"Illiterate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... neatly chipped away the counterfeit presentment of iron crosses. In some cases, also, they purified the vaults of German bones and gave back in exchange such French ones as they found scattered. They wrote in large letters on tombstones, "Boch no bon," and other illiterate comments unflattering to the dead usurpers; all of which, our old man explained, mightily endeared the Atkinses to ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... system which had borne good fruit. These literary guilds befitted and denoted a people which was alive, a people which had neither sunk to sleep in the lap of material prosperity, nor abased itself in the sty of ignorance and political servitude. The spirit of liberty pervaded these rude but not illiterate assemblies, and her fair proportions were distinctly visible, even through the somewhat grotesque garb which she ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... time when he had felt full faith in "Providence;" but he seemed to have nothing to expect now from that quarter more than from any other. Samuel Tozer! why did that name always come uppermost, staring into his very eyes? It was a curious signature, the handwriting very rude and unrefined, with odd, illiterate dashes, and yet with a kind of rough character in it, easy to identify, ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... aware that this redoubted chieftain is, even in the present days of enlightenment, as famous among his illiterate countrymen for his magical powers as for his patriotism. He says himself—or Shakespeare says it for him, which is much the ...
— The Doom of the Griffiths • Elizabeth Gaskell
... somewhere in the State, and that the two messengers whom she had sent out would eventually find him. She felt great confidence in Ben, and also in Bradley, who had impressed her as an honest, straightforward man, though illiterate and not at all ...
— Ben's Nugget - A Boy's Search For Fortune • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... effects of it be when vested in an illiterate Chinese or rude Tartar who has no other talent or recommendation for his authority than the power alone which his ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... of the evil spirit, malicious and revengeful, is common to all primitive peoples, and Brittany has its full share of demonology. Wherever, in fact, a primitive and illiterate peasantry is found the demon is its inevitable accompaniment. But we shall not find these Breton devils so very different from the fiends of ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... for litigation over such matters seemed to provide themselves without end. Lands were given to settlers without accurate description of their boundaries; farms were unfenced and cattle wandered into neighboring fields; the notaries themselves were almost illiterate, and as a result scarcely a legal document in the colony was properly drawn. Nobody lacked pretexts for controversy. Idleness during the winter was also a contributing factor. But the Church and the ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... be questioned if by 1847 Liberia had developed sufficiently internally to be able to assume the duties and responsibilities of an independent power. There were at the time not more than 4,500 civilized people of American origin in the country; these were largely illiterate and scattered along a coastline more than three hundred miles in length. It is not to be supposed, however, that this consummation had been attained without much yearning and heart-beat and high spiritual fervor. There was something pathetic in the effort of this small company, most of whose members ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... added its sundering influence. Quite naturally the Panamanians, in the course of less than half a century, had made more than fifty attempts to revolt from Colombia and establish their own independence. The most illiterate of them could understand that, if they were independent, the money which they received and passed on to Bogota., for the bandits there to spend, would remain in their own hands. An appeal to their love of ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... were in the direction of greater intelligibility. He used button instead of tache, capital for chapiter, and made Hebrew proper names in the New Testament conform to the usage of the Old. "This will prevent illiterate persons, who compose a large part of the readers of the Scriptures, from mistaking the characters. Every obstacle to a right understanding of the Scriptures, however small, should be removed, when it can be done in consistency ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... him all possibilities of education at such an early age, he was illiterate in his speech and as ignorant of the conventionalities of polite society as an Indian; but he possessed a heart overflowing with the milk of human kindness, was generous in the extreme, and honest ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... brother the monk Macarius. Every school in Serbia and Bulgaria was closed, so that no teaching could be given anywhere save in the monasteries; it is said to be a fact—I have it from Dr. Zmejanovi['c], lately Bishop of Ver[vs]ac—that when Kara George, the beloved and illiterate heiduk, made his first insurrection, there were, in addition to the monks, precisely eight individuals in Serbia—their names are recorded—who could read and write. Thus the absence of printing-presses was not greatly felt: in Bulgaria ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... passing of the Education Act there were thousands of British lads who were absolutely illiterate (this does not apply so much to Scottish boys); and there were hundreds of master-mariners who could neither read nor write, and who had a genuine contempt for those who could. They held the notion that learning, as they ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... him by George Bentinck,[13] who took the trouble. Besides, his fortune consists in great measure of wool, he lives in the country, is well versed in rural affairs and the business of the quarter sessions, has a certain calibre of understanding, is prejudiced, narrow-minded, illiterate, and ignorant, good-looking, good-humoured, and unaffected, tedious, prolix, unassuming, and a duke. There would not have been so much to say about him if they had not excited an idea in the minds of some people of making him Prime ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... "frightful lot" of books. The four walls of the library were plastered with them from floor to ceiling, save only where the door and the two windows insisted on living their own life, even though an illiterate one. To Bill it seemed the most hopeless room of any in which to look for a ...
— The Red House Mystery • A. A. Milne
... I'd shake the humdrums out of you, I guess! You'd presently confess You thought that No was Yes. It's just your sort—provided there's no hurry— We like to worry. In twenty minutes, Sir, you wouldn't know Your father from JIM CROW, Or your illiterate self from LINDLEY MURRAY! And now then, dunce, Please move your boots, at once! If 'twere not for some twinges of the gout, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, Issue 10 • Various
... the business, and defends him against the charge of inconsistency. Morris may not have thought out the question in all its aspects, but much of the criticism passed upon him was even more illogical and depended on far too narrow and illiterate a use of the word Socialism. He knew as well as his critics that no new millennium could be introduced by merely taking the wealth of the rich and dividing it into ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... toward the elimination of the negro. As an additional safeguard, however, an educational clause was added, but the educational requirement did not become effective at once, as that would have made illiterate whites ineligible as voters. Not until the latter were safely registered under the "grandfather clause," was the educational clause applied, and as, under this clause, the would-be voter must read and write ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... doctrine of Rome. Others, however, boldly denied that the Pope had any authority in this realm of England, while they as bravely asserted the Protestant doctrine for which they had been cast into prison. Many of them, of all ranks, some poor and illiterate, did in no wise shrink from the abuse heaped on them by ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... rhetoricians was so immense, that during the reign of Philip II. of Spain more than thirty chambers, composed of fifteen hundred members, often entered Antwerp in triumphal procession. But the effect of these associations, composed for the most part of illiterate men, was to destroy the purity of the language and to produce degeneracy in the literature. The Chamber of Amsterdam, however, was an honorable exception, and towards the close of the sixteenth century it counted among its members distinguished scholars, such as Spieghel, Coornhert, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... sufferer:—nineteen persons, "members of the Church", were executed, and one hundred and fifty persons were put in prison. It was sometime before the conviction began to spread, that even men of sense, education, and fervent piety could entertain the madness and infatuation of the weak, illiterate, and unprincipled. A disbeliever in witchcraft was an 'obdurate sadducee.' That conviction did at last possess men. The disease which affected the supposed bewitched children somewhat resembled St. Vitus' Dance. It was an involuntary ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... franchise, as many legally vote who were never able to bear arms, and others who have become unable to do so by reason of sickness, accident or age; nor does education mark the line, for the learned and the illiterate meet at the ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... the same. This was a great disappointment to the dominating element in the Democratic party, who had hoped and expected, through their policy of "Masterly Inactivity" and intimidation of white men, that the convention would be composed almost exclusively of illiterate and inexperienced colored men. Although a minor at that time, I took an active part in the local politics of my county, and, being a member of a Republican club that had been organized at Natchez, I was frequently called upon to address the ...
— The Facts of Reconstruction • John R. Lynch
... dissecting partner I had an uncouth cow-puncher from southern Texas. There were in the college a number of these broad-hatted and rather illiterate fellows from the southwest trying to get themselves metamorphosed into doctors. (I would often feel for their prospective patients.) This man who assisted me on the "stiff," as they call the dissecting material, did the cutting and I looked up the points of anatomy. ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... paralyzed Indian. Colonel Howell, having heard the explanation of the finding of the letter, without any hesitation and evidently without any qualms of conscience, drew out the enclosure. The letter was an illiterate scrawl. ...
— On the Edge of the Arctic - An Aeroplane in Snowland • Harry Lincoln Sayler
... already: a famous Empire run-up by Jordan, the sly builder and decorator who had got on so surprisingly. In James's younger days, Jordan was an obscure and illiterate nobody. And now he had a motor car, and looked at the tottering James with sardonic contempt, from under his heavy, heavy-lidded dark eyes. He was rather stout, frail in health, but silent and insuperable, ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... however, there has been a sudden and most alarming change, and I have just received no less than a dozen notices from tenants desirous of giving up their habitations at once. Here they are!' And he handed me a bundle of letters, for the most part written in the scrawling hand of the illiterate. 'If you look,' he went on, 'you will see that none of them give any reason for leaving. It is merely—"We CANNOT POSSIBLY stay here any longer," or "We MUST give up possession IMMEDIATELY," which they have done, and in every instance before the quarter was up. Being naturally greatly ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... the depositions of persons interested in the ruin of the Rajah, others were made by persons who then received pensions from him, the said Hastings; and several of the affidavits were made by persons of mean condition, and so wholly illiterate as not to be ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... refusal of the Gold Conspiracy to respectability and editorial law, but when he sent the manuscript on to the Quarterly, the editor of the Quarterly also refused it. The literary standard of the two Quarterlies was not so high as to suggest that the article was illiterate beyond the power of an active and willing editor to redeem it. Adams had no choice but to realize that he had to deal in 1870 with the same old English character of 1860, and the same inability in himself to understand it. As usual, ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... growing demand. The nobleman has ceased to consider the patronage of authors as any part of his duty, and the tradition which made him consider writing poetry as a proper accomplishment is dying out. Since that time our aristocracy as such has been normally illiterate. Peers—Byron, for example—have occasionally written books; and more than one person of quality has, like Fox, kept up the interest in classical literature which he acquired at a public school, and added a charm to his parliamentary oratory. The great ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... so Wykoff got his inspiration for a career from studying and admiring the diplomatic parvenus of Queen Anne's time. These Bohemiens de la haute volee, who drew their first motives from study, are by far more interesting and tolerable than those of an illiterate type. ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... reason against the events taking place as described,—when men are represented as acting contrary to the character assigned them, or to human nature in general; as when a young lady of seventeen, brought up in ease, luxury and retirement, with no companions but the narrow-minded and illiterate, displays (as a heroine usually does) under the most trying circumstances, such wisdom, fortitude, and knowledge of the world, as the best instructors and the best examples can rarely produce without ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... it is universally admitted that they are the best educated, the acutest, and the most intelligent in Christendom;—no, I must correct myself; they are all this, except when they are in the act of leasing lands, and then the innocent and illiterate husbandmen are the victims of the arts of ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... judge, I being 'a chip of the old block,' without soliciting money or favor, threw open his cellar, wherein was stowed many bushels of sweet potatoes; invited all the destitute to come. It is needless to say they came. In the spring Tobey, the Negro minister of the Baptist Church—a man illiterate, but with much native sense—after morning service, said: 'Brethren, there's gwine to be a 'lection here next week, and I wants you all to vote in de light dat God has gin you to see de light, but I spects to vote wid de taters.' Now, this may seem ludicrous, but Tobey, in that act, was a ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... illiterate old man. What do you know of literature? Aint all them gentlemen as I plays with chice sperits and writers? Isn't it a honour to jine 'em in the old English drammy, and to eat of the wittles and drink of the ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... was no more and no less than a plain horse-thief, a young man of twenty-six, who had been convicted by a jury of stealing a grocer's horse and selling it. The last man was a negro, a tall, shambling, illiterate, nebulous-minded black, who had walked off with an apparently discarded section of lead pipe which he had found in a lumber-yard. His idea was to sell or trade it for a drink. He really did not belong in this court at all; but, having been caught by an undersized American watchman charged ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... is the Established Church of Russia. The priests are as a class illiterate, and but little removed above the mujicks in their habits of life. A priest is expected to marry, but can only marry one wife. When she dies, he enters the monastic order. His sons enter the clerical seminaries, and his daughters marry ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... unhappily fallen, they nevertheless suited the audience to which they were particularly addressed. His Corinthian style, in which the Maenad of Mr. Burke was habited in the last mode of Almack's, his sarcasms against the illiterate and his invectives against the low, his descriptions of the country life of the aristocracy contrasted with the horrors of the guillotine, his Horatian allusions and his Virgilian passages, combined to produce a whole which equally fascinated and ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... cried "The result of perusing the evening papers containing a report of the first proceedings before the magistrates! The production of an illiterate man, who knew neither the use of a hyphen nor the correct word to describe the avenue! Not wholly exact either, if ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... but an atom in the most renowned of the savage races known to history, a people that, according to the white man's standard, is uncivilized, uneducated, illiterate, and barbarous. Yet the upbringing of every Red Indian male child begins at his birth, and ends only when he has acquired the learning considered essential for the successful man to possess, and which has been predetermined through many ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... good advice; but no serious Protestant, at that day, could relish the tone in which it was given. Threatening letters were sent in from irate and illiterate Irishmen; the Herald was denounced from a Catholic pulpit; its carriers were assaulted on their rounds; but the paper won no friends from the side which it affected to espouse. Every one felt that to this man nothing was sacred, or August, or venerable, or even serious. He was ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... hanging on nails, pans lay about the hearth, a sewing-machine stood on a bare deal table. Over the bed was hung an oleograph, from a Christmas supplement, of the birth of Jesus, and above it a bayonet, under which was printed in an illiterate hand on a rough scroll of paper: "Gave three of em what for at Elandslaagte. S. Hughs." Some photographs adorned the walls, and two drooping ferns stood on the window-ledge. The room withal had a sort ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... would follow the hounds fifty miles an end sometimes, would never own himself either tired or amused. I think no praise ever went so close to his heart, as when Mr. Hamilton called out one day upon Brighthelmstone Downs, "Why Johnson rides as well, for aught I see, as the most illiterate fellow in England."' He wrote to Mrs. Thrale in 1777:—'No season ever was finer. Barley, malt, beer and money. There is the series of ideas. The deep logicians call it a sorites. I hope my master will no longer endure the reproach of not keeping me a horse.' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... owner, George, first Duke of Buckingham, was stabbed by Felton; Worcester House, at one time occupied by Lord Chancellor Clarendon; and Essex House, situated near St. Clement Danes, the town residence of Arthur Capel, Earl of Essex, "a sober, wise, judicious, and pondering person, not illiterate beyond the rate of most noblemen of ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... news of Captain Winstanley, who has married a Jewish lady at Frankfort, only daughter and heiress of a well-known money-lender. The bride is reported ugly and illiterate; but there is no doubt as to her fortune. The Captain has bought a villa at Monaco—a villa in the midst of orange-groves, the abandoned plaything of an Austrian princess; and he has hired an apartment in one of the new avenues, just outside the Arc de Triomphe, where, ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... opinions and propagating others probably far more effective than the {418} mauling of men's bodies is the guidance of their minds through direction of their reading and instruction. Naturally, before the invention of printing, and in an illiterate society, the censorship of books would have slight importance. Plato was perhaps the first to propose that the reading of immoral and impious books be forbidden, but I am not aware that his suggestion was acted upon either ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... the most by them! for I will venture, (contrary to the custom of profound historians, who always assign deep causes to great events,) to ascribe the better half of the Duke of Marlborough's greatness and riches to those graces. He was eminently illiterate, wrote bad English, and spelled it still worse. He had no share of what is commonly called parts; that is, he had no brightness, nothing shining in his genius. He had, most undoubtedly, an excellent good plain understanding, with sound judgment. But these alone would probably have raised ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... Salvation Army lassies at the street corners, and look upon her as a representative of a lower class who are doing good "in their way," prepare to realize that you have made a mistake. The Salvation Army is not an organization composed of a lot of ignorant, illiterate, reformed criminals picked out of the slums. There may be among them many of that class who by the army's efforts have been saved from a life of sin and shame, and lifted up to be useful citizens; but great numbers of them, the leaders and officers, are ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... to the parish, was at great pains to teach an illiterate old man, crippled with rheumatism, his letters so that he could read the Bible. On the clergyman's return after a short absence from the parish, he ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... people found the time and patience to read. One side was packed with the forgotten lumber of bookshelves—an odd volume of sermons, a collection of scientific essays, a technical work out of date. And the men, anxious to improve their minds, stared at the titles with the curious reverence of the illiterate for a printed book. At their elbows boys gloated over the pages of a penny dreadful, and the women fingered penny novelettes with rapid movements, trying to judge the ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... trifling particular—as to whether they came from heaven or from hell. He must believe that those who were thus successful in this extraordinary conspiracy against men's senses and against common sense, were Galilaean Jews, such as all history of the period represents them; ignorant, obscure, illiterate; and, above all, previously bigoted, like all their countrymen, to the very system, of which, together with all other religions on the earth, they modestly meditated the abrogation; he must believe that, appealing to these astounding frauds ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... have been to college, I presume?" asked an illiterate but boastful exhorter of a clergyman. "Yes, sir," was the reply. "I am thankful," said the former, "that the Lord opened my mouth without any learning." "A similar event," retorted the clergyman, "happened ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... regretted the experience. It is easy now to see the absurdity of my idea, but at that time I knew less than I do now of the labouring people's condition, and in furthering the movement I entertained a shadowy hope of finding amongst the illiterate villagers some fragment or other of primitive art. It is almost superfluous to say that nothing of the sort was found. My neighbours had no arts of their own. For any refreshment of that kind they ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... the disguise, the hand that an educated person would write at the time, but is essentially a commonplace and, no doubt intentionally, rather slovenly style of handwriting. The use of small "i's" for the first person seems, in view of modern usage, to suggest an illiterate writer; but educated writers, even the King,[12] then occasionally lapsed into using them. In the letter, however, they are consistently and may have been purposely used, to avert suspicion from being the work of an educated person; though an illiterate ...
— The Identification of the Writer of the Anonymous Letter to Lord Monteagle in 1605 • William Parker
... Elkington a reward of L1000, for his valuable discoveries in the drainage of land. Joseph Elkington was a Warwickshire farmer, and Mr. Gisborne says he was a man of considerable genius, but he had the misfortune to be illiterate. His discovery had created such a sensation in the agricultural world, that it was thought important to record its details; and, as Elkington's health was extremely precarious, the Board resolved to send Mr. John Johnstone to visit, in company ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... doltish to do amiss, does not exist as a type in England. What does exist in every corner of the country is a peasantry speaking a patois that is often of varying inflections, but is always full of racy poetry, illiterate and yet possessed of a vast oral literature, sharing brains with other classes more equally than education, humorous, nimble-witted; clear-sighted, astute, cynical, not too virtuous, and having a lofty, contempt for the wiseacres of ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... had been very much astonished at this unexpected display. Disposed, as he was, to hold, that whatever had been in Greece, was right; he was more than doubtful of the propriety of throwing open the classical adytum to the illiterate profane. Whether, in his interior mind, he was at all influenced, either by the consideration that it would be for the credit of his cloth, with some of his vice-suppressing neighbours, to be able to say that he had expostulated; ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... be afraid of us, and so had I to be afraid of him. He was a huge, illiterate brute, an ex-Chesapeake-Bay-oyster-pirate, an "ex-con" who had done five years in Sing Sing, and a general all-around stupidly carnivorous beast. He used to trap sparrows that flew into our hall through the open bars. When he made ...
— The Road • Jack London
... winter. In the winter he will snare some small game, while mink and otter and muskrat skins will provide him flour and clothes from the fur-trader. Each of Sam's sons is earning seven hundred dollars a year hunting big game on the rock ridge farther north—more than illiterate, unskilled men earn in eastern lands. Then in spring Sam will emerge from his cabin, build another birch canoe and be off to the duck and wild geese haunts. When we paddled away in the morning, Sam still camped on ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... but through a glass darkly. The mind as well as the eye adds something of its own before an image, even of the clearest object, can be painted upon it; and in historical inquiries the most instructed thinkers have but a limited advantage over the most illiterate. Those who know the most approach ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... the above pleasing piece of composition. In the first place, it is perfectly stilted and unnatural; the dialogue and the sentiments being artfully arranged, so as to be as strong and majestic as possible. Our dear Cat is but a poor illiterate country wench, who has come from cutting her husband's throat; and yet, see! she talks and looks like a tragedy princess, who is suffering in the most virtuous blank verse. This is the proper end of ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... began to move slowly and automatically backwards to the porch. When he reached it he sat down, unfolded the letter, and without attempting to read it, turned its pages over and over with the unfamiliarity of an illiterate man in search of the signature. This when found apparently plunged him again into motionless abstraction. Only once he changed his position to pull up the legs of his trousers, open his knees, and extend the distance between his feet, and then with the unfolded pages carefully laid in the moonlit ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... charcoal. In a short time it changes colour; the lead becomes yellow, and is found to be converted into excellent gold: the iron becomes white, and is found to be pure silver. Delisle is altogether an illiterate person. M. de St. Auban endeavoured to teach him to read and write, but he profited very little by his lessons. He is unpolite, fantastic, and a dreamer, and ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... to whether any party designations should be printed. Most practical politicians desire that the name "Republican" or "Democrat," or even that some party symbol like a star or flag, should be affixed, which can be understood by the most illiterate voter; also, that the voter should be allowed to make one cross opposite the word "Republican" or "Democrat" when he means to vote the whole of the ticket, "in order to give each candidate the benefit of the full ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... Clonderriff a snowstorm of documents—leases and mortgages and conveyances and post-obits—all the documentary debris of a crumbled estate, from the Elizabethan charter on which the first Hewish had founded Roscarna to the illiterate IOU's of Jocelyn's spider-racing days. Considine, up to his neck in it, called on Gabrielle to help in the ordering of her affairs. At Clonderriff they had not room enough for this accumulation of papers, ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... attending all the dinners, clubs, races, balls, and other diversions that were given by them, within ten miles of his residence. His sermons were pithy and short; and he always spoke of your half-hour preachers, as illiterate prosers, who did not understand how to condense their thoughts. Twenty minutes were his gauge, though I remember to have heard my father say, he had known him preach all of twenty-two. When he compressed down to fourteen, my grandfather ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... by the laws of Aristotle, and finding those laws are violated, determines that the author ought to be hissed, instead of being applauded. This it is to be so excellent a judge; this it is which gives a critic that exalted gratification which can never be attained by the illiterate,—the supreme power of pointing out faults, where others discern nothing but beauties, and preserving a rigid inflexibility of muscle, while the sides of the vulgar herd are shaking with laughter. These merry mortals, thinking with Plato that it is no proof ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... this country. The ranks of the Abolitionists were composed of the most eloquent orators, the ablest logicians, men and women of the purest moral character and best minds in the nation. They were usually spoken of in the early days as "an illiterate, ill-mannered, poverty-stricken, crazy set of long-haired Abolitionists." While the fact is, some of the most splendid specimens of manhood and womanhood, in physical appearance, in culture, refinement, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... to write, and the first form in which his history was committed to paper was from dictation. The person who took down the words as he spoke them, one of his fellow-servants, was but imperfectly educated himself, so that it may be imagined that the result of the narrative of one illiterate person being written down by another was that the style was not likely to aspire to any very high degree of literary merit. Still, to preserve the peculiar character of the book, it has been thought better to ...
— The Autobiography of Sergeant William Lawrence - A Hero of the Peninsular and Waterloo Campaigns • William Lawrence
... To be sure, a flourishing garden may be made and managed by bright-eyed tots just out of the kindergarten, but how can commercial fertilizers be carefully analyzed by a boy who has made no study of general chemistry? and how can a balanced ration be adjusted by an illiterate person? Similarly, the girl in the laundry does not make soap by rote, but by principle; and the girl in the dressmaking-shop does not cut out her pattern by luck, or guess, or instinct, or rule of thumb, but ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... king of the gipsies: if not, some great man's protection is a sufficient warrant for his peregrination, and a meanes to procure him the town-hall, where hee may long exercise his qualities, with clown-claps of great admiration, in a tone sutable to the large eares of his illiterate auditorie. Hee is one seldome takes care for old age, because ill diet and disorder, together with a consumption, or some worse disease, taken vp in his full careere, haue onely chalked out his catastrophe but to a colon: and he scarsely suruiues to ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... claiming him on the strength of a foolish flirtation; knowing herself, at the time, to be privately married to another man? Was this woman—with the voice of a lady, the look of a lady, the manner of a lady—in league (as Geoffrey had declared) with the illiterate vagabond who was attempting to extort money anonymously from Mrs. Glenarm? Impossible! Making every allowance for the proverbial ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... any one, it is not an instinctive sentiment. The contrary is the fact. Unless we are dominated by some other sentiment than justice, we instinctively yield assent to Aristotle's proposition that the prize flute should be awarded to the best flute player whether opulent or indigent, literate or illiterate, citizen or slave. A group of small children exploring the fields and woods for wild flowers will concede to each what flowers he finds whether by his better eyes or better luck. So with groups of small boys fishing in the streams and brooks. In games of cards for stakes, the players do ...
— Concerning Justice • Lucilius A. Emery
... Orford (1302-1310), like his predecessor, Hugh Belsham, was consecrated at Rome, though not, as he had been, by the pope himself. The Archbishop of Canterbury had refused his consent to the appointment on the ground that the elect was illiterate, but the pope overruled the objection. He died at ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ely • W. D. Sweeting
... eloquence, which, in the corruption of taste and language, still preserves the majesty of the Roman laws. In some respects, the office of the Imperial quaestor may be compared with that of a modern chancellor; but the use of a great seal, which seems to have been adopted by the illiterate barbarians, was never introduced to attest the public acts of the emperors. 4. The extraordinary title of count of the sacred largesses was bestowed on the treasurer-general of the revenue, with the intention perhaps of inculcating, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... feeble boast that they are not literally illiterate. They are always saying the ancient barons could not sign their own names—for they know less of history perhaps than of anything else. The modern barons, however, can sign their own names—or someone else's for ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... subject, that every solid argument is against the extraordinary court, and that every one in its favor is specious only. It is a transfer from a judicature of learning and integrity, to one, the greatness of which is both illiterate and unprincipled. Yet such is the force of prejudice with some, and of the want of reflection in others, that many of our constitutions have copied this absurdity, without suspecting it to be one. I am glad to hear that our new constitution ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... read and write, the pupil was ready to enter on the coveted career of a scribe. In a community where nearly every one was illiterate, the scribes naturally held an honorable place. They conducted the correspondence of the time. When a man wished to send a letter, he had a scribe write it, signing it himself by affixing his seal. When he received a letter, he usually employed ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... morbidly and fanatically—I was about to say religious: but that is not the word; let me call it pseudo-religious. His strong sense and cultivated taste did not allow him to delight in the raving tracts of illiterate fanatics—and yet out of the benign and simple elements of the Scripture he conjured up for himself a fanaticism quite as gloomy and intense. He lost sight of God the Father, and night and day dreamed only of God the Avenger. His ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... have associated to any extent with the people in the rural districts, especially those of American or Dutch-American descent, they, no doubt, have observed that a great many of the older and more illiterate ones among them are very superstitious, being implicit believers in signs, charms, apparitions, etc.; and most of them, also, entertain the opinion that the moon exerts an occult influence over many things of vital importance to the residents of this mundane ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... head sunk between his shoulders. He lived well, and brought up his nephew and godchild, Gil Blas. "In so doing, Per[^e]s taught himself also to read his breviary without stumbling." He was the most illiterate canon of the whole ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... I will begin therefore to discourse of those verses of mine, which they have produced as though they were something of which I ought to be ashamed. You must have noticed the laughter with which I showed my annoyance at the absurd and illiterate manner in ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... Wales. p. 101. Edit. 2. The Saxons were so very illiterate when they were called to Britain by Vortigern, in Welsh, Gwrtheyrn, that they could neither write nor read. And for that reason Messengers were sent to them from Britain, with a verbal Invitation. Mr. Llwyd has proved that the Welsh furnished the Anglo-Saxons with an Alphabet. ...
— An Enquiry into the Truth of the Tradition, Concerning the - Discovery of America, by Prince Madog ab Owen Gwynedd, about the Year, 1170 • John Williams
... consistency, find fault with Christianity on all its sides, and with all its preachers, though you have to contradict yourself in doing so. Object to this man that he is too learned and doctrinal; to that one that he is too illiterate, and gives no food for thought; to this one that he is always thundering condemnation; to that one that he is always running over with love; to this one that he is perpetually harping upon duties; to that ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... affections are bestowed naturally in her own class, and the disconsolate urban discovers that a wide divergence of feelings and sympathies, a gulf not to be voluntarily bridged over, lies between the man of the world and the illiterate peasant; that the results of habit are not lightly to be got rid of; and that a happiness which lies below us in the social scale may be as unattainable as higher prizes. The relations of the romantic and dreamy Olenin to his barbaric neighbors are finely portrayed. Nothing could be more ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... intention to treat them with injustice. Conscious that they might be crowded out by the greater energy and enterprise of white settlers—that they could no longer depend on their means of livelihood in the past, when the buffalo and other game were plentiful, these restless, impulsive, illiterate people were easily led to believe that their only chance of redressing their real or fancied wrongs was such a rising as had taken place on the Red River in {394} 1869. It is believed that English settlers in the Prince ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... excessive expenditure of strength may be seen in the attempt of an illiterate laborer to sign his name. He grips the pen as though it were a crowbar, and puts forth enough strength to handle a twenty-pound weight. Learning to dance, or to skate, or to row a boat, is usually accompanied in the beginning by ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... Franconian herdsman, John Beheim, of Niklashausen—a 'poor illiterate', Trithemius calls him. In the summer of 1476, as he watched his flocks in the fields, he had a vision of the gracious Mother of God, who bade him preach repentance to the people. His fame soon spread, and multitudes gathered from great distances ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... a man not illiterate: he was an inhabitant of Sky, and therefore was within reach of intelligence, and with no great difficulty might have visited the places which he undertakes to describe; yet with all his opportunities, he has often ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... pocket money, and yet sometimes the whole crew including the skipper were apprentices and under twenty-one years of age. Even after that they were fitted for no other calling but to follow the sea, and had to accept the master's terms. There were no fishermen's unions, and the men being very largely illiterate were often left victims of a peonage system in spite of the Truck Acts. The master of a vessel has to keep discipline, especially in a fleet, and the best of boys have faults and need punishing while on land. These skippers themselves were brought up in a rough school, and those who fell ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... not sober, or not informed, or not conscientious? The crying need of to-day is, that men and women shall be urged into positions of conviction and activity against this most colossal evil of our time. In our country the responsibility for drunkenness rests not with the illiterate, blasphemous, ex-prison convicts who operate the 250,000 saloons of our Nation, nor yet with the 250,000 finished products of the saloon who go down into drunkards' graves every year, but with the sober, respectable, hard-working, voting citizens of our country. Nor does this exempt women, whose ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... therefrom and within quite recent times, and such I am now disposed to think is the case of the Roman version of Aladdin given by Miss Busk under the title of "How Cajusse was Married," notwithstandtng the circumstance that the old woman from whom it was obtained was almost wholly illiterate. A child who could read might have told the story out of Galland to his or her nurse, through whom it would afterwards assume local colour, with some modifications of the details. But stories having all the essential features of the tale of Aladdin were known throughout Europe ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... and cure of disease which have escaped the most sagacious observers of nature. By so doing, we may discover laws of the animal economy which have no place in our system of Nosology, or in our theories of physic. The practice of physic hath been more improved by the casual experiments of illiterate nations, and the rash ones of vagabond quacks, than by all the once celebrated professors of it, and the theoretic teachers in the several schools of Europe, very few of whom have furnished us with one new medicine, or have taught us better to use our old ones, ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... above what we have been taught.... All great men are seen to possess this freedom. They derive their standard from their own natures, and their observations on life are so natural and spontaneous that it would seem as if the most illiterate person with a scrap of common-sense would have made the same.... We become wiser with them, and know not how the difficult appears easy ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... illiterate, and unphilosophical speculations on the subject of mesmerism which the present unwholesome activity of the printing-press has ushered into the world, there is one book which stands out in prominent and ornamental relief—a book written by a member of the Church of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... mothers will wish their children to learn English again, and to speak it for all scholarly purposes; and, if they use, instead, Greek or Latin, to use them only that they may be understood by Greeks or Latins;[2] and not that they may mystify the illiterate many of their own land. Dead languages, so called, may at least be left at rest, if not honored; and must not be torn in mutilation out of their tumuli, that the skins and bones of them may help to hold our living nonsense together; while languages called living, but which live only to ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... or the man of large mental endowment, would render miserable the peasant who still lacked the development to appreciate the elegancies of refinement; while the tidy cottage and plain comforts which might constitute the paradise of the humble and illiterate rustic, would be utterly inadequate to the requirements of larger and more ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... surveyed the remains of antiquity at this place, accompanied by an illiterate fellow, as Cicerone, who called himself a descendant of a cousin of Saint Columba, the founder of the religious establishment here. As I knew that many persons had already examined them, and as I saw Dr. Johnson inspecting and measuring several ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... illiterate lubber!—My dear Charles, I have a thousand things to say to you, and this is an unfit place ...
— The Politician Out-Witted • Samuel Low
... plain as sunshine, for that must correct itself. You know I am homo unius linguae: in English, illiterate, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... them a finer kind of reward than the financial. Among other things, they understood and respected the dignity of literature, and would not have expected an editor to run a literary venture in the interests of the illiterate. The further degradation of the public taste was not then the avowed object of popular magazines. Indeed—strange as it sounds nowadays—it was rather the education than the degradation of the public taste at which the editor aimed, and in ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... Surgeon General's Office of the Army. The War Department records show that 24.9 per cent. of the draft army examined by that department's agents were unable to read and understand a newspaper, or to write letters home. In one draft in New York State in May, 1918, 16.6 per cent. were classed as illiterate. In one draft in connection with South Carolina troops in July, 1918, 49.5 per cent. where classed as illiterate. In one draft in connection with Minnesota troops in July of the same year, 14.2 per cent. were ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... day, having some occasion to write, the Indian King, who saw me, believ'd that he could write as well as I. Whereupon, I wrote a Word, and gave it him to copy, which he did with more Exactness, than any European could have done, that was illiterate. It was so well, that he who could read mine, might have done the same by his. Afterwards, he took great Delight in making Fish-hooks of his own Invention, which would have been a good Piece for an Antiquary to ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson
... the rifle of Roy, the Red Wolf. Mrs. Conyers comes up and thanks me an' John Tom without the usual extremities you always look for in a woman. She says just enough, in a way to convince, and there is no incidental music by the orchestra. I made a few illiterate requisitions upon the art of conversation, at which the lady smiles friendly, as if she had known me a week. And then Mr. Little Bear adorns the atmosphere with the various idioms into which education can fracture the wind of speech. I could ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... was an illiterate coffee-house keeper in Salonica, first came to Egypt at the head of a body of Albanians and co-operated with the English against the French. By his extraordinary vigour and intelligence he became the ruler of Lower Egypt, and succeeded in attaching the Mameluke Beys ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... utterance to its meaning, was there. He had hardly surrendered his commission as chaplain in the army. He had fought to win the freedom of a race. To make that race true free men was a task much more vast than to emancipate them. The parting of the ways had come. An illiterate people must be taught. No longer should it be a crime to instruct them. The rather was he the criminal who should deny them an education. It was an hour for the voice of a prophet. With the ken of a seer, Chaplain Cravath, representing the American Missionary Association, Jan. 9th, 1866, ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 54, No. 01, January, 1900 • Various
... He who does not allow that it passed creditably to my teachers, profitably to myself, and beneficially to the world, is a narrow-minded and illiterate man, who knows nothing of the ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... done this ting, nailed this insult to Garth's very door. The illiterate characters stamped it as the work of some one in the lower walks of life, and, with a frown of annoyance, Sara promptly—and quite correctly—ascribed it to ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... alone. It had always been the custom of the mountain dwellers to shoulder their guns and go into the thick of every fray which seemed to them in any way to threaten their native land. They went blindly, they fought desperately, and they endured manfully. Ignorant, illiterate, abjectly poor, inured to hardship through generations, they asked no questions the answers to which they could not understand. It was enough for them to know that their native land was invaded by an armed foe. ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... narrative, and the gestour would know how to make the best of incidents which he knew from experience to be specially interesting to an audience. Such yarns would be most attractive to "lewd" or illiterate men— ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... most men, and paralyzes the will. No education will ensure this greatest and most essential quality. It is born in a man, not communicated. With it his acquired knowledge will be doubly useful, but without it an illiterate slave-trader like Forrest may far outshine him as a soldier. Nor does success as a subordinate give any certain assurance of fitness for supreme command. Napoleon's marshals generally failed when trusted with an independent command, as Hooker did with us; and I do not doubt ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... colours predominated. Content with the product of their labour and having few wants, they lived in perfect equality and with extreme frugality. In an age when learning was confined to the few, they were not more illiterate than the corresponding class in other countries. 'In the summer the men were continually employed in husbandry.' They cultivated chiefly the rich marsh-lands by the rivers and the sea, building dikes along the banks and shores to shut out the tides; and made little effort to clear ...
— The Acadian Exiles - A Chronicle of the Land of Evangeline • Arthur G. Doughty
... heart, benevolence, manners and every qualification that distinguishes the worthy man. O my dear! what a degree of patience, what a greatness of soul, is required in the wife, not to despise a husband who is more ignorant, more illiterate, more low-minded than herself!—The wretch, vested with prerogatives, who will claim rule in virtue of them (and not to permit whose claim, will be as disgraceful to the prescribing wife as to the governed husband); How shall such a husband as this be borne, were he, for reasons of convenience ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson |
