"Polyglot" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the upper heights of the sky-scrapers, clear of the roofs, are still lit on the sunward side with a mellow glow, curiously serene. To the man in the mirk of the street, they seem to exude this light from the great spaces of brick. At this time the cars, always polyglot, are filled with shop-hands and workers, and no English at all is heard. One is surrounded with Yiddish, Italian, and Greek, broken by Polish, or Russian, or German. Some American anthropologists claim that the children of these immigrants show marked changes, in the shape of ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... and mountainous streets and its polyglot population, Matadi is a picturesque spot. It is the goal of every official through the long years of his service in the bush for at this place he boards the steamer that takes him to Europe. This is the pleasant side of the picture. On the other hand, Matadi is where the incoming ocean ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... the unwieldy character of the board, coupled with the irregular habits of the President, made the failure of the enterprise inevitable. Still it offered in its catalogues a good course of study and gave exhibitions, at which polyglot orations were delivered. The late Prof. Perley R. Lovejoy was the life of the institution and, after several classes had graduated, the University finally ceased to be, when Mr. Lovejoy accepted a position as Professor in ...
— The History Of University Education In Maryland • Bernard Christian Steiner
... conducted party, of course—Miss Winchelsea had seen to that—but they travelled with it because of the convenience of that arrangement. The people were the oddest mixture, and wonderfully amusing. There was a vociferous red-faced polyglot personal conductor in a pepper-and-salt suit, very long in the arms and legs and very active. He shouted proclamations. When he wanted to speak to people he stretched out an arm and held them until his purpose was accomplished. One hand was full of papers, tickets, counterfoils of tourists. ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... helped to bridge a moment fraught with possibilities, for it would be idle to assume that this polyglot gathering was composed of Bayards. Self-preservation is apt to prove stronger than chivalry under such circumstances. Let it be assumed that three among the twenty could escape that night, and it was horribly true that the field of selection might be narrowed ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... suggested a horseback excursion she instantly agreed to go, although aware that she had promised a younger gentleman of the diplomatic body to be at home that same afternoon, and the good fellow swore polyglot oaths on being turned away ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... every case they agreed with those he had given me. He used to sing a Hebrew drinking-song, which he had learned from some Jews with whom he had once travelled and astonished by joining in their conversation." {23} Borrow's colloquial gift was, to all appearance, closely allied to that of this polyglot Fleming. ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... renowned for its richly endowed university, founded by Cardinal Jimenes de Cisneros in 1510, which at the height of its prosperity numbered 12,000 students, and was second only to that of Salamanca. Here the famous edition of the Bible known as the Complutensian Polyglot was prepared from 1514 to 1517. The college of San Ildefonso, completed in 1583, was the chief university building. Its modernized Gothic church, the Colegiata, contains the 16th century marble monument of Jimenes (d. 1517) and a fine reredos. The greatest of Spanish writers, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... which exists as to the ease with which unlettered savages gain or lose a language. Captain Erskine, in his interesting "Journal of a Cruise among the Islands of the Western Pacific," especially remarks upon the "avidity with which the inhabitants of the polyglot islands of Melanesia, from New Caledonia to the Solomon Islands, adopt the improvements of a more perfect language than their own, which different causes and accidental communication still continue to bring to them;" ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... this looks like a very polyglot language. But the ancient Cornish tongue had altered and deteriorated; and was indeed changing into English at the period of our play. Why the author should have helped himself, in his literary emergency, to the two ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... building railroads to getting out the timber from the forests or making shoes and blankets in the factories. Hard physical labor was no longer performed to any extent by native Americans. Contractors everywhere recruited their polyglot companies in the great cities and shipped them out into the country where there was a demand. The men employed at Highcourt were thus obtained in San Francisco by the head contractor and merely boarded ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... polyglot audience inside the room, Helen soon became aware of nearly as many more spectators and listeners outside the building crowded about the open windows. The night was warm and still. The chapel had three windows on each side, and two at the rear behind the platform, and at each opening dark faces ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... his age had always been accustomed. Occupation of some sort he must have, if only to keep at a distance that insistent melancholy that seems to have been for ever hovering about him, and the tempter whispered "Languages." {21a} One day chance led him to a bookstall whereon lay a polyglot dictionary, "which pretended to be an easy guide to the acquirement of French, Italian, Low Dutch, and English." He took the two first, and when he had gleaned from the old volume all it had to teach him, he longed for a master. Him he found in the person of ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... savant there is something of the corpse, and this man was a savant. Only to see him you caught science imprinted in the gestures of his body and in the folds of his dress. His was a fossil face, the serious cast of which was counteracted by that wrinkled mobility of the polyglot which verges on grimace. But a severe man withal; nothing of the hypocrite, nothing of the cynic. A tragic dreamer. He was one of those whom crime leaves pensive; he had the brow of an incendiary tempered by the eyes of ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... the European languages, greeting all the newcomers, and getting mixed in his "Yes, sir," "Ja, wohl," and "Si, signor." Amedee was an inexperienced tourist, who did not drag along with him a dozen trunks, and had not a rich and indolent air; so he was quickly despatched by the Swiss polyglot into a fourth-story room, which looked out into an open well, and was so gloomy that while he washed his hands he was afraid of falling ill and dying there without help. A notice written in four languages hung upon the wall, and, to add to his ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... what most struck him about them was the look of intelligence on the faces of the horses. Judgments of this kind are too sweeping. It should be remembered that Germany is surrounded by countries of which the riff-raff is at all times seeking refuge in it or passing through it, that polyglot swindlers of every kind, the most refined as well as the most commonplace, abound, and that Anarchists are not yet an extinct species. For the Prussian police, moreover, there is a Social ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... voice Should say "These verses polyglot Are not so bad," I should rejoice; But oh, my publishers would not! * * * * * And I, though shy and unanointed, Should be ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... held positions in France, Switzerland, and Ireland. It was while officiating at the chapel of the Bavarian Legation in London that he began contributing the Prout papers to Fraser's Magazine. These consisted of fanciful narratives, each serving as a vehicle for the display of his wonderful polyglot learning, and containing translations of well-known English songs into Latin, Greek, French, and Italian verse, which later he seriously represented as the true originals from which the English authors had boldly plagiarized. He also introduced into his stories the songs of France ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... delivered this truthful poem off hand, so to speak, in "broken" French, the cosmopolitan, polyglot audience "caught on" and "shipped" the Stratford "poacher" a wave of ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... always furnished to a shipped man by the boarding masters, no matter how he has been shipped. To his surprise, as he attacked the dinner, he found Quincy and Benson, each with a similar outfit of tinware, toying with the food, and paying no attention to the polyglot discourse of the other men regarding the ship, the mates, and the food. But they glared menacingly ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson
... "History of the World," and a whole array of Christian Fathers, and Plato, and Aristotle, and Stanley's book of Philosophers, with Effigies, and the Junta Galen, and the Hippocrates of Foesius, and Walton's Polyglot, supported by Father Sanchez on one side and Fox's "Acts and Monuments" on the other,—an odd collection, as folios from lower shelves are ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... everything else. When my old friend William Woodall, M.P. for Stoke (Governor-General of the Ordnance in Mr. Gladstone's Government 1885), gave at St. Anne's Mansions his famous "Sandwich Soirees" to his friends, the spacious ballroom on the ground floor packed with his many friends—a characteristic, polyglot gathering of Ministers and Parliamentarians of all kinds, musicians, dramatists, authors, artists, actors, and journalists, who sang, recited, and gave a gratuitous entertainment (for some of these I acted as his hon. secretary, and helped ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... English.—Several ludicrous examples have of late been communicated (see Vol. ii., pp. 57. 138.), but none, perhaps, comparable with the following, which I copied about two years since at Havre, from a Polyglot advertisement of various Local Regulations, for the convenience of persons visiting that favourite watering-place. Amongst these ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 71, March 8, 1851 • Various
... interested her not at all, in a listless hand, long and delicate like her feet, and decorated with too many turquoise rings. Below, in the cabin, she could hear the noise of the men as they argued and shouted at each other in a polyglot of ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward |
