"Precocious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... who ranks among the world's greatest theologians and metaphysicians, was born in 1703 in East Windsor, Connecticut. Like Cotton Mather, Edwards was precocious, entering Yale before he was thirteen. The year previous to his going to college, he wrote a paper on spiders, showing careful scientific observation and argument. This paper has been called "one of the rarest specimens of precocious scientific genius ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... soft sands, laughing as he falls, and rising to try again. And thus, does he quickly, wonderfully develop, unfolding in the little circle of his caressers—in his mother's lap, in Shakib's arms, on Khalid's back, on Mrs. Gotfry's knee—the irresistible charm of his precocious spirit. ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... well as I knew him now. Here again I gave him credit for wishing, though he didn't love her, to spare her what he could. That he didn't love her I presumed from his indubitable willingness not to stake her in this afternoon's game. That he never had loved her—had taken her in his precocious youth simply as a gigantic chance against him, was likely enough. So much the more credit to him for such consideration as he showed her, though this was little enough. He could wish to save her from being a looker-on at his ...
— James Pethel • Max Beerbohm
... summer following her death in brooding and novel-reading. Grief, and to no small extent idleness, had shaken his whole nervous system and quickened his imagination. His tears had been like warm April showers falling on fruit trees, wakening them to a precocious burgeoning: but alas! only too often the blossoms are doomed to wither and perish in a frosty May night, before the fruit has had ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... the woods near Janville which they rented from the Seguins. So impatient, indeed, were they to find themselves once more among the fields that in spite of the doctor's advice Marianne had made the journey but fifteen days after giving birth to her little boy. However, a precocious springtide brought with it that March such balmy warmth and sunshine that the only ill-effect she experienced was a little fatigue. And so, on the day after their arrival—Sunday—Mathieu, glad at being able to remain with her, insisted ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... how girls were more precocious than boys; though it would be wrong to deduce too much from Lucien's unintelligent face. In another year he would doubtless lose all his gawkiness and become quite a gallant. Finally, Madame Deberle resumed her embroidery, making perhaps two stitches in ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... born at Peine in Hanover, April 21, 1819. Notwithstanding his precocious intellectuality and remarkable poetic talents, he was condemned by his parents to a mercantile career. After a mournful apprenticeship he managed, however, to escape from this uncongenial employment, and pursued a course of study at Goettingen, Munich ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... awakening of intellectual life, and the rapidity of its progress, that height of stature might almost as well be taken for its measure as length of years. In every community there are some young minds of peculiar gifts and precocious development, as fit to cope with the masterpieces of literature at ten years of age, as the average person of twenty, and more appreciative of them. From this class come the minds which rule the world of mind, and confer the greatest benefits on the race. How can the public library ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... off her leg, And laid it down like a cribbage-peg, For the Rout was done and the riot: The Square was hush'd; not a sound was heard; The sky was gray, and no creature stirr'd, Except one little precocious bird, That chirp'd—and then ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... on the individuals themselves in building up their bodies, strengthening their minds, and preparing them to reproduce their species in maturer years. There is a serious day of reckoning for early indulgence; for precocious persons (unless their constitutions are as powerful as their desires) who give way to their passions at their first exactions, barter their youth for their enjoyment, and are old and weary of the world at an age when people of more moderate ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... of other boys in their class who had come to me, making me a sort of mother-confessor. I do not think that I was entirely deceived by my own eloquence—there was, I am sure, a minute or two when he actually wavered. But then the habits of a precocious life-time reasserted themselves, and he set his lips and told himself that he was Douglas van Tuiver. Such things might happen in raw Western colleges, but they were not according to the Harvard manner, nor the tradition of life in Fifth ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... abnormally bright as well as with the abnormally dull. Naturally the well-to-do and the rich are the first to take advantage of these special facilities for ascertaining just what work should be done by a precocious child or by ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... thus nearly fifty when he began to write, a fact which strikes us as remarkable. We are accustomed to associate the poetic gift with a highly-strung nervous system, and unusual bodily conditions not favourable to long life, as well as with a precocious special development which proclaims unmistakably in the boy the future greatness of the man. None of these conditions seem to have been present in the early Roman school. Livius was a quiet schoolmaster, Naevius a vigorous soldier, ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... that the truth was due to the generous girl, but each word had been intense pain. He wrote on, often interrupted by little riots among the children, and finally by a sharp contention, the twins having possessed themselves of a paper-knife, which Kitty, with precocious notions of discipline, considered as forbidden; and little Mercy was rapped over the fingers in the struggle. The roar brought down interference, and Kitty fell into disgrace; but when, after long persuasion, she was induced to yield the paper-cutter, kiss and make friends, Mercy, ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... exclaimed Tobe as he held out the pan to Mrs. Sniffer and thus coaxed her from the side of Rose Mary and the small family. And, sure enough, around squirmed every little white and yellow bunch and up went every little new-born nose as it sniffed at the recession of the maternal fount. One little precocious even went so far as to attempt to set his wee fore paddies against Rose Mary's knee and to stiffen a tiny plume of a tail, with a plain instinct to point the direction of the shifting base of supplies. Rose ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... couple of days' visit, as also her son; but the doctor's age, his semi-paternal intimacy, allowed him to have with him, even in his wife's absence, this young girl whose fifteen years, the fifteen years of an Eastern Jewess glorious in her precocious beauty, left ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... develop the freak as against the citizen, the eccentric and lop- sided as against what is proportionate and disciplined. Young Hazlitt's cleverness and his passion for individual liberty were alike precocious. In 1791, at the age of thirteen, he composed and published in The Shrewsbury Chronicle a letter of protest against the calumniators of Dr. Priestley: a performance which, for the gravity of its thought as for the balance of its expression, would do credit to ninety-nine grown men in a hundred. ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... and whose high spirit and powerful intellect he detested still more. The first place at the board of Treasury was repeatedly offered to Pitt; but the offer, though tempting, was steadfastly declined. The young man, whose judgment was as precocious as his eloquence, saw that his time was coming, but was not come, and was deaf to royal importunities and reproaches. His Majesty, bitterly complaining of Pitt's faintheartedness, tried to break the coalition. Every art of seduction was practised on North, but in vain. During ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... although too immense for practical use, yet, his efforts having been exclusively directed to fanciful design, and not to practical possibility, was highly applauded. Master Russell also evinced a highly precocious talent for drawing—his salary. Prize: a splendidly-bound copy of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... them playing together. They seem to be born with the gift of telling a lie with most portentous gravity. They wear an air of the most winning candour and guileless innocence, when they are all the while plotting some petty scheme against you. They are certainly far more precocious than English children; they realise the hard struggle for life far more quickly. The poorer classes can hardly be said to have any childhood; as soon as they can toddle they are sent to weed, cut grass, gather fuel, tend herds, or ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... help them all! for there were the children too. Children— save the mark!—with pallid, precocious little faces, pinched with the ravages of starvation, gazing with dim, filmy eyes on this world of rapacity and hideousness. Children ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... impulses to be overcome. A companionable and sensible father aids him judiciously, and leaves success to be worked out on natural lines. All the stage effects of the cheaper kinds of boys' books are blissfully absent; there are no villains plotting against the upright, no nations saved by the precocious intelligence of youth, and no impossible adventure or accomplishment—just the problems before average boys, and that can be solved as these boys solve them if "Mr. Responsibility" is recognized as a partner in all undertakings, and one learns to see and grasp his opportunities. A book that ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... was only nineteen years old, she was a large girl with all the development of a much older woman. There was a certain generous amplitude to the full, round curves of her hips and shoulders that suggested the precocious maturity of a healthy, vigorous animal life passed under the hot southern sun of a half-tropical country. She was, one knew at a glance, warm-blooded, full-blooded, with an even, comfortable balance of temperament. Her neck was thick, and sloped to her shoulders, with full, beautiful curves, and ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... young woman my little rogue learned to chatter French most charmingly. It would have done your heart good to hear the dear rascal swear Mort de ma vie! and to see him stamp his little foot, and send the manants and canaille of the domestics to the trente mille diables. He was precocious in all things: at a very early age he would mimic everybody; at five, he would sit at table, and drink his glass of champagne with the best of us; and his nurse would teach him little French catches, and the last Parisian songs of Vade and Collard,—pretty ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... balance between the landowning and commercial elements has been steadiness of political progress, in contrast on the one hand to the commercial republics of Italy, whose political progress was precocious and rapid but shortlived, and on the other hand to great feudal kingdoms where commerce was comparatively weak. England, as yet, has taken but few steps backwards. It remains to be seen what the future may bring under the changed conditions ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... mind was still running upon his precocious grandson, was seen to shake his head from side to side, while a laugh, working like an earthquake, below the surface, produced various extraordinary appearances in his face, chest, and shoulders, - the more alarming because unaccompanied by any noise whatever. These emotions, however, gradually ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... children of a constitutional liability to pulmonary disease, and especially to consumption; yet no condition is less attended to in forming matrimonial engagements. The children of scrofulous and consumptive parents are generally precocious, and their minds being early matured, they engage early in the business of life, and often enter the married state before their bodily frame has had time to consolidate. For a few years every thing seems to go on prosperously, and ...
— The Maternal Management of Children, in Health and Disease. • Thomas Bull, M.D.
... time, was Edgar Poe, the future poet and story-writer. The little Edgar was adopted by the wife of Mr. John Allan, a well-to-do Scotch merchant of the city, who later became wealthy, and the boy was thereafter known as Edgar Allan Poe. He was a beautiful and precocious child, who at six years of age could read, draw, dance, and declaim the best poetry with fine effect and appreciation; report says, also, that he had been taught to stand on a chair and pledge Mr. Allan's guests in a glass of ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... reach, that he's going to spend all his time working that mine? He's going to divide time so that more than half of it will be given to Anne. Then he'll work double-quick on the mine business to catch up on his work," was Eleanor's precocious statement. ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... willed to Congreve was taken up by Alexander Pope. He was a man quite unlike Dryden, sickly, deformed, morbidly precocious, and spiteful; nevertheless he joined on to and continued Dryden. He was more careful in his literary workmanship than his great forerunner, and in his Moral Essays and Satires he brought the Horatian ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... child of eight or ten already knows far more than is good for the health of either body or mind, and, though we may succeed in reducing the size of the family, yet the means we employ will militate against the raising of the moral tone of the household, and the children will not be any less precocious ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... true, but there is more than this. The precocious development of early talent and originality is the thing which strangely terrifies these examination-maniacs. They have a horror of the man who teaches himself. They have a horror of any one who ventures to think ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... his selection of pickles, very particular that his beef-steak at breakfast shall be hot, and is instant in his demand for fresh ice in his water. But perhaps his, or in this case her, retreat from the room when the meal is over, is the chef-d'oeuvre of the whole performance. The little, precocious, full-blown beauty of four signifies that she has completed her meal—or is "through" her dinner, as she would express it—by carefully extricating herself from the napkin which has been tucked around her. Then the waiter, ever attentive to her movements, draws back the chair on which she ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... satire stands Count Roger Rabutin de Bussy, whose mind was jocose, his wit keen, and his sarcasm severe. He was born in 1618, and educated at a college of Jesuits, where he manifested an extraordinary avidity for letters and precocious talents. The glory of war fired his early zeal, and for sixteen years he followed the pursuit of arms. Then literature claimed him as her slave. His first book, Les amours du Palais Royal, excited the displeasure of King ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... stockings, peaked scarlet shoes: for the rest he was in green cloth with a blue leather belt about his waist. He had fine lace ruffles at his wrists, a fine line of white at his throat, and in his ears (if you could have seen them) gold rings. Just the pampered young minion of any Tuscan court, a precocious wrappage of wit, good manners, and sensibility, he looked what he spoke, the exquisite Florentine, to these broad-vowelled Venetian lasses; did not smile, but seemed never out of temper; and was certainly not timid. Self-possessed, reticent he was; but ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... me. I outgrew toys very early and became precocious. Elderly ladies said I was "old for my age," whatever that may mean, and that I was too smart to live. But I have always had a stubborn way of disappointing those who love me best. This precocity was taken advantage of by relatives and visitors to furnish them with amusement. Many ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... haunted him of spoiling his life. After the war, enriched by the death of his wife, he had come back to live prudently on his fortune in his mansion on the avenue of the Bois de Boulogne, tormented by the hereditary malady of which he was to die young, having gained from his precocious debauchery a salutary fear of pleasure, resolved above all to shun emotions and responsibilities, so that he might last as long as possible. Acute pains in the limbs, rheumatic he thought them, had been alarming him for some time past; he saw himself in fancy already an invalid tied down ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... fast that, before their parents realized at all what precocious youngsters they were, they had climbed out upon the edge of the nest and begun to stretch their fine wings. With hoarse expostulations their father tried to persuade them back. But their mother, who was not so conservative, chuckled her approval and flew off to hunt young ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... winter it reminds me of the very first unfolding of young leaves on trees; of the few hours while they are still hanging down, unable to raise themselves up as yet; they look so worldlywise sometimes, so precocious, and before them there still lie all hopes and all disappointments... In clear nights you forget the earth—under the hazy cover your eye is thrown back upon it. It is the contrast of the universe and ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... sadly through the mimetic mob of youngsters, who were yet not all apes and parrots, he reflected. Just as Jewry had always had its boy Rabbis, its infant phenomenons of the pulpit, prodigies of eloquence and holy learning, so it now had its precocious politicians and its premature sociologists. He was tempted for a moment to try his recruiting spells upon the juvenile Integralist, whose red hair reminded him of his girl cousin's, but it seemed cruel to add to the lad's risks. Besides, had not the boy already proclaimed—like his seniors—that ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... the time of his marriage, was a mere boy fourteen years of age. His father had died when he was nine years old. He was left under the care of his mother, Mary de Medicis, as regent. Anne of Austria was a maturely developed and precocious child of eleven years when she gave her hand to the boy-king of France. Not much discretion could have been expected of two such children, exposed to the idleness, the splendors, and the corruption of ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... conscience: "At ten years of age I waked up to a sense of the danger of the state of indulgence in which I was living"; but let us hope the crisis was not acute. It does not seem to have been. According to the testimony of her first teacher, she was simply precocious morally, but not at all morbid. Her school was at Hingham, whither she was sent at the age of thirteen. The teacher says that with her "devotedness to the highest objects and purposes of our existence, she was one of the most lively and playful girls among ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... of protesting and demonstrating their Hispanism had gone to the Palace to place themselves at the General's orders but had been arrested because it was discovered that they were armed. Providence had saved his Excellency, preventing him from receiving those precocious criminals, as he was at the time in conference with the Provincials, the Vice-Rector, and with Padre Irene, Padre Salvi's representative. There was considerable truth in these rumors, if we have to believe Padre Irene, who in the afternoon went to ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... solemn arguments in favour of the Bill fell a little flat after this sparkling attack. He should have said, "The noble Lord reminds me, not for the first time, of GILBERT'S 'Precocious Infant,' who ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 30, 1917 • Various
... from hugging and kissing, etc., in children who have the emotion in this first stage of its development, is not specifically sexual except in some cases which I am inclined to consider as precocious. Normally, there appears to be no erethism of the sexual organs during the process of love-making. But erethism, as we shall see in another chapter upon the analysis of the sex impulse, is not confined to the sexual organs, but is ...
— A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love between the Sexes • Sanford Bell
... to night. A light gig, that had once belonged to the custom-house, was polished and painted under his special directions, (often did we sigh for one of King's worst "fours!") and the fishermen marvelled at such precocious nautical talent. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... state of neglect. Grass grew over the walks, and weeds choked the fountain. The human beings in the house had much the same air. From Madame Rivals, who, eight years after her daughter's death, still wore the deepest of black, down to little Cecile, whose childish face had a precocious expression of sorrow, and the old servant who for a quarter of a century had shared the griefs and sorrows of the family,—all seemed to live in an atmosphere of eternal regret. The doctor, who kept up a certain intercourse ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... Shepney; was a precocious child, was educated at the Charterhouse, had Grote for a school-fellow, and was a student of Trinity College, Cambridge; called to the bar, but took orders in 1827, having two years previously translated Schleiermacher's "Essay on ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... young man? Two or three of them wiped Sir Felix's face, and dabbed his eyes, and proposed this and the other remedy. Some thought that he had better be taken straight to an hospital. One lady remarked that he was so mashed and mauled that she was sure he would never 'come to' again. A precocious youth remarked that he was 'all one as a dead un'.' A cabman observed that he had ''ad it awful 'eavy.' To all these criticisms on his condition Sir Felix himself made no direct reply, but he intimated his desire ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... As I was the first child in our immediate family circle, there were plenty of now venerable relatives begging to be allowed to play nurse, my aunties among them. Many of my childhood pranks and words they told me in their old age. One of them that the aunties remembered struck me as rather precocious. ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... the tired willingness of Mrs. Schum so for granted, cried herself bitterly into a state that threatened to take the form of a fever, and then to the strophe and antistrophe of her young grief, becoming self-conscious, burst, with not particularly precocious rhyme, reason, or meter, into the following, which was printed ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... Christmas. The spireas were in bloom, and the monthly roses; you could always find a sweet violet or two somewhere in the yard; here and there splotches of deep pink against gray cabin walls proved that precocious peach-trees were in bloom. It never rained. At night it was cold enough for fires. In the middle of the day it was hot. The wind never blew, and every morning we had a four for tennis and every afternoon we rode in the woods. And every night we sat in front of the fire ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... a child arrives at puberty, with its upper nature already roused into precocious action. The child nowadays is almost invariably precocious in "understanding." In the north, spiritually precocious, so that by the time it arrives at adolescence it already has experienced the extended sympathetic ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... to whom she attributed superhuman powers, which enabled him to read people's consciences; and at meal times, the looks of her fellow servants almost made her faint with mental agony, and she was always fancying that she had been found out by the cowherd, a precocious and cunning little lad, whose bright eyes seemed ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... was exceptionally precocious in reaching these conclusions and a sort of religious finality for myself by eighteen or nineteen. I know men and women vary very much in these matters, just as children do in learning to talk. Some will chatter at eighteen ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... a premature and precocious child. His figure was deformed—his back humped—his stature short (four feet)—his legs and arms disproportionably long. He was sometimes compared to a spider, and sometimes to a windmill. The only mark of genius lay in his bright and ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... Agrippina nor the great men of her family. He had a most indocile temperament, rebellious to tradition, in no sense Roman. Little by little, Agrippina saw the young Emperor develop into a precocious debauche, frightfully selfish, erratically vain, full of extravagant ideas, who, instead of setting the example of respect toward sumptuary laws, openly violated them all; and across whose mind from time ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... son. Like all children, he was imitative, so had commenced very early to make a collection of insects, and this was sufficient to give him a precocious taste for natural history; but in his character he was earnest and reflective, and very eager for knowledge. Sumichrast took pleasure in the boy's intelligence, and often amused himself by arguing with him. From the flashes of childish humor which he ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... Montreal about the year 1835. Her father was a schoolmaster, having a private school in the neighborhood of St. Antoine street, and at the tune of their arrival in this city Lillie was about the age of ten. The little girl was precocious and talented, and very pretty, and was also, as regards both these characteristics, admired and made much of. As the girl grew older she became a little vain and conceited, her principal aim being to gain the plaudits of the visitors at her father's house ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... across the bleak prairie, a lone watcher. Ascending, Carl saw that it was Eugene Field Linderbeck, a Plato freshman. That amused him. He grinningly planned a conversation. Every one said that "Genie Linderbeck was queer." A precocious boy of fifteen, yet the head of his class in scholarship; reported to be interested in Greek books quite outside of the course, fond of drinking tea, and devoid of merit in the three manly arts—athletics, flirting, and breaking rules by smoking. Genie was small, anemic, and too well dressed. ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... young man, it is a bad sign, as well from an intellectual as from a moral point of view, if he is precocious in understanding the ways of the world, and in adapting himself to its pursuits; if he at once knows how to deal with men, and enters upon life, as it were, fully prepared. It argues a vulgar nature. On the other hand, to ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... certificate and passed very handily. Naturally he expected prompt promotion, but the Old Man knew the value of experience in a second mate—also the value of years and physical weight; so he informed young Matt he was entirely too precocious and that to sail as second mate before he was nineteen might tend to swell his ego. Consequently Matt made a voyage to Liverpool and back as third mate before the Old Man ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... pose: it was due to the brimming overplus of his happiness. Happiness is surely the best teacher of good manners: only the unhappy are churlish in deportment. He was young, remember; and this was his first job. His precocious experience as a paterfamilias had added to his mien just that suggestion of unconscious gravity which is so appealing to ladies. He looked (they thought) as though he had been touched—but Oh so lightly!—by poetic sorrow or strange experience: to ask him the way to the notion counter ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... the man of genius, gives many examples of precocious poetical and musical talent: Dante (who at nine years of age wrote sonnets), Tasso (wrote at ten years of age), Wieland (who wrote an epic at 16), Lope de Vega (who wrote verses at 12), Calderoii (at 13), Metastasio (who composed at 10), Handel (who wrote a mass at 13, and was director of opera ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... that there may be a few children, here and there, at six years old, who are so very patient, and so very—(what's the word for a child that knows a deal more than he has any business to know at his age? Stop! I've got it!—precocious—that's the word)—so very patient and so very precocious that they will sit quiet in the same place for two hours; making believe all the time that they understand every word of the service, whether they really do or not. I don't deny that there may be such children, though I never met with them myself, and should think them all impudent little hypocrites ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... prove forcing-houses of sexual precocity and criminal tendencies. There is every reason for regarding the habit of "going to the pictures" without adequate restrictions as contributing seriously to precocious sexuality, and also to weakening the powers of inhibition and self-control in other directions—powers which are the distinctive attributes of the ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... who confessed to being poor walkers, the Partridge boys stuck right where they were. They set about the building of a more permanent and comfortable shack—a sod house this time. It took more than seven thousand sods, one foot by three, three inches thick; but when it was finished it was a precocious raindrop or a mendacious wind that could find ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... and led the life of a steady, thoughtful young man! Instead of meddling here, you should now have been in some studio, college, or professional man's chambers, engaged in a useful pursuit which might have made one proud to own you. But you were so precocious and headstrong; and this is what you have come to: you promise to ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... the wonderfully precocious child, Olympia Morata. See M. Jules Bonnet's monograph, Vie d'Olympia Morata, episode de la Renaissance et de la Reforme en Italie. Staehelin has well traced Calvin's religious influence upon Renee ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... over-strained application to mental processes of arithmetic and mathematics; and a too minute attention to departments of natural and civil history. How much of trick may mix with this we will not ask, but the display of precocious intellectual power in these branches, is often astonishing; and, in proportion as it is so, may, for the most part, be pronounced not only useless, but injurious. The training that fits a boxer for victory in the ring, gives him strength that cannot, and is not required, to be kept up for ordinary ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... puzzled to know just how old she was. She was very small, and, judging from her size, one would have said she was hardly three; but the expression of her face was so mature, and she saw things so quickly and understood so readily, that she must have been older. She was certainly very precocious, with a most inquiring turn of mind, and Mrs. Crawford felt herself greatly interested in her as she watched her active movements and listened to the musical ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... the precocious wiles of the Manhattan urchins quickly after his sturdy Odalisque mother had dragged him, a squalling urchin, out of the steerage confines of a cheap ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... hatred for ill-ordered lessons, his precocious intelligence was remarked by everybody. It was clear that such lucky gifts should not be neglected. Monnica, no doubt, was the first to get this into her head, and she advised Patricius to make Augustin read for ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... the precocious virtues of Margaret at the age of fifteen, it is certain that when, by her brother's elevation to the throne, she was introduced to the foremost place at court, it was her remarkable qualities of heart, quite as much ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... entries in a small diary of this date, I was neither an introspective youth nor one given to precocious literary subtleties. ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... up to grandmotherhood, and is, I believe, still leisurely pursuing her way down to the tomb in an ecstatic state of uninterrupted didacticism. There are twenty-five volumes of her and the granddaughter, who is also christened Elsie, and is her grandmother's own child, with the same precocious readiness to dispense ethical instruction to her elders. An interesting instance ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... dawning days?— Precocious shall he prove, and harass The world with inconvenient ways And lisped conundrums that embarrass? (Such as Impressionists delight To offer each aesthetic gaper, And faddists hyper-Ibsenite ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Jan. 9, 1892 • Various
... they live for, our girls so refined, So forward, precocious, and gifted at ten They are flirting and courting and things of the kind, That never came under our ...
— Nothing to Eat • Horatio Alger [supposed]
... commemorative history was remarkable for a precocious development of intelligence. An old nurse who saw him at the very earliest period of his existence is said to have spoken of him as one of the most promising infants she had seen in her long experience. At school ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... ordono. Preceptor guvernisto. Precinct limo. Precious multekosta. Precipice krutegajxo. Precipitancy trorapideco. Precipitate trorapida. Precipitation trorapideco. Precise preciza. Precisely gxuste. Precision precizeco, akurateco. Preclude eksigi, malhelpi. Precocious frumatura. Precocity frumaturo—eco. Precursor antauxulo. Predatory rabadega. Predecessor antauxulo. Predestination sortdifino. Predetermination antauxdecido. Predict antauxdiri, profetadi. Prediction antauxdiro. Predisposition inklino. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... beyond expression," wrote this precocious youth to Washington on the 10th of November, "to inform your Excellency that, on my arrival here, I find everything has been neglected and deranged by General Putnam.... Not the least attention has been paid to my order, in your name, for a detachment ...
— "Old Put" The Patriot • Frederick A. Ober
... glistening, beaming, shimmering, phosphorescent, luciferous, luminiferous, argent, orient, dazzling, glowing, glittering, flashing, scintillating, sparkling, refulgent, effulgent, brilliant, vivid, glossy, fulgent, naif, lucent, glaring, garish, crystalline; intelligent, precocious, apt, acute, discerning, clever, smart, knowing; auspicious, propitious; illustrious, glorious. Antonyms: dull, lackluster, obscure, dim, opaque, murky, nebulous, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... and visions were strangely precocious in a child of twelve years old. I suppose they were; but I never remember being a child. My sad, gentle mother, the sober, earnest, practical Peggy, were the companions of my infancy, instead of children of my own age. The sunlight of my young life was not reflected from the golden locks ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... of the precocious child who lay in the cradle. The stanza was taken down from Roberts's lips. But he could not say what was done to the ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... contrast between ignorant and precocious children confirms the view that a statement is required as to when the information should be given, who should give it, and what should be ...
— Report of the Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents - The Mazengarb Report (1954) • Oswald Chettle Mazengarb et al.
... crudities, it was such a tour de force for a lad of twenty as the world seldom sees. Its sluggish current bears along remarkable knowledge, great reflection, and the imagination of a fertile as well as a precocious brain. It is a stream which carries with it things new and old, and serves to stir the mind of the onlooker with unwonted thoughts. Were it but one fourth as long, it would still remain a favorite poem. Even now it has ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... should be the second personage of the state in order that she might come immediately after Livia or even be placed directly on an equality with her. According to the Roman ideas of the family and of its discipline, this was a precocious and excessive ambition, unbecoming a matron, much less a young girl. For the duty of the woman was to follow faithfully and submissively the ambitions of her lord and not to impart to him her own ambitions or make him her tool. In contrast to Livia, who ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... spangled speeches,—let alone the songs; Statesmen grow merry, lean attorneys laugh, And weak teetotals warm to half and half, And beardless Tullys, new to festive scenes, Cut their first crop of youth's precocious greens, And wits stand ready for impromptu claps, With loaded barrels and percussion caps, And Pathos, cantering through the minor keys, Waves all her onions to the trembling breeze; While the great Feasted views with silent glee His ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... luck still. In March an unusually early spring set in, and things began to grow. From the big mountains to the ditches by the roadside, everything became green and young; the high-road was peopled by precocious chickens, ducks, and traveling journeymen, and birds of every size flitted through the air on ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... possibly not unfrequently that Horace, his mother's pet, gleaned in the drawing-rooms of Arlington Street his first notions of that persiflage which was the fashion of the day. We. can fancy him a precocious, old-fashioned little boy, at his mother's apron-string, whilst Carr, Lord Hervey, was paying his devoirs; we see him gazing with wondering eyes at Pulteney, Earl of Bath, with his blue ribbon across his laced coat; whilst compassionating friends observing the pale-faced boy in that hot-house atmosphere, ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... Kotzebue, the Russian councillor of state and celebrated dramatist, at length published a weekly paper in which he turned every indication of German patriotism to ridicule, and exercised his wit upon the individual eccentricities of the students affecting the old German costume, of precocious boys and doting professors. The rage of the galled universities rose to a still higher pitch on the discovery, made and incontestably proved by Luden, that Kotzebue sent secret bulletins, filled with invective and suspicion, to St. Petersburg. To execrate ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... Charming's pride; and at twelve years of age the beautiful child, with precocious firmness, had steadily refused to learn the alphabet. Three teachers, chosen from the most able and patient instructors, a priest, a philosopher, and a colonel, had attempted in turn to bend his youthful obstinacy; ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various
... a new Factory Act in accordance with the draft covenants and recommendations of the Washington Conference. Indeed in some directions the Bill is in advance of Washington. The statutory definition of a child presents special difficulties in India, where physical development is more precocious than in Western countries, but, instead of making the general limit of age for juvenile work lower, the Bill proposes to raise it not to fourteen but to fifteen years, whilst still permitting the employment of younger children on special ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... feasted the citizens, as Johnson tells us, in his Annals, with "uncommon magnificence." He is described by Johnson as "a foolish old man," because he talked with too fond a pride of his children and their precocious ways. He was a zealous High Churchman and Jacobite. We are told by Boswell further, on the authority of Mr. Hector of Birmingham, that he opened a bookstall once a week in that city, but lost money by setting ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... hideous-looking urchin, scarcely twelve years old, who held in one hand a small crystal locket, set in filigree gold, torn from the soldier's breast, and lifted high in the other a long case-knife. At a glance Raoul recognised the holy relic he had given to Enguerrand, and, flinging the precocious murderer to be seized by his assistants, he cast himself beside his brother. Enguerrand still breathed, and his languid eyes brightened as he knew the dear familiar face. He tried to speak, but his voice failed, ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Though wholly lacking the Byronic flush it looks as if in- fluenced by the historical descriptions in 'Childe Harold', and might provide a quotation for a tourist's guide to Spain. The history seems competent, and the artistic knowledge precocious. ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... to the throne, and the probability of their ever gaining it must for ages have appeared very doubtful. They seem to have been a fairly old group with a very slow early development. Reptiles especially, and even birds, were far more precocious than these slower and weaker forms which crept along the earth. But reptiles and birds, like many other precocious children, soon reached the limit of their development. They had muscle, the mammal ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... were paid by an old gentleman who was not related to him. Thence at the age of seventeen he had been sent to a German University, and at the age of twenty-one had appeared in London, in a stockbroker's office, where he was soon known as an accomplished linguist, and as a very clever fellow,—precocious, not given to many pleasures, apt for work, but hardly trustworthy by employers, not as being dishonest, but as having a taste for being a master rather than a servant. Indeed his period of servitude was very short. It was not in his nature to be active on behalf of others. He ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... chronology, generally, does not bear a very close examination. Some very extraordinary anachronisms, which the critics are totally at a loss to account for, have somehow slipped into his story. There was a young philosopher in France in those days, of a most precocious, and subtle, and inventive genius—of a most singularly artistic genius, combining speculation and practice, as they had never been combined before, and already busying himself with all sorts of things, and among other things, with curious researches in regard to ciphers, and other questions ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... attention to Peter than to myself, and she evidently considered him a more desirable convert. One evening we went together to call on her and they fell into the usual line of discussion, he answering her in a tolerant amused way as if she were a precocious child. I stayed behind when he left and she walked up and down in restless agitation, half forgetful of me. 'The personality of the man!' she cried fiercely, 'he is too strong, he is ruthless! One cannot escape him. I cannot get him out of my head.' ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... That she should be capable of so ardent a love at that age need hardly be mentioned when we remember that Romeo's Juliet was only twelve at the time of her immortal amour. Love a l'Italienne is precocious. ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... post at Rouen. Wherever he lived, the elder Pascal seems to have mingled with some of the best society, and with men of eminence in science and the arts. Blaise was educated entirely by his father at home. He was exceedingly precocious, indeed excessively precocious, for his application to studies in childhood and adolescence impaired his health, and is held responsible for his death at thirty-nine. Prodigious, though not incredible stories are preserved, especially of his precocity in ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... with her own, which he compassionately used to pity, saying frequently, when she declined the delicacies that he pressed upon her, "Why, you poor child! Heaven has not blessed you with an appetite." Of the precocious feeling and imagination of the poor little girl, thus taken out of her own sphere of life into one so different and so dangerous, I remember a very curious instance, told me by herself. One of the houses where she was a most frequent visitor, and treated almost like a child of the family, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... regarded among the first families of nobility or not, it is certain that Dante enjoyed the honor of knowing that one of his forebears, Cacciaguida, had been knighted by Emperor Conrad II on the Second Crusade. Precocious Dante must have been, as a boy, with faculties and emotions extraordinarily developed, for in his ninth year, while attending a festal party, he fell in love with a little girl named Beatrice Portinari, eight years old. "Although still ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... precocious rook, who Haunts the high hall garden calling "Maud;" Mine's no "blithe newcomer" like the cuckoo ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 8th, 1920 • Various
... of contracting a marriage precludes the possibility of perilous and precocious affairs of ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... see your cousin's little daughter," said Rachel, rather abruptly, as Katherine rose to bid her good-bye. "She's an interesting, naughty little creature, small of her age, but in some ways precocious. I am fond of her, partly, I suppose, because she likes me. There is something familiar to me in her face, yet I cannot say that she ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... London, stretch away for miles in every direction. At any hour of the day thousands of persons may be observed scurrying along them with true Cheapside bustle." The Melbourne youth, however, appears to have been precocious. "I was delighted," remarks this authority, "with the Colonial young stock. The average Australian boy is a slim, olive-complexioned young rascal, fond of Cavendish, cricket, and chuck-penny, and systematically ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... son of Tommasso Mazzinghi, a Corsican musician, was born in London, 1765. He was a boy of precocious talent. When only ten years of age he was appointed organist of the Portuguese Chapel, and when nineteen years old was made musical director and composer at the King's Theatre. For many years he held the honor of Music Master ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... were these efforts of the New Learning in the direction of educational and religious reform, its political and social speculations took a far wider range in the "Utopia" of Thomas More. Even in the household of Cardinal Morton, where he had spent his childhood, More's precocious ability had raised the highest hopes. "Whoever may live to see it," the grey-haired statesman used to say, "this boy now waiting at table will turn out a marvellous man." We have seen the spell which his wonderful learning and the sweetness of his temper threw at Oxford over Colet ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... to us very interesting to show a little girl's existence, not told from the distance of past years, but written day by day. Marie Bashkirtseff was a child of precocious intelligence, ardent will, extreme intensity of life. Maurice Barres defines it sensibly in saying that she had, "when very young, amalgamated five or six exceptional souls in ...
— Marie Bashkirtseff (From Childhood to Girlhood) • Marie Bashkirtseff
... where heather grew thickly on the sides, but permitted pale violets and golden tormentilla to creep about the grassy bottom. Zebedee was more than ten years older than his brother, and he suffered from a loneliness which made their honest welcome of great value to him. He liked to listen to the boys' precocious talk and watch the grace and beauty of the girls before he went back to the ugly house in the town of dreary streets, to the work he liked and wearied himself over, and the father he did not understand. Then ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... generations; he must extend his views into the bosom of futurity; in vain he will expect the eulogies of his contemporaries; in vain will he flatter himself with seeing his reasoning adopted; in vain he will soothe himself with the pleasing reflection, that his precocious principles will be received with kindness; if he has exhibited truisms, the ages that shall follow will do justice to his efforts; unborn nations shall applaud his exertions; his future countrymen shall crown his sturdy attempts with those laurels, which interested prejudice ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... ideas of the Reformation,—an earnest, revolutionary, and progressive age. She was educated as the second daughter of Henry VIII. naturally would be, having the celebrated Ascham as her tutor in Greek, Latin, French, and Italian. She was precocious as well as studious, and astonished her teachers by her attainments. She was probably the best-educated woman in England next to Lady Jane Grey, and she excelled in those departments of knowledge for which novels have given such distaste in these ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... Precocious, as people become in the hot-house atmosphere of aristocratic society, reflective and shy, as only children, who are reared among grown people, without intercourse with companions of their own age, almost always are, endowed, moreover, with a critical mind, which ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... who was precocious for his age, heard what his mother had said, and seeing that he had not been scolded for his ill behaviour, began to scream and struggle more than ever, and his little sister imitated him, in a dutiful, feminine ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... in her hump?" said the hoarse voice of a match-boy, a hideous and repulsive specimen of precocious depravity. ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... goroo!"—until the helpless little fellow was obliged to close with an offer of a few pence instead of half a crown for his waistcoat, is the portrait of some actual Jew dealer whom, in one of the back streets of Chatham, the keen eyes of the precocious child, seeming to look at nothing, had curiously watched hovering like a hideous spider on the pounce behind his ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... to go without meat or eggs,' says I. 'Yes, Amy, honey,' says she. 'And you can't pay them each a little?' says I, 'for I am real wise about that way of doing, you know.'" Mrs. Carroll said the last with the air of a precocious child; she looked askance for admiration as she said it, and laughed herself with the others. "'No,' says poor Anna—'no, Amy, there is not enough money for two littles, only enough for one little. What shall we do, Amy?' 'Well,' says Amy, 'we had chops for lunch.' 'Those aren't paid for, and that ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... that would have done credit to maturer years. Both have been at service, and during the period have created no small degree of admiration-Annette for her promising personal appearance, Nicholas for his precocious display of talent. Both have earned their living; and now Nicholas is arrived at an age when his genius ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... Seward was neither precocious nor gifted beyond his years. He had spirit and gifts, with sufficient temper and stubbornness to defend him against impositions at home or in college; but the love for adventure and the strenuous life, that ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... a pity that time and toil should be thus wasted. The negro child, like the Hindu, is much sharper, because more precocious, than the European; at six years he will become a good penman; in fact, he promises more than he can perform. Reaching the age of puberty, his capacity for progress suddenly disappears, the physical reason being well ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... heart had sunk at the mention of work; but the ecstatic prospect of being the baby of a class, of writing home to boast of her position, and of reminding her elders at frequent intervals of her own precocious cleverness, was too tempting to be resisted. She pleaded eagerly for the upper-fourth, and came through the first morning's ordeal with gratifying success. But, alas! afternoon brought a change of scene, for the girls ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... been laid to rest in Dryburgh Abbey, there to sleep, as is most fit, amid the ruins of that old Middle Age world he loved so well, with the babble of the Tweed for lullaby. Nor had any one shown himself of stature to step into his vacant place, albeit Bulwer, more precocious even than Dickens, was already known as the author of "Pelham," "Eugene Aram," and the "Last Days of Pompeii;" and Disraeli had written "Vivian Grey," and his earlier books; while Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, Kingsley, George Eliot were all, of course, to come later. No, there was a vacant throne ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... wasn't to,' rejoined Master Bardell, 'I'm a-goin' to have some, I am.' Cheered by this prospect, the precocious boy applied himself to his infantile ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... I was slow in learning to speak. I used to be told that having met all invitations to repeat such words as 'Papa' and 'Mamma' with gravity and indifference, I one day drew towards me a volume, and said 'book' with startling distinctness. I was not at all precocious, but at a rather early age, I think towards the beginning of my fourth year, I learned to read. I cannot recollect a time when a printed page of English was closed to me. But perhaps earlier still my ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... December 9, 1594. He was the son of King Charles IX. of Sweden, and the grandson of the renowned Gustavus Vasa. He was a precocious child, and it is told (though it appears rather incredible) that at the age of twelve he spoke Latin, French, German, Dutch, and Italian with great fluency, besides having a superficial acquaintance with Polish and Russian. There can be no doubt, however, that he was ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... good—pretty good!" and a light laugh rippled over the man's lips. "And Miss Tuttle is 'first lieutenant,'" he continued, "and gallantly came forward to share the self-imposed mission of her friend 'to go to the front.' There's pluck there, too; but you are a precocious pair—you two— and keep one busy guessing what you will do next. All the same, with the right check-rein, I believe you'll both make fine women, and—the school would surely lose some of its spice ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... deeply moved by this reception, and returned to the Tuileries in a most charming frame of mind, caressed the King of Rome, covered him with kisses, and dilated to M. Fontaine and myself on the precocious intelligence displayed by this beloved child. "He was not at all frightened; he seemed to know that all those brave men were my friends." On that day he held a long conversation with M. Fontaine, while amusing himself with his son, whom he held in his arms; and when the conversation ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... called my attention to yourself, by reporting the astonishing progress you had made at the school of the Brothers. I soon found, indeed, that your excellent conduct, your gentle, modest character, and your precocious intelligence, were worthy of the most tender interest. From that moment I kept my eyes upon you, and at the end of some time, seeing that you did not fall off, it appeared to me that there was something more in you than the stuff ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... at construing, another at climbing. Some boys are peculiarly skilled at casting accounts, others in casting stones. Here we have a boy of a small appetite and many words, there one of a large appetite and few words. Sometimes precocious talent is evinced for playing the fiddle, sometimes for playing a stick; sometimes, again, a strong propensity is discovered for playing the fool. This boy makes verses, as it were, by inspiration; that boy shows an equal capacity in making mouths. ...
— The Comic Latin Grammar - A new and facetious introduction to the Latin tongue • Percival Leigh
... may be all very well at West Point—much as "what would do for a marine could not be thought of for a seaman"—but we were "officers and gentlemen," and thought no small beans of ourselves as such. There were at times absurd manifestations of this same precocious dignity, of which I may speak later; still, as O'Brien said of Boatswain Chucks, "You may laugh at such assumptions of gentility, but did any one of his shipmates ever know Mr. Chucks to do an unhandsome or a mean action?—and why? ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... who survived infancy. With his unnaturally large head and rickety legs, he would in these days have been kept from all intellectual effort, and been obliged to lie down the greater part of his time. But in that age drastic treatment was in favour, and the already precocious child was crammed with knowledge, while his sickly little frame was compelled to undergo rigorous discipline. He was a boy of no small degree of character, and with martial tastes touching in one so feeble. He died at the age of eleven of small-pox, not at Kensington, ...
— The Kensington District - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... him. Apart from the pleasure of looking at her and listening to her—of enjoying in her what others less discriminatingly but as liberally appreciated—he had the sense, between himself and her, of a kind of free-masonry of precocious tolerance and irony. They had both, in early youth, taken the measure of the world they happened to live in: they knew just what it was worth to them and for what reasons, and the community of these reasons lent to their intimacy its last exquisite touch. And now, because of some jealous whim ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... did not give me the feeling. My education, I thought, had failed to create these feelings in sufficient strength to resist the dissolving influence of analysis, while the whole course of my intellectual cultivation had made precocious and premature analysis the inveterate habit of my mind. I was thus, as I said to myself, left stranded at the commencement of my voyage, with a well-equipped ship and a rudder, but no sail; without any real desire for the ends which I had been so carefully ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... seven years—directed their steps towards the wild moors above their home rather than into the village. Over a century has passed, and practically no change has come to the moorland side of the house, so that we can imagine the precocious toddling children going hand-in-hand over the grass-lands towards the moors beyond, as though we had travelled back over the ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... Of an intellect singularly precocious, William Riddell, so early as the age of seven, composed in correct and interesting prose, and produced in his eighth year some vigorous poetry. With a highly retentive memory he retained the results of an extended course ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... Father of Pittsburgh, for he came thither in November, 1753, and established the location of the now imperial city by choosing it as the best place for a fort. Washington was then twenty-one years old. He had by that time written his precocious one hundred and ten maxims of civility and good behavior; had declined to be a midshipman in the British navy; had made his only sea-voyage to Barbados; had surveyed the estates of Lord Fairfax, going for months into the forest without fear ...
— A Short History of Pittsburgh • Samuel Harden Church |
