"Precocious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... answered it. Since then they had written to each other regularly. There was nothing sentimental, hinted at or implied, in the correspondence. Whatever the faults of Sidney's romantic visions were, they did not tend to precocious flirtation. The Plainfield boys, attracted by her beauty and repelled by her indifference and aloofness, could have told that. She never expected to meet John Lincoln, nor did she wish to do so. In the correspondence ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... writers of satire stands Count Roger Rabutin de Bussy, whose mind was jocose, his wit keen, and his sarcasm severe. He was born in 1618, and educated at a college of Jesuits, where he manifested an extraordinary avidity for letters and precocious talents. The glory of war fired his early zeal, and for sixteen years he followed the pursuit of arms. Then literature claimed him as her slave. His first book, Les amours du Palais Royal, excited the displeasure ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... futurity; bespeak, secure, engage, preengage^. accelerate; expedite &c (quicken) 274; make haste &c (hurry) 684. Adj. early, prime, forward; prompt &c (active) 682; summary. premature, precipitate, precocious; prevenient^, anticipatory; rath^. sudden &c (instantaneous) 113; unexpected &c 508; near, near at hand; immediate. Adv. early, soon, anon, betimes, rath^; eft, eftsoons; ere long, before long, shortly; beforehand; prematurely &c adj.; precipitately ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... I shall never regret, although I should die for it, the day I gave myself to you. You thought you were entering upon a new life and that with me, you would forget the women who had deceived you. Alas! Octave, I used to smile at that precocious experience which you said you had been through, and of which I heard you boast like a child who knows nothing of life. I thought I had but to will it, and all that there was that was good in your heart would come to your lips ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... mature works do not show any profound knowledge either of the Halakah or of the Haggadah, so that the statement is not to be taken strictly. It is probably nothing more than a grandiloquent way of saying that he was a precocious child, who impressed his elders. Paul, too, claimed that he was "a Pharisee of the Pharisees, and zealous beyond those of his own age in the Jews' religion," and yet he can hardly be regarded as an authority on the tradition. The autobiography of Josephus, it is pertinent to remember, ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... every lip. Old men gently stroked their chops, children patted their little stomachs, the crowd licked its thousand lips with eager joy. Even the babies danced in their nurses' arms, so precocious was the passion for tarts in this singular country. Grave professors, skipping like kids, declaimed Latin verses in honour of His Majesty and Mother Mitchel, and the shyest young girls opened their mouths like the beaks ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... stern moralist in the middle of the nineteenth century, have had a place in Pope's works for a hundred years, and it is too late now to seek to delete them. They were written by Pope in his fourteenth or fifteenth year, and gross as they are, are pardonable in a boy of precocious genius, giving way for a laughing hour to his sense of the grotesque. Joe Warton (not Tom) pompously calls them "a gross and dull caricature of the Father of English Poetry." And Mr Bowles says, "he might have ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... lad, the mysterious language of ancient prophecy, which seemed to point him out for greatness, give him consequence in the eyes of both friends and foes. Through his heroic mother, a daughter of the Lord of the Isles, he would naturally find allies in that warlike race. His precocious prowess and talents began to be noised abroad, and stimulated Perrott to the employment of an elaborate artifice, which, however, proved quite successful. A ship, commanded by one Bermingham, was sent round to Donegal, ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... nine years old when she perceived with a discernment somewhat precocious that her sleeping companion was simple, humble, ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... Schelling was born at Leonberg, Wuertemberg, January 27, 1775, the son of a learned clergyman and writer on theology. He was a precocious child and made rapid progress in his studies, entering the Theological Seminary at Tuebingen at the age of fifteen. Between the ages of nineteen and twenty-two he wrote a number of able treatises in the spirit of the new idealism, and was recognized ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... the year 1750, that he made the acquaintance of Mr. William Henry. That gentleman became deeply interested in the precocious boy, and frequently came to watch him at his portrait-painting. One day he said to Benjamin, that if he (Henry) could paint equally well he would not waste his time upon portraits, but would devote himself to historical subjects. In the course of the conversation to which this remark ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... poured into it, and neither was a common one. With all its ill-based daring and manifest crudities, it was such a tour de force for a lad of twenty as the world seldom sees. Its sluggish current bears along remarkable knowledge, great reflection, and the imagination of a fertile as well as a precocious brain. It is a stream which carries with it things new and old, and serves to stir the mind of the onlooker with unwonted thoughts. Were it but one fourth as long, it would still remain a favorite poem. Even now it has passed ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... still, to be not what he is. Having, by dint of much pains and many prayers, obtained, as you hope, some beginnings of victory over the most wayward of wills, and the most unaccountably strange of mixed natures, with its intellectual sharpness and moral bluntness, its precocious knowingness and stereotyped childishness, its quickness to learn and slowness to unlearn, prepare for the next stage of your enterprise. Lay out your scheme of emigration, get the money where you can, that is to say, call ...
— God's Answers - A Record Of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the - Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada • Clara M. S. Lowe
... had his head, and on this occasion he entered into the matter with the zeal of a true friend, and a young man who never expected to have another occasion to sing a public "In Memoriam." It made my hair stand on end,—metaphorically, of course. From my childhood I had been extremely precocious. There were anecdotes of preternatural brightness, picked up, Heaven knows where, of my eagerness to learn, of my adventurous, chivalrous young soul, and of my arduous struggles with chill penury, which was not able (as it appeared) to repress my rage, until ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... conscience: "At ten years of age I waked up to a sense of the danger of the state of indulgence in which I was living"; but let us hope the crisis was not acute. It does not seem to have been. According to the testimony of her first teacher, she was simply precocious morally, but not at all morbid. Her school was at Hingham, whither she was sent at the age of thirteen. The teacher says that with her "devotedness to the highest objects and purposes of our existence, she was one of the most lively and playful girls among her ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... children, is to overtask their mental faculties. Although it is exceedingly gratifying to see children acquire knowledge, and manifest an understanding far beyond their years, this gratification is often purchased too dearly, for precocious children are apt to die young. The tissue of the brain and nerves of children is very delicate; they have not yet acquired the powers of endurance which older persons possess. The greater portion of the nutriment assimilated, is required for growth and organic development, and they can ill afford ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... Biography. Nothing is overlooked; neither the names of the professors at the Bourges College, nor those of his deceased schoolfellows, such as Lousteau, Bianchon, and other famous natives of the province, who, it is said, knew the dreamy, melancholy boy, and his precocious bent towards poetry. An elegy called Tristesse (Melancholy), written at school; the two poems Paquita la Sevillane and Le Chene de la Messe; three sonnets, a description of the Cathedral and the House of Jacques Coeur at Bourges, ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... zeal for the regeneration of her sex that manly things were, perhaps on the whole, what she understood best. Mr. Burrage was rather a handsome youth, with a laughing, clever face, a certain sumptuosity of apparel, an air of belonging to the "fast set"—a precocious, good-natured man of the world, curious of new sensations and containing, perhaps, the making of a dilettante. Being, doubtless, a little ambitious, and liking to flatter himself that he appreciated worth in lowly ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... falling in love; for already his dreams of love were of the highest and most fantastic; and an Emir's daughter, or a Princess of Constantinople, were the very lowest game at which he meant to fly. Alftruda was beautiful, too, exceedingly, and precocious, and, it may be, vain enough to repay his attentions in good earnest. Moreover she was English as he was, and royal likewise; a relation of Elfgiva, daughter of Ethelred, once King of England, who, as all know, married Uchtred, ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... precocious author of HORAE VACIVAE, 1646, and of a volume of poems which was printed in the same year. In the LUCASTA are some complimentary lines by Lovelace on Hall's translation of the commentary of Hierocles on the Golden Verses of ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace
... wrest back the Holy City from the clutches of the Saracens, and set a second Godfrey upon the vacant throne of Palestine. To this important end the experiences of his infancy and his training by the Jesuits had undoubtedly tended to urge the precocious young poet. The servants of his father's house at Sorrento must many a time have regaled his eager boyish mind with harrowing tales of the infidel pirates who scoured the Tyrrhene Sea within sight of the watch-towers on the ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... the Liberator confided the missives that communicated this important intelligence to her father. She little knew the contents of the billet which she carried him in safety, nor did he confide them to the child. He himself did not dream the precocious extent of that enthusiasm which she felt almost equally in the common cause, and in the person of its great advocate and champion. Her father simply praised her care and diligence, rewarded her with his fondest caresses, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... places ere Miss Molly Benson took entire possession of it. Our sons and daughters must follow in the way of their parents before them, I suppose. Why, but yesterday, you were scolding me for grumbling at Miss Het's precocious fancies. To do the child justice, she disguises her feelings entirely, and I defy Mr. Warrington to know from her behaviour how ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... me if I think she'll ever get a man. Because I've had one, and am making something that resembles a trousseau, she thinks that I have a recipe for cornering the male market. Her dental arch is like the porte-cochere of the new Belmont Hotel, and last night a precocious four-year-old said, "Miss Mandy, why don't you tuck your teeth in?"—Miss Mandy would if she could but she can't. She is the sort who would stop her own funeral to sew up ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... they live for, our girls so refined, So forward, precocious, and gifted at ten They are flirting and courting and things of the kind, That never came ...
— Nothing to Eat • Horatio Alger [supposed]
... possibly not unfrequently that Horace, his mother's pet, gleaned in the drawing-rooms of Arlington Street his first notions of that persiflage which was the fashion of the day. We. can fancy him a precocious, old-fashioned little boy, at his mother's apron-string, whilst Carr, Lord Hervey, was paying his devoirs; we see him gazing with wondering eyes at Pulteney, Earl of Bath, with his blue ribbon across his laced coat; whilst compassionating friends observing the pale-faced boy in that ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... sat, was a boy's portrait, which anybody seeing him would have identified as Master Christopher Casby, aged ten: though disguised with a haymaking rake, for which he had had, at any time, as much taste or use as for a diving-bell; and sitting (on one of his own legs) upon a bank of violets, moved to precocious contemplation by the spire of a village church. There was the same smooth face and forehead, the same calm blue eye, the same placid air. The shining bald head, which looked so very large because it shone so much; and the long grey hair at its sides ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... Stock Company and incidentally the greatest of all star factories. William Morris was retained as the first leading man, and the company included Orrin Johnson, Cyril Scott, W. H. Thompson, Theodore Roberts, Sydney Armstrong, Odette Tyler, and Edna Wallace. The child in the play was a precocious youngster called "Wally" Eddinger, who is the familiar Wallace ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... undeveloped from lack of opportunities. But whether young Faraday did or did not, at an early age, display any unusual promise of his life-work, all his biographers appear to agree that he could not be regarded as a precocious child. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... give him a gingerbread or a cracknel, and amuse herself with his baby prattle. She did not lose sight of him when she removed to the Rue Vivienne. Pierre had entered the elementary school of the neighborhood, and by his precocious intelligence and exceptional application, had not been long in getting to the top of his class. The boy had left school after gaining an exhibition admitting him to the Chaptal College. This hard worker, who was in a fair way of making his own position without costing his relatives anything, greatly ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... mind. The impressions must have been deep, since, writing in advanced age, he describes their personal appearance and their different idiosyncrasies with a minuteness which is at the same time a remarkable testimony to his precocious powers of observation. What is interesting in these intimacies as throwing light on Goethe's early characteristics is, that all these persons were of mature age, and all of them more or less eccentric in their habits and ways of thinking. "Even ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... What with the mackerel and the seagulls and the barristers, everybody seems to be against it. However, Walter, Rupert and Foch succeeded. Stephanie just missed. Walter and Rupert and Foch had jolly soft roes, a fact which is recorded in a cynical little poem by the precocious Foch, believed to be the only literary work of a whitebait now extant. We have only space here to quote ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 15, 1920 • Various
... of the schooldom of Scott, that denotes anything like precocious talent. It is, however better ascertained that his early rambles amidst the Tweed scenery retarded his educational pursuits. He received the rudiments of knowledge under the home tuition of his mother; next attended an ordinary school at Edinburgh, and was then placed at the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 571 - Volume 20, No. 571—Supplementary Number • Various
... Precocious as a child, proud and haughty as a youth, gifted with a critical, penetrating, and brilliant mind, and moved by an ambition that knew no bounds, Lassalle, with all his powerful passion and dramatic talents, could not have ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... children, who should be my godfather is decided by Mammon—So precocious as to make some noise in the world and be hung a few days after I was born—Cut down in time and produce a scene of bloodshed—My early propensities fully developed by the choice ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... understand whether my precocious self-dependence confused Mrs. Micawber in reference to my age, or whether she was so full of the subject that she would have talked about it to the very twins if there had been nobody else to communicate with, but this was the strain in ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... recruit to the Whig ranks was now won over to the national cause, of which Pitt was seen to be the incarnation. Already at Eton and Oxford George Canning had shown the versatility of his genius and the precocious maturity of his eloquence. When his Oxford friend, Jenkinson (the future Earl of Liverpool) made a sensational debut in the House on the Tory side, Sheridan remarked that the Whigs would soon provide an antidote in the person of young Canning. Great, then, was their annoyance ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... furnished with the same ornaments, which analogy would lead us to attribute to the agency of sexual selection. In such cases it may be suggested with more plausibility, that there has been a double or mutual process of sexual selection; the more vigorous and precocious females selecting the more attractive and vigorous males, the latter rejecting all except the more attractive females. But from what we know of the habits of animals, this view is hardly probable, for the male is generally eager to pair with any ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... work, "From the Diary of a Seminarist." His life opened under rather auspicious influences, for his father owned a candle factory and was so prosperous that his business amounted yearly to a hundred thousand roubles. A shoemaker taught the precocious boy to read, and he was put to school at first in the local school, but this was exchanged in 1841 for the Seminary. Both here and at home he was, however, more cudgelled than educated, and his soul was threatened with suffocation ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... summer of 1828, when he was under the necessity of separating from her in consequence of the extreme violence of her temper; and in this little boy all his affections are concentrated. He is a very precocious child, and already indicates strong signs of musical talent. Being of a delicate frame of health, Paganini never can bear to trust him out of his sight. "If I were to lose him," says he, "I would be lost myself; it is quite impossible I can ever separate myself from him; when I awake in the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 490, Saturday, May 21, 1831 • Various
... been sent to a German University, and at the age of twenty-one had appeared in London, in a stockbroker's office, where he was soon known as an accomplished linguist, and as a very clever fellow,—precocious, not given to many pleasures, apt for work, but hardly trustworthy by employers, not as being dishonest, but as having a taste for being a master rather than a servant. Indeed his period of servitude was very short. It was not in his nature to be active on behalf of others. He was ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... prominent suburban resident is, the neighbors say, a precocious youngster; at all events, she knows the ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... vigour of life and soul—an energy—a daring—which gave Cleveland some uneasiness, and which did not appear to him at all congenial with the moody shyness of an embryo genius, or the regular placidity of a precocious scholar. Meanwhile the relation between father and son was rather a singular one. Mr. Maltravers had overcome his first, not unnatural, repugnance to the innocent cause of his irremediable loss. He was now fond and proud of his boy—as he was of all things that belonged to him. He spoiled ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... first. The second, though less precocious, is yet more enjoyable. Besides, we know it is true, while the other—well, it is ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... secular career! Never yet did an ill-starred young saint waste his Saturday afternoons in preaching sermons in the garret to his deluded little sisters and their dolls, without living to repent it in maturity. These precocious little sentimentalists wither away like blanched potato-plants in a cellar; and then comes some vigorous youth from his out-door work or play, and grasps the rudder of the age, as he grasped the oar, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... ruled justly according to his lights. Of course, he spoke Urdu, but he had also mastered many queer side-speeches like the chotee bolee of the women, and held grave converse with shopkeepers and Hill-coolies alike. He was precocious for his age, and his mixing with natives had taught him some of the more bitter truths of life: the meanness and the sordidness of it. He used, over his bread and milk, to deliver solemn and serious aphorisms, translated from the vernacular into the English, that made his Mamma jump and ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... at the time of his marriage (1558) he was too young to have been actively engaged in the vices of the outwardly devout court, he appears to have been fully alive to the desirability of his bride. Mary was precocious and ambitious; she was surrounded by profligates, male and female, and, though she can hardly have been in love with her young husband, she appears to have been fully reconciled to ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... sunny Saturday afternoon in early April, but not exactly an April afternoon, rather one of those precocious days of delicious warmth and full, summer-like sunshine, that come to remind us that May and June are close behind the spring showers. You and Mrs. Modestus sit on the top step of your front veranda, just as you sat there ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... formed a charming group, these two women of different races, exhibiting, as they did, the characteristic beauty of each: Tahoser elegant, graceful, and slender, like a child that has grown too fast; Ra'hel dazzling, blooming, and superb in her precocious maturity. ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... the fens, still untamed and full of wild life, and in 1830 to Clovelly in North Devon. More than thirty years later, when asked to fill up the usual questions in a lady's album, he wrote that his favourite scenery was 'wide flats and open sea'. He was precocious as a child and perpetrated poems and sermons at the age of four; but very early he developed a habit of observation and a healthy interest in things outside himself. Such a nature could not be indifferent to the beauty of Clovelly, to the coming and going of its fishermen, ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... impulses to be overcome. A companionable and sensible father aids him judiciously, and leaves success to be worked out on natural lines. All the stage effects of the cheaper kinds of boys' books are blissfully absent; there are no villains plotting against the upright, no nations saved by the precocious intelligence of youth, and no impossible adventure or accomplishment—just the problems before average boys, and that can be solved as these boys solve them if "Mr. Responsibility" is recognized as a partner in all undertakings, ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... the time of his marriage, was a mere boy fourteen years of age. His father had died when he was nine years old. He was left under the care of his mother, Mary de Medicis, as regent. Anne of Austria was a maturely developed and precocious child of eleven years when she gave her hand to the boy-king of France. Not much discretion could have been expected of two such children, exposed to the idleness, the splendors, and the corruption ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... son of the preceding, a thin, precocious boy of sixteen, who was being educated at the Lycee ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... next phrase that enjoyed the favour of the million was less concise, and seems to have been originally aimed against precocious youths who gave themselves the airs of manhood before their time. "Does your mother know you're out?" was the provoking query addressed to young men of more than reasonable swagger, who smoked cigars in the streets, and wore false whiskers to look irresistible. We have ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... beyond expression," wrote this precocious youth to Washington on the 10th of November, "to inform your Excellency that, on my arrival here, I find everything has been neglected and deranged by General Putnam.... Not the least attention ...
— "Old Put" The Patriot • Frederick A. Ober
... with the responsiveness of youth, formed several friendships that were rapidly drifting into intimacies, though she chose as her associates, for the most part, young married women rather than girls. Her particular friend was Zoya Olisco, really six months younger than herself, but of a precocious worldly experience that gave her ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... several young men who had pliable backs and flashing breastpins and whom she inarticulately introduced to them, which gave her still more to do, as after this serious step she had to stay and watch all parties. It was strange to Raymond to see her transformed by her mother into a precocious duenna. Him she introduced to no young girl, and he knew not whether to regard this as cold neglect or as high consideration. If he had liked he might have taken it as a sweet intimation that she knew he couldn't care for any ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... born December 9, 1594. He was the son of King Charles IX. of Sweden, and the grandson of the renowned Gustavus Vasa. He was a precocious child, and it is told (though it appears rather incredible) that at the age of twelve he spoke Latin, French, German, Dutch, and Italian with great fluency, besides having a superficial acquaintance with Polish and Russian. There can be no doubt, however, that he was well taught, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... was written it shows on its face that it is more an effort of memory or the effect of one of the fearful sermons of fifty years ago on the impressionable mind of youth, than the original production of a precocious boy struggling with the insoluble problem of life and judgment to come. Mark how the stock words of the pulpiteer, "transgressor," "worldly lusts," "dreadful," "awful," "perdition" stalk fiercely through the sermon of the youthful ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... these precocious unions apparent at all? It would seem as if marriage was a state very much at variance with natural habitude, seeing that it requires a special ripeness of judgment in those who conform to it. All the world knows what Rousseau said: "There ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... since she left the convent; and this sudden change, taking her back to art and to her old friends, was very welcome; and the babble of all these people about her inveigled her out of her new self; and she liked to hear about so many people, their adventures, their ideas, misfortunes, precocious caprices. ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... was one of the few persons whose manhood fulfilled the precocious promise of his youth. He could read before he could speak plainly, and at the age of six he had declared that his purpose in life was to be a printer. At eleven he tried to be apprenticed at the village printing-office ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... can it be possible? All is deceit and perfidy. Geronimo seemed the soul of virtue and loyalty; he lived with so much economy and conducted himself so honorably, that to those who knew him not he might have appeared either a poor man or a precocious miser. And this tranquil, modest, prudent young man loses at the gaming-table ten thousand crowns, the property of his benefactor! His laudable course of conduct was but a ...
— The Amulet • Hendrik Conscience
... thought from morning to night. A light gig, that had once belonged to the custom-house, was polished and painted under his special directions, (often did we sigh for one of King's worst "fours!") and the fishermen marvelled at such precocious nautical talent. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... that I am in the most unpleasant, contradictory, fractious humour, when I tell you that I do not like your term of "precocious fertilisation" for your second class of dimorphism [i.e. for cleistogamic fertilisation]. If I can trust my memory, the state of the corolla, of the stigma, and the pollen-grains is different from the state of the parts in the bud; that they are in a condition of special modification. ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... best winters, and the earliest spring I ever lived anywhere. R. H. D. came shortly after Christmas. The spireas were in bloom, and the monthly roses; you could always find a sweet violet or two somewhere in the yard; here and there splotches of deep pink against gray cabin walls proved that precocious peach-trees were in bloom. It never rained. At night it was cold enough for fires. In the middle of the day it was hot. The wind never blew, and every morning we had a four for tennis and every afternoon we rode ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... the seventh; that is utterly detestable. What! to stimulate the precocious curiosity of children to pry into dangerous mysteries; to obtrude violently upon their imaginations, ideas and notions which beyond all things you should wish to keep from them! It were far better if such actions ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... till I grew human and obedient. I entered the house. A child was sitting at the foot of the stairs, her face and arms begrimed—her black hair hanging to her back foul with disease and dirt. She was about nine years old; but evil knowledge, cunning duplicity, and the rest, were glaring in her precocious face. She clasped her knees with her extended hands, and swinging backwards and forwards, sang, in a loud and impudent voice, the burden of an obscene song. I asked this creature if a man named Warton dwelt there. She ceased her song, and commenced whistling—then stared me full ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... for our usual call, lo! the nest was empty. At not more than seven or eight days of age, those precocious infants had started out in the world! That explained the conduct of the anxious papa in the afternoon, and I forgave him on the spot. I understood his fear that I should discover or step on his babies three, scattered and scrambling about under all that depth of grass. The abandoned homestead, ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... evidenced by medical observations, but receives further testimony in popular beliefs. In Italy women with large buttocks are considered wanton, and among the South Slavs they are regarded as especially fruitful.[150] Blumenbach asserted that precocious venery will enlarge the breasts, and believed that he had found evidence of ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... impotency when precocious, influences, in no small degree, the moral character. Cabanis knew three men who, in the vigour of age, had suddenly became impotent, although in other respects they were in good health, much engaged in business, and had but little ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... and precocious and learning ways of fashion rapidly. She stood a little in awe of Madam Wetherill and could be very demure when she saw that it was the part of wisdom. Occasionally she made Primrose a tacit partner in some reprehensible matter in a way that the child could not protest ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... had a son only 6 months old, who, the evening after the visit of the emperor, noticed that his father's face wore a dejected expression. Having never learned the use of his tongue, being but a few months old, this precocious child naturally caused great astonishment when, by a miracle, he sat up in his cradle and in language that an adult would use inquired the cause of anxiety. ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... be a precocious younger sister, all in white,—she must come in late with a tennis racquet, as though she had just returned from a game. That will be stagey, won't it? Lark must be the sweet young daughter of the home. She must wear her silver mull, ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... social rank and wealth held up for her preference, she instinctively turned to the simple, unrestrained affection of the despised mother, and the greater freedom and expansion enjoyed in such company. In vain did disdainful lady's-maids try to taunt her into precocious worldly wisdom, asking if she could really want to go and eat beans in a little garret. Such a condition, naturally, she began to regard as the equivalent of ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... some progress in acquiring the art of painting; and the bequest suggests the possibility that the precocious child had already given some indications of artistic taste. Affectionate eyes were certainly on the watch for any symptoms of developing talent. Pope was born on May 21st, 1688—the annus mirabilis which introduced ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... a money-getter; and in getting his money he is a very serious obstruction to less capable neighbours who are on the same quest. I think that that is the trouble. In estimating worldly values the Jew is not shallow, but deep. With precocious wisdom he found out in the morning of time that some men worship rank, some worship heroes, some worship power, some worship God, and that over these ideals they dispute and cannot unite—but that they all worship money; so he made it the end and aim of his ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... equally the Father of Pittsburgh, for he came thither in November, 1753, and established the location of the now imperial city by choosing it as the best place for a fort. Washington was then twenty-one years old. He had by that time written his precocious one hundred and ten maxims of civility and good behavior; had declined to be a midshipman in the British navy; had made his only sea-voyage to Barbados; had surveyed the estates of Lord Fairfax, going for months into the forest without ...
— A Short History of Pittsburgh • Samuel Harden Church
... and his adventures balanced between camp and court. I imagine him the young orphan of a noble house, about to come into mortgaged estates. One wouldn't have cared to be his guardian, bound to paternal admonitions once a month over his precocious transactions with the Jews or his scandalous abduction from her convent of such and such a ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... only from the curiosity they excited: mankind were amused to know what form would be assumed by a community, composed of men who narrowly escaped the executioner. By another they were compared to an old fashioned infant, which had all the vices and deformity of a corrupt constitution and precocious passions. The exhibition of a panorama of Sydney in the metropolis of England, attracted large crowds. It was hardly possible to exaggerate the charms of its scenery, when clothed in the radiant verdure of the spring; but the dwellings were ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... and the Oil of Mercy Muslim Legend of Adam's Punishment, Pardon, Death, and Burial Moses and the Poor Woodcutter Precocious Sagacity of Solomon Solomon and the Serpent's Prey The Capon-carver The Fox and the Bear The Desolate Island Other Rabbinical ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... commemorative history was remarkable for a precocious development of intelligence. An old nurse who saw him at the very earliest period of his existence is said to have spoken of him as one of the most promising infants she had seen in her long experience. At school he was equally remarkable, ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... years of age, Tall, handsome, slender, but well knit: he seemed Active, though not so sprightly, as a page; And everybody but his mother deemed Him almost man; but she flew in a rage[45] And bit her lips (for else she might have screamed) If any said so—for to be precocious Was in her eyes a thing ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... author of the rumour, and groaned in spirit. Well, well,—it must have come in a day or two, and it was as well that the town should have the real story. What the Clavering folks thought of Mrs. Pendennis for spoiling her son, and of that precocious young rascal of an Arthur for daring to propose to a play-actress, need not be told here. If pride exists amongst any folks in our country, and assuredly we have enough of it, there is no pride more deep-seated ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Fontanges l'Hommadieu" were, however, only known to their neighbors, after the Western fashion, by their stepfather's name,—when they were known at all—which was seldom. For the boy was unpleasantly conceited as a precocious worldling, and the girl as unpleasantly complacent in her role of ingenue. The household was completely dominated by Mrs. Randolph. A punctilious Catholic, she attended all the functions of the adjacent mission, ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... sees," continued Father Francis, "how far is the heart of his highness from God and the Church. His instructors are grieved at his precocious unbelief, and they are this day to confer together upon the painful subject. The hour of the conference is at hand, and I crave your majesty's leave ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... lacks the more childish example of a brother or sister near himself in age. And this difference is of very great importance to his development. He lacks the stimulus, for example, of games in which personification is a direct tutor to selfhood, as I shall remark further on. And while he becomes precocious in some lines of instruction, he fails in variety of imagination, in richness of fancy, at the same time that his imaging processes are more wild and uncontrolled. The dramatic, in his sense of social situations, is largely hidden. It is a very great mistake ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... Too precocious the life which I bore, Which I drew sweetly in with each breath! The fulness of life did no more Than ripen a fruitage for death, Within me, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... they told how I had thought of digging the hole under the logs—a happy circumstance which got me a reputation for wisdom beyond my years. There was a certain Scotchman at Harrodstown called McAndrew, and it was he gave me the nickname "Canny Davy," and I grew to have a sort of precocious fame in the station. Often Captain Harrod or Bowman or some of the others would pause in their arguments and say gravely, "What does Davy think of it?" This was not good for a boy, and the wonder of it is that it did not ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... twisted, and after a time it acquired the habit of suddenly, and with an unpleasant oscillatory laughing noise, opening of its own accord and proclaiming its horrid secret to Euphemia's best visitors. An air of wickedness, at once precocious and senile, came upon it; it gaped and leered at Euphemia as the partner of her secret with such a familiar air of "I and you" that she could stand it no longer, and this depraved piece of furniture was banished at last from her presence, and relegated to its proper sphere of ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... that he brings the children some apples or cakes he feels that he is less unhappy, because these offerings are accepted with such an outpouring of gratitude. Gradually, the little lad gets to know all the inhabitants, and becomes especially intimate with Maroussya, whose eyes have an expression of precocious desolation. ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... London, stretch away for miles in every direction. At any hour of the day thousands of persons may be observed scurrying along them with true Cheapside bustle." The Melbourne youth, however, appears to have been precocious. "I was delighted," remarks this authority, "with the Colonial young stock. The average Australian boy is a slim, olive-complexioned young rascal, fond of Cavendish, cricket, and chuck-penny, and systematically ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... young things about it. Even in winter it reminds me of the very first unfolding of young leaves on trees; of the few hours while they are still hanging down, unable to raise themselves up as yet; they look so worldlywise sometimes, so precocious, and before them there still lie all hopes and all disappointments... In clear nights you forget the earth—under the hazy cover your eye is thrown back upon it. It is the contrast of the ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... afternoon. His weary but peculiarly winning smile had scarcely flickered to rest for a moment in an hour. For the eleven seconds that it was my privilege to be individually sociable with him, he did his best to say what might suit the case. He seemed much like a worn-out precocious boy, of great wisdom and much experience, suddenly prodded into an eminence which ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... neither Agrippina nor the great men of her family. He had a most indocile temperament, rebellious to tradition, in no sense Roman. Little by little, Agrippina saw the young Emperor develop into a precocious debauche, frightfully selfish, erratically vain, full of extravagant ideas, who, instead of setting the example of respect toward sumptuary laws, openly violated them all; and across whose mind ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... were born, and some of the more precocious, like the Italian, already possessed the style of antiquity. Dante appeared, and, from the very first, posterity greeted him as a classic. Italian poetry has since shrunk into far narrower bounds; ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... over-strained application to mental processes of arithmetic and mathematics; and a too minute attention to departments of natural and civil history. How much of trick may mix with this we will not ask, but the display of precocious intellectual power in these branches, is often astonishing; and, in proportion as it is so, may, for the most part, be pronounced not only useless, but injurious. The training that fits a boxer for victory in the ring, gives him strength that cannot, and is not ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... substitute the name or title of the person addressed,—which, when introduced occasionally and unobtrusively, is a graceful personal recognition; but when overdone, as too often observed, the constant iteration of "Yes, Mr. Brown,"—"No, Mrs. Black," etc., grows to be a maddening exposition of precocious affectation. ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... of ten I specialized in that subject, never for a moment regretting the choice. When I was still a child of twenty-four I took part in the Ninth Jupiter Expedition and after that there were many more. I had a precocious marriage at thirty and my boys, Robert and Neil, were born within a few years after Marla and I wed. It was fortunate that I fought for government permission that early; after the accident, despite my high rating, I would have been ...
— Man Made • Albert R. Teichner
... personage of the state in order that she might come immediately after Livia or even be placed directly on an equality with her. According to the Roman ideas of the family and of its discipline, this was a precocious and excessive ambition, unbecoming a matron, much less a young girl. For the duty of the woman was to follow faithfully and submissively the ambitions of her lord and not to impart to him her own ambitions or make him her tool. In contrast to Livia, who was so docile and placid in her respect for ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... on her part. That he loved her there can be but little doubt, but hardly to the verge of madness, as he wrote love sonnets to other ladies at the same time; the truth seems to be that he became mentally unbalanced as the result of the precocious development of his powers, which made a man of him while yet a boy and developed in him an intensity of feeling which made his candle of life burn fiercely, but for a short time only. His end was but the natural consequence ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... precocious and very sensitive, and his mother thinks she can't begin to guard him too early." Miss Ambient's head drooped a little to one side and her eyes fixed themselves on futurity. Then of a sudden came a strange alteration; her face lighted to an effect more joyless than any gloom, to that ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... light the character of this unhappy youth be contemplated, it is full of instruction. His talents were unusually precocious, and their variety was as astonishing as their extent. Besides the Poetical pieces in this volume, and his scholastic attainments, his ability was manifested in various other ways. His style was remarkable for its clearness and elegance, and his correspondence ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... of Blaise Pascal was sent down to Rouen as an "Intendant du Roi." Though but sixteen, the youth had already attracted the notice of the mathematical world by his treatise on conic sections. Even when only twelve the precocious boy had worked out the solutions of the first thirty-two propositions of Euclid unaided. While at Rouen he invented a calculating machine, and got a workman in the town to set it up. In 1646 he made his famous experiments on the vacuum before more than five hundred people, including half a ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... armed with the boat-hook, which he had suddenly seized, he struck down the precocious chicks one after another, and put an end to their aspiring flights by laying them ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... just Walter seemed to bring it home to her. To have that boy—and yet she liked him, too, she thought. She looked sometimes into his fresh, innocently keen face with a yearning apprehension. Paul was amused at his precocious airs, and yet was not without respect for his rapidly developing business capacity. He said once, "Walter's a real nice boy. I shouldn't mind having a ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... oaks. The same wood, if not the actual oaks, may have been there in Fenelon's time, for the ilex is one of the commonest trees in Perigord on the hills about the Dordogne. As a boy, while climbing here, he may have torn his hose into tatters, notwithstanding his precocious knowledge of Greek. The future churchman may even have robbed a jay's nest on this very spot. What quietude and what deep shadow! Not a leaf stirred; only a fiery shaft of sunshine forced its way here and there through the ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... philosophy, of art;—soon, from our survey of the rise and splendour of the Asiatic Ionians, we turn to the agony of their struggles—the catastrophe of their fall. Those wonderful children of Greece had something kindred with the precocious intellect that is often the hectic symptom of premature decline. Originating, advancing nearly all which the imagination or the reason can produce, while yet in that social youth which promised a long and a yet more glorious existence—while even ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... had cautiously laid the situation before his young Patroclus, that precocious warrior at once justified ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... which used to be the favoured method of enjoyment. Illegitimate births, formerly very rare, have multiplied, syphilis even has spread among the young. Food of a less substantial character has superseded the diet of former times, and, in short, alcoholism, precocious debauchery, and syphilis have come like so many plagues to arrest the development of the youth and seriously debilitate ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... leaf fell under Mr. Stackpole's touch, as if it had been a black frost. The American government was a rickety experiment; go to pieces presently,—American institutions an alternative between fallacy and absurdity, the fruit of raw minds and precocious theories;—American liberty a contradiction;— American character a compound of quackery and pretension;—American society (except at Mrs. Evelyn's) an anomaly;—American destiny the same with that of a Cactus or a volcano; a period of rest followed by a period of ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... a very precocious youth; was supplied by a doting mother with plenty of pocket-money, and spent it with a number of lively companions of both sexes, at plays, bull-baitings, fairs, jolly parties on the river, and such-like innocent ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Mazzinghi, son of Tommasso Mazzinghi, a Corsican musician, was born in London, 1765. He was a boy of precocious talent. When only ten years of age he was appointed organist of the Portuguese Chapel, and when nineteen years old was made musical director and composer at the King's Theatre. For many years he held the honor of Music Master to the Princess of ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... lower under the consequences of his errors. His youth was passed in the prisons of the state, where his passions, becoming envenomed by solitude, and his intellect rendered more acute by contact with the irons of his dungeon, his mind lost that modesty which rarely survives the infamy of precocious punishments. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... years Mary Wollstonecraft began a bitter training in the school of experience, which was to no small degree instrumental in developing her character and forming her philosophy. There are few details of her childhood, and no anecdotes indicating a precocious genius. But enough is known of her early life to make us understand what were the principal influences to which she was exposed. Her strength sprang from the very uncongeniality of her home and ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... frolicksome, with all the caprices of such a disposition. She was almost a portrait of her father, and possessed, besides, the same heart and the same mind. 'Who knows,' said poor Gretry, 'but that her gayety may save her.' She was unfortunately one of those precocious geniuses who devour their youth. At thirteen she had composed an opera which was played every where, Le Marriage d'Antonio. A journalist, a friend of Gretry, who one day found himself in Lucile's apartment, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... were the queerest little people. Besides the melancholy boy, who, I hoped, had not been made so by waltzing alone in the empty kitchen, there were two other boys and one dirty little limp girl in a gauzy dress. Such a precocious little girl, with such a dowdy bonnet on (that, too, of a gauzy texture), who brought her sandalled shoes in an old threadbare velvet reticule. Such mean little boys, when they were not dancing, with string, and marbles, and cramp-bones in their pockets, and the most untidy legs ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... month of September I came to the end of my journey, as I arrived on the Rio Abajo. Now I began the second chapter of my life's voyage. No longer a precocious child, I was growing to young manhood and was not lacking in those qualities which are essential in the successful performance of life's continual struggle. I was heartily welcomed by my uncle, my mother's brother. My aunt, poor lady, had, of course, given me up as lost ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... greatest of his later achievements. Almost any other youth who had as much of the sense of language as was there exhibited, would have been led astray by the standards of the hour, would have mounted the spread-eagle and flapped its wings in rhetorical clamor. But Lincoln was not precocious. In art, as in everything else, he progressed slowly; the literary part of him worked its way into the matter-of-fact part of him with the gradualness of the daylight through a shadowy wood. It was not constant in its development. For ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... youngster on the floor Slept through theology but wakes with mirth— Precocious little creature! He must go Up to his chamber. Come, Grace, take him off— Basket and all. Mary will lend a hand, And keep ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... and rather bold, not at all in the coarse sense, but she struck me as having formed a system of ethics and views of life, both good-humoured and sarcastic, and had carried into her rustic sequestration the melancholy and precocious lore of ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... to say that the Australian child is rather inclined to be a little too "free and easy" in his manners. The climate makes him grow up more quickly than in Great Britain. He is more precocious both mentally and physically. At a very early age, he (or she) is entrusted with some share of responsibility. That is quite natural in a new country where pioneering work is being done. You will see children of ten and twelve and fourteen years of age taking quite ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Australia • Frank Fox
... a precocious child, nor pushed forward by early instruction. His native talent for drawing, had it been cultivated, might have brought him into the front rank of artists; but on the perverse principle, then common, that training is either useless ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... read the bantling's dawning days?— Precocious shall he prove, and harass The world with inconvenient ways And lisped conundrums that embarrass? (Such as Impressionists delight To offer each aesthetic gaper, And faddists hyper-Ibsenite Rejoice to ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Jan. 9, 1892 • Various
... achievement is impressive, as one reviews his career. His most thoughtful, though not his most eloquent verse, his richest vein of letter-writing, his most influential addresses to the public, came toward the close of his life. Precocious as was his gift for expression, and versatile and brilliant as had been his productiveness in the 1848 era, he was true to his Anglo-Saxon stock in being more effective at seventy than he had been at thirty. ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... his was a precocious intelligence; and it had been fed upon meat for strong men. He had heard of Alexander VI.'s colossal infamies, and those of Caesar Borgia as well; and of the kingdoms ranging to this or that standard ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... were alone in the world; they lived one life, a life of close sympathy. If Mme. Willemsens was silent in the morning, Louis and Marie would not speak, respecting everything in her, even those thoughts which they did not share. But the older boy, with a precocious power of thought, would not rest satisfied with his mother's assertion that she was perfectly well. He scanned her face with uneasy forebodings; the exact danger he did not know, but dimly he felt ...
— La Grenadiere • Honore de Balzac
... and another is stupid, it is because in a previous life the clever man has devoted much effort to practise in that particular direction, while the stupid man is trying it for the first time. The genius and the precocious child are examples not of the favouritism of some deity but of the result produced by previous lives of application. All the varied circumstances which surrounded us are the result of our own actions in the past, precisely as are the qualities of which we find ourselves ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... Quevedo y Villegas (1580-1645), the greatest satirist in Spanish literature, was one of the very few men of his time who dared criticize the powers that were. He was born in the province of Santander and was a precocious student at Alcala. His brilliant mind and his honesty led him to Sicily and Naples, as a high official under the viceroy, and to Venice and elsewhere on private missions; his plain-speaking tongue and ready sword procured him numerous enemies and therefore banishments. He ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... Kittridge has dragooned into Sally. She knits his mittens and his stockings, and hems his pocket-handkerchiefs, and aspires to make his shirts all herself. Whatever book Moses reads, forthwith she aspires to read too, and though three years younger, reads with a far more precocious insight. ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... mother; but that doesn't prove there's anything in all your notions, for that child knew the truth all along. He's eight years old and he was with her until he was five;—and five's the age of memory. He's a precocious boy, besides. Every incident of his mother's life lingered in his little mind. Suppose you prove by her that it's all true?—Still, Willem remembered! And that's all there ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... there were Franz Schubert, whose melodious songs and symphonies won him the recognition of the Esterhazys and of Beethoven. Among those whose career was but beginning were Jacob Meyerbeer, a fellow pupil with Weber under Abbe Vogler at Vienna, and Felix Mendelssohn, the precocious pupil of the ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... pupil's manners. He was not at all above playing with the other boys. He took very kindly to his old studies and his old haunts, and of an evening, after dinner, went away from the drawing-room to the study in pursuit of his Latin and his Greek, without any precocious attempt at making conversation with Miss Wortle. No doubt there was a good deal of lawn-tennis of an afternoon, and the lawn-tennis was generally played in the rectory garden. But then this had ever been the case, and the lawn-tennis was always played with two on a side; ...
— Dr. Wortle's School • Anthony Trollope
... have been the precocious virtues of Margaret at the age of fifteen, it is certain that when, by her brother's elevation to the throne, she was introduced to the foremost place at court, it was her remarkable qualities of heart, quite as much as her recognized mental abilities, that called forth universal ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... it is a bad sign, as well from an intellectual as from a moral point of view, if he is precocious in understanding the ways of the world, and in adapting himself to its pursuits; if he at once knows how to deal with men, and enters upon life, as it were, fully prepared. It argues a vulgar nature. On the other hand, to be surprised and astonished ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... destined to be a Marshal of France," said M. Ricot, holding up his hands in amazement. The boy referred to was a little fellow seven or eight years of age, by name Louis Joseph de Saint Veran. M. Ricot was his tutor, and was led to express himself after this fashion in consequence of some precocious criticisms of his pupil on the tactics employed by Caius Julius Caesar at a battle fought in Transalpine Gaul fifty odd years before the advent of the Christian era. It was evident to the critic's youthful mind that the battle ought to have resulted differently, and that if ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... of husband and wife. This may be referred probably to economic conditions in part, and also to the fact that girlhood becomes womanhood at a somewhat earlier age than boyhood becomes manhood. The girl is more precocious. Thus though she be twenty and her husband twenty-three, she is ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... How early was the obvious jest made that he is about as little of a preux as he is of a saint? I have heard, or dreamt, of a schoolboy who, being accidentally somewhat precocious in French, and having read the book, ejaculated, "What a sweep he is!" and I remember no time of my life at which I should not have heartily agreed with that youth. I do not suppose that either of us—though ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... and Burgundy" (I give the catalogue so precisely because it has nothing to do with the story), "uncooked steak and limp lettuces, precocious carrots and Bartlett pears, and thirteen varieties of fluid beef, which I cannot name except ...
— The War of the Wenuses • C. L. Graves and E. V. Lucas
... a band of players travelling through the provinces, and resumed her old role; but her heart was broken, and she gradually faded away, dying at last when I was only about seven years old. Even then I used to appear upon the stage in parts suitable to my age. I was a precocious little thing in many ways. My mother's death caused me a grief far more acute than most children, even a good deal older than I was then, are capable of feeling. How well I remember being punished because I refused to act the part of one of Medea's children, ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... had tried to defend herself from these scarcely-veiled confidences, distasteful enough in themselves, and placing her, if she listened, in an attitude of implied disloyalty to the man under whose roof they were spoken. But a precocious experience of life had taught her that emotions too strong for the nature containing them turn, by some law of spiritual chemistry, into a rankling poison; and she had therefore resigned herself to serving as a kind of outlet for Bessy's pent-up discontent. It ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... was overheard by Annie, who, we may here seize the opportunity of saying, was, in addition to being a sensitive creature, one of those precocious little philosophers thinly spread in the female world, and made what they are often by delicate health, which reduces them to a habit of thinking much before their time. Not that she wanted the vivacity of her age, but that it was tempered by ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... representing two forces, had guided the city during those decades. On the one hand there was Aristides, called the Just—inflexible, incorruptible, impersonal and generous; on the other, Themistocles—precocious and wild as a boy; profligate as a youth and young man; ambitious, unscrupulous and cruel; a genius; a patriot; without moral sense. The policy of Aristides, despite his so-called democratic reforms, was conservative; he persuaded ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... badaud and the poster there was constantly and bravely renewed. It engaged my attention, whenever I passed, as the canvas of a great master in a great gallery holds that of the pious tourist, and even though I can't at this day be sure of its special reference I was with precocious passion "at home" among the theatres—thanks to our parents' fond interest in them (as from this distance I see it flourish for the time) and to the liberal law and happy view under which the addiction was ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... Pitt's constitution was unequal to the prolonged strain. In childhood his astonishingly precocious powers needed judicious repression. Instead, they were unduly forced by the paternal pride of Chatham. At Cambridge, at Lincoln's Inn, and in Parliament the intellectual pressure was maintained, with the result that his weakly ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... money for their parents, were impatient as they grew up to receive it for themselves. Marriages in the Deg family were consequently very early, and there were plenty of instances of married Degs claiming parish relief under the age of twenty, on the plea of being the parent of two children. One such precocious individual being asked by a rather verdant officer why he had married before he was able to maintain a family, replied, in much astonishment, that he had married in order to maintain himself by parish assistance. That he never had been able ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... been in her grave in Abbotshall Kirkyard these fifty and more years? We may of her cleverness,—not of her affectionateness, her nature. What a picture the animosa infans gives us of herself,—her vivacity, her passionateness, her precocious love-making, her passion for nature, for swine, for all living things, her reading, her turn for expression, her satire, her frankness, her little sins and rages, her great repentances! We don't wonder Walter Scott carried her off in the neuk of ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various |
