but there was precious little freedom in fairyland by the best official accounts. Mr. W.B. Yeats and other sensitive modern souls, ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... is preferable to precept in teaching children, will be obvious, when we consider the nature of the principle of grouping, as exercised by the young, and the difficulty they experience in remembering abstract or didactic subjects. When a child receives instruction by a story, the imagination is enlisted in the exercise, the grouping of the persons and circumstances assists the memory, and the moral and practical lessons which they have drawn ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall |
