"Pedant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... now return to the dear flighty creature, and the sentence which she passes upon the Poets. She has a fling at Homer, whom the beauteous Harriet, in her dispute with the university pedant, had before criticized upon in a masterly manner, and like a good Englishwoman, from the authority of her godfather Deane, concluded, that our Milton has excelled him in the sublimity of his images, this, is a controversy which I shall not enter into, with so lovely a ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous
... A writing, Pedant! dost demand from me? Man, and man's plighted word, are these unknown to thee? Is't not enough, that by the word I gave, My doom for evermore is cast? Doth not the world in all its currents rave, And must ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... my dear Bessie, is naught but a miserable pedant, who loves nothing so well as hearing himself talk, and prating by the hour together on matters of law and religion, and on the divine right of kings. He is not the King such as England has been wont to know—a King to whom his subjects might gain access ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... forsooth in loue, I that haue beene loues whip? A verie Beadle to a humerous sigh: A Criticke, Nay, a night-watch Constable. A domineering pedant ore the Boy, Then whom no mortall so magnificent, This wimpled, whyning, purblinde waiward Boy, This signior Iunios gyant dwarfe, don Cupid, Regent of Loue-rimes, Lord of folded armes, Th' annointed soueraigne of sighes and groanes: Liedge ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... stranded on the ignorance of those who surrounded her, and found herself isolated as a sort of pedant; and as time went on, the narrowness of interests chafed her, and in like manner left her alone. As she grew past girlhood, the cui bono question had come to interfere with her ardour in study for its ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... works may be collected a system of civil and oeconomical prudence. Yet his real power is not shown in the splendour of particular passages, but by the progress of his fable, and the tenour of his dialogue; and he that tries to recommend him by select quotations, will succeed like the pedant in Hierocles, who, when he offered his house to sale, carried a brick in his ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... some studies, as all children do. When he emerged from the hands of Aunt Gillenormand, his grandfather confided him to a worthy professor of the most purely classic innocence. This young soul which was expanding passed from a prude to a vulgar pedant. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... Candide: only a Pedant Optimist, I think, which became the soubriquet of Maupertuis' Akakia Optimism; but I have not the book, and do not want ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... not unmixed with contempt. He and his sister Chichi had from childhood felt an instinctive hostility toward the cousins from Berlin. It annoyed him, too, to have his family everlastingly holding up as a model this pedant who only knew life as it is in books, and passed his existence investigating what men had done in other epochs, in order to draw conclusions in harmony with Germany's views. While young Desnoyers had ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... which would have made their possessor an Admirable Crichton, if genius had not elevated him into a far loftier category than Crichtons belong to. Rechberg plays well, and likes his game; but he is in Whist, as are all Germans, a thorough pedant. I remember an incident of his whist-life sufficiently amusing in its way, though, in relation, the reader loses what to myself is certainly the whole pungency of the story: I mean the character and nature of the person who imparted the anecdote to me, and ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... of literary English. He would slip, as it were, unconsciously, into foreign idioms and obsolete words. In America, where his name arouses no political prejudice, he is better judged. To the Englishman, at least to the pedant, he is still ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... courage, Moliere, this is true comedy." The learned Menage was the only member of the society who had the good sense to detect the drift; he perceived the snake in the grass. "We must now," said this sensible pedant (in a remote allusion to the fate of idolatry and the introduction of Christianity) to the poetical pedant, Chapelain, "follow the counsel which St. Remi gave to Clovis—we must burn all that we adored, and adore what we have burned." The success of the comedy was universal; ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... the rising men was Seward of New York, a Northern Whig, whose speech in opposition to the Fugitive Slave clause in Clay's Compromise had given him the leadership of the growing Anti-Slavery opinion of the North. He was soon to be joined by Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, null in judgment, a pedant without clearness of thought or vision, but gifted with a copious command of all the rhetoric of sectional hate. The place of Calhoun in the leadership of the South had been more and more assumed by a soldier ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... social culture has two extremes to avoid: the youth may, in his effort to prove his individuality, become vain and conceited, and fall into an attempt to appear interesting; or he may become slavishly dependent on conventional forms, a kind of social pedant. This state of nullity which contents itself with the mechanical polish of social formalism is ethically more dangerous than the tendency to a marked individuality, for it betrays emptiness; while the effort towards ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... gained. It is not uncustomary in those who have excelled in scholarship to despise those who have excelled merely in sympathetic understanding of the human race. But in the military services, though there are niches for the pedant, character is at all times at least as vital as intellect, and the main rewards go to him who can make other men feel ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... her fine hazel eyes, so anxious and perturbed her entire being, that she appeared almost ugly. Not only so, but added to impatience and anger there seemed something like repugnance, disgust, directed at the miserable pedant who under the fires of womanly wrath blinked and smiled, but had ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... constitutes proof; he saw all fallacies and discovered at a glance illusions in logic that had long been palmed off on the world as truth. He saw the gulf that lies between coincidence and sequence, and hastened the day when the old-time pedant with his mighty tomes and tiresome sermons about nothing should be no more. And so today, in the Year of Grace Nineteen Hundred, the man who writes must have something to say, and he who speaks must have a message. "Coleridge," says Principal Shairp, "was the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... worked a pretty enough havoc with fine-spun rhetoric to raise the wig off a pedant's head, Jean and I thought we read some sense in ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... Castle of Indolence to him, that saved him from a too early initiation into the seductive distractions of a refined and luxurious society, would have preserved Coningsby from the puerile profligacy of a college life, or from being that idol of private tutors, a young pedant. It was that noble ambition, the highest and the best, that must be born in the heart and organised in the brain, which will not let a man be content, unless his intellectual power is recognised by his race, and desires that it should contribute to their welfare. It is the heroic ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... exaggeration attributed to me. In this article it is said that the Poles will one day be as proud of me as the Germans are of Mozart, which is palpable nonsense. But that is not all, the critic says further: "That if I had fallen into the hands of a pedant or a Rossinist (what a stupid expression!) I could not have become what I am." Now, although I am as yet nothing, he is right in so far that my performance would be still less than it actually is if I had ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... does it define the "Invisible" one? And what does "faithful" mean? What if I thought Cromwell and Pierre Leroux infinitely more faithful men in their way, and better members of the "Invisible Church," than the torturer-pedant Laud, or the ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... common instincts of sensuality which oscillate between the conventicle and the tavern as the poles of duty and pleasure, or, more pathetically still, he may attempt to bring the code of the observatory to bear immediately on the vagaries of the untameable world, and suffer the pedant's disaster. A martyr to the good that is to be, he has voluntarily maimed himself "for the kingdom of Heaven's sake"—if, perchance, the kingdom of Heaven might come by observation. The enthusiasm of his self-denial shows itself in his unavailing struggle to ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... futile than presumptuous to lay down exact formulae as to what the artist ought and ought not to do. No modern critic is likely to waste his time in framing rules and canons, which can be so easily handled by the pedant and stand condemned by the first great man who defies them. Aristotle did it once and for all for the Greek drama, and when the perspective of life widened and new forms of literature grew up to compete with drama, his rules ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... made as good show of argument as he could, but was evidently no match for his antagonist. He was soon vanquished in the wordy warfare. Well he might be, for it appeared that the stranger was no less a personage than Peter Rythovius, a doctor of divinity, a distinguished pedant of Louvain, a relation of a bishop and himself a Church dignitary. This learned professor, quite at home in his subject, was easily triumphant, while the poor dissenter, more accustomed to elevate the hearts of his hearers than to perplex their heads, sank prostrate ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... without excusing himself; so that when he had them, he enjoyed them without affectation, and when he had them not, he did not want them. No one could ever say of him that he was either a sophist or a [home-bred] flippant slave or a pedant; but every one acknowledged him to be a man ripe, perfect, above flattery, able to manage his own and other men's affairs. Besides this, he honored those who were true philosophers, and he did not reproach those who pretended to be philosophers, nor yet ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... cannot be urged against him; nor does this imposing display of learning indicate a pedant. Lyly had nothing in common with the spirit of his old friend Gabriel Harvey, whom indeed he laughed at. There is a story that Watson and Nash invited a company together to sup at the Nag's Head in Cheapside, and to discuss the pedantries of ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... he deserves great credit also. Peter Petersen Syv (1631-1702) was a very able philologist, who was also a minor poet of ambition. In 1695 he reprinted and edited Vedel's text, adding 100 more kjaempeviser which had been unknown to Vedel. But his work was not so well done; Syv was something of a pedant, and unfortunately either too critical or not critical enough. He ventured to correct the irregularities of the ballads, and not seldom has spoiled them. He bore the proud title of Philologer Royal of Denmark, ...
— Grimhild's Vengeance - Three Ballads • Anonymous
... shame, The cause unknown, yet still to me the same, Warn'd by some friendly hint, perchance, retir'd, With this submission all her rage expired. From dreaded pangs that feeble Foe to save, She hush'd her young resentment, and forgave. Or, if my Muse a Pedant's portrait drew, POMPOSUS' [5] virtues are but known to few: 90 I never fear'd the young usurper's nod, And he who wields must, sometimes, feel the rod. If since on Granta's failings, known to all Who share the converse of a college hall, She ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... his school of theology and exegetics became the most famous one in Europe. His most important work, an interlinear gloss on the Scriptures, was regarded as authoritative throughout the later Middle Ages. He died in 1117. That he was something of a pedant is probable, but Abelard's picture of him is certainly very ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... a blessed thing to be in the open air again—to be quit of all their niggling and naggling, to be quit of that pompous old fool the Rector, and of that hypocrite Joliffe, and of that pedant of a doctor! Why does he want to waste money on cementing the vaults? It's only digging up pestilences; and they won't spend a farthing on the organ. Not a penny on the Father Smith, clear and sweet-voiced as a mountain brook. Oh," he cried, "it's ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... self-conscious absurdity, as an anachronism, as a life-long prisoner of etiquette. However, with the assistance of his cousin—who, incidentally, was also his heir—the prince most opportunely died. Oh, pedant that you are! in any event he was interred. And so, the prince was gathered to his fathers, and his cousin Augustus reigned in his stead. Until a certain politician who had been privy to this pious fraud——" The tutor shrugged. "How can I word it ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... in a James, in his parasites, in his Ministers, for absorption in their one essential quality, their ability, as holding headsman and gaolers in a leash, to keep alive or kill, to bind or let loose. To this age James is an awkward, ludicrous pedant. The spectacle of Ralegh's veneration is exasperating. For Ralegh he was a symbol of sovereign authority, a mysterious keeper of the scales of fate. He represented for Ralegh a power above courts of law, and entitled to set right their mistakes ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... large; what does it matter how his own countrymen pronounce the letters? Shall we insist on the French pronouncing Newton without that final tong which they never fail to give him? They would be wise enough to laugh at us if we did. We remember that a pedant who was insisting on all the pronunciations being retained, was met by a maxim in contradiction, invented at the moment, and fathered upon Kaen-foo-tzee,[612] an authority which he was challenged to dispute. Whom ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... left no trace upon her manner of painting. The genre pictures, in which she excels, clearly show the influence of the old Dutch school. A writer in "Moderne Kunst" says, in general, that she shows us real human beings under the "precieuses ridicules," the languishing gallants and the pedant, and often succeeds in individualizing all these with the sharpness of a Chodowiecki, though at times she is ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... wrote, 'I passed some days with men of learning, whose names want no advancement from my commemoration, or with women of elegance, which, perhaps, disclaims a pedant's praise.' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... Gascon French; and, in spite of his endless quotations, began the crusade against pedantry. It was not, however, till a century later, that the reform became complete in France, and then crossed the Channel. Milton is still a pedant in his prose, and not seldom even in his great poem. Dryden was the first Englishman who wrote perfectly easy prose, and he owed his style and turn of thought to his French reading. His learning ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... effect of their little declaration of independence of the united state—the phrase sounds familiar somehow!—by staying out five or six minutes longer, and going in half an hour later; two things only the merest pedant would declare incompatible. But it kept the servants up, and Miss Dickenson had ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... going to hire a footman—which I am much too poor to do—and that Monsieur de Chavannes had applied for the place. What on earth have I to do with the young gentleman's character or principles? I know that he is very gentlemanlike, and is neither a coxcomb nor a pedant, which is refreshing ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... themselves by projecting the Scriblerus Club, a body which never had, it would seem, any definite organization, but was held to exist for the prosecution of a design never fully executed. Martinus Scriblerus was the name of an imaginary pedant—a precursor and relative of Dr. Dryasdust—whose memoirs and works were to form a satire upon stupidity in the guise of learning. The various members of the club were to share in the compilation; and if such ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... his talk is to profitable conversation what the stone is to the pulp of the peach, what the cob is to the kernels on an ear of Indian corn. Once more: Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant, with all his knowledge and valuable qualities, and will "cavil on the ninth part of a hair," if it will give him a chance to show off ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... critics may praise their subtle and elegant brevity; yet Dr. Bentley (Dissertation upon Phalaris, p. 48) might justly, though quaintly observe, that "you feel, by the emptiness and deadness of them, that you converse with some dreaming pedant, with his elbow ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... lowered. Her wide-open eyes, shone with extraordinary fire, she grew red and pale by turns, and stirred convulsively in her chair. How admirable is the Italian organization, which can understand poetry without needing a pedant to explain ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee
... own loving heart! I must first meet Major Alan Hawke, and send him away to be busied on some apparently important duty, which will keep him away from old Andrew Fraser. We know the old professor's cunning character. Miser and pedant, he is but a shriveled parchment edition of his heartless, dead brother. We must not alarm him. We have already traced the insured packet to his hands. Now, he properly has the custody of the dead nabob's will. He may soon ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... itself!' he cried, from the depths of his heart. 'I feel as if I had been the merest pedant and ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... had to hide himself under some disguise, a name, 'Elia,' taken literally as a pen name, or some more roundabout borrowing, as of an old fierce critic's, Joseph Ritson's, to heighten and soften the energy of marginal annotations on a pedant scholar. In the letter in which he announces the first essays of Elia, he writes to Barron Field: 'You shall soon have a tissue of truth and fiction, impossible to be extricated, the interleavings shall be so delicate, the partitions perfectly ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... generally—and who the deuce can be at the bother of your pragmatical preparations! I am sure it might be said of you, as it was of James the First, of most pacific and pedantic memory, that you are 'Captain of arts and Clerk of arms'—at least you are a very pedant in gunnery." ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... and, with reverence the most profound, began to address him in Latin; but, turning quick towards him, he gaily said, "Monsieur, j'ai l'honneur de representer Ciceron, le grand Ciceron, pere de sa patrie! mais quoique j'ai cet honneur-la, je ne suit pas pedant!—mon dieu, Monsieur, je ne parle que le Francois dans la bonne compagnie!" And, politely bowing, he ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... booke-knowledge in these cases is both disgraced and condemned, euery one fayling in his experiments, because he is guided by no home-bredde, but a stranger; as if to reade the english tongue there were none better then an Italian Pedant. This to auoide, I will neither begge ayde nor authoritie from strangers, but reuerence them as worthies and fathers of their ...
— The English Husbandman • Gervase Markham
... they looked upon it as a haunt of demons, and no better than a pagan shrine. The monks, the nuns, and the populace publicly proclaimed their detestation of the union; and their opposition was inflamed by the bigotry of an ambitious pedant, who, under the name of Georgius Scholarius, acted as a warm partisan of the union at the Council of Florence, and under the ecclesiastical name of Gennadius is known in history as the subservient patriarch of Sultan Mahomet II. On returning from Italy, he made ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... choose an able master for his son—'a man of profound learning, possessed of both the ancient languages, whose method of teaching is the finest and most time-saving that has yet been tried; a gentleman withal, with nothing of the pedant in him.'[6] The boy was lucky also in the companion of his studies, a cousin, Cristoforo Tasso, who had come from Bergamo to profit by the ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... The secret history of his own times, And fashions of the world when he was young: How England slept out three and twenty years, While Carr and Villiers rul'd the baby king: The costly fancies of the pedant's reign, Balls, feastings, huntings, shows in allegory, And Beauties of the court ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... Legion of Honour for a ring presented by this Emperor to one of his ancestors, though his nobility is well known not to be of sixty years' standing. But woe to him who dared to suggest any doubt about what Napoleon believed, or seemed to believe! A German professor, Richter, more a pedant than a courtier, and more sincere than wise, addressed a short memorial to Bonaparte, in which he proved, from his intimacy with antiquity, that most of the pretended relics of Charlemagne were impositions on the credulous; that the portrait was a drawing of this ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... imbecility, to which the trifling of schoolmen and academicians is as nothing. It is to solve the enigma of Dante's works by imagining for him a character in which it is hard to say which predominates, the pedant, mountebank, or infidel. After that we may read Voltaire's sneers with patience, and even enter with gravity on the examination of Father Hardouin's historic doubts. The fanaticism of an outraged liberalism, produced ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... and diplomatic movements; briefly, as far as was then possible, to be an incarnate blue-book. He was to study literature and appreciate art, though he was carefully to avoid the excess which makes the pedant or the virtuoso. He was to cultivate a good style in writing and speaking, and even to learn German. Chesterfield's prophecy of a revolution in France (though, I fancy, a little overpraised) shows at least that he was a serious observer ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... hatred and anger made an orator, who wielded in masterly style the plough as well as the sword, who with his narrow, but original and sound common sense ordinarily hit the nail on the head—was this young unimpassioned pedant from whose lips dropped scholastic wisdom and who was everywhere seen sitting book in hand, this philosopher who understood neither the art of war nor any other art whatever, this cloud-walker in the realm of abstract morals. Yet he attained to moral and thereby ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Madame Dupin's service as "intendant." The serio-comic figure of this personage, so graphically drawn by George Sand herself in the memoirs of her early life, will never be forgotten by any reader of those reminiscences. Pedant, she says, was written in every line of his countenance and every movement that he made. He was possessed of some varied learning, much narrow prejudice, and a violent, crotchety temper, but had proved ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... close-running mate of Archbishop Laud, who hunted heretics and cropped the ears of a thousand Puritans. Noy is described for us as a law-pedant, finding legal precedent for anything that royalty wished to do. Noy devised the ship-money scheme, and then died before his law went into effect: killed by the hand of Providence, the Puritans said, who uttered prayers of thankfulness for his taking off, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... philosophers. But I must say it seems to me to be a finer thing to work for a future in which one knows one will not participate oneself than for one in which one's personal happiness is involved. I have always sympathized with Comte, pedant as he was, in the remark he made when he ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... said to me, "you are nothing but an old pedant. I always suspected as much. The smallest little ragamuffin who goes along the road with his shirt-tail sticking out through a hole in his pantaloons knows more about me than all the old spectacled folks in your Institutes and your Academies. To know is ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... in an instant she returned and, at her bidding, he held the shining glass before her, she patted his cheeks with their thin, fair, pointed beard, and called him her faithful little Wolf, her clear, stupid pedant and Satan in person, who would fill her mind ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... I love most in the world, I explained myself badly (in my last letter). I spoke to you of distractions and of nothing more. I am not such a pedant as to prefer phrases to living beings. The further I go the more my sensibility is exasperated. But the basis is solid and the thing goes on. And then, after the Prussian war there is ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... not a series of nursery-rules for man—formal, didactic droppings of a pedant's tongue. Homiletics is the appeal of man to man, for the welfare of his soul, and the true progress of mankind. Exegesis is not a matter of Hebrew or Greek alone. It includes the spiritual interpretation of the great problems of the race. Homer, Tennyson, Browning, and Dante are exegetes, no ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... on his companions; they did not suspect that this austere man, who came so punctually to the lectures in a wide village sledge with a pair of horses, was inwardly almost a child. He appeared to them to be a queer kind of pedant; they did not care for him, and made no overtures to him, and he avoided them. During the first two years he spent in the university, he only made acquaintance with one student, from whom he took lessons in Latin. This student Mihalevitch by name, an enthusiast and a poet, ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... a detail yet his generalisations were marvellous. He had, said Mr. Eccles, an intuitive mind. He had, too, read more than was realised, partly because his carelessness and contempt for scholarship misled. Where the pedant would have referred and quoted and cross-referred, he went dashing on, throwing out ideas from his abundance and caring little if among his wealth were a few faults of fact or interpretation. "Abundance" was a word much used of his work just now, and in the field of literary ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... alone distinguishes the civilized man from the barbarian, distinguishes a nation from a horde—respect for the word once given. Yes, it is war, but war the theory of which could only be made up by such pedant megalomaniacs as the Julius von Hartmanns, the Bernhardis, and the Treitschkes; the theory which accords to the elect people the right to uproot from the laws and customs of war what centuries of humanity, of Christianity, and chivalry have at great pains ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... against Napoleon, old as Luther's appeal to the German Princes in 1520. The years following Leipsic were consumed by German Liberalism in efforts to invent a constitution like that of England. It was the happy period of the doctrinaire, of the pedant, and of the student of 1688 and the pupils of Sieyes. Heine's bitter address to Germany, "Dream on, thou son of Folly, dream on!" sprang from a chagrin which every sincere German, Prussian, Bavarian, Wuertemberger, or Rheinlander felt not less deeply. The Revolution of 1848, the blood ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... look out for a copyist. Madame Wesendonck has given me a gold pen of indestructible power, which has once more turned me into a caligraphic pedant. The scores will be my most perfect masterpiece of caligraphy. One cannot fly from his destiny. Meyerbeer years ago admired nothing so much in my scores as the neat writing. This act of admiration has been my curse; I must write neat scores as long ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... and from the papers set in any Natural Sciences Tripos, not to speak of scholarship examinations of every kind, it would be possible to extract question after question that ought never to have been set, referring to things that need never have been taught, and knowledge that no one but a pedant would dream of carrying in his head for ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... "model of human life," to quote Fielding's own descriptive phrase of his book, those which tell us most of their author are that worthy, authoritative, humourous clergyman, Dr Harrison; the good Sergeant Atkinson; and that fiery pedant Colonel Bath, with his kind heart hidden under a ferocious passion for calling out every man whom he conceived to have slighted his honour. Dr Harrison does not win quite the same place in our hearts as the man whom Thackeray calls 'dear Parson Adams'; his cassock rustles ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... peaceful man avoiding contention, thou didst never answer this blustering Franck, but wentest quietly about thy quiet Lea, and left him his roaring Brora and windy Assynt. How could this noisy man know thee—and know thee he did, having argued with thee in Stafford—and not love Isaak Walton? A pedant angler, I call him, a plaguy angler, so let him huff away, and turn we to thee and to thy sweet charm in ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... languages of the earth; and when any such resemblance or analogy was observed, it was commonly supposed that that base-born slave, the vulgar tongue, had dared to make a clumsy copy of something peculiarly belonging to the twin tyrants who ruled all the dialects of the world with a pedant's rod. ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... have made no attempt to correct the tags of Latinity in this play. Mrs. Behn openly confessed she knew no Latin, and she was ill supplied here. I do not conceive that the words are intentionally faulty and grotesque. Lady Knowell is a pedant, but not ignorant. ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... Francois de Guise, who both distrusted her, the closest and ablest enemy of Catherine de' Medici was her daughter-in-law, Queen Mary, a fair little creature, malicious as a waiting-maid, proud as a Stuart wearing three crowns, learned as an old pedant, giddy as a school-girl, as much in love with her husband as a courtesan is with her lover, devoted to her uncles whom she admired, and delighted to see the king share (at her instigation) the regard she had for them. A mother-in-law is always a person whom the daughter-in-law ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... a month later, by Queen Elizabeth is an event on which all English historians are fond of dwelling. The pedant, on being presented to that imperious and accomplished sovereign, deported himself with the same ludicrous arrogance which had characterised him at the Hague. His Latin oration, which had been duly drawn up for him by the Chancellor of Sweden, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... to a German Brigadier-General on behalf of some homeless women and children, the Prussian martinet—half pedant and half poltroon—answered her with a quotation from Nietzsche to the effect that "Pity is a waste of feeling—a moral parasite injurious to the health." She early felt the cruel and iron will of the invader, but, nothing daunted, she proceeded in the arduous ...
— The Case of Edith Cavell - A Study of the Rights of Non-Combatants • James M. Beck
... are not simply to follow the destinies of a hero and heroine. The person mostly in evidence is Hans Sachs, a sort of heavy father, who has some of the most glorious music. The young lover comes along—Walther—and tries to win Eva by gaining the prize in a contest of minstrels; Beckmesser, a pedant, opposes him. Sachs supports him, and he wins. Every note of the music can readily be understood. There are regular set numbers provided for in the structure of the libretto, so as to come in naturally; there is even a sextet—which I have often heard encored—and the opera ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... nemophilist, I protest against botany. A flower worth a five-mile walk and a wet foot is worthy of something better than dissection with the Linnaean classification, afterward adding insult to injury. The botanist is not a discoverer; he is only a pedant. He finds out nothing about the plant; he serves it as we might fancy a monster doing, who should take this number of the "Atlantic" and sit down, not to read it, not to inhale the delicate fragrance of its thought, but to count its articles, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... numbering the syllables and tabulating the results of a computation which shall attest in exact sequence the quantity, order, and proportion of single and double endings, of rhyme and blank verse, of regular lines and irregular, to be traced in each play by the horny eye and the callous finger of a pedant. "I am ill at these numbers"; those in which I have sought to become an expert are numbers of another sort; but having, from wellnigh the first years I can remember, made of the study of Shakespeare the chief intellectual ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... was now off on grievances of his own connected with the washing of his shirts, which somehow led to the frequent visits of Hughling Elliot, who was a bore, a pedant, a dry stick of a man, and yet Ridley couldn't simply point at the door and tell him to go. The truth of it was, they saw too many people. And so on and so on, more conjugal talk pattering softly and unintelligibly, until they were both ready to ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... interested in the welfare of his subjects and allies, with enlightened ideas for the time upon public economy. It is difficult, in the man conversing thus amicably and sensibly with the Dutch ambassador, to realise the shrill pedant shrieking against Vorstius, the crapulous comrade of Carrs and Steenies, the fawning solicitor of Spanish marriages, the "pepperer" and hangman of Puritans, the butt and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... departments of poetry, was made by the Italians. The Sophonisba of Trissino, which belongs to the beginning of the sixteenth century, is generally named as the first regular tragedy. This literary curiosity I cannot boast of having read, but from other sources I know the author to be a spiritless pedant. Those even of the learned, who are most zealous for the imitation of the ancients, pronounce it a dull laboured work, without a breath of true poetical spirit; we may therefore, without further examination, safely appeal to their judgment ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... impertinence, "Perfectly right as it stood," came to hand; kindling the King into hot provocation; "extreme displeasure, AUSSERSTES MISFALLEN," as his Answer bore: "Rectify me all that straightway, and relieve these Arnolds of their injuries!" You Pettifogging Pedant Knaves, bring that Arnold matter to order, will ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... open, sincere; A stranger to flatt'ry, a stranger to fear; Who scatter'd around wit and humour at will, Whose daily bons mots half a column would fill; A Scotchman, from pride and from prejudice free, A scholar, yet surely no pedant was he. ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... all ages. With the whole sum of the idolatry which affects us at his name, the mass of readers peruse, without amusement, the characters formed on the extravagances of temporary fashion; and the Euphuist Don Armado, the pedant Holofernes, even Nym and Pistol, are read with little pleasure by the mass of the public, being portraits of which we cannot recognize the humour, because the originals no longer exist. In like manner, while the distresses of Romeo and Juliet ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... your permission," said the old pedant loftily. "In fact, some will be set off this evening, and some to-morrow, wherever ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... ever-present tendency to disparage others, especially the fortunate and the successful, are manifestations of this type of superiority seeking. Half the humor of the world is the pleasure, produced by a technique, of feeling superior to the boor, the pedant, the fool, the new rich, the pompous, the over-dignified, etc. Half, more than half, of the conversation that goes on in boudoir, dining room, over the drinks and in the smoking room, is criticism, playful ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... plunge violently into the scurrilous quarrels of the day, and as he was matched with wittier and more popular antagonists, he has come down to us as a foolish pretender, or at least as a dull and stupid scholar who knew little of the real value of the books he was always ready to quote, like the pedant of the comedies, or Shakespere's schoolmaster Holofernes. Further, he was one who, with his classical learning, had little belief in the resources of his mother tongue, and he was one of the earliest and most confident supporters of a plan ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... eh?" said he, after a little pause. "I'm rather well acquainted with his method, and the fact that he's been given charge of the coroner's examination isn't a very hopeful sign. He's a sort of pedant, who has come to think that the mixture of medical learning and knowledge of police conventions which he possesses makes ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... as the language of the schools in the market. The mere man of the world, who insists that no other terms but such as occur in common conversation should be employed in a scientific disquisition, and with no greater precision, is as truly a pedant as the man of letters, who either over-rating the acquirements of his auditors, or misled by his own familiarity with technical or scholastic terms, converses at the wine-table with his mind fixed on his museum or laboratory; even though the latter pedant instead of desiring ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... dark-grey walls and a red-gabled roof, for it was a mansion of the kind which Russia builds for her military settlers and for German colonists. A noticeable circumstance was the fact that the taste of the architect had differed from that of the proprietor—the former having manifestly been a pedant and desirous of symmetry, and the latter having wished only for comfort. Consequently he (the proprietor) had dispensed with all windows on one side of the mansion, and had caused to be inserted, in their place, only a small aperture ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... but injudiciously in each." The chronicle of this club was found in 'The Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus,' which is thought to have been written entirely by Arbuthnot, and which describes the education of a learned pedant's son. Its humor may be appreciated by means of the citation given below. The first book of 'Scriblerus' appeared six years after Arbuthnot's death, when it was included in the second volume of Alexander Pope's works (1741). Pope said that from the 'Memoirs ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... pedant waste his oil, With the soldier all is sport; Let your blockheads make a coil In the cloister or the court; Let them fatten in their stall, We can ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... Stile, Language, Expression, and the like, without taking much notice of the Contrivance and Management, of the Plots, Characters, etc." (Plautus, sig. a1). The remarkable fact about Echard's discussion of these matters, despite his dependence at times upon that arch-pedant, the Abbe D'Aubignac,[9] is the critical intelligence with which he puts forward his argument. Unlike many neoclassical critics, Echard keeps his eyes fixed firmly on the strengths and weaknesses of Restoration ...
— Prefaces to Terence's Comedies and Plautus's Comedies (1694) • Lawrence Echard
... "the prettiest pedant in the world," was thus paid out for his intrigues against La ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... in disuse of arms, but in mistaken methods. For a quarter of a century the civilised world has tended more and more to become a drill-ground, but the spirit dominating it has been that of the pedant. There has been more exercise and less reality. The training, especially of officers, becomes increasingly scholastic. This, and the deterioration consequent on it, are not merely modern phenomena. ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... theological matters, was extensive; and he was already a voluminous author on subjects which ranged from predestination to tobacco. But his shrewdness and learning only left him, in the phrase of Henry the Fourth of France, "the wisest fool in Christendom." He had in fact the temper of a pedant, a pedant's conceit, a pedant's love of theories, and a pedant's inability to bring his theories into any relation with actual facts. It was this fatal defect that marred his political abilities. As a statesman he had shown no little capacity in his smaller realm; his cool humour and good temper ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... insists on her suckling it herself. You ask my advice on this matter; and, to give it you frankly, I really think that Mr ——'s demand is unreasonable, as his wife's constitution is tender, and her temper fretful. A true philosopher would consider these circumstances; but a pedant is always throwing his system in your face, and applies it equally to all things, times and places, just like a taylor who would make a coat out of his own head, without any regard to the bulk or figure of the person that must wear it. All those fine-spun arguments that he has drawn from nature, ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... say? What honour to the other does this imply! When one might challenge the proudest pedant of them all, to say he has been disciplined into greater improvement, than she had made from the mere force of genius and application. But it is demonstrable to all who know how to make observations on their acquaintance ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... Faust. Pedant! will writing gain thy faith, alone? In all thy life, no man, nor man's word hast thou known? Is't not enough that I the fatal word That passes on my future days have spoken? The world-stream raves and rushes (hast not heard?) And shall a promise hold, unbroken? Yet this delusion haunts the ...
— Faust • Goethe
... a rhetorician, A painter, pedant, a geometrician, A dancer on the ropes and a physician; All things the hungry Greek exactly knows, And bid him go to heaven, to ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... with uplifted eyes, his gaze bent on the bright colors of the floating bubble, has voiced it from a thousand platforms. The earnest youth grinding at the academic mill has dreamed it in the pauses of his studious labor. The impassioned pedant has written it in heavy prose smothering its brightness in the dull web of his own thought. The brilliant imaginative mind has woven it into romance, making its colors brighter still with ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... young men of his time. He was also spoken of as a superior person, inheriting all his father's intellectual gifts, and having the reputation of being singularly free from the vices of profligate youth. He was neither prig nor pedant, and he was very popular in the best society; but he was not ashamed to let it be seen that his ambition soared higher than the fashionable world of turf and stable, cards and ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... his writings only one passage can be cited which even faintly suggests a coincidence with any in Shakspere; and in that the suggestion is faint indeed. In Bruno's ill-famed comedy IL CANDELAJO, Octavio asks the pedant Manfurio, "Che e la materia di vostri versi," and the pedant replies, "Litterae, syllabae, dictio et oratio, partes propinquae et remotae," on which Octavio again asks: "Io dico, quale e il suggetto et il proposito."[131] So far as it goes this is something of a parallel to Polonius's question ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... knowledge. I looked with contempt on the tribes painted on the church walls, which I once so much admired, and on the carved chimneypiece in the Squire's Hall. I found my old master to be a poor ignorant pedant; and, in short, the whole scene to be extremely changed for the worse. This I could not help mentioning, because though it be of no consequence in itself, yet it is certain, that most prejudices are contracted and retained by this narrow way of thinking, which, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... Little secret plans as to what they were to read about, and think about, and pray about on certain days of the week and at certain hours of the day and the night. You must not call the father an old pedant, for the fact is, it was the son who was the pedant if there was one in that happy house. The two intimate friends had a word between them they called agenda. And nobody but themselves knew where they had borrowed that uncouth word, what language it was, or ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... pedagogue, perhaps something of a pedant, a hot partisan, a special pleader; but few lives can show a more dignified and noble end. If it was the truth he had written this old man cared for nothing else, not even for that fame which is the last infirmity ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... general than a novel, and perhaps is little more than a ponderous dissertation on Johnson's favourite theme, the "vanity of human wishes." As to its actual merits, Johnson's contemporaries differed widely, some proclaiming him a pompous pedant with a passion for words of six syllables and more, others delighting in those passages in which weighty meaning was illustrated with splendour ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... with genuine literary emotion: the passion of the pedant). Caesar: once in ten generations of men, the world gains an ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... whilom servitor of Exeter College, Oxford (commonly called Sir Vindex, after the fashion of the times), was, in those days, master of the grammar-school of Bideford. He was, at root, a godly and kind-hearted pedant enough; but, like most schoolmasters in the old flogging days, had his heart pretty well hardened by long, baneful license to inflict pain at will on those weaker than himself; a power healthful enough for the victim (for, doubtless, flogging is the best of all punishments, being ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... Daniel Boon, formerly a hunter"; nominally written by Boon himself, in 1784, but in reality by John Filson, the first Kentucky historian,—a man who did history good service, albeit a true sample of the small hedge-school pedant. The old pioneer's own language would have been far better than that which Filson used; for the latter's composition is a travesty of Johnsonese in its most aggravated form. For Filson see Durrett's admirable "Life" in ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... booksellers, by the derision of fools, by the insincerity of patrons, by that bread which is the bitterest of all food, by those stairs which are the most toilsome of all paths, by that deferred hope which makes the heart sick. Through all these things the ill-dressed, coarse, ungainly pedant had struggled manfully up to eminence and command. It was natural that, in the exercise of his power, he should be "eo immitior, quia toleraverat," that, though his heart was undoubtedly generous and humane, his demeanour in society should be harsh and despotic. For severe distress he had sympathy, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... young gentleman of Odo's rank to be attended at the Academy not only by a body-servant but by a private governor or pedant, whose business it was to overlook his studies, attend him abroad, and have an eye to the society he frequented. The old Marquess of Donnaz had sent his daughter, by Odo's hand, a letter recommending her to select ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... hall could be heard in the stillness the old clock, that now lifted up its voice with unwonted emphasis, as if, unnoticed through the bustling week, Sunday was its vantage ground, to proclaim to mortals the swift flight of time. And if the old pedant performed the task with something of an ostentatious precision, it was because in that house nothing else put on official airs, and the clock felt the responsibility of doing ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... was as far gone as all the other male guests, played with Mengs's children. There was nothing of the pedant about this philosopher; he loved children and young people, and his cheerful disposition made him delight in all kinds ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... to live by my goods; and I hope you will be pleased to allow some difference between a neat fresh piece, piping hot out of the classicks, and old threadbare worn-out stuff that has past through every pedant's mouth and been as common at the universities as ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... the solution of the eternal riddle. Would it be a greater and more guilty folly than the happy carelessness of the Little Countess? We shall see. In the meantime, retain, for my sake, that ground-work of melancholy upon which you weave your own gentle mirth; for, thank God! you are not a pedant; you can live, you can laugh, and even laugh aloud; but thy soul is sad unto death, and that is only why I love unto death ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... I lingered somewhat long over the schooldays at Cowan Bridge and that I found the Brussels period dull; M. Heger struck me as a tiresome pedant, and I wondered how Charlotte could ever have put up with him. There was a great deal about Branwell that I could not understand at all, and so forgot. And I skipped all the London part, and Charlotte's literary letters. I had a very ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... down those words. But in this question of fairy tales my immediate point is, not how near he was to hell, but how very far off he was from fairyland. That notion about the hero with a magic sword being the superman with a magic superiority is the caprice of a pedant; no child, boy, or man ever felt it in the story of Jack the Giant Killer. Obviously the moral is all the other way. Jack's fairy sword and invisible coat are clumsy expedients for enabling him to fight at all with something which is by nature stronger. They are a rough, savage substitute ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... every natural fact. The depth of his perception found likeness of law throughout Nature, and I know not any genius who so swiftly inferred universal law from the single fact. He was no pedant of a department. His eye was open to beauty, and his ear to music. He found these, not in rare conditions, but wheresoever he went. He thought the best of music was in single strains; and he found poetic suggestion in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... know what they were for. She saw underneath them the words—drunkard—idler—glutton, etc. etc. She very soon remarked that the drunkard resembled the coachman, the cross and meddling person the cook, the pedant her own teacher, and thus she proved ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... the consul, should go and leave the care of his commonwealth to busy himself idly about her; and after him your Diogenes Laertius, the biographer, and your Theodorus Gaza, the philosopher, and your Argiropilus, the emperor, and your Bessario, the cardinal, and your Politian, the pedant, and your Budaeus, the judge, and your Lascaris, the ambassador, and the devil and all of those you call lovers of wisdom; whose number, it seems, was not thought great enough already, but lately your Scaliger, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais |
