"Pedantical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... litterateur who unreasonably thinks himself a great one, on the airs and graces of the gushing blue-stockings who were in vogue in that day, on the detestable vulgarity of literary lionising, she had no mercy. She recounts with caustic relish the story about a certain pedantical lady, of whom Tierney had said that there was not another head in England that could encounter hers on the subject of Cause and Effect. The story was that when in a country house one fine day she took her seat in a window, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 6: Harriet Martineau • John Morley
... young wife, getting tired of a pedantic husband in the way so familiar to students of novels, goes off with a companion more to her taste, anyone can foresee trouble, or what would there be to write about? When, further, her detestable lover, seeking ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 14, 1917 • Various
... administered justice with pedantic severity, Briscoe's influence still further declined. There was no longer scope in the State for men of spirit; even the gaols were handed over to the stern mercy of crop-eared Puritans; Moll herself had fallen upon evil times; and Ralph Briscoe determined to ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... serious, Bert or Grubb had to go out and fetch the machine home. Hire was always charged up to the hour of return to the shop and deducted from the deposit. It was rare that a bicycle started out from their hands in a state of pedantic efficiency. Romantic possibilities of accident lurked in the worn thread of the screw that adjusted the saddle, in the precarious pedals, in the loose-knit chain, in the handle-bars, above all in the brakes and tyres. Tappings and clankings and strange rhythmic creakings awoke as the intrepid ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... see. But snub would have done, Mr Herrick. Reprove sounds pedantic. That will do, but ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... was an extremely stolid young person, and, in some respects, a model servant. She never argued. She never seemed to have any notions of her own whatever. She accepted our ideas without comment, and carried them out with such pedantic precision and such evident absence of all feeling of responsibility concerning the result as to surround our home legislation with quite a ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... we tore the wrapper off our paper with fevered hands, a transmutation were to take place, and we were to find inside it—oh! I don't know; shall we say Pascal's Pensees?" He articulated the title with an ironic emphasis so as not to appear pedantic. "And then, in the gilt and tooled volumes which we open once in ten years," he went on, shewing that contempt for the things of this world which some men of the world like to affect, "we should read that the Queen of the Hellenes had arrived at Cannes, ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... O'Connor that he remembered all the plots and most of the characters of the "thousands" of novels he had read for the firm. But he trusted his memory too much and never verified. Indeed, when it was a question merely of verbal quotation he said it was pedantic to bother, and when latterly Dorothy Collins looked up his references he barely ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... is the first time, I believe, that ever a rendezvous was given to a gentleman at an opera ball to talk anatomy, ancient literature, and mathematics. I am sorry to say so, but you are the most pedantic genius I ever met in ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... by these incorrigible fools, I left declaiming in pedantic schools; Where, with men-boys, I strove to get renown, Advising Sylla to ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... what the war-spirit can make of Shakespeare. It was interpreted in the pedantic historical vein, and was given as a bloody, brutal mediaeval piece without a thought or a smile or a tear. Richard was shown as a "Hun" of the worst kind. His murderous career was facilitated by his characterless victims. Anne ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... feet alike of Presbyterian and Independent, Parliament and army. The Greeks of Constantinople denouncing the Azymite, when Mohammed II. was forming his lines round the doomed city, were not more infatuated than these pedantic commonwealth men with their parliamentarianism when Charles ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... it short, I say—I'll have no adventurers, who live by their wits, making up to my daughter—pedantic puppies, good for ushers, nothing else. What do they mean by knowing so ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... critic of irreverence, who doubts the wisdom of universities, and of pedantic scholars who burrow like moles in the mouldering remnants of antiquity, but see nothing of the glorious sky overhead. While I have no reverence for barren or wasted intellect, I have the profoundest respect for the ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... Charterhouse, or as my schoolfellow Thackeray was wont to style it, Slaughterhouse, no doubt from the cruel tyranny of another educational D.D., the Rev. Dr. Russell. For this man and the school he so despotically drilled into passive servility and pedantic scholarship, I have less than no reverence, for he worked so upon an over-sensitive nature to force a boy beyond his powers, as to fix for many years the infirmity of stammering, which was my affliction until past middle life. As for tuition, it must ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... of education A something somehow have obtained, Thus, praised be God! a reputation With us is easily attained. Oneguine was—so many deemed [Unerring critics self-esteemed], Pedantic although scholar like, In truth he had the happy trick Without constraint in conversation Of touching lightly every theme. Silent, oracular ye'd see him Amid a serious disputation, Then suddenly discharge a joke The ladies' ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... personal advertisement, no flamboyant interviews. Even a complimentary luncheon at the Voyagers' Club was courteously declined. Indeed, it began to be felt that the self-effacement of the returned pressmen was being carried to a pedantic length. Foreman compositors, advertisement clerks, and other members of the non-editorial staff, who had, of course, taken no part in the great trek, found it as impossible to get into direct communication with the editor and his satellites now that they had returned as when they had been ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... Hebrew pronunciation of the several letters, but rather what is the accented syllable in each word. To pronounce in a manner nearly approaching to the Hebrew might make the congregation stare, but would appear very pedantic to a learned ear. The safest mode is to examine the Greek of the Septuagint, or of the New Testament (if the reader does not understand Hebrew), and observe the place of the acute accent. On that place, if it be on the penultimate or antepenultimate, the accent should be laid in English. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various
... his head solemnly at the other as though to indicate that, his occult powers were something not to be lightly mentioned. He had no fear of the tall man, at any rate. He placed him as a very ordinary German, a common type in the Fatherland, simple-minded, pedantic, inquisitive, and a prodigious bore withal but dangerous, for of this stuff German discipline ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... she knew she had learned from books or from her companionship with Captain Dane that first summer after Clive had gone abroad. And there was nothing orthodox, nothing pedantic, nothing simulated or artificial in her likes or dislikes, her preferences or ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... with Englishmen and Lowland Scots. In the midst of all these changes the great Queen, grown old and very lonely, died in 1603; and with her ended the glorious Tudor dynasty of England. James, pusillanimous and pedantic son of Darnley and Mary Queen of Scots, ascended the throne as the first of the sinister Stuarts, and, truckling to vindictive Spain, threw Raleigh into prison under ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... result only in these abstraction's. For us it is elsewhere, beyond these finite shapes, on which, by an illusion, it seemed to rest. The Greek statues are tropes, which we gladly allow in their original use, but, repeated, they become flat and pedantic. Hence the air of caricature in modern portrait-statues; for caricature does not necessarily imply falsification, but only that what is given is insisted on at the expense ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... cleanness which characterises the diction of our academical Pharisees. The author does not attempt to polish and brighten his composition into the Ciceronian gloss and brilliancy. He does not in short sacrifice sense and spirit to pedantic refinements. The nature of his subject compelled him to ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... these matters as concrete and practical as possible, we shall give in the remainder of this chapter a series of somewhat unrelated suggestions about conducting an ensemble rehearsal, trusting that the reader will forgive the didactic (and possibly pedantic) language in which ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... scientific astronomy among the Greeks. I am amazed equally at the amount of research and its comparative worthlessness; for what addition to science can be made by an enumeration of the puerilities and errors of the Greeks, and how wasted and pedantic the learning which ransacks all antiquity to prove that the Greeks adopted ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... resolute effort to correct the abuses of his time, even when they had been clearly pointed out by Miyoshi Kiyotsura. The usurpations of the Fujiwara; the prostitution of Buddhism to evil ends; the growth of luxurious and dissipated habits, and the subordination of practical ability to pedantic scholarship—these four malignant growths upon the national life found no healing treatment at ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... volume of Americanisms Mr. Bartlett has been enabled to gather, for it shows that our language is alive. It is only from the roots that a language can be refreshed; a dialect that is taught grows more and more pedantic, and becomes at last as unfit a vehicle for living thought as monkish Latin. This is the danger which our literature has to guard against from the universal Schoolmaster, who wars upon home-bred phrases, and enslaves the mind and memory of his victims, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... group stood a personage of a very different stamp—a most interesting specimen of the genus Yankee, contrasting in a striking manner with the rough-hewn sons of Anuk who surrounded him. He was a man of some thirty years of age, as dry and tough as leather, of grave and pedantic mien, the skin of his forehead twisted into innumerable small wrinkles, his lips pressed firmly together, his bright reddish-grey eyes apparently fixed, but, in reality, perpetually shifting their restless glances from the men by whom he was surrounded, to some chests ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... which men have died are all true. Perhaps humor—your right Hegelian touchstone to which everything yields up its latent negation, passing on to its own contradiction—gives truer lights and shades than your pedantic Philistinism. Is Truth really in the cold white light, or in the shimmering interplay of the rainbow tints that fuse in it? Bah! Your Philistine critic will sum me up after I am dead in a phrase; or he will take my character to pieces and show how they contradict ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... price was to be nine-pence Pennsylvania money, with considerable allowance to shopmen who should take quantities. The brevity of Franklin's advertisement is in strong contrast to the learned length of Webbe's pedantic prospectus. He claims that the idea of the magazine had long been in his mind, and that Webbe had stolen his plans. Before he had divulged the scheme to Webbe he had proceeded so far in the matter as to choose his writers and to buy his ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... a word of Latin, but he had a pedantic pleasure in introducing it whenever he could. Genders were ever a mystery to him, though with the help of a dictionary he would often substitute a Latin for an English word. Thus he used the signatures "Gulielmus Hintoniensis, ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... honest longing for the new; and afterwards it is made to express the longing in his soul for other things. With the consummate craftsmanship Wagner possessed at this period he adds to the score the utterance of the masters' disapproval, of Sachs' approval, of Beckmesser's pedantic maliciousness, of the riotous fooling of the apprentices, until we have them all hard at work united in accompanying Walther's song in what is nothing more nor less than a grand operatic finale. The thing is justified theatrically, so to speak, rather than truly ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... fidelity, but this is all of Nature that she describes. Her narrow fervid nature accounted as simple annoyance the trivial scenes and personages touched with immortal sympathy and humour in 'Villette' and 'Shirley'; Paul Emanuel himself appeared to her only as a pedantic and exacting taskmaster; but, on the other hand, to a certain class of mind, there is nothing in fiction so moving as the spectacle of Heathcliff dying of joy—an unnatural, unreal joy—his panther nature paralysed, aneanti, in a delirium of ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... capacity of Chancellor to the Republic, undertook to write the annals of the people of Florence from the earliest date to his own time. Lionardo Aretino wrote down to the year 1404, and Poggio Bracciolini to the year 1455. Their histories are composed in Latin, and savor much of the pedantic spirit of the age in which they were projected.[1] Both of them deserve the criticism of Machiavelli, that they filled their pages too exclusively with the wars and foreign affairs in which Florence was ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... schoolmaster: Training for the Church: Poetical glimmerings. The Duke of Wuertemberg, and his Free Seminary: Irksome formality there. Aversion to the study of Law and Medicine. (9.)—Literary ambition and strivings: Economic obstacles and pedantic hindrances: Silent passionate rebellion. Bursts his fetters. (13.)—The Robbers: An emblem of its young author's baffled, madly struggling spirit: Criticism of the Characters in the Play, and of the style of the work. Extraordinary ferment ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... Gros-Rene ridicules the pedantic arguments of some of the philosophers of the time of Moliere. It also attributes to the ancients some sayings of authors of the day; for example, the comparison, from a Greek author, "that a woman's head is like a quicksand," is from a contemporary; the saying from Aristotle, comparing ...
— The Love-Tiff • Moliere
... shall have seen your country ruined. I shall not pretend to disturb your understandings, which are none of the strongest, with a hotchpotch of unintelligible terms, such as Aristotle's four principles of generation, unformed matter, privation, efficient, and final causes. Aristotle was a pedantic blockhead, and still more knave than fool. The same censure we may safely put on that wiseacre, Dioscorides, with his faculties of simples— his seminal, specific, and principal virtues; and that crazy commentator, Galen, with his four elements, elementary qualities, ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... powder-barrels found among wood and faggots, but also one of the conspirators, Guy Fawkes, who was busy with the last preparations for the execution of the plot. With a smiling countenance he confessed his purpose, which he seemed to regard as the fulfilment of a religious duty. The pedantic monarch thought himself in the presence ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... Greek Medicine came with the Renaissance,[263] but even this long step in advance did not immediately liberate the art from bondage. A new generation of professors arose who added fresh material to the storehouses, already overflowing, of pedantic erudition, and showed the utmost contempt for any fruit of other men's labour which might not square exactly with the utterances of the founders. This attitude rendered these professors of Medicine the legitimate objects ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... subject, malice, and the style, I should suspect it for a blot of the same pen that wrote Eikonoklastes. It runs foul, tends to tumult; and, not content barely to applaud the murder of the King, the execrable author of it vomits upon his ashes with a pedantic and envenomed scorn, pursuing still his sacred memory. Betwixt him [Milton] and his brother Rabshakeh [Needham?] I think a man may venture to divide the glory of it. It relishes the mixture of their united faculties and wickedness.... Say, Milton, Needham, either or both of you, or whosoever ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... talking, as fishermen sometimes do; the hunter becomes a disciple, and learns by the easy method of hearing the fisherman discourse about his art. The conversations, it must be confessed, are often diffuse and pedantic; but they only make us feel most comfortably sleepy, as one invariably feels after a good day's fishing. So kindly is the spirit of the angler, so exquisite his appreciation of the beauty of the earth and sky, that one returns to the book, as to ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... A PEDANTIC fellow called for a bottle of hock at a tavern, which the waiter, not hearing distinctly, asked him to repeat. "A bottle of hock—hic, haec, hoc," replied the visitor. After sitting, however, a long time, and no wine appearing, he ventured to ring again, ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... was the stormy authority of the sword of the Lord of Gideon of the Old Testament which had drawn him into the fold of religion. It was some strain of heredity, his upbringing, the life into which he was born, pious, pedantic and preposterously prayerful, which had made him a professional Christian, as he was a professional farmer, rancher and money-maker. For such a man ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... which had since been kept in good exercise by the necessity of frequent practice. Still it was from an imperfect recollection of what he had acquired during this pacific period, that he drew his sources of conversation when in company with women; in other words, his language became pedantic when it ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... giant. Johnson and Carlyle were intellectual giants and few can hope to stand on the same literary pedestal. The tyro in composition should never seek after the heavy style. The best of all authors in the English language for style is Addison. Macaulay says: "If you wish a style learned, but not pedantic, elegant but not ostentatious, simple yet refined, you must give your days and nights to the volumes of Joseph Addison." The simplicity, apart from the beauty of Addison's writings causes us to reiterate the literary command—"Never use a big word when ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... high-class missionaries on the really curious inquisitiveness of certain of the foreign passengers on board, he introduced to them the indisputably learned, the very argumentative, crashing, arrogant, pedantic, dogmatic, philological German gentleman, Dr. Gannius, reeking of the Teutonic Professor, as a library volume of its leather. With him is his fairhaired artless daughter Delphica. An interesting couple for the beguilement of a voyage: she so beautifully ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... hand at a novel. One of the most important parts of a novelist's equipment he certainly possesses, namely, an insight into character and an ability to delineate it. This gift is seen especially in his sketch of Parson Wilbur, who edited the Biglow Papers with a delightfully pedantic introduction, glossary, and notes; in the prose essay On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners, and in the uncompleted poem, Fitz Adam's Story. See also the sketch of Captain Underhill in the essay on New ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... he said; 'and what, stripling, do you know of the laws of your country? Could you learn jurisprudence under a base-born blotter of parchment, such as Saunders Fairford; or from the empty pedantic coxcomb, his son, who now, forsooth, writer himself advocate? When Scotland was herself, and had her own king and legislature, such plebeian cubs, instead of being called to the bar of her supreme courts, would scarce have been admitted to the ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... seconded by Francis North, Lord Guildford who had lately been made Keeper of the Great Seal. The character of Guildford has been drawn at full length by his brother Roger North, a most intolerant Tory, a most affected and pedantic writer, but a vigilant observer of all those minute circumstances which throw light on the dispositions of men. It is remarkable that the biographer, though he was under the influence of the strongest fraternal partiality, and though he was evidently ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... country to lecture on literary themes. The daughter of a Dartmouth professor, she was cradled in literature, and has made it in a certain way the work of her life. There is nothing, however, of the pedantic about her. She is the embodiment of a woman's wit and humour; but her forte is a certain crisp and lively condensation of persons and qualities which carry a large amount of information under a captivating cloak of vivacious and confidential talk with ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... When a pedantic schoolmaster sees a boy eagerly watching a paper kite, he observes, "What a pity it is that children cannot be made to mind their grammar as well as their kites!" And he adds, perhaps, some peevish ejaculation ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... difficult in nature to make tolerable on the stage, its leading characteristic being wordiness. Sir Paladin, a gentleman (in the ultra strict sense of that term) seventy years of age, is desirous of the character of un homme de bonnes fortunes. Cold, precise, and pedantic, he tells the objects—not of his flame—but of his declarations, that he is consumed with passion, dying of despair, devoured with love—talking at the same time in parenthetical apologies, nicely-balanced antitheses, and behaving himself with the most frigid formality. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 27, 1841 • Various
... by turns been cajoled into a belief of his exclusive support towards obtaining it at the first vacancy. Those, however, who have paid attention to his machinations, and studied his actions; who remember his pedantic affectation of being considered a modern, or rather a second Charlemagne; and who have traced his steps through the labyrinth of folly and wickedness, of meanness and greatness, of art, corruption, and policy, which have seated him on the present ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... social abuse, and does not even spare the ladies—some are too fast, some are learned and pedantic, some cruel to their slaves—even scourging them with cowhides. "What fault," he asks, "has the girl committed, if your own nose has displeased you?" As to religion, that has disappeared altogether. ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... the "consort" of the fire-god into line with such expressions of activity as Moles, Virites, and so on; and it seems that as early as the second century B.C., sport and speculation with these names were beginning. I have quoted the whole pedantic passage from Macrobius in my Roman Festivals, p. 98, where the reader may enjoy it at leisure. I shall not be surprised if he comes to the conclusion that neither Macrobius nor his learned informers knew anything about Maia. When he reads that she was the mother ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... encountering a dragon for her sake. This tone of romantic gallantry found a clever but conceited author, to reduce it to a species of constitution and form, and lay down the courtly manner of conversation, in a pedantic book, called Euphues and his England. Of this, a brief account is given in the text, to which it may now be proper to ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... or philosophers, or politicians. They go by a man's looks and manner. Richardson calls them 'an eye-judging sex'; and I am sure he knew more about them than I can pretend to do. If you run away with a pedantic notion that they care a pin's point about your head or your heart, you will repent ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... which he wore plain in Queen Elizabeth's days, and since, here has put in a piece of red, and there a piece of blue, and here a piece of green, and there a piece of orange-tawny. We borrow words from the French, Italian, Latin, as every pedantic man pleases". ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... too long on this asinine subject. I have already passed the Pons Asinorum, and will desist, remembering the old pedantic pun of Jem Boyer, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... natural for Dryden to appeal to the most accomplished of those amongst whom he lived, and to whose taste he was but too strongly compelled to adapt his productions. Sedley, therefore, as a man of wit and gallantry, is called upon to support our author against the censures of pedantic severity. Whatever may be thought of the subject, the appeal is made with all Dryden's spirit and elegance, and his description of the attic evenings spent with Sedley and his gay associates, glosses over, and almost justifies, their occasional ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... snapping, sniffing, and snarling! I could have wept then like the sensitive fool I was. ... I can laugh now! In brief, my friend—for you ARE my friend and the best of all possible good fellows—I have made up my mind to conquer those that have risen against me—to break through the ranks of pedantic and pre-conceived opinions—and to climb the heights of fame, regardless of the little popular pipers of tame verso that obstruct my path and blow their tin whistles in the public ears to drown, if possible, my song. I WILL be heard! ... and ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... what should induce you to allow that fellow the honour of reading with you!" said Forgue. "He's a long-winded, pedantic, ill-bred lout!" ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... direction; but before he started he spoke to Rosamund with a flash of that guileless tact which redeemed much of his childish vanity, and with something of that spontaneous poetry which made it difficult, pedantic as he was, to ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... himself perfectly indifferent to all the charms of Miss Furnival, nevertheless he could hardly restrain his dislike to Lucius Mason, who, as he thought, was disposed to admire the lady in question. In talking of Lucius to his own family and to his special friend Graham, he had called him conceited, pedantic, uncouth, unenglish, and detestable. His own family, that is, his mother and sister, rarely contradicted him in anything; but Graham was by no means so cautious, and usually contradicted him in everything. Indeed, there was no sign of sterling worth so plainly marked ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... become a term of art in poetry. By this means, small poets have such a stock of able hard words lying by them, as dryades, hamadryades, aoenides, fauni, nymphae, sylvani, &c. that signify nothing at all; and such a world of pedantic terms of the same kind, as may serve to furnish all the new inventions and "thorough reformations" that can happen between this and Plato's ...
— English Satires • Various
... set to Pope's tune with the omission of the rhymes, whilst Thomson, revolting more or less consciously against the canons of his time, too often falls into mere pompous mouthing. Shaftesbury, in the previous generation, trying to write poetical prose, becomes as pedantic as Johnson, though in a different style; and Gibbon's mannerism is a familiar example of a similar escape from a monotonous simplicity into awkward complexity. Such writers are like men who have been chilled by what Johnson would call the 'frigorifick' ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... who held the office in the shire of—at the time of this catastrophe, was well born and well educated; and, though somewhat pedantic and professional in his habits, he enjoyed general respect as an active and intelligent magistrate. His first employment was to examine all witnesses whose evidence could throw light upon this mysterious event, and ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... your own playmates, one of whom was now become the bailiff of the place. On your asking them whether they knew you, one and all of them answered so heartily, "O, yes, yes—why, your are Master Frederic." The pedantic school-master, you will remember, was not so frank. He expressed himself in the stiff town phrase of, "He had not the honour of knowing you, as during your residence in that village, when a child, he had ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... Vista gave evidence through his life, having the singular conceit that his genius was military and fitter for arms than for the council. He had a precise manner, and an austerity that was at first forbidding; but his voice was always clear and firm. Although not a scholar in the pedantic sense of the term, and making no pretensions to the doubtful reputation of the sciolist, his reading was classical and varied, his fund of illustration large, and his resources of imagery plentiful ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... invites the world to witness how selfish and sensual they were in their domestic relations. He is a pulpit rhetorician, so he goes boldly and recklessly to work. Subtlety and discrimination he abhors as pedantic vices, savoring too much of "culture." His judgments are of the robustious order. Like Jesus Christ, he fancies that all men can be divided into sheep and goats. The good are good, and the bad are bad. And naturally the good are ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... point of view of the highly trained pedantic young builder, the type that, in the past few years, has honored our landscape with those paradoxical memorials of Abraham Lincoln the railsplitter, memorials whose Ionic columns are straight from Paris. Pericles is the real hero of such a man, not Lincoln. So let him ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... prince, bitterly, "that I am free to wander through the stupid streets of Potsdam; appear at his table; that my clothes may be soiled by his unbearable four-legged friends, and my ears deafened by the dull, pedantic conversation of his no less ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... knows nothing of, such as the Creed, or the history of Little Bukleton, or some favourite book. Then, again, if one is alone with one's opponent, it is quite easy to pretend that the subject on which one has shown ignorance is unimportant, peculiar, pedantic, hole in the corner, and this can be brazened out even about Greek or Latin. Or, again, one can turn the laugh against him, saying that he has just been cramming up the matter, and that he is airing his knowledge; or one can begin making jokes about him till he ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... was served that, in case the Republic did not speedily obey these orders, the Pope would excommunicate its leaders and lay an interdict upon its people. It was indeed a serious contingency. For many years the new Pope had been known as a hard, pedantic ecclesiastical lawyer, and now that he had arrived at the supreme power, he had evidently determined to enforce the high mediaeval supremacy of the Church over the State. Everything betokened his ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... 'wanken' and 'schweben' are not easily translated. The English words, by which we attempt to render them, are either vulgar or pedantic, or not of sufficiently general application. So 'der Wolken Zug'—The Draft, the Procession of Clouds.—The Masses of the Clouds sweep onward in ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... and guts!" Lester put in, trying to belong, and be light-minded, like he thought the others were, instead of a scared, pedantic kid. He slapped the blastoff drum under him, familiarly, as if to draw confidence from its ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... recognise in you The mind judicial, the untroubled view; The critic who, without pedantic pose, Takes his firm foothold on the thing he knows; Who, free alike from passion or pretence, Holds the good rule of calm and common sense; And be the subject or perplexed or plain,— Clear or confusing,—is throughout urbane, Patient, ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... but in Formal Logic it is not very convenient. If Socrates is wise, is it an identity to say 'Therefore the master of Plato is wise'; or, further that he 'takes enlightened views of life'? If Every man is fallible, is it an identical proposition that Every man is liable to error? It seems pedantic to demand a separate proposition that Fallible is liable to error. But, on the other hand, the insidious substitution of one term for another speciously identical, is a chief occasion of fallacy. How if we go on ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... words with something base or trivial. For instance,—to express woods, not on a plain, but clothing a hill, which overlooks a valley, or dell, or river, or the sea,—the trees rising one above another, as the spectators in an ancient theatre,—I know no other word in our language (bookish and pedantic terms out of the question), but hanging woods, the sylvae superimpendentes of Catullus; yet let some wit call out in a slang tone,—"the gallows!" and a peal of laughter would damn the play. Hence it is that so many dull pieces have ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... I knew one symbol letter of the anaglyph. Talk, talk, talk on persons we never heard of, things we never cared for. All we thought of importance, puerile or pedantic trifles; all we thought so trite and childish, the grand momentous business of life! If you found a little schoolboy on his half-holiday fishing for minnows with a crooked pin, and you began to tell him of all the ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a partisan, lending effectual aid to Socrates; there is Critias assuming the tone of impartiality; Callias, here as always inclining to the Sophists, but eager for any intellectual repast; Prodicus, who finds an opportunity for displaying his distinctions of language, which are valueless and pedantic, because they are not based on dialectic; Hippias, who has previously exhibited his superficial knowledge of natural philosophy, to which, as in both the Dialogues called by his name, he now adds the profession of an interpreter of the Poets. The two latter personages ...
— Protagoras • Plato
... peacemakers, ready to break the laws of any land for the sake of a great ideal. Goodness knows what stuff they talked together. Mary said she would blush to think of it till her dying day, and I gathered that on her side it was a mixture of Launcelot Wake at his most pedantic and ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... explain (full explanation will be found later on) and they are composed of atoms belonging to an ultra-physical realm of Nature with which the occultist has long been familiar and describes as "the Astral Plane." Some rather pedantic critics have found fault with the term, as the "plane" in question is of course really a sphere entirely surrounding the physical globe, but as all occultists understand the word, "plane" simply signifies a condition of nature. Each condition, and there are many ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
... portion of her time, her thoughts, her fortune, to the most sacred of all duties—charity, in its most comprehensive meaning. Neither did her knowledge, like that of Mrs. Bluemits, evaporate in pedantic discussion or idle declamation, but showed itself in the tenor of a well-spent life, and in the graceful discharge of those duties which belonged to her sex and station. Next to goodness Mary most ardently admired talents. She knew there ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... councillors. Philip never originated a thought, nor laid down a plan, but he was ever true to the falsehood of his nature, and was indefatigable in following out the suggestions of others. No greater mistake can be made than to ascribe talent to this plodding and pedantic monarch. The man's intellect was contemptible, but malignity and duplicity, almost superhuman; have effectually lifted his character out of the regions of the common-place. He wrote accordingly to say that the pardon, under certain conditions, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... men that made America a nation. If one is not subject to the spirit of ancestor worship that has long ruled American history, one is bound to say that—apart from some forceful pamphleteering of transient purpose—the voluminous political literature of the formative period displays much pedantic erudition but has little that goes really deep. The Federalist, the artillery of a hard fought battle, is a striking exception. So, too, is the series of reports by Hamilton. But his plans could not prevail by force of reason against the general spirit ...
— Washington and His Colleagues • Henry Jones Ford
... of all this business was that a peace was made between us and the Council of the Abati. After their pompous, pedantic fashion they swore solemnly on the roll of the Law that they would aid us in every way to overcome the Fung, and even obey such military orders as we might give them, subject to the confirmation of these orders by a small council of their ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... vague, vapourish, and metaphysical. And this predominates absurdly through all its classes. The poet prides himself on being as much a dreamer in his prose as in his poetry; the scholar is proud of being perplexed and pedantic; the statesman is naturally immersed in that problematic style, which belongs to the secrecy of despotic governments, and to the stiffness of circles where all is etiquette. But Walpole and his tribe have fashion wholly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... deal more than a classicist, but a classicist first and foremost. And so it was natural that he should think a classical education the best education that could be offered to boys, and should desire to see classics, taught in a literary and not a pedantic spirit, the staple of instruction in all those Public Schools, whether of ancient or of modern foundation, to which the Upper and Middle Classes should resort. He was perfectly ready to make composition in Greek and ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... the presence of this big-boned, brawny stranger, with his great flashing eyes, who had forced his way among them from the plough-tail at a single stride; and it will always be a reflection in their honour that they suffered no pedantic prejudices to interfere with their reception of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... suffer in a sordid world; and how many human passions must they subdue, before they can penetrate thy mazy walks, or approach the hidden sanctuaries of thy temple of Truth! Little thinks the babbling politician, the pedantic linguist, or the equivocating metaphysician, of the watchful hours which thy worshippers must pass,—of the never-ending patience which they must exert,—of the concurring circumstances which must favour their enthusiasm! Whether we consider the necessary magnitude of the library, the ascending ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... thou from Nature, not the Schools Distorted by pedantic rules, With patience wrought, such logic vain Had ne'er perverted thus thy brain: For Genius never gave delight By means of what offends the sight: Nor hadst thou deem'd, with folly mad, Thou could'st to Nature's beauties add, By taking from her that which gives ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... the Reformers of the sixteenth century fell into the same snare before they were aware of it. We wonder at the eccentricities of the priesthood, at the conceit of the hereditary nobility, at the affectation of majestic stateliness inherent in royalty. But the pedantic display of learning, the disregard of the real wants of the people, the contempt of all knowledge which does not wear the academic garb, show the same foible, the same conceit, the same spirit of caste ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... acquaintance, was in some degree a favorite of his, his good qualities being brought out to neutralize his many bad ones. Jovellanos and Arguelles appear the only honest characters in the midst of such a mass of vice, and even they were pedantic, impracticable, and prejudiced. No history, narrative, or memoir can be so disgusting as those of Spain and its court under the dominion of the House of Bourbon. The imagination of no novelist has ever attained that acme of duplicity, cruelty, villany, and cowardice, which made ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... theologians of the Sorbonne had, during the past year, been aroused by the fame of Martin Luther's "heresy," and they were ready to resent any attempt at innovation, however slight, either in doctrine or in practice, as evidence of heretical proclivities. Natalis Beda, the ignorant but pedantic syndic of the theological faculty, entered the lists as Lefevre's opponent, and an animated dispute was waged between the friends of the two combatants. Of so great moment was the decision regarded by Poncher, Bishop of ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... "I descend! I have had the statesman, the earl, the courtly knight, the pedantic Huguenot, for my warders. Now am I come to the clown. Soon will it be the dungeon ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... complex forms of the British constitution. In similar manner, many of the old objections of our deistical writers have ceased to be heard of in our day, unless it be from the lips of the veriest sciolism; the objections, for instance, of that truly pedantic philosophy which once argued that ethical and religious truth are not given in the Scripture in a system such as a schoolman might have digested it into; as if the brief iteration and varied illustration of pregnant truth, intermingled ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... could have put so grotesque a fancy into his head? and then he smiled as he traced it to Sylvia's playful suggestion that the bottle might contain a "genie," as did the famous jar in the "Arabian Nights," and to her father's pedantic correction of the word to "Jinnee." Upon that slight foundation his sleeping brain had built up all that elaborate fabric—a scene so vivid and a story so circumstantial and plausible that, in spite of its extravagance, he could hardly even now persuade himself that it was ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... women to cultivate letters, and that it is unjust and tyrannical to deprive flowery of their perfumes, by banishing young girls from all but domestic cares. One can imagine in what manner a future queen, sustaining such a thesis, was likely to be welcomed in the most lettered and pedantic court in Europe. Between the literature of Rabelais and Marot verging on their decline, and that of Ronsard and Montaigne reaching their zenith, Mary became a queen of poetry, only too happy never to have to wear another crown than that which Ronsard, Dubellay, ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the kingdom, a more dogmatical or luxurious set of men, than the pedantic tyrants who reside in colleges and preside at public schools. The vacations are equally injurious to the morals of the masters and pupils, and the intercourse, which the former keep up with the nobility, introduces the same vanity and extravagance ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... would go better without all that jiggery-pokery of wires up above. They are like the Western judge in the murder trial who said that if only they got a man hanged for this abominable crime, he wouldn't make a pedantic fuss about the question of which man. They are like the plain, straightforward promoter who became impatient with maps and planned a railway across Switzerland by drawing a straight line with a ruler across Jungfrau and Matterhorn ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... the discussion of principle but the dissection of personality. His power lay in his style and the knowledge that enabled him to inform the general public of facts which were the private possession of the inner political circle. His mind was narrow and pedantic. He stood with Grenville on American taxation; and he maintained without perceiving what it meant that a nomination borough was a freehold beyond the competence of the legislature to abolish. He was never generous, always abusive, ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... of Henry {41} VI. (1422-1471). Chaucer's contemporary, John Gower, wrote his Vox Clamantis in Latin, his Speculum Meditantis (a lost poem), and a number of ballades in Parisian French, and his Confessio Amantis (1393) in English. The last named is a dreary, pedantic work, in some 15,000 smooth, monotonous, eight-syllabled couplets, in which Grande Amour instructs the lover how to get the love ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... if he altered the time of one movement in order to make room for another, in which he would himself be more prominent? What should we say if the conductor of an orchestra committed a single one of these criminal absurdities? The musical public would rise against him as one man, the pedantic critics and the young men who smoke as they stand on promenade floors. And yet this, nothing more nor less, is done on the stage of the theatre whenever a Shakespeare play, or any serious work of dramatic art, is presented with ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... possible that a man who is guilty of such pedantic folly as this,—a man who can see a confirmation of his doctrine in such a recovery as this,—a recovery which is happening every day, from a breath of air, a drop or two of water, untying a bonnet-string, loosening a stay-lace, and which can hardly help happening, whatever ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... sapphire, sapphirine, amethystine, turquoise, ultramarine, sky-colored; livid, ecchymosed; rigorous, severe; (Colloq.) melancholy, downhearted, depressed, despondent, dejected, low-spirited, dispirited, hypochondriac, chapfallen, gloomy, (Colloq.) gloomy, inauspicious, dismal, depressing; (Colloq.) pedantic, literary. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... man "of small learning," says Murimuth; "passably literate," writes Chambre; at the best, according to Petrarch, "of ardent temperament, not ignorant of literature, with a natural curiosity for out-of-the- way lore": an antiquarian, not of the lovable kind, but unscrupulous, pedantic, and vain, indulging an inordinate taste for collecting and hoarding books, perhaps to satisfy a craving for shreds and patches of knowledge, but more likely to earn a reputation as a great clerk.[1] For De Bury was something of a humbug; the Philobiblon, if it is his work, ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... unequal, touching at times the highest point of inspiration, as in the angels of Guccio at Perugia, and sinking not unfrequently into the commonplace of easygoing triviality, as in the common floral traceries of Milanese windows. But it is never laboured, never pedantic, never dulled by the painful effort to subdue an obstinate material to the artist's will. If marble is required to develop the strength of the few supreme sculptors, terra-cotta saves intact the fancies of a crowd ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... the intellectual pretensions of Mr. O'Connell, let us turn to his latest General Epistle, dated from 'Conciliation Hall,' on the last day of October. This is no random, or (to use a pedantic term) perfunctory document; not a document is this to which indulgence is due. By its subject, not less than by its address, it stands forth audaciously as a deliberate, as a solemn, as a national state paper; for its subject is the future political ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... which in their different ways Allan Ramsay and Percy himself had set the example, was not always up to the highest lights on this subject of editorial faithfulness. It must, for instance, seem odd to the least pedantic nowadays that he should have thought proper to print Dryden's Virgil with Dr. Somebody's pedantic improvements instead of Dryden's own text. But the case of the ballads is very different. Here, it must be remembered, ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury |
