"Unlettered" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the elder period in praise of wine and love, which forcibly illustrates the contempt felt by the student class for the unlettered laity and boors, shall be inserted here. It seems to demand ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... to a person knowing nothing either of Christian beliefs or of the beliefs which preceded them. The real mastery of any European tongue is impossible [4] without a knowledge of European religion. The language of even the unlettered is full of religious meaning: the proverbs and household-phrases of the poor, the songs of the street, the speech of the workshop,—all are infused with significations unimaginable by any one ignorant of the faith of the people. Nobody knows this better than ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... taught them things which He had taught to no one else, and given them a great and awful work to do—the work of changing the ways and thoughts and doings of the whole world. He had sent them out—eleven unlettered working men—to fight against the sin and the misery of the whole world. And He had given them open warning of what they were to expect; that by it they should win neither credit, nor riches, nor ease, nor anything ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... it to firm land by magic step! Build there cloud-cleaving spires, beneath whose shade Great cities rise for vassals; to call forth From plough and loom the rank unlettered hinds, And make them saints and heroes—send them forth To sway with heavenly craft the spirit of princes; Change nations' destinies, and conquer worlds With love, more mighty than the sword; what, Count? Art thou ambitious? practical? ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... in some way indebted; and the few Keepers of the Seal who neither cared for letters nor cultivated the society of students, are amongst the judges whose names most Englishmen would gladly erase from the history of their country. Jeffreys and Macclesfield represent the unlettered Chancellors; More and Bacon the lettered. Fortescue's 'De Laudibus' is a book for every reader. To Chancellor Warham, Erasmus—a scholar not given to distribute praise carelessly—dedicated his 'St. Jerom,' with cordial eulogy. Wolsey was a patron ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... by examining a few castles and arms, know more of the peaceful and warrior life of the dead nobles and gentry of our island than from a library of books; and yet a man is stamped as unlettered and rude if he does not know and value such knowledge. Ware's Antiquities, and Archdall, speak not half so clearly the taste, the habits, the everyday customs of the monks, as Adare Monastery,[33] for the fine ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... nations of unlettered men so adapted their language to philosophic truth, that all physical and intellectual research can find no essential rule to reject or change."—Ibid., p. 91. I have shown that "the nations of unlettered men" are among that portion of the earth's population, upon whose language the genius of grammar has never yet condescended to look down! That people who make no pretensions to learning, can furnish better models or instructions than "the most enlightened scholars," ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... showing was so fearful against her that the court in Iowa refused her any support from the estate, and in her shame and confusion she went away to Texas and taught school for six months to earn money enough to make her defense; that there she met an unlettered and sensitive man, but at the same time one of the clearest-brained, most generous and noble-hearted men in the world, but in whom, from the fact he was so sensitive and generous, she could not confide, lest she might not be able to vindicate herself; ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... Longinus,[70] who was included among the numerous and perhaps innocent victims of her fear, will survive that of the Queen who betrayed or the tyrant who condemned him. Genius and learning were incapable of moving a fierce unlettered soldier, but they had served to elevate and harmonize the soul of Longinus. Without uttering a complaint he calmly followed the executioner, pitying his unhappy mistress, and bestowing comfort on ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... through with their distasteful task. That the gloom of the hour and scene, and the utter forlornness of all the accompaniments of what was meant for Christian burial, had stamped themselves upon the mind and heart of the unlettered slave, was evident from the brief sentences he quavered out—joining his withered hands and raising his bleared ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... only that—a simple, unlettered countryman, as I thought him—I should know how to win his confidence. But, do you know, sir, he is well educated and intelligent. Once he studied for the priesthood or ...
— Mary Louise in the Country • L. Frank Baum (AKA Edith Van Dyne)
... many occasions. This was seen in a most exemplary manner, at the time that the principles of the French revolution were most approved of here. Those principles were plausible, though flimsy, and founded on sophisms, and a species of reasoning, that plain unlettered men could not answer, and men who did give themselves the pains to reason might have answered; yet, three times in four, it was the man who could not answer it, who, guided by upright intentions, rejected it as bad, without being able to tell why. The ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... not think he ever addressed a public, or even private, meeting in his life, and that may have left the unlettered world unaware of his deep loathing of the cruelties of the laboratories; but he was one of the earliest Englishmen of unquestioned distinction to join the anti-vivisection movement and to accept the office ...
— Great Testimony - against scientific cruelty • Stephen Coleridge
... and at all times its ruling spirit, so he now established himself as dictator and proceeded to appoint a magnificent staff, most of whom contrived to escape as soon as they were out of reach of his bolo. Yet he drew considerable numbers about him, for this man, though almost entirely unlettered, seems to have been quite a personality among his own people, especially possessed of that gift of oratory in his native tongue to which the Malay is so ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... had for ages been unintelligible to the bulk of the laity, and was but partially intelligible to not a few of its ordinary priests. It had no catechisms or hymn books bringing down to the capacities of the unlettered the truths of religion, and freely circulated among them.[4] It did not, when the invention of printing put it in its power, make any effort to circulate among them the Holy Book, that they might read therein, in their own tongue, the message of God's love. No doubt ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... my experience as an occasional lecturer during the past twelve years, I have been much impressed by the keen interest evinced, even by the most unlettered persons, when astronomical subjects are dealt with in plain untechnical language which they ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... came to know—rude man as he was, unlettered, but strong of soul—that there is a Power superior to fate, that the stormiest sea has its Master, that the waif that is cast by the roughest wave on the loneliest shore is ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... is more important in criticizing what they wrote, these seamen were mostly simple, unlettered folk, to whom a country's wealth in natural products and their practical value made the strongest appeal, and whose admiration of bays, harbours, trees, fields of grain, etc., was measured by the same standard of utility. Even such unskilled reporters did not entirely ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... ourselves, and to travel in a manner becoming our position. We are quite willing to be healed, but we would like to be healed with due deference. You are an educated man, a student; you do not like to take the same place as the most unlettered, and to feel that the common fact of sin puts you, in a very solemn respect, upon the level of these narrow foreheads and unlettered people. And so some of you turn away because Christianity, with such ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... about Lake George a captain. He never went to school. Like so many other New England boys, he learned what is essential for the carrying on of business in the chimney-corner, by the light of the fire. He possessed one beautiful accomplishment: he was a grand reader. Unlettered as he was, he greatly enjoyed the more lofty compositions of poets and orators; and his large, sonorous voice enabled him to read them with fine effect. His sons read in his manner, even to his rustic pronunciation of some words. Daniel's calm, clear-cut rendering of certain noted passages—favorites ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... my extremities, being giddy, and doubtful what to do, at least it was put into my labouring thoughts, to make happy use of this paper; and to blear their unlettered eyes, I told them there was a Device for a Mask drawn int', and that (but for their interception,) I was going to a Gentleman to receive my reward for't: they, greedy at this word, and hoping to make purchase of me, offered their attendance, ...
— The Puritain Widow • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... public opinion. In fact, no man can be said to be thoroughly civilized or always civilized; the most refined, the most enlightened person has his moods, his moments of barbarism, in which the best, or even the second best, shall not please him. At these times the lettered and the unlettered are alike primitive and their gratifications are of the same simple sort; the highly cultivated person may then like melodrama, impossible fiction, and the trapeze as sincerely and thoroughly as a boy of thirteen or ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... periods of Egyptian history, which are represented by an abundance of papyrus documents of all kinds, chiefly in Greek. Among them are not a few original letters and personal documents, in which we may see the handwriting of many lettered and unlettered individuals who lived during the 3rd century B.C. and in succeeding times, and which prove how very widespread was the practice of writing in those days. We owe it to the dry and even atmosphere of Egypt that these written documents have been preserved in such numbers. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... Majesty is. For any business which is not of my profession I shall not direct by my own judgment; in this matter, accordingly, I consulted with those whose business it was, and I pray your Lordship to tell me if I did wrong in this. Your Grace says that I am new in the islands, and unlettered; and on the other hand you say that those with whom I have consulted are misleading me and are mistaken. I do not know then what recourse your Lordship leaves for me to find it out, if, as you say, I am a new arrival, and not a theologian, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume VIII (of 55), 1591-1593 • Emma Helen Blair
... great Caesar leads! Happy, thrice happy, he who, when the world Is nodding to its ruin, knows the spot Where he himself shall, though in ruin, lie! No trumpet call shall break his sleep again: But in his humble home with faithful spouse And sons unlettered Fortune leaves him free From rage of party; for if life he owes To Caesar, Magnus sometime was his lord. Thus happy they alone live on apart, Nor hope nor dread the event ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... Fire and air, as not distinctly known by the unlettered, are not expressly named by Moses among the parts of the world, but reckoned with the intermediate part, or water, especially as regards the lowest part of the air; or with the heaven, to which the higher ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... mysterious sympathy of the millions throughout the world was given spontaneously. The best writers of Europe waked the conscience of the thoughtful, till the intelligent moral sentiment of the Old World was drawn to the side of the unlettered statesman of the West. Russia, whose emperor had just accomplished one of the grandest acts in the course of time, by raising twenty millions of bondmen into freeholders, and thus assuring the growth and culture of a Russian people, remained ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... much claret. The good resolutions at Iona and the influence of the ruins had passed away, the trip is extended to two months, and he frets irritably over his old friend Henry Dundas's election as King's Advocate,—'to be sure he has strong parts, but he is a coarse unlettered dog.' Harry Dundas at least was never found philandering as we find Bozzy on this occasion, where the mixture of religion and flirtation is so confusing. 'After breakfasting with Paoli,' he writes before leaving for the north, ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... inundated the world with frivolous and pedantic criticism. A picture or any other work of Art, is worth nothing except in so far as it has emanated from mind, and is addressed to mind. It should, indeed, be read like a book. Pictures, as it has been well said, are the books of the unlettered, but then we must at least understand the language in which they are written. And further,—if, in the old times, it was a species of idolatry to regard these beautiful representations as endued with a specific sanctity and power; so, in these days, it is a sort ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... yet a kind of insinuation, as it were, in via, in way, of explication; facere, as it were, replication, or rather, ostentare, to show, as it were, his inclination,—after his undressed, unpolished, uneducated, unpruned, untrained, or rather, unlettered, or ratherest, unconfirmed fashion,—to insert again my haud credo ...
— Love's Labour's Lost • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... savage, ready with sword and knife and club for any imaginable violence. Women safe from none but their own husbands and sons, and not always from them. Children wild and untaught, growing up to be fierce and unlettered like their fathers. And in the midst of such a city, Cola di Rienzi, with great heart and scanty learning, labouring to decipher the inscriptions that told of dead and ruined greatness, dreaming of a republic, of a tribune's ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... of Goths were capable of preserving a faint tradition of their Scandinavian origin, we must not expect, from such unlettered barbarians, any distinct account of the time and circumstances of their emigration. To cross the Baltic was an easy and natural attempt. The inhabitants of Sweden were masters of a sufficient number of large vessels, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... uncertain terminations of the penman who is not certain about the spelling of his own name. The great collections of London contain many manuscripts of celebrated authors, ancient and modern, and some that are hard to decipher, but there is no chirography more hopelessly and irreclaimably unlettered and unscholarly than that ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... fourteen, lost his father. Charged, at this early age, with the care of a widowed mother, and children still younger than himself, neither the circumstances of his family, of the country, or his peculiar condition, allowed him the chances of education. Almost as unlettered as James Harrod, he was a memorable example of a self-formed man. Great natural acuteness, and strong intellectual powers, were, however, adorned by a disposition of uncommon benevolence. Under the eye of an excellent father, he commenced ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... only certifying to our having been in his employ, but also to our not being highwaymen, kidnappers, nor yet runaway seamen. Even written in English, a paper like this would answer every purpose; for the unlettered natives, standing in great awe of the document, would not dare to molest us until acquainted with its purport. Then, if it came to the worst, we might repair to the nearest missionary, and have the ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... book" is again the key—it was to this I was indebted for ridding me of my fright, and once more giving me the advantage over my unlettered companion. In that book I remembered having read—of course in the same chapter that treated of the baobab—how a curious practice existed among some tribes of negroes, of hollowing out the great trunks ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... debauchery or art, regarded the peasant as a different race—"the ox without horns" they called him—to be cudgeled while he was tame and hunted like a wolf when he ran wild. Artists and men of letters ignored the very existence of the unlettered, with the superb Horatian, "I hate the vulgar crowd and I keep them off," or, if they were aroused for a moment by the noise of civil war merely remarked, with Erasmus, that any tyranny was better than that ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... unfriended, With sophistry blended, Deep science in Chaos had slept; Its limits were fettered, Its voters unlettered, Its students in movements but crept. Till, despite of great foes, Great WALSH first arose, And with logical might did unravel Those mazes of knowledge, Ne'er known in a college, Though sought for with unceasing travail. With ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... state it stood—a boy was born and christened Andrew Jackson. His father had died a few days before—one of those sturdy Scotch-Irish whom we have seen emigrating to America in such numbers in search of a land of freedom. The boy grew up in the rude backwoods settlement, rough, boisterous, unlettered; at the age of fourteen, riding with Sumter in the guerrilla warfare waged throughout the state against the British, and then, captured and wounded on head and hand by a sabre-stroke whose mark he bore till his dying day, a prisoner ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... outward form the epic poem is simply a narrative in verse. Historically it seems to have originated in the records of ancestral heroism, which passed from mouth to mouth in metre, as the natural form of oral communication in an unlettered age. In the Iliad and Odyssey we first find this outward form penetrated by a new spirit, which converts the narrative into the poem. There is no need to do violence to historical probability by supposing that Homer was a conscious artist, or that he imagined himself to be doing ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... in their anxiety to see their wives and children once more, after a long and painful service. Their companion, the hope and prop of his family, had sunk under the fatigue, and they had made a grave for him; but they were poor unlettered men, and unable to repeat the funeral service from the holy Koran-would his Highness but perform this last office for them, he would, no doubt, find his reward in this world and the next. The Mogul dismounted—the body had been placed in its proper position, ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... what I mean if you had seen the monstrous relics of the age you admire. The few ruled the many; the knights were simply a brotherhood of blood and rapine; men were slaves, women were worse. The bravest were as unlettered as your body-servant, the most beautiful dames as termagant as Penelope the cook. At the table men and women ate from a common dish, without forks or spoons. Men guzzled gallons of unfermented wine. A bath was unknown. Cleanliness was as unpracticed as Islamism in ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... father. Men and women in all nations and tribes are pretty nearly on a level as to common sense and forethought for the future good of the family. Indeed, the interests of the home, protection of the children, and the morals and behavior of the community make the standard of even unlettered women one notch higher than that of their ignorant husbands. Let us of this nation hesitate before we establish a sex supremacy that it may ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... reply. He and the other Democratic leaders thought the president uncouth, unlettered, and very weak. The phrase "please write me at least as long a letter as this" produced an impression upon the scholarly, cultured, cautious, and diplomatic Seymour which was most unfavorable to its author. Seymour acknowledged the receipt of ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... not occur to him that the gratification of his wish might have involved war-paint and feathers, a semi-nude body, a wild unlettered life, and a predilection for raw meat and murder. No, rapid though thought is, it did not convey these ideas to his mind. His one desire— after the first unguarded "exclamation" and impulsive grasp of the ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... treasure to his visitors, how often has it been examined with undilating eyes, and cold, unenvious hearts! Yet so he must confess himself to have looked upon a friend's superb first edition of "Pickwick" though surely not without that measure of interest which all, save the quite unlettered or unintelligent, must feel in seeing the first visible shape of a book of such resounding ...
— The Compleat Angler - Facsimile of the First Edition • Izaak Walton
... certain sense this unlettered woman was being educated by her little boy in the same manner as Dora had been and still was, ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... estimate the rewards which would have fallen to Edgar Poe, had chance made him the contemporary of Mark Twain and of "Called Back." It may be that your criticisms helped to bring in the new era, and to lift letters out of the reach of quite unlettered scribblers. Though not a scholar, at least you had a respect for scholarship. You might still marvel over such words as "objectional" in the new biography of yourself, and might ask what is meant by such a sentence as "his connection with it had inured to his own benefit ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... march, as recorded by Captain John Tipton, is exceedingly interesting. The militiamen of southern Indiana and Kentucky assembled from the frontier settlements, were men of simple habits, rough, unlettered, hard to teach the intricacies of military evolutions, but as General John C. Black has stated, they were also "insensible to fatigue, watchful as a catamount, resolute as men, heroic as martyrs." Some of their favorite sports were wrestling, shooting at a mark, and horse-racing. All were inured ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... he said tauntingly. "Then must I tell thee a little story. I am an unlettered man, being but a poor fool, as thou knowest, but I try to do my duty, and every Sunday I go to church in Carlisle city with my betters. And at our church we have a right good preacher, though his sermons run through my poor brain as if it were a sieve; but there ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... and frequently recollected, that he who has not obtained the proper qualifications of an author, can have no excuse for the arrogance of writing, but the power of imparting to mankind something necessary to be known. A man uneducated or unlettered may sometimes start a useful thought, or make a lucky discovery, or obtain by chance some secret of nature, or some intelligence of facts, of which the most enlightened mind may be ignorant, and which it is better to reveal, though by a rude and ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... light step over the low wall of boundary, and crossed the wave-like mounds that heaved as a grassy sea, and beneath which lay the unlettered dead, the long grasses writhing and clinging to his feet, as though loath to let him escape the dust upon which they fed and grew so rank. Heedless of their greedy embrace, he walked with long stride towards the lower end of the yard, until he stood before a gray and lichen-covered ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... told, this wound was twice the subject for witty remarks by two young women, the daughters of a North Carolina patriot. Tarleton remarked to one of these sisters that he understood Colonel Washington was an unlettered fellow, hardly ...
— Hero Stories from American History - For Elementary Schools • Albert F. Blaisdell
... mutual encouragement: but with this exception, no one else knew anything of the girl's poetical essays, whose mild timidity made her often pass for a person of weak intellect. This soul must have been great and beautiful, for in all her unlettered strains there was not a word of murmuring respecting her hard lot: her note was sad, but gentle—desponding, but resigned; it was especially the language of deep tenderness—of mournful sympathy—of angelic charity for ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... strong and serviceable, or, sitting on a pile of lumber, watching the carpenter as he put in execution the plans which they had made. The children of the village were generally playing near by, in the sand, with blocks and chips,—growing up as unlettered and ignorant as their parents. Some of them were great boys and girls,—almost as tall as Noll himself,—and had never yet seen ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... same time, two reasons debar me from laying further stress upon this line of argument. In the first place we must remember that his unlettered readers have been taught by their religious instructors to believe in the unlimited power of the devil, and they have probably found in the outrageous nature of the narratives a real incentive to accept them. In ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... Chisholm wrote only forty years after the event, and forty more had elapsed at the time of Mr. Hira Lal's investigation. [383] Of the Chamar Reformer himself Mr. Chisholm writes: [384] "Ghasi Das, like the rest of his community, was unlettered. He was a man of unusually fair complexion and rather imposing appearance, sensitive, silent, given to seeing visions, and deeply resenting the harsh treatment of his brotherhood by the Hindus. He was well known to the whole community, having travelled much among them; had the reputation of ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... entering public life as a means of winning glory for their youthful genius. The custom has long since become obsolete, but even if the practice were still common, it would not apply to Aemilianus. It would not have been becoming to him to make any display of his eloquence, for he is rude and unlettered; nor to show a passion for renown, since he is a mere barbarian bumpkin; nor thus to open his career as an advocate, for he is an old man on the brink of the grave. The only hypothesis creditable to him would be that he ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... obscurity of humble domestic annals. In the earliest liturgies, in the most ancient sacramentaries, there is the prayer for "refreshment, light, and peace," as it is now found in the missals used at the daily sacrifice, on the lips of the priest, in the prayers of the humblest and most unlettered petitioner. It is the "low murmur of the vale," changing, indeed, at times into the thunder on the mountain tops, amazing the unbelieving world which stands aloof and stares, as in the instances but lately quoted, or existing forgotten, ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... Each in its tether Sleeping safe on the bosom of the plain, Cared-for till cock-crow: Look out if yonder be not day again Rimming the rock-row! That's the appropriate country; there, man's thought, Rarer, intenser, Self-gathered for an outbreak, as it ought, Chafes in the censer. Leave we the unlettered plain its herd and crop; Seek we sepulture On a tall mountain, citied to the top, Crowded with culture! Air the peaks soar, but one the rest excels; Clouds overcome it; No! yonder sparkle is the citadel's Circling its ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... the Romans left Britain there was no channel through which ideas might flow in to her; and this idea, especially, was hardly in Europe to flow in. And yet this idea has curiously persisted in Wales, as a tradition among the unlettered, even to our own day. Dr. Evans-Wentz, of Berkeley, Oxford, and Rennes Universities, in this present twentieth century, found old people among the peasantry who knew something about it, had heard of it from their elders; there ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... understood by the simplest of the unlettered age for whom it was intended. It was remembered by them... For almost five centuries it was appealed to as the decisive authority on behalf of the people... To have produced it, to have preserved it, to have matured it, constitute the immortal claim of England on the esteem ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... Melville. See post, under Nov. 29, 1777. Boswell wrote to Temple on May 22, 1775:—'Harry Dundas is going to be made King's Advocate—Lord Advocate at thirty-three! I cannot help being angry and somewhat fretful at this; he has, to be sure, strong parts, but he is a coarse, unlettered, unfanciful dog.' Letters of Boswell, p. 195. Horace Walpole describes him as 'the rankest of all Scotchmen, and odious for that bloody speech that had fixed on him the nick-name of Starvation! Journal of the Reign of George III, ii. 479. On p. 637 ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... France comprised on the one hand a small elite and on the other a great unlettered mass. There was no middle class between. Yet the population of the colony always contained, especially among its officials and clergy, a sprinkling of educated and scholarly men. These have given us a literature of travel and description which is extensive and of high, quality. No other ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... have been on my lips since early youth," I told my companion. "All Bengal, even the unlettered peasants, delights in his ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... the poor, and this cry against oppression, grew stronger and stronger till it culminated in "Bobby" Burns, who, more than any other writer in any language, is the poet of the unlettered human heart. ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... Irish amiability and hospitality, since it was given at a time when grievances were as real as plenty; when unutterable resentment must have been rankling in many minds; and when those traditions were growing which have coloured the whole texture of Irish thought, until, with the poor and unlettered, to be 'agin the government' is an inherited instinct, to ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... to estimate the advantages which are in the possession of others above their real value. Every one must have remarked, what powers and prerogatives the vulgar imagine to be conferred by learning. A man of science is expected to excel the unlettered and unenlightened even on occasions where literature is of no use, and among weak minds, loses part of his reverence, by discovering no superiority in those parts of life, in which all are unavoidably equal; as when a monarch makes a progress to the remoter provinces, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... good deal of feeling, sir, for the unlettered and the vulgar. They have their station, but they have also—though doubtless in smaller capacity than ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... to a considerable extent. Like many of its relatives, catnip was a popular medicinal remedy for many fleshly ills; now it is practically relegated to domestic medicine. Even in this it is a moribund remedy for infant flatulence, and is clung to only by unlettered nurses of ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains
... however rude and unlettered a mountaineer he may have been, had a voice and ear, and Harry still listened with the keenest pleasure to the melodious note that came floating down the river. The spell was upon him. His imagination became so vivid that it was not a mountaineer singing. ...
— The Guns of Bull Run - A Story of the Civil War's Eve • Joseph A. Altsheler
... very hard to say no to the requests. If one is in the right mood when he or she writes an occasional poem, it seems as if nothing could have been easier. "Why, that piece run off jest like ile. I don't bullieve," the unlettered applicant says to himself, "I don't bullieve it took him ten minutes to write them verses." The good people have no suspicion of how much a single line, a single expression, may cost its author. The wits used to say that Ropers,—the poet once before referred to, old Samuel Ropers, ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... is marked only by a weeping willow and a plain stone at its head. This is the grave of Marshal Ney. I should not have known that it was his, but some unknown hand had written with black paint, "Bravest of the Brave," on the unlettered stone that stands at the head of the man who followed Napoleon through nearly all his battles, and who was shot after the occupation of Paris by the allied army. Peace to his ashes. During my ramble through this noted place, I saw several who were hanging fresh wreaths of everlasting flowers ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... correspondence of the attitude of this unseen Power towards them with their own attitude towards it. Such teaching was not a narrow anthropomorphism but the adaptation to the intellectual capacity of the unlettered multitude of the very deepest truths of what we now call Mental Science. And the basis of it all is the cryptic personality of spirit hidden throughout the infinite of Nature under every form of manifestation. As unalloyed Life and Intelligence it can be no ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... their genius was indulged on festivals by drinking wine in the day-time without censure; a greater freedom arose both, to the numbers [of poetry], and the measure [of music]. For what taste could an unlettered clown and one just dismissed from labors have, when in company with the polite; the base, with the man of honor? Thus the musician added now movements and a luxuriance to the ancient art, and strutting backward and forward, drew ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... eyes apparently oblivious of all but childish interests, but really recording life-facts which now in her hour of need stretched under her feet like a solid pathway across an oozing marsh. All those men and women whom she had seen in a thousand unpremeditated acts, those tired-faced, kind-eyed, unlettered fathers and mothers were not breathing poisoned air, were not harboring in their simple lives a ghastly devouring wild-beast. She recalled with a great indrawn breath all the farmer-neighbors, parents working together for the children, the people she ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... were those distinguished for purity of life, for benevolence to the poor, for bold denunciation of the excesses of the great. He had not, like the Norman, the grand design of creating in the priesthood a college of learning, a school of arts; such notions were unfamiliar in homely, unlettered England. And Harold, though for his time and his land no mean scholar, would have recoiled from favouring a learning always made subservient to Rome; always at once haughty and scheming, and aspiring to complete domination over both the souls of men and the thrones of ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... you poor unlettered fool. Don't you know that all card-players and chicken-fighters and horse-racers go to hell? You crack-brained creetur, you! And don't you know that them that plays cards always loses their ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... An unlettered girl, a peasant in France, saw an opportunity to save the glory of her country, and with a courage that baffles human understanding Joan of Arc went ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... the peasants of Gai-Orlov left their fields unfilled, and cultivated nothing save hymns and prayers. They seemed to be uplifted as by some wave of dreamy, poetic madness. Even the unlettered imitated Grigorieff in composing psalms and hymns, some specimens of which are to be found in Father Arsenii's collection. They breathe an almost ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... when that which is perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away." He recalled the accusation, "Thou art beside thyself, much learning hath made thee mad," and he hastened to assure the unlettered fishermen and the simple and devout women who were followers of Christ, that "all knowledge" was naught if they had not love; that even faith was vain if it led to the rejection of the diviner wisdom that a little child ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... the cut-throats and robbers of Christians, slow-bellied monks, who have made escape from their cloisters, simoniacal and perjured shavelings, busy Sir John lack-Latins, thrasonical and unlettered chemists, shifting and outcast pettifoggers, light-headed and trivial druggers and apothecaries, sun-shunning night-birds and corner-creepers, dull-pated and base mechanics, stage-players, jugglers, peddlers, ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... home the great Milanese painter to adorn his banqueting-room at Donnaz. The lords of Donnaz had never been noted for learning, and Odo's grandfather was fond of declaring that a nobleman need not be a scholar; but the great Marquess Gualberto, if himself unlettered, had been the patron of poets and painters and had kept learned clerks to write down the annals of his house on parchment painted by the monks. These annals were locked in the archives, under Don Gervaso's care; but Odo learned ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... of the magnificent library he would gather for himself. And it should be in no wise for show—the gross ostentation of the unlettered parvenu—but a genuine library, which should minister to his own individual culture. The thought took instant hold upon his interest. By that road, his progress to the goal of gentility would be smooth and simple. He ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... that it were better to drop out of memory points of division and separation, and to act in the manner most likely to attract and unite all parties who were serious in religion. Moreover, he was not pleased, as a man and a scholar, to be always dictated to by his unlettered father-in-law; and as a clergyman, he did not think it fit to seem for ever under the thumb of an elder of his own kirk-session. A proud but honest thought carried his opposition now and then a little farther than it would otherwise have gone. "My brethren," he said, "will suppose ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... century brought forth no great German lyrist, it is exceptionally rich in good songs, mostly anonymous, that express the joys and sorrows of the general lot. Not all of them were the work of unlettered poets, but all were made to be sung; for lyric poetry as a branch of 'mere literature' had not yet come into being. The selections are from Tittmann's Liederbuch aus dem 16. Jahrhundert, Leipzig, 1881, which gives full information as to the ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... communities where the children grow up in Christian homes and are environed in cultured society, with the best of common schools, the church finds the material for its membership, so far forth, prepared to its hand, but among these millions of unlettered peoples the church, if it is to be pure and intelligent, must be the outgrowth of the Christian school; and the branches of the tree might as well be expected to grow up without the roots, as such churches without these schools. The work among them begins in the primary school, and follows ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889 • Various
... angered by his tones of proprietorship, and almost instinctively she compared him with the young fellow who had spoken so rudely to her the night before. Wilson was commonplace, unlettered; he had only the tastes of the ordinary common, money-making manufacturer, and for the first time a feeling amounting to revulsion came into her heart as she thought of the hopes which she ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... chains nevertheless, marches through the streets of Philadelphia to-day, an appendage of the chariot wheels which proclaim the coming of her king, her lord, her master, whether he be white or black, native or foreign-born, virtuous or vile, lettered or unlettered. As the state-house bell, with its inscription, "Proclaim liberty—throughout the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof," pealed forth its jubilant reiteration,—the daughters of Jefferson, of Hancock, of Adams, and Patrick Henry, who have been politically ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... there is much uncertainty in the spelling and the use of names. A scattered people in a huge half-wild country, unlettered for the most part and with no one to turn to for counsel but the priests, is apt to pay attention only to the sound of names, caring nothing about their appearance when written or the sex to which they pertain. Pronunciation has naturally varied in ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... stretch of water. But I was not born Norwegian. I am a Dane. My father and mother were Danes, and how they ever came to that bleak bight of land on the west coast I do not know. I never heard. Outside of that there is nothing mysterious. They were poor people and unlettered. They came of generations of poor unlettered people—peasants of the sea who sowed their sons on the waves as has been their custom since time began. There is no more ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... meet with were the lying memoirs of some intriguing cardinal or the deluding apology of an exiled minister. To his surprise, he found that, without an exception, the collection consisted of poetry and romance. Somewhat surprised, Vivian looked with a curious eye on the unlettered backs of a row of mighty folios on a corner shelf. "These," he thought, "at least must be royal ordinances, and collected state papers." The sense of propriety struggled for a moment with the passion of curiosity; but nothing is ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... his greatest, keenest regret, and that Napoleon was also short and slight did not serve to satisfy him or to make his regret less continual. What availed the sharply cut, smoothly shaven face and the eyes that flashed when he was moved, or the bell-like voice, if every unlettered ranchman or ranger could place both hands on his shoulders and look down at him from heights above? But they forgot this and he forgot it before he had reached the peroration of his closing speech. ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... opposed.' Again, says he, 'The apostles they considered as judging only by their senses, which were deceived in this case: and though they gave entire credit to them with respect to every thing which they had seen, or heard, they considered them as plain unlettered men who were ignorant of what was not within the sphere of their senses.' To these it is supposed that John alludes in his first Epistle iv. 1—3. If, therefore, the apostles did believe, and contend for the literal resurrection, and personal appearing of Jesus, and ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... was thenceforth to be his home, is a metropolitan small town; where college professors and the lawyers of the Parliament House give the tone, and persons of leisure, attracted by educational advantages, make up much of the bulk of society. Not, therefore, an unlettered place, yet not pedantic, Edinburgh will compare favourably with much larger cities. A hard and disputatious element has been commented on by strangers: it would not touch Fleeming, who was himself regarded, even in this metropolis of disputation, ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... imprudent, when such a band of armed warriors were in their vicinity, to send any of their feeble force from behind the intrenchments which they had reared. After several messages, through their interpreter, had passed to and fro, Massasoit, who, though unlettered, was a man of reflection and of sagacity, proposed that the English should send one of their number to his encampment to communicate to him their designs in settling upon lands which had belonged to one of his vassal tribes. ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... rhymed eight-syllable lines which he had already used in part of his Song on May Morning. Like that beautiful little poem, they represent him in his simplest mood, the mood of the quiet years at Horton, spent, more than any other part of his life, in the open air, and among plain folk unlettered and unpolitical. It is natural enough, therefore, that they are the most popular as they are the easiest of all his poems. Their two titles, which mean The Cheerful Man and The Thoughtful or Meditative Man, point to the two moods from which they regard ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... Liebig, the creator of the chemical theory of agriculture, often got on the wrong tack in their love of mere theories, unlettered agriculturists opened up new roads to prosperity. Market-gardeners of Paris, Troyes, Rouen, Scotch and English gardeners, Flemish and Lombardian farmers, peasants of Jersey, Guernsey, and farmers on the Scilly Isles have opened up such large horizons that the mind hesitates to grasp ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... under the guidance of Roughgrove, Glenn, and his unwearying and affectionate sister, was now rapidly making amends for the long neglect of his education while abiding with the unlettered Indians. He had already gone through the English grammar, and was entering the higher branches of study. The great poets of his own country, and the most approved novelists were his companions during the hours ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... things we have little will to talk about: for we be poor men with no master to fleece us, and no lord to help us: also we be folk unlearned and unlettered, and from our way of life, whereas we dwell in the wilderness, we seldom come within the doors of a church. But whereas we have drunk with thee, who seemest to be a man of lineage, and thou hast been ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... not heard of the early Christian martyrs? Is there a doubt that they, unlettered men, slaves, weak women, even children, did exhibit, under an infinite sense of duty, issuing in infinite self-sacrifice, a heroism such as the world had never seen before; did raise the ideal of human nobleness ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... daily paper on which I worked had been receiving, among the general literary driftage of amateur essayists, poets and sketch-writers, some conceits in verse that struck the editorial head as decidedly novel; and, as they were evidently the production of an unlettered man, and an OLD man, and a farmer at that, they were usually spared the waste-basket, and preserved—not for publication, but to pass from hand to hand among the members of the staff as simply quaint ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... Samaritan copies of the Pentateuch, which give the whole age of Zerah exactly 145 years: and confirm the account of Stephen, that Abraham waited till the decease of his father, and then immediately left Haran. Had Mr. English no light upon this subject, but what he derived from his unlettered Rabbi, or even from the Commentators whose "troubles" he finds or feigns, one could not blame him for passing over this fact in silence. But I remember well the time, when Mr. English collected[fn40] the text of the Samaritan copy as it stands ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... scarce, I conceive that a reprint of it in your pages may be acceptable to your Folk-lore readers. The "Rules" are interlarded with scraps of poetry, somewhat after the manner of old Tusser, and bear the unmistakeable impress of a "plain, unlettered Muse." The author concludes his work with a poetical address "to the antiquity and honour of shepheards." The title is rather a droll one, and ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... feeling so tumultuous that there was no room for reflection. Besides, she had reflected, and reflected, for months and months, so she would have said, and the time had come for action. Susanna was not unlettered, but she certainly had never read Meredith or she would have learned that "love is an affair of two, and only for two that can be as quick, as constant in intercommunication as are sun and earth, ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... intrinsically the same Gaul whom Julius Caesar described eighteen hundred years ago, so the gentleman of T[o]ki[o] or Ki[o]to is, in his mental make-up, wonderfully like his ancestors described by the first Japanese Stanley, who shed the light of letters upon the night of unlettered Japan and darkest ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... are unfamiliar and which was not used in the performance. But the music of the choral masses, the songs sung in the intimacy of the Czar Boris's household, the chants of the monks, needed not to be strange to any student of folk-song, nor could their puissance be lost upon the musically unlettered. In the old Kolyada Song "Slava" [Footnote: Lovers of chamber music know this melody from its use in the allegretto in Beethoven's E minor Quartet dedicated to Count Rasoumowski, where it appears thus:—] with which Boris is greeted by the populace, as well as in the wild shoutings ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... censor, that he never paid more than 15,000 drachmae for a slave. After the great conquests of the Romans, in Corsica, Sardinia, Spain, Greece, and the Orient, the market went down by reason of the multitude of human beings thrown upon it. An able-bodied, unlettered man could be bought for the price of an ox. Such were the men of Spain, Thrace, and Sardinia. Educated slaves from Greece and the East brought a higher price. We learn from Horace, that his slave Davus whom he has rendered so celebrated, cost him 500 drachmae.[3] ...
— Public Lands and Agrarian Laws of the Roman Republic • Andrew Stephenson
... his mind and heart. The Idea that possessed his life had operated as a means of education; it had gone on cultivating his powers to the highest point of which they were susceptible; it had raised him from the level of an unlettered laborer to stand on a star-lit eminence, whither the philosophers of the earth, laden with the lore of universities, might vainly strive to clamber after him. So much for the intellect! But where ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... with wrath by this time. The idea that this simple, unlettered, friendless "girl of the people" should so coolly brave him—him on whose words enraptured ears were wont to hang, at whose eloquence enthusiastic hundreds burst into applause! It stung him to the very marrow of his conceit. Something ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... upon this occasion has already been described. They were, for the most part, plain, unlettered, and of little refinement. Poetry in general they read, when read at all, from the mere force of imitation, and with few sensations of pleasure; but this poem had a peculiar vein of glowing inspiration. This very poem would probably ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... Carolina were to be a school where great life lessons would be learned. Fresh from the University halls of Jena, he had met the students of Oxford on equal footing, quickly winning their respect and admiration, but these soldiers and sailors, restless, eager for excitement, rude and unlettered, were a new thing to him, a book written in a language to which he had no key. Later he would learn to find some point of contact with the unlearned as well as the learned, with the negro slave and the Yorkshire collier as well as the student ...
— The Moravians in Georgia - 1735-1740 • Adelaide L. Fries
... Dorion. Not alone because Charley had blasphemed against religion did they hate him at this moment, but because every heart was scorched with envy and jealousy—the black unreasoning jealousy which the unlettered, the dull, the crude, feels for the lettered, the able and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... committed to memory a few of their prayers, and can read and write certain parts of the Koran, he is reckoned sufficiently instructed; and with this slender stock of learning commences his career of life. Proud of his acquirements, he surveys with contempt the unlettered negro; and embraces every opportunity of displaying his superiority over such of his countrymen as are not ...
— Travels in the Interior of Africa - Volume 1 • Mungo Park |
