"Precocity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... When eighty years old, Jeremy gave anecdotes of his infancy to his biographer, Bowring, who says that their accuracy was confirmed by contemporary documents, and proved his memory to be as wonderful as his precocity. Although the child was physically puny, his intellectual development was amazing. Before he was two he burst into tears at the sight of his mother's chagrin upon his refusal of some offered dainty. ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... of 'Polyolbion,' was born in the parish of Atherston, in Warwickshire, about the year 1563. He was the son of a butcher, but displayed such precocity that several persons of quality, such as Sir Walter Aston and the Countess of Bedford, patronised him. In his childhood he was eager to know what strange kind of beings poets were; and on coming to Oxford, (if, indeed, he did study there,) is said to have importuned his tutor to make him, if possible, ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... father, and the extremest zeal and warmth of his adoration was given to his son Charles James. The child was from the first precocious, alert, and gifted beyond his years, and the father fostered and flattered the precocity with a kind of worship that proved, as it was bound to prove, disastrous. It seems to have been Henry Fox's deliberate belief that the best way to bring up a spirited, gifted, headstrong child was to gratify every wish, surrender to every whim, ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... usual addresses to subscribers and the liveliness natural to family news-columns. The composition is smooth and the manner entertaining, and there is abundance of good spirits and fun of a boyish sort. The paper shows the literary spirit and taste in its very earliest bud; but no precocity of talent distinguished it, though doubtless the thought of authorship fed on its tender leaves. Such experiments belong to the life of growing boys where education is common and literary facility is thought to be a distinction and sign ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... of herself and Alfred she wrote; then, Alfred faded in the background; herself and a certain, new comer prevailed; one Alfred Fanshawe de Bassompierre de Hamal began to reign in his father's stead. There were great boastings about this personage, extravagant amplifications upon miracles of precocity, mixed with vehement objurgations against the phlegmatic incredulity with which I received them. I didn't know "what it was to be a mother;" "unfeeling thing that I was, the sensibilities of the maternal heart were Greek and Hebrew to me," and so on. In due course of nature this young gentleman ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... often figure thus in popular tales: readers of Rabelais will remember his story of the Fool and the Cook; and there is a familiar example of a boy's precocity in the story of the Stolen Purse—"Craft and Malice of Women," or the Seven Wazirs, vol. vi. of ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the soil—not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements and modes of ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... serious and thoughtful and loving beyond the usual capacities of childhood; perhaps her solitary condition and habits of constant intercourse with one so grave as Mordaunt, and who always, when not absent on his excursions of charity, loved her to be with him, had given to her mind a precocity of feeling, and tinctured the simplicity of infancy with what ought to have been the colours of after years. She was not inclined to the sports of her age; she loved, rather, and above all else, to sit by Mordaunt's side and silently pore over some books ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in honor of Hercules. He composed a tragedy on the story of Oedipus. His passionate attachment to Aurelia in after-years shows that between mother and child the relations had been affectionate and happy. But there is nothing to indicate that there was any early precocity of talent; and leaving Caesar to his grammar and his exercises, we will proceed with the occurrences which he must have heard talked of in his father's house, or seen with his eyes when he began to open them. The society there ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... (1757-1804), because of his wonderful youthful precocity, reminds us of Jonathan Edwards (p. 50). In 1774, at the age of seventeen, Hamilton wrote in answer to a Tory who maintained that England had given New York no charter of rights, and that she could not complain that her rights ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... shape of a camel-fight. On arrival we found another camel-man (i.e., a man who prospects with camels instead of horses, not necessarily a camel-driver) in whose train was a large white bull. Misery, with his usual precocity, at once began to show fight. The owner of the white camel, a gentleman much given to "blowing," warned me that his bull was the "strongest in the —— country," and advised me to keep my camels away. Anxious to see how Misery would shape in a genuine bout, I paid ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... without annihilating his foe. He was not yet nineteen when he commanded at Towton, at the head of almost fifty thousand men; and two months before he had gained the Battle of Mortimer's Cross, under circumstances that showed skillful generalship. No similar instance of precocity is to be found in the military history of mankind. His victories have been attributed to Warwick, but it is noticeable that he was as successful over Warwick as he had been over the Lancastrians, against ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... youth of Sir Walter Raleigh. He was a younger son, descended of an ancient family, and was born at a farm called Hayes, near the mouth of the river Otter, in Devonshire, in the year 1552. He went to Oriel College, Oxford, at an early age, and gained high praise for the quickness and precocity of his talents. In 1569 he began his military career in the civil wars of France, as a volunteer in the Protestant cause. It is conjectured that he remained in France for more than six years, and returned to England in 1576. Soon after he ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... We are sorry that she dismissed La Blancherie quite so theatrically. There is a trace too much of consciousness in her fine self-analysis, perhaps a little vanity, and we half suspect that her unchildlike penetration and precocity of motive was sometimes the reflection of an afterthought. But it is to be remembered that, even in childhood, she had lived in such close companionship with the heroes and moralists of the past that their ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... a real boy. He smoked cubeb cigarettes with an almost unprecedented precocity. He nearly learned to chew tobacco. He could snap a sparrow off a telegraph-wire with a nigger-shooter almost infallibly. He had the first air-gun in town and a shot-gun at fifteen. He thought that he was manlier than Drury because he was wiser and ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... be married to an emperor. It was in that atmosphere that Yasmini learned she must either use her wits or be outwitted, and women begin young to assert their genius in the East. But she outstripped precocity and, being Western too, rode rough-shod on convention when it suited her, reserving her concessions to it solely for occasions when those matched the hand she held. All her life she has had to play in a ruthless game, but ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... (Heaven knows how they came there), two of our many and long-looked-for letters, wherein was a circumstantial account of the whole conduct and behavior of our pets; with marvellous narrations of Charley's precocity at a Twelfth Night juvenile party at Macready's; and tremendous predictions of the governess, dimly suggesting his having got out of pot-hooks and hangers, and darkly insinuating the possibility of his writing us ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... it!" exclaimed Duff Salter, pushing aside his gray apron of beard to see her more distinctly. "Did that brother who rushed in vicious precocity to maintain another and a wicked woman ever think of relieving you ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... amateur character while still a boy. His "Comic English Histories," executed when he was only fifteen years of age, were published after his death; but he was still young when he first became known to the public. He was possessed of an extraordinary power of fanciful draughtsmanship; and his precocity is sufficiently proved by his comic illustrations to Homer, wrought at the tender age of twelve, with real humour, wealth of invention, and excellence of expression. His uncle, Mr. Conan, dramatic critic of the "Morning Herald," showed his work to his friend Mark ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... a very remarkable case," continued my friend; "very rare precocity. I have never met with any thing of the kind in ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... good-mannered and right-thinking men of the world, and succeeded in turning them out affectedly grave and ridiculous little prigs, disdainful of games, absolutely ignorant, without anything spontaneous or boyish about them, and of a desperate precocity. The little Jansoulets were not very happy in this forcing-house, notwithstanding the immunities which they enjoyed by reason of their immense wealth; they were, indeed, utterly left to themselves. Even the creoles in the charge of the institution ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... Delinquent" to learn facts without the distraction of critical uncertainty. With this in mind, therefore, a few of his conclusions, picked mostly at random, may be quoted. An important factor in the production of delinquency he finds to lie in the premature appearance of adult sex development—a precocity which he regards as dangerous because it seems to be correlated with a stimulation of sex instinct before adult inhibitions appear. In girls (not in boys) he finds a distinct tendency to general ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... precocity of Vallabha that at the age of twelve he had already discovered a new religion and started on a pilgrimage to preach it. He was well received at the Court of Vijayanagar, and was so successful in disputation that he was recognized as chief doctor of the Vaishnava school. He subsequently ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... matter how firm his sources, or complex the subject, any instructor should form the habit of adding a few thoughts of his own to any presentation. It is not a mark of precocity but of interest when an instructor knows his material, and its application to the human element, sufficiently well to express an occasional personal opinion. Since he is not a phonograph record, he has a right to ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... capricious, no matter what the world may say. It will occasionally happen that sorts planted for cutting late in spring will turn in earlier than they are wanted, and the sun rather than the seedsman must be blamed for their precocity. In average seasons the late sorts turn in late; but the Broccoli is a sensitive plant, and unseasonable warmth results in premature development. Sow the Spring Broccoli in April and May, the April sowing being the more important. It will not do, however, ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... arms, and was welcomed by both of them with much effusion. Jack was a tall, thin girl, all legs and arms, with a droll, freckled face and round blue eyes, with all the awkwardness of fourteen, and none of its precocity. Her real name was Jacqueline, but we had always called her Jack, for brevity, and because, with her cropped head and rough ways, she resembled a boy more than a girl; her hair was growing now, and hung about her neck in ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... normal, healthy boy. Fortunately there are no brilliant sayings to record; he did not lisp in periods. Genius was not written upon his brow, nor tied upon his sleeve. He had none of the pale fervor of precocity, or the shyness of premature conceit. He was absorbed in childish things, loved play, shirked his studies, dreamed of a life on the ocean wave, and regarded "Robinson Crusoe" and "Sinbad the Sailor" as the ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... childhood, he was imbued with a military spirit; his father and uncles at table talked of nothing but their perils in war and feats of arms; his imagination took fire; he got accustomed to looking upon their pursuits as the only ones worthy of a man of rank and feeling, and he plunged ahead with a precocity which we no longer comprehend. I have read many records of the service of gentlemen who were assassinated, guillotined or emigres; they nearly always began their careers before the age of sixteen, often at fourteen, thirteen and eleven.[4163] M. des Echerolles,[4164] captain ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... better, or at all events more intimately, than any of her old friends, for she had not treated him as a negligible junior even when he arrived in New York at the tender age of twenty-two. His ingenuous precocity had amused her and she had discovered a keen interest in the newspaper world of whose existence she had hardly been aware; no interviewer had ever dared approach her; and as he grew older, developing rapidly and more and more unlike her sons and her sons' friends, ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... education to shew off their intellectual acquirements, the more injury you do their health and your own; and in the effort to do too much, you violate the laws of nature, defeat your own object, and make the school a hot-bed of precocity, instead of a rational infants' school for the training and educating infants. I have been blamed, by writers on the infant system, for that which I never did, and never recommended; I have been made answerable for the errors and mis-conceptions ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... learned tomes were far beyond his age, but he understood them, remembered them afterwards, and could recall in later years not only the thought in each book, but also the disposition of his mind when he read them. Naturally this precocity of intellect caused brain fatigue, though this would never have been suspected by the Fathers of their ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... how generous nature has been in bestowing the gift of genius, the pursuit of art is nevertheless a long and continuous labor. Many artists have been precocious, but without diligence their precocity would have come to nothing. The anecdote related of West is well known. When only seven years old, struck with the beauty of the sleeping infant of his eldest sister, whilst watching by its cradle, he ran to seek some paper, and forthwith ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... yellow-haired, young creature, promising to be like her mother, the Countess, had a tongue which loved to run, and with the precocity and importance of wifehood at sixteen, she dilated to her companions on her mother's constant attendance on the Queen, and the perpetual plots for that lady's escape. "She is as shifty and active as any cat-a-mount; and at Chatsworth she had a scheme for being off out of her ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... which seemed full of the humid fire of love. He had also a finely developed form, which his close-fitting garments set off to the best advantage, and, above all, what had the most charm for the eyes of his friends as they so heartily welcomed him to their house was the evident precocity of his organs of love, which in their quiescent state showed a most ...
— The Power of Mesmerism - A Highly Erotic Narrative of Voluptuous Facts and Fancies • Anonymous
... bad. But they are seldom much better off, even if they have parents. A detective police officer told me that he knew of half- a-dozen cases where Italian fathers of this class had made a regular business of hiring out their children for the purposes of prostitution; and the precocity of development and expression frequently betrayed by the girls, still young in years, is mournful evidence of the truth ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... was born at Harborne, Staffordshire, England, Aug. 2, 1823. His precocity as a child was remarkable; at seven he read English and Roman history, and at eleven he had acquired a knowledge of Greek and Latin, and had taught himself the rudiments of Hebrew. An increase in fortune ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... Bergen, The Feast at Solhoug was a success, while Olaf Liljekrans was a failure; but neither incident could have meant very much to Ibsen, who, if there ever was a poet who lived in the future, was waiting and watching for the development of his own genius. Slowly, without precocity, without even that joy in strength of maturity which comes to most great writers before the age of thirty, he toiled on in a sort of vacuum. His youth was one of unusual darkness, because he had not merely poverty, isolation, citizenship of a remote and ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... developed. Such advantages are not unmixed with danger; this same arterial blood may exite and feed inflammation, and either convulsions, or water on the brain, or insanity, or, at last, idiocy may follow. How proud a mother is in having a precocious child! How little is she aware that precocity is frequently ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... him. The subjects are more miscellaneous; but still, as far as possible, kept to those which can appeal to the minds of scholars of eleven or twelve years of age, without either calling for, or encouraging, precocity. In Books II., III., and IV., a few old ballads and other pieces have been purposely introduced; as nothing so readily expands the mind and lifts it out of habitual and sluggish modes of thought, as forcing upon the attention the expressions and the thoughts ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... precincts of the cathedral, whilst the long winter evenings were beguiled with fairy-tales and fables, his mother and nurse reading or reciting these, their little listener being always busy with pen or pencil. Something much more than mere precocity is shown in these almost infantine sketches. Exorbitant fancy is here much less striking than sureness of touch, outlined figures drawn between the age of five and ten displaying remarkable precision and point, each line of the silhouette telling. ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... Roman society when Cicero was born His education and precocity He adopts the profession of the law His popularity as an orator Elected Quaestor; his Aedileship Prosecution of Verres His letters to Atticus; his vanity His Praetorship; declines a province His Consulship; conspiracy of Catiline Banishment of Cicero: his weakness; ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... H. LADD SPENCER, published by Phillips, Sampson, and Co., Boston, are rather remarkable specimens of juvenile precocity, most of them having been written in the days of the author's earliest boyhood, and some of them during his twelfth year, and at a period little less remote. Their poetical merit must, of course, be inconsiderable, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... can't help feeling it rather awful to have to do with a being so spiritual as that, and it appears to me to increase on him, so that he never seems quite to belong to me. And precocity is a ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... landscape painter of exceptional precocity, born near Nottingham; painted the "Ducal Palace" and "Grand Canal" at ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... for his incomplete methods of locomotion, able to knock about town with the boys. The Quimbeys took note of his mature demeanor with sinking hearts; they looked anxiously at the judge, wondering if he had ever before seen such precocity—anything so young to be so old: "He 'ain't never afore 'peared so survigrus—so durned survigrus ez he do ter-day," they ...
— His "Day In Court" - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... his son; but the grandson, stirred by the blood of a Puritan mother, exchanged the North Sea shore for the banks of the Hudson, where his son breathed the air that made him a leading spirit in the war for American independence. Clinton's youth is one record of precocity. Before the war began he passed through a long, a varied, even a brilliant career, climbing to the highest position in the State before he had reached the age when most men begin to fill responsible places. At fifteen he manned ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... my precocity for science a very successful impetus and left me at his death fully in possession of the ideas and projects he cherished. Amongst these projects, one partially realized, was the acceleration of plant growth by means of electric light, and heating ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... although I was brought up from remote country parts in the dark ages of 1819 and 1820 to behold the splendor of Christmas pantomimes and the humor of Joe, in whose honor I am informed I clapped my hands with great precocity, and although I even saw him act in the remote times of 1823, yet as I had not then aspired to the dignity of a tail-coat, though forced by a relentless parent into my first pair of boots, I am willing, with the view of saving this honest gentleman further time and trouble, to concede that ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... told, and is by this time tolerably familiar. Here, however, is part of it. In early life Pope began writing letters, bits of pompous insincerity, as indeed the letters of clever boys generally are, to men old enough to be his grandparents, who had been struck by his precocity and anticipated his fame, and being always master of his own time, and passionately fond of composition, he kept up the habit so formed, and wrote his letters as one might fancy the celebrated Blair composing his sermons, ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... noted for precocity and cruelty. Perhaps the tragedy of Giacopo de' Pazzi, and the mauling of his mutilated body by the street urchins, had left their marks on succeeding generations of boys and girls. The most popular pastime was mimic warfare, wherein the actualities of wounds and even deaths were ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... him would probably have been surprised to hear him speak with all the deliberation of an older and experienced man, and to see him everlastingly charging his wooden pipe; but in the Province of Quebec the boys are looked upon as men when they undertake men's work, and as to their precocity in smoking there is always the excellent excuse that it afford some protection in summer against the attacking swarms of black-flies, ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... by many given up, and precocity is discouraged. People are beginning to see that the first requisite to success in life is to be a good animal. The once universal practice of learning by rote is daily falling into discredit. We are substituting principles for rules, as is exemplified ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... charge of a tutor, Professor Barre by name, who took a great interest in this American boy, whose travels and experiences had given him a precocity which the professor had never met with in any of his other scholars. Ralph would have much preferred to study Paris instead of books, and the professor, who was able to give a great deal of time to his pupil, did not altogether ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton |
