"Unlettered" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... contemptuously. Foreigners were things which in his untraveled, unlettered ignorance he despised. The difference between a Frenchman and a South Sea Islander was a thing never quite appreciated by his lordship. Some subtle difference he had no doubt existed; but for him it was enough to know that both were foreigners; ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... he does of mine. When I see a flight of birds overhead, performing their evolutions, or steering their course to some distant settlement, their signals and cries are as unintelligible to me as are the learned languages to an unlettered mechanic: I understand as little of their policy and laws as ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... Written in a Country Churchyard, by Thomas Gray, is so superior as a poem to Spoon River Anthology. The rich were buried in the church; the poor in the yard; we are therefore given the short and simple annals of the poor. The curious thing is that these humble, rustic, unlettered folk were presented to the world sympathetically by a man who was almost an intellectual snob. One of the most exact scholars of his day, one of the most fastidious of mortals, one of the shyest ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... it must be remembered that Mr. Chisholm wrote only forty years after the event, and forty more had elapsed at the time of Mr. Hira Lal's investigation. [383] Of the Chamar Reformer himself Mr. Chisholm writes: [384] "Ghasi Das, like the rest of his community, was unlettered. He was a man of unusually fair complexion and rather imposing appearance, sensitive, silent, given to seeing visions, and deeply resenting the harsh treatment of his brotherhood by the Hindus. He was well known to the whole community, having travelled much among them; had the reputation ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... father, unhappy boy; unlettered, old and broken with the burden of your disgrace, but loyal still to God and country. I have guarded those great virtues well, for God gave them to me, and I would have transmitted them to my posterity, and linked the ...
— The City and the World and Other Stories • Francis Clement Kelley
... were to be a school where great life lessons would be learned. Fresh from the University halls of Jena, he had met the students of Oxford on equal footing, quickly winning their respect and admiration, but these soldiers and sailors, restless, eager for excitement, rude and unlettered, were a new thing to him, a book written in a language to which he had no key. Later he would learn to find some point of contact with the unlearned as well as the learned, with the negro slave and the Yorkshire collier ...
— The Moravians in Georgia - 1735-1740 • Adelaide L. Fries
... Singing together! Leave we the common crofts, the vulgar thorpes Each in its tether Sleeping safe on the bosom of the plain... That's the appropriate country; there, man's thought, Rarer, intenser, Self-gathered for an outbreak, as it ought, Chafes in the censer. Leave we the unlettered plain its herd and crop; Seek we sepulture On a tall mountain... Thither our path lies; wind we up the heights: Wait ye the warning! Our low life was the level's and the night's; He's for the morning. Step to a tune, square chests, erect each head, 'Ware the beholders! ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... old women who were born in Kentucky or Tennessee, or came here to Illinois early in their youth; the strong, courtly, old-fashioned men, carrying with them the early traditions of the republic, in their way Lincolns—honest, truth telling, industrious, courageous Americans—plain and unlettered, many of them, but full of the sterling virtues. Yes, he would have written poems out of these people; and he would have done something more—he would have given us symbols, songs of eternal truth, of unutterable magic and profound meaning like "La Belle Dame sans Merci." ...
— Mitch Miller • Edgar Lee Masters
... many successive generations of Goths were capable of preserving a faint tradition of their Scandinavian origin, we must not expect, from such unlettered barbarians, any distinct account of the time and circumstances of their emigration. To cross the Baltic was an easy and natural attempt. The inhabitants of Sweden were masters of a sufficient number of large vessels, with oars, [13] and the distance is little more than one hundred miles from ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... way the noise was, if mine ear be true, My best guide now. Methought it was the sound Of riot and ill-managed merriment, 172 Such as the jocund flute or gamesome pipe Stirs up among the loose unlettered hinds, When, for their teeming flocks and granges full, In wanton dance they praise the bounteous Pan, And thank the gods amiss. I should be loth To meet the rudeness and swilled insolence Of such late wassailers; yet, oh! where ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... courteously and in a few words given us the sharpest rebuke in the world; for that, an you consider aright, these tombs are the houses of the dead, seeing they are laid and abide therein, and these, saith he, are our house, meaning thus to show us that we and other foolish and unlettered men are, compared with him and other men of learning, worse than dead folk; wherefore, being here, we are in our own house.' Thereupon each understood what Guido had meant to say and was abashed nor ever plagued him more, but held Messer Betto thenceforward ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... schismatic; such as Nestorius or Marcian at one time, such as Arius or Pelagius at another. In his character of theologian, therefore, Mahomet was simply the most memorable of blunderers, supported in his blunders by the most unlettered of nations. In his other character of legislator, we have seen, that already the earliest stages of Mahometan experience exposed decisively his ruinous imbecility. Where a rude tribe offered no resistance to his system, for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... pagans and Arians of Alexandria were no longer worthy of his enmity, he fanned into a flame a new quarrel which was then breaking out in the Egyptian church. The monks of Upper Egypt, who were mostly ignorant and unlettered men, were anthropomorphites, or believers that God was in outward shape like a man. They quoted from the Jewish Scriptures that he made man in his own image, in support of their opinion. They held that he was of a strictly human form, like Jesus, which to them seemed fully asserted in the Nicene ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... creed. Least of all did they seek to explain the mysteries of their faith by metaphysical reasoning. Their doctrines were not brought to the test of philosophy. It was enough for these simple and usually unimportant and unlettered people to accept generally accredited facts. It was enough that Christ had suffered and died for them, in his boundless love, and that their souls would be saved in consequence. And as to doctrines, all they sought to know was what our Lord and his apostles said. Hence there was among them ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... and this cry against oppression, grew stronger and stronger till it culminated in "Bobby" Burns, who, more than any other writer in any language, is the poet of the unlettered human heart. ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... in the world whilst he lived. "He thought it," Plutarch says—we quote from Dryden's translation—"a nauseous course of life not to be doing mischief to others or receiving some from them." But he was in reality an unlettered soldier of fortune, probably very much of the same type as some of Napoleon's rougher marshals, such as Augereau or Massena. His manners were those of the camp, and his statesmanship that of the barrack-room. He blundered in ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... had long fallen as we continued to chat together beside the blazing wood embers,—she evidently amusing herself with the original notions of an untutored, unlettered boy, and I drinking deep those draughts of love that nerved my heart through many a breach ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... disturbed the counterpoise between his mind and heart. The Idea that possessed his life had operated as a means of education; it had gone on cultivating his powers to the highest point of which they were susceptible; it had raised him from the level of an unlettered laborer to stand on a star-lit eminence, whither the philosophers of the earth, laden with the lore of universities, might vainly strive to clamber after him. So much for the intellect! But where was the heart? That, ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... course, accepted humbly by the unlettered Teutons; and did its work well, for centuries to come. It is said—I trust not truly—to be still enrolled among the decrees of the Canon law, though reprobated by all enlightened Roman Catholics. Be that as it may, ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... "the gorgeous East," in the scenery, the art, the history and politics of Italy and Greece. He widened the horizon of his contemporaries, bringing within their ken wonders and beauties hitherto unknown or unfamiliar, and in so doing he heightened and cultivated, he "touched with emotion," the unlettered and unimaginative many, that "reading public" which despised or eluded the refinements and subtleties of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... they feel, and how such feelings can alone be repressed. I have heard them in my youth from a naked savage, in the indignant character of a prince surrounded by his subjects, addressing the Governor of a British colony, holding a bundle of sticks in his hand, as the notes of his unlettered eloquence. "Who is it," said the jealous ruler over the desert, encroached upon by the restless foot of English adventure—"who is it that causes this river to rise in the high mountains, and to empty itself into the ocean? Who is it that ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... domineering Romans, and the gentler cultured Greeks. He drew the half-breed Samaritans, who were despised by both Jew and foreigner, as not being either one thing or the other. The military men and the civilians, the cultured and the unlettered, the official class and those in private life, all alike felt the strong pull upon ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... no other view than to depict the Gitanos such as they are, and to illustrate their character; and, on that account, we have endeavoured, as much as possible, to bring them before the reader, and to make them speak for themselves. They are a half-civilised, unlettered people, proverbial for a species of knavish acuteness, which serves them in lieu of wisdom. To place in the mouth of such beings the high-flown sentiments of modern poetry would not answer our purpose, though several authors have not ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... unlettered maiden was poor, but high-bred, Oh, women of fashion far above you! And I thrilled at the graceful poise of her head And the radiant smile of my love when she said, "Why James, you know that I love you." Nymph-like her lithe ...
— The Loom of Life • Cotton Noe
... religion(494) which marked the eighteenth century, and which by spreading vital piety prepared an effectual check against unbelief, when the lower orders were afterwards invaded by it, was due to the spiritual yearnings created by the ministrations of men, often rude and unlettered, who told the wondrous story of Christ crucified, heart speaking to heart, with intuitions kindled from on high. The sinful began to feel that God was not afar off, reposing in the solitude of his own blessedness, and abandoning mankind to ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... of the march, as recorded by Captain John Tipton, is exceedingly interesting. The militiamen of southern Indiana and Kentucky assembled from the frontier settlements, were men of simple habits, rough, unlettered, hard to teach the intricacies of military evolutions, but as General John C. Black has stated, they were also "insensible to fatigue, watchful as a catamount, resolute as men, heroic as martyrs." Some of their favorite sports were wrestling, shooting at a ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... ancient Northumbrian farmer as could be met with—a distinct race, a few samples of whom were here and there to be found within the last thirty years—free, careless, hospitable, happy, boisterous, unlettered, and half-civilized. Sandy was one of these in their primitive ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... greatest by far—is The Scholar-Gipsy. I have read—and that not once only, nor only in the works of unlettered and negligible persons—expressions of irritation at the local Oxonian colour. This is surely amazing. One may not be an Athenian, and never have been at Athens, yet be able to enjoy the local colour of the Phaedrus. One may not be an Italian, and ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... I remember," continued Eleanor, "that first sight of the great Earl. My brothers had teased me for going so far north, and told me the English were mere rude islanders—boorish, and unlettered; but, child as I was, scarce eleven years old, I could perceive the nobleness of the Earl. 'If all thy new subjects be like him,' said my brother to me, 'thou wilt reign over a race of kings.' And how good he was to me ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sense this unlettered woman was being educated by her little boy in the same manner as Dora had been and still ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... in rising towns, somehow or other grinding money out of everything by force of will, bending everything to his purpose by stubborn sinew, always truthful, straightforward, and genuine. Consider what immense labour this represent! I do not think many such men can be found, rude and unlettered, yet naturally gentleman-like, to work their way in the world without the aid of the Lombard Street financiers; in village life, remember, where all is stagnant and dull—no golden openings such as occur near great towns. On work-days still wearing the same old hat—I wonder ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... pride was hurt; the idea of being beaten at his own business by a pack of unlettered Asiatics made him sad. 'It kinder destroys a man's faith in himself he said. As a result of his eloquence the miners knotted windlass-ropes together, and stole down upon the Chinese camp in the small and early hours of morning. ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... fortified by every precaution that the long experience of a vagabond could suggest, and he was permitted to pass forthwith. The poor Westphalian student presented an instrument fairly written out in scholastic Latin, and escaped further trouble by the vanity of the unlettered agent of the police, who hastily affirmed it was a pleasure to encounter documents so perfectly in form. But the Bernese was about to take his station by the side of the other two, appearing to think inquiry, in his case, unnecessary. While ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... to have its services in a language which had for ages been unintelligible to the bulk of the laity, and was but partially intelligible to not a few of its ordinary priests. It had no catechisms or hymn books bringing down to the capacities of the unlettered the truths of religion, and freely circulated among them.[4] It did not, when the invention of printing put it in its power, make any effort to circulate among them the Holy Book, that they might read therein, in their own tongue, the message of God's love. No doubt it had its pictures ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... and had brought home the great Milanese painter to adorn his banqueting-room at Donnaz. The lords of Donnaz had never been noted for learning, and Odo's grandfather was fond of declaring that a nobleman need not be a scholar; but the great Marquess Gualberto, if himself unlettered, had been the patron of poets and painters and had kept learned clerks to write down the annals of his house on parchment painted by the monks. These annals were locked in the archives, under Don Gervaso's care; but Odo learned from the old servant that some of ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... youth, under the guidance of Roughgrove, Glenn, and his unwearying and affectionate sister, was now rapidly making amends for the long neglect of his education while abiding with the unlettered Indians. He had already gone through the English grammar, and was entering the higher branches of study. The great poets of his own country, and the most approved novelists were his companions ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... The jailer had been furnished with my name. You are right surely, touching the character of Aurelian. Though rude and unlettered, and severe almost to cruelty, there are generous sentiments within which shed a softening light, if inconstant, upon the darker traits. I would conceal nothing from you, Gracchus; as I would do nothing without your approbation. I know your indifference to life. I know that ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... can read and write certain parts of the Koran, he is reckoned sufficiently instructed; and with this slender stock of learning, commences his career of life. Proud of his acquirements, he surveys with contempt the unlettered Negro; and embraces every opportunity of displaying his superiority over such of his countrymen as are not distinguished by ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... "It was understood by the simplest of the unlettered age for whom it was intended. It was remembered by them... For almost five centuries it was appealed to as the decisive authority on behalf of the people... To have produced it, to have preserved it, to have matured it, constitute ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... elder period in praise of wine and love, which forcibly illustrates the contempt felt by the student class for the unlettered laity and boors, shall be inserted here. It seems ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... did not serve to satisfy him or to make his regret less continual. What availed the sharply cut, smoothly shaven face and the eyes that flashed when he was moved, or the bell-like voice, if every unlettered ranchman or ranger could place both hands on his shoulders and look down at him from heights above? But they forgot this and he forgot it before he had reached the peroration of his closing speech. They saw only the Harry Harvey they knew and adored moving and rousing them with his voice, ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... Lamberteschi, he was, from the original plan, to have gone to Hungary. The Professorship must, therefore, have been in Hungary. But in 1422 no professor was wanted in that country, because it had no university: Hungary then was, and remained a wilderness of unlettered barbarism for nearly half a century after, it not being until 1465, half a dozen years from the death of Bracciolini, that Matthias Corvinus established in Buda the first Hungarian University, filling it with valuable works which he got copied from rare manuscripts in the principal cities ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... by the Revolution—eager young apprentices to the splendid trade of war, not old and broken men-at-arms, despairing survivors of an age-long accumulation of monotonous defeats; but Joan of Arc, a mere child in years, ignorant, unlettered, a poor village girl unknown and without influence, found a great nation lying in chains, helpless and hopeless under an alien domination, its treasury bankrupt, its soldiers disheartened and dispersed, all spirit torpid, all courage dead in the hearts of the people through ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... For the last year of his life, he had, it seems, led a more loose and extravagant course than in all his days before, contracting an acquaintance with several women of the town, creatures who are the utter ruin of all such unhappy men, especially of all unlettered unexperienced persons as ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... of God and the Church have always taught that there be certain things hidden, only to be revealed to man by God or through the ordinances of the Church, not to be sought after through curiosity by unlettered men themselves. Yet for as much as Satan is never at rest, and can transform himself on occasion into an angel of light, he is ever present with men urging them on to pry into these hidden mysteries and to make light of the ordinances ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green
... of my experience as an occasional lecturer during the past twelve years, I have been much impressed by the keen interest evinced, even by the most unlettered persons, when astronomical subjects are dealt with in plain untechnical language which they can ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... to say more of Julian, but perhaps her own words have sufficed to show that here we are dealing with one of the great mystics of the world. Childlike and yet rashly bold, deeply spiritual, yet intensely human, "a simple creature, unlettered," yet presenting solutions of problems which have racked humanity, she inherits the true paradoxical nature of the mystic, to which is added a beauty and delicacy of thought ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... encouragement: but with this exception, no one else knew anything of the girl's poetical essays, whose mild timidity made her often pass for a person of weak intellect. This soul must have been great and beautiful, for in all her unlettered strains there was not a word of murmuring respecting her hard lot: her note was sad, but gentle—desponding, but resigned; it was especially the language of deep tenderness—of mournful sympathy—of angelic charity for all poor creatures consigned, like ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... to deliverance than intellect which innovates," is a phrase ascribed to a Mohammedan saint, and do not modern theologians report with enthusiasm, the unlettered ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... might be by the complexities of the female mind, the mental processes of the unlettered male were quite familiar to him and he showed his comprehension ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... "The ignorant and the unlettered," observed Colville, with the air of making a concession, "are always at a disadvantage—even ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... own keen relish of life, and his delight in watching the lights and shades of human character, took him into that wider circle where witty and notable men are always eagerly sought after to grace the feasts or enliven the heavy splendour of the rich and the unlettered. He was still young, and happy in the animal spirits which make the exhausting life of a luxurious capital endurable even in spite of its pleasures. What Victor ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... huntress goddess, Diana. Those who know but little of ancient statuary can still brighten to intelligent recognition of the huntress with her quiver and her little stag when they meet with them in picture gallery or in suburban garden. That unlettered sportsman in weather-worn pink, slowly riding over the fragrant dead leaves by the muddy roadside on this chill, grey morning, may never have heard of Artemis, but he is quite ready to make intelligent reference to ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... made no reply. He and the other Democratic leaders thought the president uncouth, unlettered, and very weak. The phrase "please write me at least as long a letter as this" produced an impression upon the scholarly, cultured, cautious, and diplomatic Seymour which was most unfavorable to its author. Seymour acknowledged the receipt ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... thunders upon the bold, softening the hearts of the errant, mingling with our unbending creed the more pliable ethics of worldly graces, and, in a word, walking like Saint John on the savage border of civilization, to thrill the brutal and unlettered with the tidings of one just day to come—our itinerant lives drift on till the marble slab in the meeting-house wall writes the itinerant's ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... that "the eastern and western empires afforded protection to the church!" Why, the empire, in both its wings, was the deadly enemy of the church, as we have already seen! (ch. xi. 7.) Alas! what absurdities result from political bias! The unlettered Christian will readily perceive under the emblem in the text, a plain allusion to the gracious interposition of the church's Redeemer in the days of old. "Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... Western Europe by their monkish occupiers, without being struck by the influence of terror which such events as eclipses of the Sun and Moon and such celestial visitors as Comets and Shooting Stars exercised far and wide. And this influence overspread, not only the unlettered lower orders, but many of those in far higher stations of life who, one might have hoped, would have been exempt from such feelings of mental distress as they often exhibited. Illustrations of this fact will ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... the thirteen classics, on which the Chinese specially pride themselves, it is politeness. Even had their literature alone not sufficed to place them far higher in the scale of mental cultivation than the unlettered barbarian, a knowledge of those important forms and ceremonies which regulate daily intercourse between man and man, unknown of course to inhabitants of the outside nations, would have amply justified the graceful and polished Celestial in arrogating to himself the proud position he now occupies ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... not affirm that all the above-named qualifications are necessary to a saving knowledge of God's word. Its great essential doctrines and precepts are so plain that the unlettered reader, who brings to the work an honest heart, cannot fail to understand them. In this respect God has made the vision so plain "that he may run that readeth it;" and the road to heaven so direct that "the wayfaring ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... solitary study, and entirely unacquainted with the conduct of the present ministry, must know that we have hitherto acted upon different principles. We have always regarded letters as great obstructions to our scheme of subordination, and have, therefore, when we have heard of any man remarkably unlettered, carefully noted him down, as the most proper person for any employments of trust or honour, and considered him as a man, in whom we could safely repose our ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... for life, and he takes his revenge by imprisoning the reader's imagination in luckless verse. Shut out from social converse, from learned colleges and halls, where he passed his youth, he has no cordial fellow-feeling with the unlettered manners of the Village or the Borough; and he describes his neighbours as more uncomfortable and discontented than himself. All this while he dedicates successive volumes to rising generations of noble patrons; and while he desolates a line of coast with sterile, blighting ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... we not heard of the early Christian martyrs? Is there a doubt that they, unlettered men, slaves, weak women, even children, did exhibit, under an infinite sense of duty, issuing in infinite self-sacrifice, a heroism such as the world had never seen before; did raise the ideal of human nobleness a whole stage—rather say, a whole heaven—higher than before; ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... remain incomprehensible to a person knowing nothing either of Christian beliefs or of the beliefs which preceded them. The real mastery of any European tongue is impossible [4] without a knowledge of European religion. The language of even the unlettered is full of religious meaning: the proverbs and household-phrases of the poor, the songs of the street, the speech of the workshop,—all are infused with significations unimaginable by any one ignorant of the faith of the people. Nobody knows this better than a man who has passed many ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... next. Books of religion, however, cannot be considered a fair test of the enduring and vivacious properties of human thought, because such books so seldom really touch upon their ostensible subject, and have, therefore, so little business to be written at all. So long as an unlettered soul can attain to saving grace there would seem to be no deadly error in holding theological libraries to be accumulations of, for the most part, ...
— The Old Manse (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... public life as a means of winning glory for their youthful genius. The custom has long since become obsolete, but even if the practice were still common, it would not apply to Aemilianus. It would not have been becoming to him to make any display of his eloquence, for he is rude and unlettered; nor to show a passion for renown, since he is a mere barbarian bumpkin; nor thus to open his career as an advocate, for he is an old man on the brink of the grave. The only hypothesis creditable ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... not an easy thing to determine the laws or the practices of an unlettered people, who have abandoned the wild and primitive life to live under regulations prescribed by their conquerors, and who must depend upon tradition and recollection for the practices of the old life; but fortunately intelligent ...
— Sioux Indian Courts • Doane Robinson
... empire is concentrated in the ulemas and lawyers. The members of the Sublime Porte and other state officers, with but few exceptions, are unlettered men, who owe their elevation, to partiality or bribery. Under Mahmoud, beauty of person was the best ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... which "all your adversaries will not be able to resist and gainsay." And this, in so far as the enlightenment was inward, is not to be reckoned as a miracle, but only as regards the outward action—namely, in so far as men saw that those who had been unlettered and simple spoke with such wisdom and constancy. Wherefore it is written (Acts 4:13) that the Jews, "seeing the constancy of Peter and of John, understanding that they were illiterate and ignorant men . . . wondered."—And though such like ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... wars, for she was chosen by the King of Heaven to save France from its enemies. And they called her "Daughter of God." But Jeanne was filled with fear and grave misgiving, for how was she, a poor, unlettered girl and the daughter of peasants, to lead armies and wield the sword ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... alone, Johnie?" he said tauntingly. "Then must I tell thee a little story. I am an unlettered man, being but a poor fool, as thou knowest, but I try to do my duty, and every Sunday I go to church in Carlisle city with my betters. And at our church we have a right good preacher, though his sermons run through my ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... departed greatness; of the mournful feelings which arise on approaching the seat of lost empire; of the shades of the dead alone tenanting the scene of so much glory. Such reflections arise unbidden in the mind; the most unlettered traveller is struck with the melancholy impression. An eloquent Italian has described this striking spectacle:—"A vast solitude, stretching for miles, as far as the eye can reach. No shelter, no resting-place, no defence for the wearied traveller; a dead silence, interrupted only by the ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... the present day. A word or two, very derogatory of the anti-slavery people, is received with deafening applause. Of the descendants of the Huguenots he says but little; they are few, rich, and very unpopular in this part of the little sovereign state. And he quite forgot to tell this unlettered mass of a sovereign constituency the true cause of their poverty and degradation. Mr. Scranton, however, in one particular point, which is a vital one to the slave-ocracy, differs with the ungovernable Romescos,—he would not burn all ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... the humblest man in the world. He wore ragged clothing and lived in the filthiest tenement-house in New York. He was unlettered, had never opened a book, and seemed to know little of the ways of men. His hair and beard were long, and like golden silk; his eyes held the blue ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... man is so because he is well natured, and just as the cause is more admirable than the effect, so is a good disposition, unlettered, more praiseworthy than a well lettered man who ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... refute the common misconception that it is only the educated and Christian Indian who has contributed to the progress of his people and to the common good of both races. There are many men wholly unlettered, and some of whom have not proclaimed themselves followers of Christ, who have yet exerted great influence on the side of civilization. Almost every tribe has a hero of this type who arose at a critical ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... find the author's Baptist friends keeping aloof because of his liberal sentiments; but it is delightful to witness the hearty affection with which an Independent minister recommends the work of a Baptist; and truly refreshing to hear so learned a man commending most earnestly the work of a poor, unlettered, but gigantic brother in the ministry. Surely there is water enough connected with that controversy to quench any unholy fire that differences of opinion might ignite. George Cokayn appears to have possessed much a kindred spirit with John ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... his interior life of adoration, its artistic expression in music and words—for he was a skilled musician as well as a poet—he lived the sane and diligent life of the Oriental craftsman. All the legends agree on this point: that Kabr was a weaver, a simple and unlettered man, who earned his living at the loom. Like Paul the tentmaker, Boehme the cobbler, Bunyan the tinker, Tersteegen the ribbon-maker, he knew how to combine vision and industry; the work of his hands helped ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... words that unlettered woman had said, what would—if men were but wise enough to hear and heed the great truth which she spoke—banish slavery from ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... troubled and half-formed regrets; Carlyle's "Frederick the Great" set up tumultuous imaginings; but the "Life of Jackson" (as did the story of Napoleon long ago) stirred all that was masterful in his blood. Unlettered as he was, Jethro had a power which often marks the American of action—a singular grasp of the application of any sentence or paragraph to his own life; and often, about this time, he took away the breath of a judge or a senator by flinging at them ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... wisdom, was a God of peace and love; And as God upon Mount Sinai, stooping from his heavenly throne, Gave the law unto his people, deeply graven into stone, "Gitche Manitou, the Mighty," in compassion for the race Of unlettered, untaught heathen who knew not his god-like face Save they saw it in the tempest or the lightning's livid glare, Or in some familiar emblem they could see, or feel, or wear, Taught them peace and love to kindred, ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... could scarcely have been put forward by any one who considers what the Jew has been in the past—what an enormous factor his past and present have been and are, in the development and progress of our highest civilisation. Historically, we first meet him coming forth from the Arabian desert, a rude unlettered herdsman, in intelligence, cultivation, and morality far below the tribes among whom he is thrown. A terrible weapon arms him—a theism stern, hard, and pitiless, beyond, perhaps, all the world has ever seen. To the bravest and best of his race—a ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... ye gods! My successful rival, mine, is the yellow-headed, muddy-brained, unlettered Foy—and they say that women have souls! Of your courtesy answer me one question. Tell me when did this strange and monstrous thing happen? When did you declare yourself vanquished by the surpassing ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... the book-reading class, wide as that is in America. It was to be noted even in the untravelled and unlettered American, the man whose spiritual horizon is bounded by his Sunday newspaper, the man in the street and on the farm. The events of the past year had taught him—and he rubbed his eyes at the realisation—that ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... form the epic poem is simply a narrative in verse. Historically it seems to have originated in the records of ancestral heroism, which passed from mouth to mouth in metre, as the natural form of oral communication in an unlettered age. In the Iliad and Odyssey we first find this outward form penetrated by a new spirit, which converts the narrative into the poem. There is no need to do violence to historical probability by supposing ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... of "unlettered fame," was born, August 12, 1753, THOMAS BEWICK, the celebrated artist and engraver on wood; or more strictly speaking, the reviver of this branch of art. His whole life was one of untiring industry and ardent attachment to the object of his study—the only ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... He had hoped to find the whole country rejoicing in the restoration of the gentle monarch, whom he loved with the ardour of a generous and impetuous temperament. But these simple folks, rustic and unlettered though they were, managed somehow to throw a shadow over his spirit by their ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green
... gods worshipped by different sections, so as to secure the constant allegiance of all classes to their rulers. Alien deities were therefore associated with local and tribal deities, those of the nomads with those of the agriculturists, those of the unlettered folks with those of the learned people. Reference has been made to the introduction of strange deities by conquerors. But these were not always imposed upon a community by violent means. Indications are not awanting that the worshippers of alien gods were sometimes welcomed and encouraged ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... later, Mark Twain received in England an appreciative reception of well-nigh national character. Whilst the literary and academic circles of America withheld their unstinted recognition of an author so primitive and unlettered, Great Britain received him with open arms. He was a welcome guest at the houses of the exclusive; the highest dignitaries of public life, the authoritative journals, the leaders of fashion, of thought, and of opinion openly ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... things perhaps lay in the vague ambitions of twice two hundred men who now lay in camp at the border of our unknown empire. They were all Americans—second, third, fourth generation Americans. Wild, uncouth, rude, unlettered, many or most of them, none the less there stood among them now and again some tall flower of that culture for which they ever hungered; for which they fought; for which they now adventured ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... the contempt and loathing with which they looked upon the earl was the love, the veneration they bore to her and to her children. If his mother's lips had been silent, the youthful heir would have learned loyalty and patriotism from his brave though unlettered retainers, as it was to them he owed the skin and grace with which he sate his fiery steed, and poised his heavy lance, and wielded his stainless brand—to them he owed all the chivalric accomplishments of the day; and though he had never quitted the territories of Buchan, ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... of this sort, extending over a hundred or a thousand other points, were so universally accepted in his time that to dispute them was to be ranked with the unlettered or the fantastic. I asked him if it were so in economics. He said: Yes, in England, where there was a similar dogma of ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... are in the possession of others above their real value. Every one must have remarked, what powers and prerogatives the vulgar imagine to be conferred by learning. A man of science is expected to excel the unlettered and unenlightened even on occasions where literature is of no use, and among weak minds, loses part of his reverence, by discovering no superiority in those parts of life, in which all are unavoidably equal; as when a monarch makes ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... him with increasing fear. How little she knew the real man! Could it be possible that this lonely, unlettered boy of the streets of lower New York, starved and stunted in childhood, had within him the soul of a great poet? How else could she explain the sudden rapture over the threatening silences and shadows of these mountain gorges which had depressed her? And yet his utter ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... sight died out among them the race lived on. They had even time to adapt themselves to the blind control of fire, which they made carefully in stoves of stone. They were a simple strain of people at the first, unlettered, only slightly touched with the Spanish civilisation, but with something of a tradition of the arts of old Peru and of its lost philosophy. Generation followed generation. They forgot many things; they devised many things. Their tradition of the greater world they came from became mythical in ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... Edgar Poe, had chance made him the contemporary of Mark Twain and of "Called Back." It may be that your criticisms helped to bring in the new era, and to lift letters out of the reach of quite unlettered scribblers. Though not a scholar, at least you had a respect for scholarship. You might still marvel over such words as "objectional" in the new biography of yourself, and might ask what is meant by such a sentence as "his connection with it had inured to ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... was helped, and in his progress from boyhood to supreme distinction, there is nothing that cannot be emulated by every boy at school to-day. The minds of human beings when they are born into the world are as naked as their bodies; it matters not if parents, grandparents, and remoter ancestors were unlettered or had the wisdom of all the ages, the new mind has to build up its own wisdom from the beginning. We cannot even say with certainty that children inherit mental aptitudes and capacities from their parents; for as tall sons may come ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... soon take it that way as the other, teaching as preaching. Is not the teaching of laymen as sectarian as the preaching of clergymen? What is the difference between unlettered laymen and lettered clergymen in this respect? Every one knows that laymen are as violent controversialists as clergymen, and the less informed the more violent. So this, while it is a little more ridiculous, is equally obnoxious. According to my experience, a layman is just as likely to ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... shelf in my home along with Albrecht, McCarrison, and Howard. Price, a dentist with strong interests in prevention, wondered why his clientele, 1920s midwest bourgeoisie, had terrible teeth when prehistoric skulls of aged unlettered savages retained all their teeth in perfect condition. So he traveled to isolated parts of the Earth in the early 1930s seeking healthy humans. And he found them—belonging to every race and on every continent. And ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... travel in a manner becoming our position. We are quite willing to be healed, but we would like to be healed with due deference. You are an educated man, a student; you do not like to take the same place as the most unlettered, and to feel that the common fact of sin puts you, in a very solemn respect, upon the level of these narrow foreheads and unlettered people. And so some of you turn away because Christianity, with such impartiality and persistency, insists upon the identity of the fact of sin in us all, and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... can provide a constructive plan for society. Mr. Lowes Dickinson makes his imaginary Chinese official write of the social teachings of Jesus: "Enunciated centuries ago, by a mild Oriental enthusiast, unlettered, untravelled, inexperienced, they are remarkable not more for their tender and touching appeal to brotherly love, than for their aversion or indifference to all other elements of human excellence. The subject of Augustus and Tiberius lived and died unaware of the history and destinies of imperial ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... I found another surprise—my friend Mr. Carson of the Rockies. It seemed a little incongruous that the simple, unlettered Irishman should have found his way into the brilliant, many-countried company, where were men who made history and held the fate of nations in their hands and built or crumbled empires, and women to match, regally gowned, keen of ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... good deal of feeling, sir, for the unlettered and the vulgar. They have their station, but they have also—though doubtless in smaller capacity than we—their ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... a good horseman, made him a popular hero at El Refugio. At the end of three years Don Juan found that this inexperienced and apparently idle boy of fourteen knew more of the practical ruling of the rancho than he did himself; also that this unlettered young rustic had devoured nearly all the books in his library with boyish recklessness of digestion. He found, too, that in spite of his singular independence of action, Clarence was possessed of an invincible loyalty of principle, and that, ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... antiquity. In the wall of the church is a narrow opening, at which the priest is supposed to have sat and listened to the confession of the sinner on the outside of the building. The dead lie all around the church, under stones bearing the dates of several centuries. One epitaph, which the unlettered Muse must have dictated, is worth recording. After giving the chief ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... cross to save sinners. They know nothing of the true religion, mama; and when they die they cannot go to the golden country of the blessed. God will take care of the teacher; do not weep, mama." Blessed faith in an omnipresent Heavenly Father! It gives even the unlettered Karen disciple, an eloquence in consolation, to which worldly philosophy is ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... gone by, on my journey back from Italy into England, in order not to waste all the time that must needs be spent on horseback in dull and unlettered gossiping, I preferred at times either to turn over in my mind some topic of our common studies or to give myself over to the pleasing recollection of the friends, as learned as they are beloved, whom I had left behind me in England. You were among the very first of these to spring to mind, my ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... a minuter study of the process, let me enliven our understanding of the definition by a concrete example. I choose the quaint case of an unlettered man, Stephen H. Bradley, whose experience is related in a ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... conversation. It was my constant rule in life never to avoid the conversation of any man who seemed to desire it: for if good, I might profit by his instruction; if bad, he might be assisted by mine. I found this to be a knowing man, of strong unlettered sense; but a thorough knowledge of the world, as it is called, or, more properly speaking, of human nature on the wrong side. He asked me if I had taken care to provide myself with a bed, which was a circumstance I had never once ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith
... labourers in the vineyards, and engaged in various menial occupations from which I was exempted, the knowledge that in something I was regarded as their superior, soon forced itself upon me; I felt a distaste for the society of little unlettered, and unmannered boors, and in silence and solitude made progress in studies, which, mere matters of amusement to me, would have been hailed by many youths as tasks more severe than daily ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 530, January 21, 1832 • Various
... extent the faculty of memory may be sharpened and developed by a class of men devoted to this culture in communities where such mechanical aids do not exist. It is known that long poems, stories, and historical narratives have been preserved by unlettered peoples much below the civilized condition of the Peruvians. Long poems, extending to three and four hundred lines, were retained by memory, and transmitted from generation to generation among the Sandwich Islanders. ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... Though an unlettered man, Lance Lovelace had been a close observer of humanity. The big book of Life had been open always before him, and he had profited from its pages. With my advent at Las Palomas, there were less than half a dozen books ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... dignity to whatever we say, even in cases where that depth of knowledge is not required. Science adorns the speaker at all times, and, where it is least expected, confers a grace that charms every hearer; the man of erudition feels it, and the unlettered part of the audience acknowledge the effect without knowing the cause. A murmur of applause ensues; the speaker is allowed to have laid in a store of knowledge; he possesses all the powers of persuasion, and then is called ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... by plain, blunt, unlettered George Stephenson before the lawyers and members of the House of Commons was strange and interesting, and no wonder it ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... call thee, studious, from the classic groves, Where calm-eyed Pallas with still footstep roves, And charge thee seek the turmoil of the state? What bade thee hear the voice and rise elate, Leave home and kindred and thy spicy loaves, To lead th' unlettered and despised droves To manhood's home ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... for a rebellion for the latter date. The plot was engineered by Lieut. Colonel Solomon G. Maritz and General Christian Frederick Beyers. Maritz is a brilliant though unlettered Colonel who won distinction in the Boer war, while Beyers was the Commandant General of the South African Union forces. Beyers is dead now; Maritz and some of the prominent men associated in the conspiracy ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... which he is placed, reflects upon the infinite wonders of creation, and meditates upon the equal wonders of his own mind, can be at a loss respecting the sources and causes of superstition. Let him transport himself back to the condition of a primitive and unlettered people, before whom the world appears in all its original and sublime mystery. Science has not lifted to their eyes the curtain behind which the secret operations of nature are carried on. They observe ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... of plain, poor, farmer folk, immemorially dwelling close to the soil; unlettered, unambitious, long-lived, abounding in children, without physical beauty, but marking the track of their generations by a path lustrous with right-doing. For more than a hundred years on this spot the land had ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... as bitterly as they hated her. It was natural for unlettered saints, for the fair inspired, frank of mind, capricious, and enthusiastic to feel an antipathy towards doctors all inflated with knowledge and stiffened with scholasticism. Such an antipathy Jeanne had recently felt towards clerks, even when as at Poitiers ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... the lamentation of a poet. Now, the class of people to whom this country is so admirably adapted are formed of the unlettered and industrious labourers and artisans. They feel no regret that the land they labour on has not been celebrated by the pen of the historian or the lay of the poet. The earth yields her increase to them as freely as if it had been enriched by the blood of heroes. ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... its better estimation. Eyes well accustomed to the glories of the Vatican, the galleries of Florence, all the mightiest works of art in Europe, have grown dim before it with the strong emotions it inspires; ignorant, unlettered, drudging men, mere hewers and drawers, have gathered in a knot about it (as at our back a week ago), and read it, in their homely language, as it were a Book. In minds, the roughest and the most refined, it has ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... other New England boys, he learned what is essential for the carrying on of business in the chimney-corner, by the light of the fire. He possessed one beautiful accomplishment: he was a grand reader. Unlettered as he was, he greatly enjoyed the more lofty compositions of poets and orators; and his large, sonorous voice enabled him to read them with fine effect. His sons read in his manner, even to his rustic pronunciation ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... his religious day, and then, by sheer dint of his sanctified and soaring imagination and his exquisite style, he stands forth the peer of the foremost men in the intellectual world. And thus it is that the great unlettered religious world possesses in John Bunyan all but all that the select and scholarly world possesses in Dante. Both Dante and Bunyan devoted their splendid gifts to the noblest of services—the service of spiritual, and especially of personal religion; but for one appreciative reader ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... followed his endeavor, and his quota of the Company was soon made up by the enlistment of nearly every able-bodied young man in the Township. His recruits fairly idolized him, and in their rougher and more unlettered way, were equally earnest advocates of the suppression of the Rebellion by ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... life," and in the mind of the folk the life of the world and the life of man have run about the same course. By common consent the golden age of both was at the beginning, ab ovo. With Wordsworth, unlettered thousands ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... reprieved and unlettered soldier were too strong for his words to utter; he shook the hand of his deliverer ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... this type, representing the wealth, perhaps, but by no means the culture, of modern civilization, are, in fact, nearer to the unlettered labourers in their outlook, and are therefore by far less embarrassing to them, than those of another and kindlier type which figures largely in this parish to-day. Those people for whom the enclosure of the common, as it has turned out, made room in the valley—I mean the well-to-do ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... and all in a moment turned red with ire. "Do ye not blush to play with your book-craft on your unlettered friend, and throw dust in his eyes, evening the saints ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... light step over the low wall of boundary, and crossed the wave-like mounds that heaved as a grassy sea, and beneath which lay the unlettered dead, the long grasses writhing and clinging to his feet, as though loath to let him escape the dust upon which they fed and grew so rank. Heedless of their greedy embrace, he walked with long stride towards the lower end of the yard, until he stood before ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather |
