"Erudition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this account of Bloet's—which appears to me the only one trustworthy—to the courtesy and erudition of Professor Henry Morley, who finds it quoted from Bloet's 'Acroama,' in the 'Observationum Medicarum Rariorum, lib. vii.,' of John Theodore Schenk. Those who wish to know several curious passages of Vesalius' life, which I have not inserted ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... century B.C., when the language, having been progressively refined, became fixed in the writings of Kalidasa, Jayadeva, and other poets. A fourth period, including the tenth century A.D., may be added, distinguished by its erudition, grammatical, rhetorical, and scientific disquisitions, which, however, is not considered as belonging to the classical age. From the Hindu languages, originating in the Sanskrit, new literatures have sprung; but they are essentially ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... in great spirits, and thought this drive in the wet huge fun, again replied heartily, "Rather," and her mother congratulated herself on having done the right thing in bringing her to Germany, home of erudition and profundity, already evidently ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... very hurtful to Men on the Earth." Yet "for the most part, such Storms are sent by the Providence of God as a Sign of His Displeasure for the Sins of Men," and sometimes "as Prognosticks and terrible Warnings of Great Judgements not far off." From the height of his erudition Mather thus rebukes the timid voice of scientific scepticism: "There are some who would be esteemed the Wits of the World, that ridicule those as Superstitious and Weak Persons, which look upon Dreadful Tempests as ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... of rhyme falling from the ruby lips of the young and fair daughters of Eve, have often caused a masculine heart to beat faster and to be thrown around the lovely borrower of words an atmosphere of gentle and refined erudition that nothing else could ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... practically and theoretically, all things, and had published multifarious Books of his own. [List of them, Twenty-one in number, mostly on learned Antiquarian subjects,—in Forster, ii. 255, 256.] The sublime long-eared erudition of the man was not to be contested; manifest to everybody; thrice and four times manifest to himself, in the ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Latin his "Policratic,"[279] or "De nugis Curialium," his "Metalogic," his "Enthetic" (in verse), and his eulogy on Becket.[280] John is only too well versed in the classics, and he quotes them to an extent that does more credit to his erudition than to his taste; but he has the gift of observation, and his remarks on the follies of his time have a great historical value. In his "Policratic" is found a satire on a sort of personage who was ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... would rise with the sun, while they were buried in sleep, and hide myself in the woods, that I might read and study in quiet;" but they beat the bushes, and started in his burrow the future man of erudition. Sir WILLIAM JONES was rarely a partaker in the active sports of Harrow; it was said of GRAY that he was never a boy; the unhappy CHATTERTON and BURNS were singularly serious in youth;[A] as were HOBBES ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... only waiters between the acts. They cannot appreciate the nice distinctions between "buttocks and rounds," neither does everybody perceive the wit of Joey's elegant toast, "Cheap beef and two-pence for the waiter!" This kind of erudition—like that expended upon Chinese literature and the arrow-headed hieroglyphics of Asia Minor—is confined to too small a class of the public for extensive popularity, though it may be highly amusing to the table-d'hote ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... illustrating one of the embarrassments it has evolved. Only man thoroughly happy is HARCOURT. He invented the line of attack on ground of breach of constitutional usages; put up Mr. G. to make his speech; supplied him with authorities, and in supplementary speech amazed House with his erudition. Made stupendous speech last night; literally gorged the House; to-night picks up fragments and provides another feast: six baskets wouldn't ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99., August 2, 1890. • Various
... "dead authors are safe. Our great divines," and he stood upright, "were models; 'there were giants on the earth in those days,' as King George the Third had once said of them to Dr. Johnson. They had that depth, and power, and gravity, and fulness, and erudition; and they were so racy, always racy, and what might be called English. They had that richness, too, such a mine of thought, such a world of opinion, such activity of mind, such inexhaustible resource, such diversity, too. Then they were so eloquent; the majestic Hooker, the imaginative Taylor, ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... which has preserved to us the thoughtful foreheads of so many writers and statesmen, and the sweet smiles of so many noble matrons. It had induced Parr to suspend his labors in that dark and profound mine from which he had extracted a vast treasure of erudition; a treasure too often buried in the earth, too often paraded with injudicious and inelegant ostentation, but still precious, massive, and splendid. There appeared the voluptuous charms of her to whom the heir of ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... sweet deference that was a marked contrast to the aggressiveness with which she had met Dumaresque in the morning. The Countess Helene, observing the deprecating manner with which she received the implied praise for erudition, found herself watching with a keener interest the girl who had seemed to ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... wireless telegraphy, steam engines, anaesthetics—these are powerful things. But no man is profited by his discoveries; he cannot keep them to himself, and use them for his own private ends. The most he can do is to make a large fortune out of them. And as to other kinds of knowledge, erudition, learning, how do they profit the possessor? "No one knows anything nowadays," said an eminent man to me the other day; "it is not worth while! The most learned man is the man who knows best where to find things." There still appears, in works of fiction, with pathetic persistence, ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... given any attention to the matter of teaching itself. They have studied the subject matter with which they are to deal. They have become proficient so far as knowledge is concerned. No fault can be found with them touching the matter of erudition. But they have not given any reflective thought to the art of teaching. They have not made a study of the human mind in its development in order to know how it receives knowledge as mental nourishment, and ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... means the thin and conventional sprinkling of classical erudition which makes these poems of the Goliardi pagan, and reminds the student of Renaissance art. Conversely, the scholastic plays on words which they contain do not stamp them out as medieval. Both of these qualities are rococo and superficial ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... 'study;' for having earned a rushlight by running messages, or doing extra work for his neighbours, he might be found at night, as long as the light would last, poring over a book. In this way he had, unknown to others, while still a mere boy, read through that vast quarry of erudition, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various
... or what does not clearly appear; everybody, sooner or later, had to go there, and nobody wanted to carry off the entrance. Cerberus is known to have had three heads, and some of the poets have credited him with as many as a hundred. Professor Graybill, whose clerky erudition and profound knowledge of Greek give his opinion great weight, has averaged all the estimates, and makes the number twenty-seven—a judgment that would be entirely conclusive is Professor Graybill had known (a) something about dogs, and ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... the flower of youth, Had attained to so eminent a degree of knowledge in Mathematics, Philosophy, Languages, And in every other branch of useful and polite learning. As few have acquired in a long life Wholly devoted to study: Yet to this erudition he joined What can rarely be found with it. Great talents for business, Great propriety of behaviour, Great politeness of manners! His eloquence was sweet, correct, and flowing; His memory vast and exact; His judgement ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... education was, of course, not intended to be only elementary. The amount of Chinese literature is enormous, and the older texts are extremely difficult to understand. There is scope, within the tradition, for all the industry and erudition of the finest renaissance scholars. Learning of this sort has been respected in China for many ages. One meets old scholars of this type, to whose opinions, even in politics, it is customary to defer, although they have the innocence and unworldliness of the old-fashioned don. They remind ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... antiquity; the bumpy page crackles faintly; the big irregular print meets the eye with a pleasant and leisurely mellowness. But what do they tell one? Very little, alas! that one need know, very much which it would be a positive mistake to believe. That is the worst of erudition—that the next scholar sucks the few drops of honey that you have accumulated, sets right your blunders, and you are superseded. You have handed on the torch, perhaps, and even trimmed it. Your errors, your patient explanations, ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... principle of error and imposture, how can faith, that is to say, a blind belief, render the books reliable which are themselves the foundation of this blind belief? What a pity and what insanity! But let us see if these books have of themselves any feature of truth; as, for example, of erudition, of wisdom, and of holiness, or some other perfections which are suited only to a God; and if the miracles which are cited agree with what we ought to think of the grandeur, goodness, justice, and infinite ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... afterwards returned to England. Soon after his return, about the year 1635, he published his "Religio Medici," his first and greatest work, which may be fairly regarded as the reflection of the mind of one who, in spite of a strong intellect and vast erudition, was still prone to superstition, ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... also well aware of the many perforated stones that exist in Scotland, not referred to by Dr. Munro. He perforated some which could not be worn as ornaments, just as the Arunta do. We shall find that the forger, either by dint of wide erudition, or by a startling set of chance coincidences, keeps on producing objects which are analogous to genuine relics found in many ...
— The Clyde Mystery - a Study in Forgeries and Folklore • Andrew Lang
... Dallas to have some impression that his pleasing you with his book might advance his Scottish suit. But all I know is, that he is a gentleman of great attainments and erudition, much distinguished as the writer of the best critical literary pieces in The Times, and thoroughly versed in the subjects which Professor ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... poetry there is a new vein of popularity. Since we left the primary poetry we have been on the track of a literature whose spring was in book-learning. A foreign erudition had thrown the lore of the native minstrel into the shade. But some relics of domestic material reappear with the new gush of popular song in the 13th century. Among the mass of stories which fill that time, we find here and there ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... he some commutation broach, I'll pledge my aith in guid braid Scotch, He need na fear their foul reproach Nor erudition, Yon mixtie-maxtie queer hotch-potch, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... friends, among whom he mentions the ardent Ugo Foscolo and the learned Mazzuchelli; but none of these could help him. He turned the pages of Crescimbeni, Quadrio, Gamba, Corniani, Tiraboschi, weighty with enormous erudition—and only those who make a special study of Italian know how little has escaped their scrutiny—but found no mention of Campanella as a poet. At last, after the lapse of a quarter of a century, he received the long-coveted ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... Elsie. He was absurdly anxious to humour us. Just at first, it is true, he had discussed the subjects that lay nearest to his own heart. He was an ardent votary of the noble quadruped; and he loved the turf—whose sward, we judged, he trod mainly at Tattersall's. He spoke to us with erudition on 'two-year-old form,' and gave us several 'safe things' for the spring handicaps. The Oaks he considered 'a moral' for Clorinda. He also retailed certain choice anecdotes about ladies whose Christian ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... were making faults, by trying to remove them: "Ut olim vitiis, ita nunc remediis laboratur." And, indeed, where mere conjecture is to be used, the emendations of Scaliger and Lipsius, notwithstanding their wonderful sagacity and erudition, are often vague and disputable, like ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... before your eyes such a man as Montesquieu. Think of a genius not born in every country or every time: a man gifted by Nature with a penetrating, aquiline eye,—with a judgment prepared with the most extensive erudition,—with an Herculean robustness of mind, and nerves not to be broken with labor,—a man who could spend twenty years in one pursuit. Think of a man like the universal patriarch in Milton (who had ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... so eminent a degree of knowledge in mathematics, philosophy, languages, and in every branch of useful and polite learning, as few have acquired in a long life wholly devoted to study; yet to this erudition he joined, what can rarely be found with it, great talents for business, great propriety of behaviour, great politeness of manners: his eloquence was sweet, correct and flowing; his memory vast and exact; his judgment strong and acute." On visiting Slate, in 1773, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... more appropriate title), supposed that the Brevia Parliamentaria of Prynne stood for "short parliaments.'' Lord Lansdowne told Moore that he was with Lord Holland when the letter containing this precious bit of erudition arrived. Another story of Lord Lansdowne's is equally good. His French servant announced Dr. Mansell, the Master of Trinity, when he called, as "Matre des ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... Mamurra and Caesar, pathics both. Nor needs amaze: they share like stains—this, Urban, the other, Formian,—which stay deep-marked nor can they be got rid of. Both morbidly diseased through pathic vice, the pair of twins lie in one bed, alike in erudition, one not more than other the greater greedier adulterer, allied rivals of the girls. A comely couple ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... the views current in the fourth century regarding the punishment due to heresy. Very little was known of Priscillian until lately; and despite the publication of several of his works in 1889, he still remains an enigmatical personality.[1] His erudition and critical spirit were, however, so remarkable, that an historian of weight declares that henceforth we must rank him with St. Jerome.[2] But his writings were, in all probability, far from orthodox. ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard
... Spain, C.M.G., of the 6th N.F. came to command the Brigade during the absence of Brigadier-General Riddell on leave. He was a man of remarkable erudition and a collector of prints and other things. And I soon found that we had many things in common and many interesting talks I had with him on ...
— Q.6.a and Other places - Recollections of 1916, 1917 and 1918 • Francis Buckley
... has subsisted until our time: it has never been without writers of the greatest taste, judgment and erudition; the names of Cujacius, Augustinus, the Gothofredi, Heineccius, Voetius, Vinnius, Gravina and Pothier, are as dear to the scholar as they are to the lawyer; an Englishman however must reflect with pleasure, that the ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... some little misgivings as to the solid benefit to be derived from such fantastic erudition, and ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... obtaining indubitable evidence on some controverted point. Besides those who had the privilege of listening to his prelections from the professorial chair, there are many in the Churches on both sides of the Atlantic who have profited by his great erudition; and his published writings, which all bear the impress of a master-hand, will always be reckoned standard works ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... you, instead of that, happen to disprove me, the concern indeed would be mine, but the loss will be yours. Lord Bolingbroke is a strong instance on my side of the question; he joins to the deepest erudition, the most elegant politeness and good-breeding that ever any courtier and man of the world was adorned with. And Pope very justly called him "All-accomplished St. John," with regard to his knowledge and his manners. He had, it is true, his faults; which proceeded from unbounded ambition, and ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... Richet of the University of Paris spoke of him in the highest terms, and regarded him as "an exceptionally careful and cautious investigator." His book, Mental Suggestion, which was published early in the eighties, is considered an authority, and his general erudition and scientific attainments no one could question. For many years he was professor ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... as well as classical erudition Ascham preferred Sophocles and Euripides to the oratorical and sententious Seneca, his view was not shared by the renaissance. Scaliger, preoccupied as he was with style, found his ideal of tragedy not in the plays of the great Greeks, but in the closet dramas of the declamatory Spaniard. Seneca ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... which she generally knew how "to make the worse appear the better reason." Miss Portman knew that Mr. Percival possessed the happy talent of drawing out all the abilities of those with whom he conversed, and that he did not value men merely for their erudition, science, or literature; he was capable of estimating the potential as well as the actual range of the mind. Of his generosity she could not doubt, and she was persuaded that he would take every possible means which good nature, joined to good sense, could suggest, to raise Lord ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... one of the gentlemen, who appeared to be the president. "But ours is a feast of reason and the flow of soul, and we are met here to discuss works of art, to hear read the practical effusions of our members, and to enjoy the society of men of intellect and erudition." ...
— Voyages and Travels of Count Funnibos and Baron Stilkin • William H. G. Kingston
... Even the original number of islands in the Seine and Caesar's statements concerning the Gauls and their manners and customs are now disputed. When it comes to the origin of things and of peoples, the erudition is profound. M. G. de Mortillet proposes for the epoch quaternaire or pleistocene four successive divisions,—in their order of antiquity, the Chelleen, the Mousterien, the Solutreen, and the Magdalenien; ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... the same thing as a measure of wheat from Morgagni,—there is a formidable display of authorities, and an abundant proof of ingenious researches to be found in each of the great works of Hahnemann with which I am familiar. [Some painful surmises might arise as to the erudition of Hahnemann's English Translator, who makes two individuals of "Zacutus, Lucitanus," as well as respecting that of the conductors of an American Homoeopathic periodical, who suffer the name of the world-renowned Cardanus to be spelt Cardamus in at least three ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... brilliant exceptions must, however, be noticed. Spinoza, in the seventeenth century, and Lessing, in the eighteenth, were men far in advance of their age. They are the fathers of modern historical criticism; and to Lessing in particular, with his enormous erudition and incomparable sagacity, belongs the honour of initiating that method of inquiry which, in the hands of the so-called Tubingen School, has led to such striking and valuable conclusions concerning, the age and ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... all the good you have obtained from three perusals of the Commentaries on Scottish Criminal Jurisprudence?" said his companion. "I suppose the learned author very little thinks that the facts which his erudition and acuteness have accumulated for the illustration of legal doctrines, might be so arranged as to form a sort of appendix to the half-bound and slip-shod ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... harder, for the Thirty Years War had, as he confesses, made many people doubt the benefits of the Reformation, distrust its principles, and reject its doctrines. He discharged the thankless labor of apology in a work of enormous erudition, still valuable to the special student for the ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... pretensions of ecclesiastical authority, as developed in the history of modern science. No previous writer has treated the subject from this point of view, and the present monograph will be found to possess no less originality of conception than vigor of reasoning and wealth of erudition."—New York Tribune. ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... and sensibility with masculine strength and breadth of understanding; the same taste for the beautiful in poetry, in art, and in nature, joined to similar fondness for metaphysical studies; the same delight in books of devotion and in books of theology; and the same varied erudition. Only one of them seems to have been an accomplished Hebraist, but both were good Latin and Greek scholars; and both were familiar with Italian, Spanish, French, and German. Even in Sara Coleridge's admiration and reverence for her father, Mrs. Hopkins was in full sympathy with her. ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... was easily induced to renounce his public profession of parish schoolmaster, make his constant residence at the Place, and, in consideration of a sum not quite equal to the wages of a footman even at that time, to undertake to communicate to the future Laird of Ellangowan all the erudition which he had, and all the graces and accomplishments which—he had not indeed, but which he had never discovered that he wanted. In this arrangement, the Laird found also his private advantage; securing the constant benefit of a patient auditor, to whom he told his stories when they ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... that Mrs. Amyot, at that period, did not often walk home alone; but I doubt whether any of my discomfited rivals, whatever his claims to favor, was ever treated to so ravishing a mixture of shyness and self-abandonment, of sham erudition and real teeth and hair, as it was my privilege to enjoy. Even at the opening of her public career Mrs. Amyot had a tender eye for strangers, as possible links with successive centres of culture to which in due course the torch of Greek art might be ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... it hath not pleased on thee Deep erudition to bestow, Or black Latino's gift of tongues, No Latin let thy pages show. Ape not philosophy or wit, Lest one who cannot comprehend, Make a wry face at thee and ask, "Why offer flowers to ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Charles Sumner for preventing the annexation of San Domingo, was called a traitor to the negro race, and it was said that his speech on the subject was delivered under the influence of brandy. A college-professor informed his class that Sumner was a man of small erudition, and Garrison spoke of him as one who had evidently joined the anti-slavery cause from interested motives. A Boston merchant whose word had been as good as his note for thirty years was gibbetted soon after his death by a high-minded journalist, as ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... he was a pure Greek, among the Latins a pure Roman.... Even when he spoke ex tempore, his speech was so perfect and so pure that one could easily believe that one heard a Roman rather than a German. United with his powerful eloquence was the broadest erudition. He had investigated all the mysteries of philosophy, and thoroughly mastered every branch of music. In his later years he devoted his whole soul to the mastery of Hebrew and to the study of the Holy Scriptures. He cared but little ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... the later Greek and Roman writers using the words cyclic and cyclic poet as terms of disparagement. The great Mythus of Troy had run its course and exhausted itself; the age of imitation, formalism, erudition had come, while that of creation had passed away. Still it has preserved for us the idea of the cycle, which is necessary for the adequate comprehension of Homer, and which the Greeks ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... method," as she saw no reason for becoming seriously wrought up over it. According to her honest conviction there were other things in life of far greater importance than knowledge, to say nothing of erudition, and these other things were: a good appearance and good manners. That her children should all present a good appearance was with her an article of faith, so to speak, and she considered it a natural consequence of their good appearance that ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... and large for his age, his slowness in learning classed him with the children of twelve or thirteen. However, as learning was considered in New Canaan a superfluous and wholly unnecessary adjunct to the means of living, Absalom's want of agility in imbibing erudition never troubled him, nor did it in the least call forth the pity ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... Provence, voluntarily undergoing a certain amount of fatigue for sheer delight in the beauty of nature. This was a great, an immortal deed, greater than all his sonnets and treatises put together. In a long letter which has been preserved to us, he describes with much spirit and erudition this extraordinary ascent, before whose profound significance all the Alpine exploits of our time shrink ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... up enough of her companion's erudition to understand what had attracted him to the house. She noticed the fan-shaped tracery of the broken light above the door, the flutings of the paintless pilasters at the corners, and the round window set in the gable; and she knew ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... presence accuses, and which it threatens to destroy, whenever the hour of vengeance shall arrive. (* The argument deduced from the civilization of Rome and Greece in favour of slavery is much in vogue in the West Indies, where sometimes we find it adorned with all the graces of erudition. Thus, in speeches delivered in 1795, in the Legislative Assembly of Jamaica, it was alleged that from the example of elephants having been employed in the wars of Pyrrhus and Hannibal, it could not be blamable to have ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... there? Thirty, shall we say? and it is always glorious to be a wrangler. Out of that thirty there is probably but one who has not failed, who is not called on to submit to the inward grief of having been beaten. The youth who is second, who has thus shown himself to be possessed of a mass of erudition sufficient to crush an ordinary mind to the earth, is ready to eat his heart with true bitterness of spirit. After all his labour, his midnight oil, his many sleepless nights, his deserted pleasures, his racking ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... a document which is neither French nor Burgundian, but Italian. I refer to the Chronique d'Antonio Morosini, published and annotated with admirable erudition by M. Germain Lefevre-Pontalis. This chronicle, or to be more precise, the letters it contains, are very valuable to the historian, but not on account of the veracity of the deeds here attributed ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... countenance when we take up the palaver about Sidonia and the Chosen Race. The Novels by Eminent Hands are all good: they are much more than parodies; they are real criticism, sound, wise, genial, and instructive. Nor are they in the least unfair. If the balderdash and cheap erudition of Bulwer and Disraeli are covered with inextinguishable mirth, no one is offended by the pleasant imitations of Lever, James, and ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... Mercury, J. C. Squire has the light touch of the columnist but limits himself somewhat more closely to books and the subjects suggested by them. Very few men living can write about books with more actual and less apparent erudition than Mr. Squire. Born in 1884, educated at Cambridge, an editor of the New Statesman, a poet unsurpassed in the field of parody but a poet who sets more store by his serious verse, Mr. Squire can best be appreciated by those who have just that desultory interest in ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... as to a matter of 'erudition,' which you greatly love to hear me 'start' and 'dwell upon.' Dr. Lewen once, in 'your' presence, (as you, 'my good patron,' cannot but remember,) in a 'smartish' kind of debate between 'him' and 'me,' took upon him to censure the 'paranthetical' style, ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... from this fount the streamlets flow, That widen in their course. Hero and sage arise to show Science the mighty source, And laud the land whose talents rock The cradle of her power, And wreaths are twined round Plymouth Rock, From erudition's bower. ...
— Poems • Mary Baker Eddy
... longed to play the part of a magician. With that idea, when I left the house of the ridiculous antiquarian, I proceeded to the public library, where, with the assistance of a dictionary, I wrote the following specimen of facetious erudition: ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... in which to prepare two lectures on subjects of which I had previously been ignorant; but, thanks to Mr. Gow's Handbook to School Classics—a work with which my pupils are unfamiliar because I have not yet told them to read it—I succeeded in displaying an erudition which, in the circumstances, was creditable. Since the conclusion of my lectures, I have been employed in visiting the candidates whom I am preparing for examination, and encouraging them to continue their studies. ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... Levites had been no doubt complete; but changes had been effected as circumstances required. He was presumed to have alluded to the order of Melchisedek, but he abstained from any mention of the name. He roamed very wide, and gave many of his hearers an idea that his erudition had carried him into regions in which it was impossible to follow him. The gist of his argument was to show that audacity in Reform was the very backbone of Conservatism. By a clearly pronounced disunion of Church and State the theocracy of Thomas a Becket would ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... Fanshawe was told this story, the circumstances of which she states to have happened only three months previously. The Colonel was a most extraordinary character, and though a man of genius and erudition, was very nearly a madman. A voluminous collection of his MSS. is preserved in the British Museum, whence it appears that he was in the habit of committing his most private thoughts to paper; that there was scarcely a subject to which his attention was not ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... de Breves, had served as ambassador both at Constantinople and Rome, and was a man of great erudition. Well versed in history, an able diplomatist, and possessed of considerable antiquarian lore, he had travelled in Greece, Asia Minor, and the Holy Land. His pupil, at the period of his appointment, being still a mere infant, he did not enter upon ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... talk with them, and understand them, rather better than last season, and, Persian-like, they ply me mercilessly with questions. Often, when some one asks a question of me, Mirza Hassan, as becomes a telegraphies, and a person of profound erudition, thoughtfully saves me the trouble of replying by undertaking to furnish the desired information himself. One old mollah wants to know how many farsakhs it is from Aivan-i-Kaif to Yenghi Donia (New World-America); ere I can frame a suitable reply, Mirza Hassan forestalls ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... English Socialists with praise in "The Poverty of Philosophy'' (1847). They, like him, tend to base their arguments upon a Ricardian theory of value, but they have not his scope or erudition or scientific breadth. Among them may be mentioned Thomas Hodgskin (1787-1869), originally an officer in the Navy, but dismissed for a pamphlet critical of the methods of naval discipline, author of "Labour Defended Against ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... compliments—To entertain agreeable notions of one's own character is a great incentive to act with propriety and spirit. But I should be sorry to contribute in any degree to your acquiring an excess of self-sufficiency ... I own indeed that when ... to display my extensive erudition, I have quoted Greek, Latin and French sentences one after another with astonishing celerity; or have got into my Old-hock humour and fallen a-raving about princes and lords, knights and geniuses, ladies of quality and harpsichords; you, with a peculiar comic smile, have gently reminded me ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... to think the title fits, you may call me by it if you like." So from that time forth John always addressed me as "Professor," and from hearing him constantly using the term, M'Allister soon acquired the same habit. I am afraid they both credited me with rather more erudition than I really possessed; but although I should never attempt to talk at large on matters with which I was not fully acquainted, I have lived long enough to know that it is not always wise to go very ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... can scarcely mean anything else than his disapprobation of the University system. Notwithstanding this he had been received on a former occasion with unexpected favour, and on the present is able to say, "I triumph as one placed among the stars that so many men, eminent for erudition, and nearly the whole University have flocked hither." We have thus a miniature history of Milton's connection with his Alma Mater. We see him giving offence by the freedom of his strictures on the established practices, and misliking them so much as to write in 1642, "Which [University] ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... Articles of Religion, continually disturbs their Opinion of themselves, and creates severe Misgivings and Distrust in their Minds, lest their Notions about Religion should not be true, when they observe, that many Persons of eminent Parts, superior Reason and Erudition, maintain with Zeal quite contrary Sentiments; or else it proceeds from their Hatred of Men of Vertue, founded in the Dissimilitude of Dispositions and Manners, and Disagreement in Interest, Employments and Designs; ...
— Essay upon Wit • Sir Richard Blackmore
... catechism and the offices of the Church, made up his whole stock of erudition. That he was devout as a monk of the middle ages, conforming daily and hourly to religious ceremonies, need scarcely be stated. It was not probable that the son of Philip II. would be a delinquent to church observances. He was not deficient in courage, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... foundation was recent, and its prospects flattering. At the head of the institution, at this period, was a learned and Orthodox divine, whose fame was in all the churches. He was the author of several works which evinced much erudition and depth of research; and the public, perhaps, thought the more highly of his abilities from a singularity in the purposes to which he applied them, that added much to the curiosity of his labors, though ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... while we quickened our pace, making the branches fall off more than ever. Then—'The wheelbarrow,' said the professor, 'amazes us by its combined simplicity and perfection. The conception of a man of universal genius and vast erudition,—I allude to Leonardo da Vinci, the marvellous Florentine,—it has for upwards of three hundred years served mankind as a humble but valued ally. In every rank of life it finds its place. This barrow, ...
— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards
... the conviction that he would be compelled to depend upon his own exertions for a livelihood. He devoted himself with assiduity to studying the literature pertaining to the equity branch of the law. By the time he reached manhood he had acquired considerable erudition, and it was predicted of him that he would make a mark in his profession. He did his utmost to justify the prediction, for he had no sooner been called to the bar than he came before the world as an author. ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... person on record, who is celebrated for his learning, is Tobias, the ninth bishop of Rochester, who succeeded to that see in 693. He is noticed by Bede as not only furnished with an ample store of Greek and Latin literature, but skilled also in the Saxon language and erudition (26). It is probable, therefore, that he left some proofs of this attention to his native language and as he died within a few years of Bede, the latter would naturally avail himself of his labours. It is worthy also of remark, that Bertwald, ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown
... made a party resolve, he goes to the House of Commons and speaks in its favor; nay, even it may be, proposes it. Pulteney made a long and what would now be called an exhaustive speech. It was stuffed full of portentous erudition about the early history of the eldest sons of English kings. The speech was said to have been delivered with much less than Pulteney's usual force and fire; and indeed, so far as one can judge ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... of speculation, I apprehend, this etalage of bold results, rather than any success in their development, which has fixed the public attention. Development, indeed, applied to philosophic problems, or research applied to questions of erudition, was hardly possible within so small a compass as one hundred and seventeen pages, for that is the extent of the work, except as regards the notes, which amount to seventy-four pages more. Such ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... fairly out of his depth. At first this puzzled him, and he very nearly committed the mistake of pronouncing John Brown a first-rate scholar in the common-room; but when he found his performance at lecture did not by any means keep pace with the remarkable erudition sometimes displayed by him in private, he began in his turn to suspect the trick. He dared not refuse to play his part, when called upon, in these learned discussions, though he dreaded them more and more; for his college reputation was at stake, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... the other. Like the author of NORMA, he was full of melodic feeling, yet he was ambitions of attaining the harmonic depth of the learned old master; desiring to unite, in a great and elevated style, the dreamy vagueness of spontaneous emotion with the erudition ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... Fergusson's work, "Tree and Serpent Worship" (London, 1868), is not quite free from this defect, the learned author having displayed more erudition and ingenuity than ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... an Indian history, or tale of shipwreck, was sold by a peddler or wandering subscription-man, to some one in the village, and read through its owner's nose to a slumberous auditory. Like my brother fishermen, I grew into the belief that all human erudition was collected in our pedagogue, whose green spectacles and solemn phiz, as he passed to his little school- house, amid a waste of sand, might have gained him a diploma from any college in New England. In truth I dreaded him. When our children were old enough to claim his care, you remember, ...
— The Village Uncle (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Hellenic deities after the approved Italian recipe; nor do a few long words about geography or science disquiet us any more. Milton was not writing for an uncivilized mob, and his occasional displays of erudition will represent to a cultured person only those breathing spaces so refreshing in all epic poetry. That Milton's language is saturated with Latinisms and Italianisms is perfectly true. His English may not ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... month or two after the receipt of the books Jude had grown callous to the shabby trick played him by the dead languages. In fact, his disappointment at the nature of those tongues had, after a while, been the means of still further glorifying the erudition of Christminster. To acquire languages, departed or living in spite of such obstinacies as he now knew them inherently to possess, was a herculean performance which gradually led him on to a greater interest in it than in the presupposed patent process. ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... examinations, they thrive by living as far as possible among the things they ought to learn. They thus assimilate the object of instruction, which becomes a living and useful part of their personality, instead of becoming encysted in the brain in the form of dead erudition like a foreign body, and filling it with formulae learnt by heart. Such formulae are ill-understood by children, and later on it is difficult for them to clear their brains of this indigestible rubbish to make room for the realities ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... their different courts subordinate circles of the first court, and rivalled with one another in vassalage. One wanted to be the cup-bearer of the ensign of Brienne; another, his butler. Charlemagne's history was put under contribution by the erudition of the German chancellor's officers. The higher they were, the more eager their demands. As Bonaparte said in Las Cases, a lady of the Montmorencys would have hastened to undo the Empress's shoes." The monarchs were more like Napoleon's courtiers ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... secret will be for ever preserved, I know, under every change of fortune or of political tenets, while honour, and virtue, and religion, and friendly affection, and erudition, and the principles of a gentleman have binding force and authority upon minds so cultivated and dignified. When they fall, I am ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 74, March 29, 1851 • Various
... amount of erudition has been expended by historical students to establish the truth or falsity of this Pocahontas story. The author has refrained from entering the controversy, preferring to let the story stand as it was told by Captain Smith in his "General ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... work in the department of paleontology is particularly noteworthy as it has extended the boundaries of knowledge through its many explorations in the western fossil fields. The success of the Museum is largely due to the energy and erudition of Dr. W. J. Holland, its amiable director. In the music-hall, a symphony orchestra is maintained, and free recitals are given on the great organ twice every week by a capable performer. When the orchestra began its work thirteen years ...
— A Short History of Pittsburgh • Samuel Harden Church
... very ordinary women, which perhaps accounted for the fact that no Borlsover had been a genius, and only one Borlsover had been mad. But they were great champions of little causes, generous patrons of odd sciences, founders of querulous sects, trustworthy guides to the bypath meadows of erudition. ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... Intelligences and emotions, relieved of all the imbecile preoccupations of civilised life, move in intricate and subtle dances, crossing and recrossing, advancing, retreating, impinging. An immense erudition and an immense fancy go hand in hand. All the ideas of the present and of the past, on every possible subject, bob up among the Tales, smile gravely or grimace a caricature of themselves, then disappear to make place for something new. The verbal surface of his writing is rich and fantastically ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... "muddy-headed," "he would do little or nothing besides heaping up notes"; "as for MSS. he would not trouble himself about any, but rest wholly upon what had been done to his hands by former editors." This habit of carping, this trick of collecting notes, this inability to put a work through, this dawdling erudition, this horror of manuscripts, every Oxford man knows them, and feels those temptations which seem to be in the air. Oxford is a discouraging place. College drudgery absorbs the hours of students in proportion to their conscientiousness. They have only the waste odds-and-ends ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... Calvinistic model, has been fiercely disputed. It is a question on which men of eminent parts, learning, and piety have differed, and do to this day differ very widely. It is a question on which at least a full half of the ability and erudition of Protestant Europe has ever since the Reformation, been opposed to the Anglican pretensions. Mr. Gladstone himself, we are persuaded, would have the candour to allow that, if no evidence were admitted but that which is furnished ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Biographers and critics have discussed his theories,—some in the interest of philosophy, and some in the interest of religion,—some in the spirit of discipleship, and some in the spirit of opposition,— but all with consenting and admiring attestation of the vast erudition and intellectual prowess and unsurpassed capacity [1] ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... foundations, some of which were famed through the land for their theological teaching of the principles of the Jo[u]do[u] sect. Conspicuous among these were the Tenjingatani and the Mushigatani, seminaries widely sought for the erudition of the professors. In all nearly three thousand students attended the halls, with an eye to ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... his justly well reputed Geschichte des Franz. Romans im XVII. Jahrh. (Oppeln u. Leipzig, 1891, i. 133 note) would rule Rabelais out of the history of the novel altogether. This book, which will be quoted again with gratitude later, displays a painstaking erudition not necessitating any make-weight of sympathy for its author's early death after great suffering. It is extremely useful; but it does not escape, in this and other places, the censure which, ten years before the war of 1914, the present writer felt it his duty to express on modern German critics ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... 1st March 705, instead of the 1st Jan. 706. The pitiful dissimulation and procrastinating artifice of Pompeius are after a remarkable manner mixed up, in these arrangements, with the wily formalism and the constitutional erudition of the republican party. Years before these weapons of state-law could be employed, they had them duly prepared, and put themselves in a condition on the one hand to compel Caesar to the resignation of his command from the day when the term ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... aspect of this virtual dissolution of family-life which has great interest as connected with German erudition. The English or American scholar, whose social hours are mainly spent with his family, or in the mixed society of the sexes, would never think of introducing the subjects of his study into such circles, and hence is without the best means ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... some matter relative to that ancient Rome, the rise and the decline of whose past power and glories we have spent our youth in endeavouring to comprehend. But this, believe me, is no vain enigma of erudition, useful but to the studious,—referring but to the dead. Let the Past perish!—let darkness shroud it!—let it sleep for ever over the crumbling temples and desolate tombs of its forgotten sons,—if it cannot afford us, ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... by the women as a man of great erudition, for he had read several books quite through, and was a perfect master of Cotton Mather's 'History of New England Witchcraft,' in which, by the way, he ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... well call your attention to a few cases. Let me see. There was 'The Dead Alive,' a capital thing!—the record of a gentleman's sensations when entombed before the breath was out of his body—full of tastes, terror, sentiment, metaphysics, and erudition. You would have sworn that the writer had been born and brought up in a coffin. Then we had the 'Confessions of an Opium-eater'—fine, very fine!—glorious imagination—deep philosophy acute speculation—plenty of fire and fury, and a good spicing ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... with unequal arms by the duke of Newcastle, the earl of Cholmondeley, lord Hervey, the lord chancellor, the bishop of Salisbury, and in particular by the earl of Hay, a nobleman of extensive capacity and uncommon erudition; remarkable for his knowledge of the civil law, and seemingly formed by nature for a politician; cool, discerning, plausible, artful, and enterprising, staunch to the minister, and invariably true to his own interest. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... Worcester. This accomplished person, born in an age and nation where the nobility valued themselves on ignorance as their privilege, and left learning to monks and schoolmasters, for whom indeed the spurious erudition that prevailed was best fitted, had been struck with the first rays of true science, which began to penetrate from the south, and had been zealous, by his exhortation and example, to propagate the love of letters among his unpolished countrymen. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... came out of that library as we went in—the one clean roller a day forbade it. Nothing but the conscientious desire to embellish our "copy" with enough facts and references to make a showing of erudition ever induced Field or any of the active members of the editorial staff to borrow the library key from Ballantyne to break in upon the soporific labors of Mr. Plumbe. Here the editorial conferences, which ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... what the world will not long or greatly desire to learn from him. "Shakspeare," said Dryden, not having the fear of Locke before his eyes, "was naturally learned"; but whoever is quite destitute of natural learning will never achieve winged words by dint and travail of other erudition. If his soul have not been to school before coming to his body, it is late in life for him to qualify himself for a teacher of mankind. Words that are cups to contain the last essences of a sincere life bear elixirs of life for as many lips as shall ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... was intent on doing good in public affairs, because he was anxious for the honor of Rome and of Romans, not because he was or was not a "real power in the State" that his memory is still worth recording. Added to this was the intellect and the wit and erudition of the man, which were at any rate supreme. And then, though we can now see that his efforts were doomed to failure by the nature of the circumstances surrounding him, he was so nearly successful, so often on the verge of success, that we are ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... kind of Socrates, a devotee of truth and lover of youth, ready to sit up to any hour, and drink beer and talk with anyone, lavish of learning and counsel, a contagious example of how lightly and humanly a burden of erudition might be borne upon a pair of shoulders. In faculty-business he might not run well in harness, but as an inspiration and ferment of character, as an example of the ranges of combination of scholarship with manhood that are possible, his influence on ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... his piratical wars, and obtained in that service a naval crown. In the civil wars he joined the side of the Republic, and was taken by Caesar; by whom he was likewise proscribed, but obtained a remission of the sentence. Of all the ancients, he has acquired the greatest fame for his extensive erudition; and we may add, that he displayed the same industry in communicating, as he had done in collecting it. His works originally amounted to no less than five hundred volumes, which have all perished, except a treatise De Lingua Latina, and one De ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... me most is the general decay of intellectual cultivation. This may sound paradoxical in an age which habitually talks so much about Education and Culture; but I am persuaded that it is true. Dilettantism is universal, and a smattering of erudition, infinitely more offensive than honest and manly ignorance, has usurped the place which was formerly occupied by genuine and liberal learning. A vast deal of specialism, "mugged up," as boys say, at the ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... which, perhaps, added force to his precepts. When at school I heard a dialogue, between an usher and the man who cleaned the shoes, about Mr. ——, a minister, a very corporate body with due area of waistcoat. "He is a man of great erudition," said the first. "Ah, yes sir," said Joe; "any one can see that who ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... of Mr. Max Mueller is familiar to American students as that of a man who, learned in the high German fashion, has the pleasant faculty, unhappily too rare among Germans, of communicating his erudition in a way not only comprehensible, but agreeable to the laity. The Teutonic Gelehrte, gallantly devoting a half-century to his pipe and his locative case, fencing the result of his labors with a bristling hedge of abbreviations, cross-references, and untranslated citations ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... remember (or, if unlearned, he must be informed) that this judgment has now become the unanimous judgment of all the most competent authorities—that is, of all those who, having first of all the requisite erudition as to Greek, as to classical archaeology, &c., then subsequently applied this appropriate learning to the searching investigation of the several narratives authorised by Herodotus. In the middle of the last century, nothing could rank lower than the historic credibility ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... tail, and stooping low His wide mouth near the ground, his dreadful roar Makes all the desart tremble: he proclaims His ire—proclaims his strong necessity; And that surprise or artifice he scorns. Unskill'd, alas! in philosophic lore, Unbless'd with scientific erudition; How can I sing of elemental War, Or the contending powers of opposite Attractions, that impel, and poize, and guide, The ever-rolling Spheres: Animal War, The flux of Life, devouring and devour'd, Ceaseless in every tribe, through ...
— An Essay on War, in Blank Verse; Honington Green, a Ballad; The - Culprit, an Elegy; and Other Poems, on Various Subjects • Nathaniel Bloomfield
... being the most learned society on earth, for men versed in all literature and erudition, when hurried into our presence for examination, quail and stand in silent amazement. 'Placid Death' alone is coeval with this Society, and resembles it, for in its own Catalogue it equalizes rich and poor, great and small, white ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... Government established by the revolution of 1860, came into power to set all these acts of negligence and roguery to rights. Signor Fiorelli, who is all intelligence and activity, not to mention his erudition, which numerous writings prove, was appointed inspector of the excavations. Under his administration, the works which had been vigorously resumed were pushed on by as many as seven hundred laborers at a time, and they dug out in the ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... (inventive genius,) an utterly untrustworthy and incompetent observer, (profound searcher of Nature,) a shallow dabbler in erudition, (sagacious scholar,) started the monstrous fiction (founded the immortal system) of Homoeopathy. I am very fair, you see,—you can help yourself to either ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... circumstance that first strikes us is the very scanty foundation of instruction, upon which he contrived to raise himself to such eminence both as a writer and a politician. It is true, in the line of authorship he pursued, erudition was not so much wanting; and his wit, like the laurel of Caesar, was leafy enough to hide any bareness in this respect. In politics, too, he had the advantage of entering upon his career, at a time when habits of business and a knowledge of details were less looked for in public men than ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... purpose, the main thing to learn is not the art of accumulating material, but the sublimer art of investigating it, of discerning truth from falsehood and certainty from doubt. It is by solidity of criticism more than by the plenitude of erudition, that the study of history strengthens, and straightens, and extends the mind 60. And the accession of the critic in the place of the indefatigable compiler, of the artist in coloured narrative, the skilled limner of character, the persuasive advocate of good, or other, causes, amounts to a ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... of the conversation, found means to resign that opinion without adopting any other in lieu of it, and parted with him under all the impatience of curiosity. The knight, on his part, was very well entertained with the witty sarcasms and erudition of the doctor, who appeared to be a sort of cynic philosopher tinctured with misanthropy, and at open war with the whole body of apothecaries, whom however it was by no means his interest ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... de ce paladin, Lagardere, pair de d'Artagnan, pair de Cyrano, pair presque de Roland et d'Olivier. Et si je ne l'avais pas su, j'aurais pu l'apprendre dernierement en lisant ce livre aussi plein de charme que d'erudition, "Les Anciens Theatres de Paris" de M. Georges Cain. Mais je crois que cette verite est connue de peu de monde dans les pays ou se parle la langue anglaise, que quand on loue "Le Bossu" de Feval on doit aussi louer ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... ancestors of the Howards, the Plantagenets, and the Montmorencis," says Prue, surprising me with her erudition. "Have you any remoter ancestry, Mr. Sculpin?" she asks Minim, who only smiles compassionately upon the dear woman, while ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... boy. A letter is extant from him to Wolsey, written when he was nine years old, begging the cardinal to intercede with the king, "for an harness to exercise myself in arms according to my erudition in the Commentaries ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... applause of his contemporaries, Petrarch was not satisfied that he should enjoy this honour without passing through an ordeal as to his learning, for laurels and learning had been for one hundred years habitually associated in men's minds. The person whom Petrarch selected for his examiner in erudition was the King of Naples. Robert the Good, as he was in some respects deservedly called, was, for his age, a well-instructed man, and, for a king, a prodigy. He had also some common sense, but in classical ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... Morse lectures, I have purposely robbed my pages of all appearance of erudition, by using as few uncouth words as possible, by breaking up the matter into paragraphs of moderate length, by liberally introducing subject-headings in italics, and by relegating all notes to the appendix. Since ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... Portion" come the new Lectionary and the new Tables for finding Easter. Of these, the former is law already, except so far as respects the Lessons appointed for the proposed Feast of the Transfiguration. The Easter Tables are a monument to the erudition and accuracy of the late Dr. Francis Harison. The Tables in our present Standard run to the year 1899. Perhaps a "wholesome conservatism" ought to discover a tincture of impiety in any proposal to disturb them before the century ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... gentleman with a new hat on one side of his head, who might perhaps be about forty years old. The place was very dark, and the man was turning over the leaves of a ledger. A stranger to city ways might probably have said that he was idle, but he was no doubt filling his mind with that erudition which would enable him to earn his bread. On the other side of the desk there was a little boy copying letters. These were Mr. Sextus Parker,—commonly called Sexty Parker,—and his clerk. Mr. Parker was a gentleman ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... power of the constitution to sustain itself amid the ever-varying changes to which it is exposed, has been learned by common observation, as well by the peasant as by the man of erudition. The fact, that man, "made of one blood, can dwell" in all the varieties of climate, "on the face of the whole earth," and can sustain himself, without any change of organization, at one period on the burning sands of a Numidian desert, at another among the ice-bergs ...
— A Dissertation on the Medical Properties and Injurious Effects of the Habitual Use of Tobacco • A. McAllister
... Chatterer, I declare to all my kind Readers, as well as Hearers, that I never did make the least Pretension to Scholarship; and besides, the World must long have been so fully convinced of the "profound Erudition" of the Lieutenant-Governor of this Province, that it would be the highest Degree of Vanity in any Man to think of rivaling him as a Scholar. It was obvious to common Readers that "what comes from the King thro' his Minister, does not ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams
... Production of one of those Grecian Sophisters, who have imposed upon the World several spurious Works of this Nature. I speak this by way of Precaution, because I know there are several Writers, of uncommon Erudition, who would not fail to expose my Ignorance, if they caught me tripping in a Matter of so ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... Parnassus was Jonson's home. His art has too much effort about it, too much definite intention. His style lacks the charm of chance. Mr. Symonds is right also in the stress he lays on the extraordinary combination in Jonson's work of the most concentrated realism with encyclopaedic erudition. In Jonson's comedies London slang and learned scholarship go hand in hand. Literature was as living a thing to him as life itself. He used his classical lore not merely to give form to his verse, but to give flesh and blood to the persons of his plays. He could build up ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde |
