"Pedant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wench, a passing pretty wench. A sweeter duck all London cannot yield; She cast a glance on me as I pass'd by, Not Helen had so ravishing an eye. Here is the pedant Sir Aminadab; I will inquire of him if he can tell By any circumstance, whose wife she is: Such fellows commonly have intercourse Without suspicion, where we are debarr'd. God ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... country home at Down. New species of animals and plants were being described by naturalists at an alarming rate. The bulk of knowledge of specific characters and the necessity of specialisation bade fair to make every species-monger a dry and narrow pedant; and the pedants quarrelled about the characters and limits ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... greater and more guilty folly than the happy carelessness of the Little Countess? We shall see. In the meantime, retain, for my sake, that ground-work of melancholy upon which you weave your own gentle mirth; for, thank God! you are not a pedant; you can live, you can laugh, and even laugh aloud; but thy soul is sad unto death, and that is only why I love unto ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... what would be called in political life a young man; he was not quite forty. He had led a varied and somewhat eccentric career. His father, a morose man, had a coldness for him. Young Stanhope, according to his own account, was an absolute pedant at the university. "When I talked my best I quoted Horace; when I aimed at being facetious I quoted Martial; and when I had a mind to be a fine gentleman I talked Ovid. I was convinced that none but the ancients had common-sense; that the classics contained ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... son, when grown of size, a tutor had, No pedant rude, with Greek and Latin mad, But young and smart, a master too of arts, Particularly learned in what imparts, The gentle flame, the pleasing poignant pang, That Ovid formerly so sweetly sang. Some knowledge of good company he'd got; A charming voice and manner were his lot; And if we may disclose ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... Quin, "I were to say that you did not see the great truths of science exhibited by that tree, though they stared any man of intellect in the face, what would you think or say? You would merely regard me as a pedant with some unimportant theory about vegetable cells. If I were to say that you did not see in that tree the vile mismanagement of local politics, you would dismiss me as a Socialist crank with some particular fad about public parks. If I were to say that you were guilty of the supreme blasphemy ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... civil arm to protect the victim, but, for reasons which seem good to him, turns tail, breaks his arranged part, and is very nearly accessory to a murder. At the other end of the story, carrying out his general character of prig-pedant, as selfish as self-righteous, he meets Valjean's rather foolish and fantastic self-sacrifice with illiberal suspicion, and practically kills the poor old creature by separating him from Cosette. When the eclaircissement comes, it appears to me—as Mr. Carlyle said of Loyola ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... pages: the tremendous vitality, the enormous erudition, the dazzling optimism, the courage, the inventiveness, the humanity, of that extraordinary age. And these qualities are conveyed to us, not by some mere conscientious pedant, or some clumsy enthusiast, but by a born writer—a man whose whole being was fixed and concentrated in an astonishing command of words. It is in the multitude of his words that the fertility of Rabelais' spirit most obviously shows itself. His book ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... je ferai representer par mes disciples une piece que j'ai composee. Elle a pour titre les jeunes amours de Muley Bergentuf Roi de Moroi." "Disciples" is a translation of "discipulos." A French writer would have said "eleves." Again, the title of the Pedant's play is thoroughly Spanish. It was intended to ridicule the habit which prevailed in Spain, after the expulsion of the Moriscoes in 1610, of adapting for the stage Moorish habits and amusements, by ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... to a German Brigadier-General on behalf of some homeless women and children, the Prussian martinet—half pedant and half poltroon—answered her with a quotation from Nietzsche to the effect that "Pity is a waste of feeling—a moral parasite injurious to the health." She early felt the cruel and iron will of the invader, ...
— The Case of Edith Cavell - A Study of the Rights of Non-Combatants • James M. Beck
... "pedant" was the latest epithet taken up by Romantic journalism to heap confusion on the ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... a close-running mate of Archbishop Laud, who hunted heretics and cropped the ears of a thousand Puritans. Noy is described for us as a law-pedant, finding legal precedent for anything that royalty wished to do. Noy devised the ship-money scheme, and then died before his law went into effect: killed by the hand of Providence, the Puritans ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... strong and vigorous children), she need not possess a cent. If well-read, so much the better, provided she is not too fond of her book to neglect overseeing her affairs and suffering the hole in her stocking to go unmended. She must not be a pedant or a scold but must know enough of books to distinguish between a volume of history and a novel; and have sufficient spirit to prevent being imposed upon. Communication addressed to A. B. and left at the composing room, if originating in ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... prayers; My mother was as mild as any saint, Half-canonized by all that looked on her, So gracious was her tact and tenderness: But my good father thought a king a king; He cared not for the affection of the house; He held his sceptre like a pedant's wand To lash offence, and with long arms and hands Reached out, and picked offenders from the mass For judgment. Now it chanced that I had been, While life was yet in bud and blade, bethrothed ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... qualities, the types of which existed in his monitor and his preceptor; two great men, whom history has not failed to distinguish—Archie Armstrong and George Buchanan—the wit and the scholar, which in him became the representatives of two much more useful and esteemed qualities—fool and pedant! ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... shall I say of the fragrant weed which Raleigh taught our gallants to puff in capacious bowls; which a royal pedant denounced in a famous 'Counterblast,' which his flattering, laureate, Ben Jonson, ridiculed to please his master; which our wives and sisters protest gives rise to the dirtiest and most unsociable habit a man can indulge in; of which some ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... wholly himself, Lamb had to hide himself under some disguise, a name, 'Elia,' taken literally as a pen name, or some more roundabout borrowing, as of an old fierce critic's, Joseph Ritson's, to heighten and soften the energy of marginal annotations on a pedant scholar. In the letter in which he announces the first essays of Elia, he writes to Barron Field: 'You shall soon have a tissue of truth and fiction, impossible to be extricated, the interleavings shall be so delicate, the partitions perfectly ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... seems at first blush impossible material. It is easy to make a hero out of a noble character; it is equally easy to make a hero out of a thorough scoundrel, a train-robber, or a murderer. Milton made a splendid hero out of the Devil, But a hero out of a nincompoop? A hero out of a dull, sexless pedant? ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... lover, an honourable one it might be; a 'leman' in like manner might be a lover, and be used of either sex in a good sense; a 'beldam' was a fair lady, and is used in this sense by Spenser; [Footnote: F. Q. iii. 2. 43.] a 'minion' was a favourite (man in Sylvester is 'God's dearest minion'); a 'pedant' in the Italian from which we borrowed the word, and for a while too with ourselves, was simply a tutor; a 'proser' was one who wrote in prose; an 'adventurer' one who set before himself perilous, but very often ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... written to inculcate all that Ascham upheld, may have been suggested by Ascham. It is in three books, and draws largely on Quintilian, the first two books being substantially little more than a compilation, but a very judicious one, from the Institutes of Oratory. But Wilson is no pedant, and has many excellent remarks on the nature of the influence which the classics should exercise on English composition. One ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... language of the schools in the market. The mere man of the world, who insists that no other terms but such as occur in common conversation should be employed in a scientific disquisition, and with no greater precision, is as truly a pedant as the man of letters, who either over-rating the acquirements of his auditors, or misled by his own familiarity with technical or scholastic terms, converses at the wine-table with his mind fixed on his museum or laboratory; even though the latter ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... has produced two valuable books; La Motte's "Reflexions sur la Critique," and Madame Dacier's "Des Causes de la Corruption du Gout." La Motte wrote with feminine delicacy, and Madame Dacier like a University pedant. "At length, by the efforts of Valincour, the friend of art, of artists, and of peace, the contest was terminated." Both parties were formidable in number, and to each he made remonstrances, and applied reproaches. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... his speech worked a pretty enough havoc with fine-spun rhetoric to raise the wig off a pedant's head, Jean and I thought we read some sense in ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... and quotes portions of the declarations of loyalty which the Italian envoys addressed to the Pope. Court flattery could not be carried further than it was in this case by Hieronymus, an affected pedant, an empty-headed braggart, a fanatical papist. Alexander made him Bishop of Andria and Governor of the Romagna. In 1497 Hieronymus, then in Cesena, composed a dialogue on Savonarola and his "heresy concerning the power of the Pope." The kernel of the ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... in her fine hazel eyes, so anxious and perturbed her entire being, that she appeared almost ugly. Not only so, but added to impatience and anger there seemed something like repugnance, disgust, directed at the miserable pedant who under the fires of womanly wrath blinked and smiled, but had ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... every science is taught which is liberal, and at the same time useful to mankind? Nothing would so much tend to bring classical literature within proper bounds as a steady and invariable appeal to these tests in our appreciation of all human knowledge. The puffed-up pedant would collapse into his proper size, and the maker of verses and the rememberer of words would soon assume that station which is the lot of those who go up unbidden to the ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... thou child of stormy dawn, Thou winter flower, forlorn of nurse; Chilled early by the bigot's curse, The pedant's frown, ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... resemblance or analogy was observed, it was commonly supposed that that base-born slave, the vulgar tongue, had dared to make a clumsy copy of something peculiarly belonging to the twin tyrants who ruled all the dialects of the world with a pedant's rod. ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... especially in theological matters, was extensive; and he was already a voluminous author on subjects which ranged from predestination to tobacco. But his shrewdness and learning only left him, in the phrase of Henry the Fourth of France, "the wisest fool in Christendom." He had in fact the temper of a pedant, a pedant's conceit, a pedant's love of theories, and a pedant's inability to bring his theories into any relation with actual facts. It was this fatal defect that marred his political abilities. As a statesman he had shown no little capacity in his smaller realm; ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... Bessie, is naught but a miserable pedant, who loves nothing so well as hearing himself talk, and prating by the hour together on matters of law and religion, and on the divine right of kings. He is not the King such as England has been wont to know—a King to whom his subjects might gain access to plead ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... Warden, who was a mighty man of learning, and myself, but after all he gave me one of his books, and wrote in it, "To my young friend and quondam companion." "Quondam" was rather a pity, perhaps; it sounds pedantic, and the Warden was no pedant, unless he wanted ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... said a moralistic pedant and trifle-retailer, "that I honour and respect an unselfish man: not, however, because he is unselfish, but because I think he has a right to be useful to another man at his own expense. In short, the question is always who ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Esseintes felt himself intrigued toward this ill-balanced but subtile mind. No fusion had been effected between the skilful psychologist and the pious pedant, and the very jolts and incoherencies constituted the personality of ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... party banged with tankards upon the table. One of the number put a question of his own. He had a look half pedant, half bully, and he spoke with a ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... without arrogance and without excusing himself; so that when he had them, he enjoyed them without affectation, and when he had them not, he did not want them. No one could ever say of him that he was either a sophist or a [home-bred] flippant slave or a pedant; but every one acknowledged him to be a man ripe, perfect, above flattery, able to manage his own and other men's affairs. Besides this, he honored those who were true philosophers, and he did not ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... point of exhibiting your learning aggressively anywhere. "Classical quotation is the literary man's parole the world over," says Dr. Samuel Johnson, but he savored somewhat of the pedant, and his imitators, by too frequent an indulgence in this habit, may run the risk of aping his pedantry without possessing his genius. Neither is it well to interlard conversation with too frequent quotations from English authors, no matter how well they may fit the occasion. This is a habit that ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... pleasures derived from fame. And indeed why should he not, when he himself had such a furious lechery and wriggling after glory as made him not only to disown his masters and scuffle about syllables and accents with his fellow-pedant Democritus (whose principles he stole verbatim), and to tell his disciples there never was a wise man in the world besides himself, but also to put it in writing how Colotes performed adoration to him, as he was one day philosophizing, by touching his knees, and ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... his writings only one passage can be cited which even faintly suggests a coincidence with any in Shakspere; and in that the suggestion is faint indeed. In Bruno's ill-famed comedy IL CANDELAJO, Octavio asks the pedant Manfurio, "Che e la materia di vostri versi," and the pedant replies, "Litterae, syllabae, dictio et oratio, partes propinquae et remotae," on which Octavio again asks: "Io dico, quale e il suggetto et il proposito."[131] So far as it goes this is something of a parallel to Polonius's question to ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... of the gossips, "the prettiest pedant in the world," was thus paid out for his intrigues against La Bruyere in ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... of a canon may be illustrated in many ways; for, like all notions which resume actual experiences, it will be found applicable in many spheres. Thus, on the subject of verse, the eternal quarrel between the poet and the pedant is, that for the first the rules of prosody and rhyme are only useful in so far as they make the licenses he takes appreciable at their just value; while for the pedant such licenses ever anew seem to imply ignorance of the rule or incapacity to follow it,—an ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... That he has so is owing to the romantic movement. For the significant circumstance about the attitude of the last century toward the whole medieval period was, not its ignorance, but its incuriosity. It did not want to hear anything about it.[2] Now and then, hints Pope, an antiquarian pedant, a university don, might affect an admiration ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... painful accidents and mishaps,—if not too serious,—deformations of the body (humpbacks), epithets and nicknames, slang and other abuses of language (like mispronunciation by foreigners), vituperation, caricature and burlesque of respectable types like the pedant, dandy, Puritan, imbecile, or the rich and great, always raise a laugh in the crowd and are relished by the crowd. They are constant elements of farce and fun. They have been so for three thousand years. Jugglery and ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... prodigious regard to dreams henceforward. I know not but I may write a book upon that subject; for my own experience will furnish out a great part of it. 'Glanville of Witches,' 'Baxter's History of Spirits and Apparitions,' and the 'Royal Pedant's Demonology,' will be nothing ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... homogeneous national life. The tardy dawn of history in the modern world was owing to its immense complexity. Materials also were wanting. They gradually emerged out of manuscript all over Europe, during what may be called the great pedant age (1550-1650), under the direction of meritorious antiquaries, Camden, Savile, Duchesne, Gale, and others. Still official documents and state papers were wanting, and had they been at hand would hardly have been used with competence. The national and religious limitations were still too marked ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... this choice was not due, as it so often is, to a love of procuring deference cheaply. It was not deference that he sought, but a sympathy that he could make sure of, and that put him at his ease. Nobody that ever lived was less of a pedant, academic don, or loud Sir Oracle. He was easy to live with, a gay and appreciative companion, and the most amiable of friends, but nothing was further from his thoughts than to pose as guide and philosopher. His conversation was particularly neat and ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... lips, there glisten eyes, There throb young hearts with generous hope; Thence, playmates, rise for high emprize; For, though he fail, yet shall ye cope With worldling wrapped in silken lies, With pedant, hypocrite, ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... A writing, Pedant! dost demand from me? Man, and man's plighted word, are these unknown to thee? Is't not enough, that by the word I gave, My doom for evermore is cast? Doth not the world in all its currents rave, And must a promise hold me fast? Yet fixed is this ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... second best, in the judgment of his friends and worshippers, who had no sympathy for anybody who ventured to tilt with their champion. Nevertheless I persisted, and, not standing much in awe of the pedant and the pedagogue, however much I admired the logician and the poet or the lawyer, I lost no opportunity of asserting my independence, and took, I am afraid, a sort of malicious pleasure in showing that I had views and opinions of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... retire and leave the job to the German. The Englishman, one might say, "larks" into achievement, the German "grinds" into it. The one, accordingly, is free-living, genial, generous, careless; the other laborious, exact, routine-ridden. It is hard for an Englishman to be a pedant; it is not easy for a German to be anything else. For philosophy no man has less capacity than the Englishman. He does not understand even how such questions can be put, still less how anyone can pretend to answer them. The ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... envious fear intrude, To check my bosom's fondest thought, And interrupt the golden dream, I crush the fiend with malice fraught, And still indulge my wonted theme. Although we ne'er again can trace In Granta's vale the pedant's lore; Nor through the groves of Ida chase Our raptured visions as before, Though Youth has flown on rosy pinion, And Manhood claims his stern dominion, Age will not every hope destroy, But yield some ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... I resisted, lest I should not be a very woman. And I have studied music as a sentiment rather than as a science, and drawing as an amusement rather than as an art, lest I should become a musical pedant, or a masculine artist.' ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... say that dear Casey's estimate had the arid accuracy of the pedant, but she had a rich and helpful imagination. In rare moments of depression and unhappiness I have found that by reading one of her testimonials I can always recover my tone. And they were effective for their purpose. By this time I was accepting ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... taste in dress, and her acquaintance with the most fashionable games and amusements, while her piety is to be anxiously concealed, and her knowledge affectedly disavowed, lest the former should draw on her the appellation of an enthusiast, or the latter that of a pedant. ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... commits the rhetorical blunder of mixing up metaphors or not. That matters very little, except to a pedant and a rhetorician. In his impetuous way he blends three here, and has no time to stop to disentangle them. They all mean substantially the same thing which I have stated in the words that conduct here determines the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the name of an old pedant who has written a tiresome book; and the adventures of this book form the subject of the poem. Some wag relates how he read it a month ago, having come into the garden for that purpose; and then revenged himself by dropping it through a crevice in a ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... institutions, but were made up of a cosmopolitan crowd of men of every nation in Europe, intelligible to each other, as unhappily we are not, by the universal knowledge and use of that mediaeval Latin, which might distress the Ciceronian ears of a pedant of the Renaissance, but was a good, useful, and adaptable language. It was a turbulent, disorderly, brutal, profligate, and drunken world, for the students were as hard drinkers as the citizens, but it was animated, it was made alive by a true passion ...
— Progress and History • Various
... availed to secure him immortality than all his verse? They call him the English Bayard, and the Frenchman need not be displeasured by the comparison. But when you come to read his poetry you find that our Bayard had in him a strong dash of the pedant and a powerful leaven of the euphuist. Subtle, delicate, refined, with a keen and curious wit, a rare faculty of verse, a singular capacity of expression, an active but not always a true sense of form, he wrote for the few, and (it may be) the few will always love him. But his intellectual life, ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... sentimentalism of Murillo. Goya stems more from Caravaggio and Salvator Rosa than from any of his predecessors, except Velasquez. The presence of Tiepolo, the last of the Venetians, in Spain may have influenced him. Certainly Raphael Mengs, the "Saxon pedant," did not—Mengs associated with Tiepolo at Madrid. It is in company with the bravos of the brush, Caravaggio and Rosa, that Goya is closely affiliated. We must go to Gustave Courbet for a like violence of temperament; both men painted con furia; both were capable of debauches in work; Goya could ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... every natural fact. The depth of his perception found likeness of law throughout Nature, and I know not any genius who so swiftly inferred universal law from the single fact. He was no pedant of a department. His eye was open to beauty, and his ear to music. He found these, not in rare conditions, but wheresoever he went. He thought the best of music was in single strains; and he found poetic suggestion in ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... pedantry to be always wrong. Your true prig of a pedant goes immensely out of his way to be vastly more correct than other people, and succeeds in the end in being vastly more ungrammatical, or vastly more illogical, ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... impure haunts; if, in fine (to speak in my own praise), I live undefiled, and innocent, and dear to my friends; my father was the cause of all this: who though a poor man on a lean farm, was unwilling to send me to a school under [the pedant] Flavius, where great boys, sprung from great centurions, having their satchels and tablets swung over their left arm, used to go with money in their hands the very day it was due; but had the spirit to bring me a child to Rome, to be taught those arts ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... had received an eccentric education from his eccentric grandfather. He was practised daily in talking Latin, to which afterwards he added a competent study of the Greek; and finally he became unusually learned for his rank, but the most absolute and undistinguishing pedant that perhaps literature has to show. He sneers continually at the regular built academic pedant; but he himself, though no academic, was essentially the very impersonation of pedantry. No thought however beautiful, ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... things: Retire into private places with thy foolish cackle; or, what were better, give it up, and weep, not that the reign of wonder is done, and God's world all disembellished and prosaic, but that thou hitherto art a Dilettante and sandblind Pedant.' ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... Don Juan contained "an elaborate satire on the character and manners of his wife." "If," he writes, "in a poem by no means ascertained to be my production there appears a disagreeable, casuistical, and by no means respectable female pedant, it is set down for my wife. Is there any resemblance? If there be, it is in those who make it—I can see none."—Letters, 1900, iv. 477. The allusions in stanzas xii.-xiv., and, again, in stanzas xxvii.-xxix., are, and must have been meant ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... to one of his ancestors, though his nobility is well known not to be of sixty years' standing. But woe to him who dared to suggest any doubt about what Napoleon believed, or seemed to believe! A German professor, Richter, more a pedant than a courtier, and more sincere than wise, addressed a short memorial to Bonaparte, in which he proved, from his intimacy with antiquity, that most of the pretended relics of Charlemagne were impositions on the credulous; that the portrait was a drawing of this century, the diploma ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... removed from the jurisdiction of Boyer, we were near enough (as I have said) to understand a little of his system. We occasionally heard sounds of the Ululantes, and caught glances of Tartarus. B. was a rabid pedant. His English style was crampt to barbarism. His Easter anthems (for his duty obliged him to those periodical flights) were grating as scrannel pipes.[4]—He would laugh, ay, and heartily, but then it must be at Flaccus's quibble about Rex—or at the tristis severitas ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... outlets—new forms for its expression. He had just the temperament to take up with the mode of the Nineties that drove the Young Men to asserting themselves and upholding their doctrines in papers and magazines of their own. The pedant may trace the fashion back to the Hobby-horse of the Eighties, or, in a further access of pedantry to the Germ of the early Fifties. He may follow its growth as late as the Blast of yesterday and The Gypsy of to-day. But I do not have to go further than ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... to Mr. Fox, which the latter read to Sheridan a few days before the Debate; and the only remark that Sheridan made, on hearing it, was, "What an odd pedantic fancy!" But the wit knew well the value of the jewel that the pedant had raked up, and lost no time in turning it to account with all his accustomed skill. The Letter of Wakefield, in which the application of the fable occurs, has been omitted, I know not why, in his published Correspondence with Mr. Fox: but a Letter of Mr. Fox in the same collection, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... even here homage was paid, awkwardly indeed and sullenly, to the literary supremacy of our neighbours. The melodious Tuscan, so familiar to the gallants and ladies of the court of Elizabeth, sank into contempt. A gentleman who quoted Horace or Terence was considered in good company as a pompous pedant. But to garnish his conversation with scraps of French was the best proof which he could give of his parts and attainments. [172] New canons of criticism, new models of style came into fashion. The quaint ingenuity which had deformed the verses of Donne, and had ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... relief to the reader. This is true of the First Part of his great work. In the Second there was no longer room for such discussion. But he has supplied the place by garrulous reminiscences, personal anecdotes, incidental adventures, and a host of trivial details,— trivial in the eyes of the pedant,—which historians have been too willing to discard, as below the dignity of history. We have the actors in this great drama in their private dress, become acquainted with their personal habits, listen to their familiar sayings, and, in short gather up those ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... while the more impatient, more aspiring, less sensuous art which belongs to Western civilisation may bear many a change and not die utterly; nay, may feed on its intellect alone for a season, and enduring the martyrdom of a grim time of ugliness, may live on, rebuking at once the narrow-minded pedant of science, and the luxurious tyrant of plutocracy, till change bring back the spring again, and it blossoms once more into ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... the dear flighty creature, and the sentence which she passes upon the Poets. She has a fling at Homer, whom the beauteous Harriet, in her dispute with the university pedant, had before criticized upon in a masterly manner, and like a good Englishwoman, from the authority of her godfather Deane, concluded, that our Milton has excelled him in the sublimity of his images, this, is a controversy which ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous
... After all the flattering incidents of the evening, the chance meeting with which it concluded had jarred unpleasantly. Confound the fellow! Was he the first man in the world who had been thrown over by a girl because he had been discovered to be a tiresome pedant? For even supposing Miss Boyce had described that little scene in the library at Mellor to her fiance at the moment of giving him his dismissal—and the year before, by the help of all the news that reached him about the broken engagement, by ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... about the school list and the remarks he had made about each boy's character. This infamy was more than he could own to, and he kept his counsel concerning it. Fortunately he was safe in doing so, for Dr Skinner, pedant and more than pedant though he was, had still just sense enough to turn on Theobald in the matter of the school list. Whether he resented being told that he did not know the characters of his own boys, or whether he dreaded ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... epilogues to Phaedra and to Lucius he is very happily facetious; but in the prologue before the queen the pedant has found his way with Minerva, ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... think you had from me this winter. 'The Guesses' are well worth reading; nay, buying: very ingenious, with a good deal of pedantry and onesidedness (do you know this German word?), which, I believe, chiefly comes from the Trinity Fellow, who was a great pedant. I have just read Mrs. Austin's Characteristics of Goethe: which I will bring for you when I come. It is well worth knowing something of the mind of certainly a great man, and who has had more effect on his age than any one else. There is something ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... woman's placid exterior concealed. But for the child, he well knew that her problem had been met and solved, and that she had laid it aside with a trust in immanent good which he did not believe all the worldly argument of pedant or philosopher ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... remark, that a thought which is often quoted from Francis Bacon, occurs in Bruno's Cena di Cenere, published in 1584; I mean the notion, that the later times are more aged than the earlier. In the course of the dialogue, the Pedant, who is one of the interlocutors, says, 'In antiquity is wisdom;' to which the philosophical character replies, 'If you knew what you were talking about, you would see that your principle leads to the opposite result ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 58, December 7, 1850 • Various
... he had courage, he had not the initiative of a man of action. He invented none of the ideas or methods of the Revolution, not even the Reign of Terror, but he was very dexterous in accepting or appropriating what more audacious spirits than himself had devised and enforced. The pedant, cursed with the ambition to be a ruler of men, is a curious study. He would be glad not to go too far, and yet his chief dread is lest he be left behind. His consciousness of pure aims allows him to become an ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... knowledge of maritime affairs. This opinion however he had very much to himself. Men who had passed half their lives on the waves, and who had been in battles, storms and shipwrecks, were impatient of his somewhat pompous lectures and reprimands, and pronounced him a mere pedant, who, with all his book learning, was ignorant of what every cabin boy knew. Russell had always been froward, arrogant and mutinous; and now prosperity and glory brought out his vices in full strength. With the government ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... "Amiable pedant! I don't remember who my importunate correspondent was, or what address he or she wrote from, or what it was about. It was one of those letters that produce a general sense of discomfort, the sort you want to forget ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 13, 1914 • Various
... a thoroughgoing pedant will drag his students through two weeks' lectures and a hundred pages of text at the beginning of the course in the effort to define sociology and chart all its affinities and relations with every ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... very dilapidations furnish matter for new works of controversy, and his rust is more precious than the most costly gilding. Under his plastic hand trifles rise into importance; the nonsense of one age becomes the wisdom of another; the levity of the wit gravitates into the learning of the pedant, and an ancient farthing moulders into infinitely more ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... speech in opposition to the Fugitive Slave clause in Clay's Compromise had given him the leadership of the growing Anti-Slavery opinion of the North. He was soon to be joined by Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, null in judgment, a pedant without clearness of thought or vision, but gifted with a copious command of all the rhetoric of sectional hate. The place of Calhoun in the leadership of the South had been more and more assumed by a soldier who had been forced to change his profession by reason of ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... generalisations were marvellous. He had, said Mr. Eccles, an intuitive mind. He had, too, read more than was realised, partly because his carelessness and contempt for scholarship misled. Where the pedant would have referred and quoted and cross-referred, he went dashing on, throwing out ideas from his abundance and caring little if among his wealth were a few faults of fact or interpretation. "Abundance" was a word much used of his work just now, and in the field of literary criticism he was placed ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... screamed the chief, bestowing upon Ivan Ivanovitch a glance such as a giant might cast upon a pigmy, a pedant upon a dancing-master: and he stretched out his foot and stamped upon the floor with it. This boldness cost him dear; for his whole body wavered and his nose struck the railing; but the brave preserver of order, with the purpose of making light of it, righted himself immediately, ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... Mephistopheles had in the first Part of the play given his diabolic advice as to the choice of a profession. The scholar is now, after a course of University education, a match for the devil himself. He flouts poor Mephisto as a dried-up old pedant, not up to date with the new generation's aesthetic and literary self-conceits, or with its contempt for its elders—and for everything else except its own precious self. 'Youth and its genius,' he exclaims, 'are the only things of value; as soon as one is thirty ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... And you—only your own loving heart! I must first meet Major Alan Hawke, and send him away to be busied on some apparently important duty, which will keep him away from old Andrew Fraser. We know the old professor's cunning character. Miser and pedant, he is but a shriveled parchment edition of his heartless, dead brother. We must not alarm him. We have already traced the insured packet to his hands. Now, he properly has the custody of the dead nabob's ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... fit for very state to do; Of whose best phrase and courtly accent joined, He forms one tongue, exotic and refined, Talkers I've learned to bear; Motteux I knew, Henley himself I've heard, and Budgel too. The doctor's wormwood style, the hash of tongues A pedant makes, the storm of Gonson's lungs, The whole artillery of the terms of war, And (all those plagues in one) the bawling bar: These I could bear; but not a rogue so civil, Whose tongue will compliment you to the devil. A tongue that can cheat widows, cancel ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... actual experiences. A man must have a rich and varied experience of men and women before he can use books to advantage. Life is varied, men and women many, while the individual life is short; wise men read books, therefore, to enrich their experience, not merely as the pedant does, to garner facts. "J'etudie les livres en attendant que J'etudie les hommes," writes Voltaire. "Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... the stoic lesson, got by rote, The pomp of words, and pedant dissertation, That can support us in the hour of terror. Books have taught cowards to talk nobly of it: But when the trial comes, ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... instructive; but his talk is to profitable conversation what the stone is to the pulp of the peach, what the cob is to the kernels on an ear of Indian corn. Once more: Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant, with all his knowledge and valuable qualities, and will "cavil on the ninth part of a hair," if it will give him a chance to show off ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... knowledge. I looked with contempt on the tribes painted on the church walls, which I once so much admired, and on the carved chimneypiece in the Squire's Hall. I found my old master to be a poor ignorant pedant; and, in short, the whole scene to be extremely changed for the worse. This I could not help mentioning, because though it be of no consequence in itself, yet it is certain, that most prejudices are contracted and retained by this ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... in regard to Tariff Reform very easily. I am no pedant about Protection, and if it could be shown that the security of an island kingdom like the United Kingdom could only be made complete by Protection in certain matters, I should be perfectly willing to vote for measures ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... me—true enough to kill generally—and who the deuce can be at the bother of your pragmatical preparations! I am sure it might be said of you, as it was of James the First, of most pacific and pedantic memory, that you are 'Captain of arts and Clerk of arms'—at least you are a very pedant ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... offer an advice, I should say employ the next two years in letting him see a little more of real life and acquire a due sense of its practical objects. Send him to a private tutor who is not a pedant, but a man of letters or a man of the world, and if in the metropolis so much the better. In a word, my young friend is unlike other people; and, with qualities that might do anything in life, ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of history, could have used. So Mr. Sparks without blushing went through Washington's letters and substituted for the originals words which he decided were more seemly. Again the public came to know George Washington, not by his own words, but by those attributed to him by an overzealous stylist-pedant. Well might the Father of his Country pray to be ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... involved scheme of diction, and I confess that I should regard the future of poetry in this country with much more apprehension than I do, if I believed that the purely learned poet, the prosodical pedant, was destined to become paramount amongst us. That would, indeed, threaten the permanence of the art; and it is for this reason that I look with a certain measure of alarm on the excess of verbiage about versification which attends not merely criticism—for that matters ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... And to my vast advantage! What should I have become? A clerkship at Whitehall—heaven defend us! At best a learned pedant, in my case. She sent me out into the world, where there is always hope. She gave me health and sanity. Above all, she set before me an ideal which has never allowed me to fall hopelessly—never will let me become a contented brute! If she never addresses another word to me, ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... great perplexity, and said, "I don't know what to do, pray advise me; my master is gone the circuit, and left me particular orders to send him an express if the King died: but here's the Prince, dead and he said nothing about him." You would easily believe this story, if you knew what a mere law-pedant it is! ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... to the sense of size, and makes us doubly aware of the movement of life, the colossal circulation to which London owes so much of its impressiveness. We gain more by this than we lose by the infraction of some pedant's canon about the artistically correct intersection of right lines. Vast as is the world below the bridge, there is a vaster still on high, and when trains are passing, the steam from the engine will ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... idea or thought of "retreat," I left General Lanrezac's Headquarters believing that the Commander-in-Chief had over-rated his ability; and I was therefore not surprised when he afterwards turned out to be the most complete example, amongst the many this War has afforded, of the Staff College "pedant," whose "superior education" had given him little idea of how to ...
— 1914 • John French, Viscount of Ypres
... the dragon had him," muttered King AEetes to himself, "and the four-footed pedant, his schoolmaster, into the bargain. Why, what a foolhardy, self-conceited coxcomb he is! We'll see what my fire-breathing bulls will do for him. Well, Prince Jason," he continued aloud, and as complacently as he could, "make yourself comfortable for today, and tomorrow ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various |
