"Precocity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rifled bolt on quitting the muzzle of the gun, so the lower race, in childhood, may outstrip the higher. But the higher eventually overtakes the lower, and surpasses it in range. As regards individuals, we do not always find the precocity of youth prolonged to mental power in maturity; while the dulness of boyhood is sometimes strikingly contrasted with the intellectual energy of after years. Newton, when a boy, was weakly, and he showed no particular aptitude at school; but in his eighteenth ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... cause. When he had read the old squire's letter he did not as yet wish to forgive his nephew. He was becoming very tired of his courtship, but in his estimation the wife would be better than the nephew. Though he had been much put out by the precocity of that embrace, there was nevertheless a sweetness about it which lingered on his lips. Then Mountjoy had come down, and he had answered Mountjoy very stoutly: "A lie!" he had exclaimed. "Did he tell a lie?" he had asked, as though all must be over with a young ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... having thus spoken, the senior demons were amazed at his precocity, and performed a pradakshina, exclaiming, "Truly thou art a highly superior young devil!" They then departed to prepare the new infernal chamber, agreeably to ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... recorded, on good authority, where a French child but three years old underwent all the physical changes incident to puberty, and grew to be a healthy woman. But what children can surpass the American in precocity? This French child-woman is quite left in the shade by one described in a recent number of a western medical journal, who from her birth had regular monthly changes, and the full physical development which ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... precocious. Lucky Richard was a democrat. Result: Young Dick learned in a year from a private teacher what would have required three years in the grammar school, and used all of the saved years in playing in the open air. Also, result of precocity of son and democracy of father, Young Dick was sent to grammar school for the last year in order to learn shoulder-rubbing democracy with the sons and daughters of workmen, ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... humorously amorous nature—"Hallo, Hallo, Who's Your Lady Friend?"; "You're my Baby"; and the ungrammatical "Who Were You With Last Night?" Another great favourite is an involved composition which always appears to begin in the middle. It deals severely with the precocity of a youthful lover who has been detected wooing his lady in the Park. Each verse ends, ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... said, "Well, Clements, you have built a machine to surprise all the world, and I am come to surprise you by paying you for it." And to show his early quick perception, ready reply, wilfulness, and precocity, I must here relate two well-attested anecdotes: the first, when quite a child, and at his lessons in the nursery, on his mother's running up to dispel the noise and disturbance he was making, she exclaimed ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... the chief authentic source of his biography. It was written shortly after his death, although not published for some time later; and nothing can be more lively, graphic, and yet dignified, than its portraiture of his youthful precocity, and, again, of the devotions and austerities of his later years. But it leaves many gaps unsupplied. Like other memoirs of the kind, it is written from a somewhat conventional point of view. No one, as M. Havet says, was nearer to him in all senses of the expression, ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... that day beside that grave, the most brilliant by far was the third son, Joseph Addison Alexander. Dr. Charles Hodge said of him: "Taking him all in all, he was the most gifted man with whom I have ever been personally acquainted," In childhood, such was his precocity that he knew the Hebrew alphabet at six years of age (I am afraid that some ministers do not know it at sixty); and he could read Latin fluently when he was only eight! Of his wonderful feats of memory I could give many illustrations; one was ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... called attention to Scandinavian mythology. Bodmer soon afterwards published for the first time the Nibelungen Lied. Macpherson startled the literary world in 1762 by what professed to be an epic poem from the Gaelic. Chatterton's career (1752-1770) was a proof not only of unique poetical precocity, but of a singular facility in divining the tastes of the literary world at the time. Percy's Reliques appeared in 1765. Percy, I may note, had begun oddly enough by publishing a Chinese novel (1761), and a translation of Icelandic poetry (1763). Not long afterwards Sir William ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... the early proofs of reason, as well as genius, in Cowley, Milton, and Pope, (Many other names might be added.) but only appeal to experience to decide whether young men, who are early introduced into company (and examples now abound) do not acquire the same precocity. So notorious is this fact, that the bare mentioning of it must bring before people, who at all mix in the world, the idea of a number of swaggering apes of men whose understandings are narrowed by being brought into the society of men when they ought to have been spinning ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... for ever, and in whose innocence he might still love his fellow man. On the third day of his acquaintance with Muche he brought an alphabet to the office, and the lad delighted him by the intelligence he manifested. He learned his letters with all the sharp precocity which marks the Parisian street arab, and derived great amusement from the ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... She had the straight, uncurling hair like his, and her dark eyes were a little sunken under the finely-arched brows. It was rather a bewitching little face, only too thin and sallow for health, and with an intelligent expression, almost amounting to precocity. ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 355, October 16, 1886 • Various
... Smith, of Clapham, who had brought up her children in the strictest propriety, welcomed as play-mates for her dears, whom she had kept away from the contaminating associations of the alleys, Belgian children from the toughest quarters of Antwerp, who had a precocity that led to baffling confusion in Mrs. Smith's mind between parental responsibility and patriotic duty. Smart society gave the run of its houses sometimes to gentry who were used to getting the run of that kind of houses by lifting a window with a jemmy on a dark ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... has gone afield, and there could be no better instance of a successful fugitive and a genuine affinity, no more interesting example of selection—selection of field and subject—operating by that insight which has the precocity and certainty of an instinct. The domicile of Mr. Abbey's genius is the England of the eighteenth century; I should add that the palace of art which he has erected there commands—from the rear, as it were—various ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... having forgiven him, thanked me and was about to depart in the same manner in which he came, when I intimated to him my willingness to extend a much greater kindness than my pardon. In short, his offence was punished only by sweet imprisonment in my arms; and delighted with his precocity, I blessed the lucky chance which had so unexpectedly furnished me with a youthful and handsome lover. Ere daylight he departed; and has since then frequently visited me, always gaining access to my chamber by means of the gardener's ladder. ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... Barrett was drinking from the same fount of inspiration among the Malvern Hills, and was already turning it to account in the production of her first epic. The fifty copies of the 'Battle of Marathon,' which Mr. Barrett, proud of his daughter's precocity, insisted on having printed, bear the date of 1819. Only five of them are now known to exist, and these are all in private hands; even the British Museum possesses only the reprint which the hero-worship of the present generation caused to be produced in 1891. ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... child—never had the language of a child." So it fared with him during the period of his home instruction, the first eight years of his life; and his father having, as scholar and schoolmaster, no doubt noted the strange precocity of his youngest son, appears to have devoted especial attention to his training. "In my ninth year," he continues, "my most dear, most revered father died suddenly. O that I might so pass away, if, like him, I were an Israelite without guile. The image ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... Goodhouse, who, under the Ruling of Beneficent Providence, was the Happy Preserver of a Beautiful and Precious Life of Virtuous Precocity, this Box is presented by the Father of Him whom He saved as a grateful acknowledgment ...
— Stolen Treasure • Howard Pyle
... often figure thus in popular tales: readers of Rabelais will remember his story of the Fool and the Cook; and there is a familiar example of a boy's precocity in the story of the Stolen Purse—"Craft and Malice of Women," or the Seven Wazirs, vol. ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... inconsistencies too, both as a writing and as a Reading. There was altogether too much precocity for a genuine boy, in the nice discrimination with which the Boy at Mugby hit off the contrasting nationalities. The foreigner, for example, who politely, hat in hand, "beseeched Our Young Ladies, and our Missis," for a "leetel gloss hoif prarndee," ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... in Boston at the time of Poe's birth, January 19, 1809. At the age of three he was left an orphan by the death of his mother. A wealthy Scotchman of Virginia, Mr. John Allan, adopted him and brought him up in luxury—a much spoiled child, everywhere petted for his beauty and precocity. ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... center of it is a perfect miniature pea-pod, with the peas all in it,—as perfect a pea-pod as it will ever be, only it is as tiny as a chatelaine ornament. Maize and some other things show the same precocity. This confirmation of the theologic theory is startling, and sets me meditating upon the moral possibilities of my garden. I may find in it yet the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... by his literary and social gifts, had made his name several years before 1811, when he first became personally acquainted with Byron. His precocity was as remarkable as his versatility. The son of a Dublin grocer, for whom his political interest secured the post of barrack-master, he went, like Sheridan, to Samuel Whyte's school, and was afterwards at Trinity College, Dublin. Before he was fifteen he had written ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... of the medical art—he was insane; and to what extent this mania acted as a monomania, that is, how far he was himself deceived, the world can never know. One thing, at least; it redeems all his faults. Precocious beyond any other known instance of precocity; intensely haughty; bold in falsehood; working best when the moon was at the full, he stands in English literature as the most singular of its curiosities. His will is an awful jest; his declaration of his religious opinions a tissue of contradictions and absurdities: he bequeathes to a clergyman ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... be contemplated without frequent admiration, and constant affection. His talents took the form of genius, which Washington's did not. But active, various, and brilliant, as the faculties of Hamilton were, whether viewed in the precocity of youth, or in the all-accomplished elegance of maturer life—lightning quick as his intelligence was to see through every subject that came before it, and vigorous as it was in constructing the argumentation ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... of an artist. "She was small and slight in person, pale, sandy-haired, and with green eyes, habitually cast down, but very large, odd, and attractive when they looked up." Becky had the "dismal precocity of poverty," and, being engaged as governess in the family of Sir Pitt Crawley, bart., contrived to marry, clandestinely, his son, Captain Rawdon Crawley, and taught him how to live in splendor "upon nothing a year." Becky ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... will it be. I cannot refrain from a smile when a sanguine planter informs me with exultation that he has obtained a nut from a tree only three or four years planted out; so much the worse for his chance of success, too great precocity being ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... and loving beyond the usual capacities of childhood; perhaps her solitary condition and habits of constant intercourse with one so grave as Mordaunt, and who always, when not absent on his excursions of charity, loved her to be with him, had given to her mind a precocity of feeling, and tinctured the simplicity of infancy with what ought to have been the colours of after years. She was not inclined to the sports of her age; she loved, rather, and above all else, to sit by Mordaunt's side and silently ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... souls. No tear their mother shed was unobserved by them; they knew when their father had lost, and when he had won; they knew, too, all the varying moods of his unhinged mind; and in this terrible school of misery they acquired an instinctive intelligence, which in the eyes of strangers seemed mere precocity. ...
— A Ghetto Violet - From "Christian and Leah" • Leopold Kompert
... learn facts without the distraction of critical uncertainty. With this in mind, therefore, a few of his conclusions, picked mostly at random, may be quoted. An important factor in the production of delinquency he finds to lie in the premature appearance of adult sex development—a precocity which he regards as dangerous because it seems to be correlated with a stimulation of sex instinct before adult inhibitions appear. In girls (not in boys) he finds a distinct tendency to general physical ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... much more conspicuous in the later stages. Jealousy is present from the first. It is more pronounced in the cases of love between children and adults of the opposite sex on account of the child's being less able to monopolize the attention of the adult and on account of the precocity of the child concerned in such cases. A fuller discussion of jealousy belongs in another ...
— A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love between the Sexes • Sanford Bell
... the daughter of Catherine, and Elizabeth, the daughter of Anne Boleyn. Edward VI., who was but ten years old at his accession, was weak in body, but was a most remarkable instance of intellectual precocity. The government now espoused the Protestant side. Somerset, the king's uncle, was at the head of the regency. The Six Articles (p. 407) were repealed. Protestant theologians from the Continent were taken ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... remarkable, for a boy of his age, bred in the country, astonishing. She had heard her father describe Pitt at twenty-one and Byron at eighteen. Without making absurd comparisons, there was, all the same, something of that precocity of manhood here, something also of the arrogance that the great men had exhibited. She was very glad that she ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... unexpectedly, through the government bag (Heaven knows how they came there), two of our many and long-looked-for letters, wherein was a circumstantial account of the whole conduct and behavior of our pets; with marvellous narrations of Charley's precocity at a Twelfth Night juvenile party at Macready's; and tremendous predictions of the governess, dimly suggesting his having got out of pot-hooks and hangers, and darkly insinuating the possibility of his writing us a letter before long; and many other workings of the ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... nearly as tall as young Paynter, whose slenderness, however, is like steel. I well remember when Dr. McGee took him to North Carolina and made him over—a weak, irritable little precocity of twelve or so. He never ate or slept in a house for three years, and I think that the birds and trees of that period got into his opera and made it what it is, the musical event of a decade. He works best in Paris, and they will ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... he was an adoring father, and the extremest zeal and warmth of his adoration was given to his son Charles James. The child was from the first precocious, alert, and gifted beyond his years, and the father fostered and flattered the precocity with a kind of worship that proved, as it was bound to prove, disastrous. It seems to have been Henry Fox's deliberate belief that the best way to bring up a spirited, gifted, headstrong child was to gratify ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... studied his art. A few lines farther down, the pseudo-Tacitus tells us that Crassus, in his nineteenth year, held a brief against Carbo; that Caesar did so in his twenty-first against Dolabella; and Pollio, in his twenty-second year, against Cato.[43] In this precocity Cicero did not imitate Crassus, or show an example to the Romans who followed him. He was twenty-six when he pleaded his first cause. Sulla had then succeeded in crushing the Marian faction, and the Sullan proscriptions had taken ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... a real boy. He smoked cubeb cigarettes with an almost unprecedented precocity. He nearly learned to chew tobacco. He could snap a sparrow off a telegraph-wire with a nigger-shooter almost infallibly. He had the first air-gun in town and a shot-gun at fifteen. He thought that he was manlier than Drury ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... music and all the music of the time, one should be cautious—one cannot be too cautious. The music for these plays was not composed till at least fifteen years later. The biographers had also a craze for proving Purcell's precocity. They would have it that Dido and Aeneas dated from his twenty-second year. If they had boldly stuck to their plan of attributing the music to the year of the first performance of the play to which ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... generous nature has been in bestowing the gift of genius, the pursuit of art is nevertheless a long and continuous labor. Many artists have been precocious, but without diligence their precocity would have come to nothing. The anecdote related of West is well known. When only seven years old, struck with the beauty of the sleeping infant of his eldest sister, whilst watching by its cradle, he ran to seek some paper, and forthwith drew its portrait in red and black ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... a fashionable young lady with no more aptitude for the 'concord of sweet sounds,' than for the abstractions of Hegel, or Differential Calculus. It is traditional, that while in my nurse's arms, I performed miracles of melody such as Auld Lang Syne, with one little finger; but such undue precocity, madly stimulated by ambitious mamma and nurse Nell, resulted fatally in the total destruction of my marvellous talent, which died of cerebro-musical excitement when confronted with the gamut. Except as the language in which Strauss appeals to my waltzing genius, I have ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... college. The ideas in many of the learned tomes were far beyond his age, but he understood them, remembered them afterwards, and could recall in later years not only the thought in each book, but also the disposition of his mind when he read them. Naturally this precocity of intellect caused brain fatigue, though this would never have been suspected by the Fathers of their ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... speller. In manhood he said: "I do not remember when I could not read, so it must have been very early." He was one of those irrepressible little fellows, whose intuition and observation are better than school. He learned more out of school than he could or would have done in it. His precocity put him in advance of most boys at seven, even without schooling. It was not necessary for him to have school-teachers to testify that he possessed ten talents,—his parents knew that, and every one else ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... he who told the kindly mother, offering to bring her 'Gustus to join him in his play, that "if you bring your 'Gustus here I shall make a slit in him with my new knife, and let out his sawdust"—when, I repeat, we come in contact with such an obnoxious precocity as this, what word can describe him so satisfactorily ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... descended to Sylvia amusingly. She had never attended school, but he had taught her systematically at home, and his interests were hers. The students attributed to her the most abstruse knowledge, and stories of her precocity were repeated proudly by the Lane folk. Many evenings spent with her grandfather at the observatory had not been wasted. She knew the paths of the stars as she knew the walks of the campus. Dr. Wandless, the ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... Augustus Freeman was born at Harborne, Staffordshire, England, Aug. 2, 1823. His precocity as a child was remarkable; at seven he read English and Roman history, and at eleven he had acquired a knowledge of Greek and Latin, and had taught himself the rudiments of Hebrew. An increase in fortune in 1848 enabled him to settle down ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... system has been by many given up, and precocity is discouraged. People are beginning to see that the first requisite to success in life is to be a good animal. The once universal practice of learning by rote is daily falling into discredit. We are substituting principles for rules, as is exemplified ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... precocity of which he was completely unaware, he began rapidly sorting and cataloguing noises that had previously conveyed no meaning. He now learned to associate certain sounds with certain sources and place others under tentative listings while awaiting further data. ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... all her struggles, in thoroughly shaking off this hated yoke, she did but exchange her Persian for Greek masters, when the empire of Cyrus perished. Since then, Greeks, Romans, Saracens, and Turks have, each in their turn, been masters of the Egyptian race, which has paid the usual penalty of precocity in the early ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... words, mannerisms, habits, and oddities of human beings. If Hugh had been born in a household professionally artistic, and had been trained in art of any kind, I think he would very likely have become an accomplished artist or musician, and probably have shown great precocity. But he was never an artist in the sense that art was a torment to him, or that he made any sacrifice of other aims to it. It was always just a part of existence to him, and of the nature of an amusement, though in so far as it represented the need of self-expression in forms of beauty, ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and Genius offer a special difficulty to education in the precocity which often accompanies them. But by precocity we do not mean that they early render themselves perceptible, since the early manifestation of gifts by talent and genius, through their intense confidence, ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... warrant an occasional draft upon his talents for the entertainment of her Majesty's immediate circle, which held itself as far as possible aloof from the court, and was disposed to be self-reliant for its amusements. Daniel had entered upon the vocation of courtier with flattering auspices. His precocity while at Oxford has found him a place in the "Bibliotheca Eruditorum Praecocium." Anthony Wood bears witness to his thorough accomplishments in all kinds, especially in history and poetry, specimens of which, the antiquary tells ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... adaptation of the Plutus of Aristophanes. There is no doubt that Randolph's work gives the impression of considerable power. At the same time it is fair to remember that the author's life was one very conducive to precocity, inasmuch as he underwent at once the three stimulating influences of an elaborate literary education, of endowed leisure to devote himself to what literary occupations he pleased, and of the emulation caused by literary society. Jonson's friendship seems to have acted as a forcing-house ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... a child should be; that is, she was as slightly a child, and for as brief a time, as might be. Childhood, as an age of progress, was not to be delayed, as an age of imperfection was to be improved, as an age of inability was not to be exposed except when precocity distinguished it. It must at any rate be shortened. Lucy Apsley, at four years old, read English perfectly, and was "carried to sermons, and could remember and repeat them exactly." "At seven she had eight tutors ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... birth of Minerva," he did but allude to what is to be remarked of all Hamilton's works. All that he did was perfect, and no one seems to have been aware of his power until he had established the fact of its existence. Such a combination of precocity and versatility stands quite unparalleled. Octavius, William the Third, Henry St. John, Charles James Fox, and William Pitt the younger, all showed various powers at early periods of their lives; but not one of them was the equal ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... reaches the Anthophora's cells. Among these cells are some which contain larvae and which result from the labours of last May; others, though of the same date, are already occupied by the perfect insect. The precocity of metamorphosis varies from one larva to another; however, a few days' difference of age is enough to explain these inequalities of development. Other cells, as numerous as the first, contain a parasitical Hymenopteron, a Melecta (M. armata), likewise in the perfect state. ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... elders with two bits of wood, so the family orchestra was complete. The last accident was the arrival of one Frankh, a distant relative. This was long before the magical feats of the baby Mozart had set every grasping parent staring for signs of musical precocity in his children. But Mathias undoubtedly wanted to do his best for his boy, and Joseph himself must have had ambition of a sort—witness his endeavours to play the fiddle without a fiddle to play—and when Frankh undertook ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman
... glazier, who brought him up tenderly and whom he never ceased to venerate as his true mother. His anonymous father, however, partly supported him by an annual income of twelve hundred francs. He was educated at the college Mazarin, and surprised his Jansenist teachers by his brilliance and precocity. They believed him to be a second Pascal; and, doubtless to complete the analogy, drew his attention away from his theological studies to geometry. But they calculated without their host; for the young student suddenly found ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... she would like to see—and remembered one or two trifles she had mentioned which she wanted from town, and even laid in a stock of amusements for little Geoff,—boys' books, suited rather to his years than to his precocity. About the other and more serious part of his self-constituted mission Warrender, however, had done nothing. He had passed one of those "Scholastic Agencies," which it had been his (vague) intention to inquire at, had paused and passed it by. There was ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... an amateur character while still a boy. His "Comic English Histories," executed when he was only fifteen years of age, were published after his death; but he was still young when he first became known to the public. He was possessed of an extraordinary power of fanciful draughtsmanship; and his precocity is sufficiently proved by his comic illustrations to Homer, wrought at the tender age of twelve, with real humour, wealth of invention, and excellence of expression. His uncle, Mr. Conan, dramatic critic of the "Morning Herald," showed his work to his friend ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... Darwinian: the derivation of our bodies from the bodies of apes is a conception too grossly materialistic for him. Our souls, however, he is quite willing to derive from the souls of lower animals. Obviously we have pre-existed; how are we to account for Mozart's precocity save by supposing his pre-existence? He brought with him the musical skill acquired in a previous life. In general, the souls of musical children come from nightingales, while the souls of great architects have passed into them from beavers (p. 247). ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... mind, of a spirit, ever seeking, ever striving, and pressing onward and upward to new truth and light. Her works are the mirror of this progress. In reviewing them, the first point that strikes us is the precocity, or rather the spontaneity, of her poetic gift. She was a born singer; poetry was her natural language, and to write was less effort than to speak, for she was a shy, sensitive child, with strange reserves and reticences, not easily putting herself "en rapport" ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... his nurse under the chin, and he'd say, With his "Fal, lal, lal"— "'Oo doosed fine gal!" This shocking precocity drove 'em away: "A month from to-day Is as long as I'll stay— Then I'd wish, if you please, for to ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... legate, Johannes Magni, was the son of a pious burgher of Linkoeping, and along with his two brothers had been educated from childhood for the Church. At the age of eighteen so marvellous was his precocity that he was made a canon both of Linkoeping and of Skara. Later, as was the practice with scholars of that period, he continued his studies at several of the leading universities in Europe. But in spite of a sojourn of some seventeen years away from Sweden, he never ceased ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... found in the fields during a thunder storm, clapping his hands at each flash of lightning, and shouting "Bonny! Bonny!"—a bit of infantile intrepidity which makes more acceptable a story of another sort illustrative of his mental precocity. A lady entering his mother's room found him reading aloud a description of a shipwreck, accompanying the words with excited comments and gestures. "There's the mast gone," he cried, "crash it goes; they will ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... rarer case of female flowers on a true male panicle, and likewise hermaphrodite flowers.[572] Azara describes[573] a variety in Paraguay the grains of which are very tender, and he states that several varieties are fitted for being cooked in various ways. The varieties also differ greatly in precocity, and have different powers of resisting dryness and the action of violent wind.[574] Some of the foregoing differences would certainly be considered of specific value with plants in a ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... innocent heart to forget Nicolas and so put it off its guard, Catherine distilled into the girl the insidious nectar of compliments. Unawares, she touched a secret wound. La Pechina, without being other than a poor peasant girl, was a specimen of alarming precocity, like many another creature doomed to die as prematurely as it blooms. Strange product of Burgundian and Montenegrin blood, conceived and born amid the toils of war, the girl was doubtless in many ways the result of her ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... we have a marvellously graphic description, extending over three pages, perhaps the most elaborately painted landscape in Browning's work. It seems like wronging the poem to speak of its promise: it is, indeed, far from mature, but it has a superb precocity marking a certain stage of ripeness. It is lacking, certainly, as Browning himself declares, in "good draughtsmanship and right handling," but this defect of youth is richly compensated by the wealth of inspiration, the keen intellectual ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... the charge of a tutor, Professor Barre by name, who took a great interest in this American boy, whose travels and experiences had given him a precocity which the professor had never met with in any of his other scholars. Ralph would have much preferred to study Paris instead of books, and the professor, who was able to give a great deal of time to his pupil, did not altogether ignore this natural instinct of a youthful ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... year. Give it him; and dismiss him if he plays humdrum and doesn't earn it. Dismiss half a dozen, if necessary, till you get a fellow with a grain or two of genius for tuition. When the boy is seventeen, what with his Oriental precocity, and this system of education, he will know the world as well as a Saxon boy of twenty-one, and that is not saying much. Then, if his nature is still as wild, get him a large tract in Australia; cattle to breed, kangaroos ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... at rearing a family. It is at most a fortnight since the Rat was laid in the earth; and here already is a vigorous population on the verge of the metamorphosis. Such precocity amazes me. It would seem as though the liquefaction of carrion, deadly to any other stomach, is in this case a food productive of especial energy, which stimulates the organism and accelerates its growth, so that the victuals may be consumed before its approaching conversion ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... of the Regulating Captain no man was older than he looked, no lad as young as he avowed. Hence thousands of pressed men over fifty-five, who did not look the age they could not prove, figured on the books of the fleet with boys whose precocity of appearance gave the lie to their assertions. George Stephens, son of a clerk in the Transport Office, suffered impressment when barely thirteen; and the son of a corporal in Lord Elkinton's regiment, one Alexander M'Donald, was listed in the same manner while still "under ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... conclusions and discussions primitive. He became an ardent bookworm, reading incessantly or rather at such times when his parents permitted, for they were simple folk who were rather alarmed at their boy's interests and zeal. No noticeable difference from other boys was noted aside from precocity in study, yet even at the age of ten life was running in two great currents for this boy. The one current was the outer world with its ever varied happenings, the other was the inner world of thoughts and moods, deeply, fascinatingly interesting. It seemed to H. I. that there were "two I's, ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... College, I come now to speak. Of him I shall speak familiarly, as of an intimate friend; and impartially and justly, as one who wishes him well. Willis, I venture to pronounce the most remarkable genius our country has yet produced. I do not call him remarkable merely for his unusual precocity of song, but remarkable for the possession of that rare genius, which by any man, young or old, in our land, I do not think has ever been displayed. Nature has done wonderful things for him; but alas! he has thus ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... generation's "four-year-olds" where my father could hear me. To have simply skinned me alive and considered his duty at an end would have seemed to him criminal leniency toward one so sinning. He was a stern, unsmiling man, and hated all forms of precocity. If I had said some of the things I have referred to, and said them in his hearing, he would have destroyed me. He would, indeed. He would, provided the opportunity remained with him. But it would not, for I would have had judgment enough to take some strychnine first and say my smart thing afterward. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the light of the tall lamp, despite all his former physical sufferings and his present anxieties! Again there was a look of childish pain on his lips, and in his large eyes humid beneath the brow that harbored thoughts of a magnificent precocity. Again compassion filled her at sight of this weakness, this ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... but here the marvelous Jacob, whose physique supported a precocity that would have shattered a Gentile of his years, showed that he had been listening with much comprehension by saying, "You are coming again. Have you got any more knives ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... time, (1672,) he was twenty-two years of age, and had received an excellent education, and shown considerable military abilities. In consequence of his precocity of talent, his unquestioned patriotism, and the great services which his family had rendered to the state, he was appointed commander-in-chief of the forces of the republic, and was encouraged to aspire to the office of stadtholder, the highest in the commonwealth. ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... eighteen months, before he had ever seen or heard a violin player, he continually amused himself by using two pieces of stick after the manner of the violin and bow, and singing to himself. It is fair to say that similar precocity in other children has not always resulted in virtuosity. A case might be cited of a very young person who amused himself by inverting a small chair, and imagining that he was a street organist, but he grew to maturity without adopting ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... which the father took in order to display the talents of his children, she divided the public attention with her brother. Wolfgang, however, not only profited as a player, from the careful instruction which both the children received from their parent, but began then to exhibit the extraordinary precocity of his musical mind; the minuets and other little movements which he composed from the age of four to seven show a consistency of thought and a symmetry of design which promised a maturity of the highest genius. Of the first expedition of Leopold Mozart with his son and daughter, in January, 1762, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 394, October 17, 1829 • Various
... more vivacious negro. "The indigenous Mexican is grave, melancholic, silent, so long as he is not under the influence of intoxicating liquors. This gravity is peculiarly remarkable in Indian children, who at the age of four or five years display more intelligence and precocity than the children of whites. The Mexican loves to attach mystery even to his most trifling actions; the strongest passions do not display themselves in his countenance; the transition is frightful when it passes suddenly ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 372, Saturday, May 30, 1829 • Various
... reading in Familiar Science, a work arranged in the form of questions and answers. He asked: "What is the shape of the world?" "Round," she replied. "Then why don't we fall off?" he asked, and she answered: "Because of the attraction of gravitation." "This is awful," he said, in horror at such precocity. ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... LADD SPENCER, published by Phillips, Sampson, and Co., Boston, are rather remarkable specimens of juvenile precocity, most of them having been written in the days of the author's earliest boyhood, and some of them during his twelfth year, and at a period little less remote. Their poetical merit must, of course, be inconsiderable, and they are not sufficiently curious ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... serious. Among women simplicity lasts longer than it does elsewhere. They are slower in losing respect, and in weighing values and characters; they are less ready to suspect evil and to analyse their husbands.... They have not the cleverness, the advanced ideas, the assured behaviour, the precocity which with us turns a young girl into a sophisticated woman and a queen of society in six months. A secluded life and obedience are easier for them. More yielding and more sedentary, they are at once more reserved, more self-centred, ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... on Mardi Gras years ago. It was a woman's, of course; for "Il est toujours les femmes qui sont malheureuses," says an old proverb, and perhaps it is right. This woman—a child, she would be called elsewhere, save in this land of tropical growth and precocity—lost her heart to one who never knew, a very common story, by the way, but one which would have been quite distasteful to the haughty judge, her father, ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... physician, encouraged them in their vows of constancy, and pledges to become man and wife at a future, but an early day. To some persons all this may seem exceedingly improper, as well as extremely precocious; but the truth compels us to say, that its impropriety was by no means as obvious as its precocity. The latter it certainly was, though Mark had shot up early, and was a man at a time of life when lads, in less genial climates, scarcely get tails to their coats; but its impropriety must evidently be measured by the habits of the state of society in which the parties ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... boy is compelled to attend family worship: he is forbidden to read irreligious books: if he will not learn his catechism, he is sent to bed without his supper: if he plays truant at church-time a task is set him. If he should display the precocity of his talents by expressing impious opinions before his brothers and sisters, we should not much blame his father for cutting short the controversy with a horse-whip. All the reasons which lead us to ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... printed the answers of three of the most eminent. The late Dr. Woodward, of Worcester, promptly said, that children under eight should never be confined more than one hour at a time, nor more than four hours a day; and that, if any child showed alarming symptoms of precocity, it should be taken from school altogether. Dr. James Jackson, of Boston, allowed the children four hours' schooling in winter and five in summer, but only one hour at a time, and heartily expressed his "detestation of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... children are the most usual sufferers in this way. They are generally remarkable for large heads, great precocity of understanding, and small, delicate bodies. But in such instances, the great size of the brain, and the acuteness of the mind, are the results of morbid growth. Even with the best of management, the child passes the first ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... Queen. He devoted his attention then primarily to gaining a predominant influence over the young King, with great success-the result, in no small measure, of his posing as a puritan; for the boy had all the uncompromising partisanship natural to the morbid precocity which his ill-health and Tudor cleverness combined to develop. If Edward had lived, no doubt the Tudor penetration would have unmasked Northumberland in due course; but this the Duke would hardly have ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... in the general direction of home, indulging ourselves in as many deviations from the route as pleased our fancy. Presently, as we rolled noiselessly over the smooth streets, leaf-strewn from the bordering colonnades of trees, I began to exclaim about the precocity of school children who at the age of thirteen or fourteen were able to handle themes usually reserved in my day for the college and university. This, however, the ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... exaggerate, Darwin K. Anthony, the father, saw in the person of Adelbert Higgins a budding criminal of rare precocity, and a menace to his son; while to the object of his solicitude the aforesaid criminal was nothing more than an entertaining companion, whose bizarre disregard of all established rules of right and wrong matched well with his own careless temper. Higgins, ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... constitutional vigour, is certain. It would be superfluous to quote any facts; for all experimenters, Koelreuter, Gaertner, Herbert, Sageret, Lecoq, and Naudin, have been struck with the wonderful vigour, height, size, tenacity of life, precocity, and hardiness of their hybrid productions. Gaertner[296] sums up his conviction on this head in the strongest terms. Koelreuter[297] gives numerous precise measurements of the weight and height of his hybrids in comparison with measurements of both parent-forms; ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... that at the age of twelve Chopin knew so much that he was left to himself with the usual good and ill results. He first played on February 24, 1818, a concerto by Gyrowetz and was so pleased with his new collar that he naively told his mother, "Everybody was looking at my collar." His musical precocity, not as marked as Mozart's, but phenomenal withal, brought him into intimacy with the Polish aristocracy and there his taste for fashionable society developed. The Czartoryskis, Radziwills, Skarbeks, ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... his own hand {197} in 1770, at the age of seventeen, is one of the most wonderful examples of precocity in the history of literature. His father had been sexton of the ancient Church of St. Mary Redcliff, in Bristol, and the boy's sensitive imagination took the stamp of his surroundings. He taught himself to read from a black-letter ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... was born October 25, 1800, the son of a wealthy merchant who was active in securing the abolition of the slave trade. His precocity is almost beyond belief. He read at three years of age, gave signs of his marvelous memory at four, and when only eight years old wrote a theological discourse. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, at eighteen, ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... his wondrous precocity; the genuine sailor-poet, Falconer, had lately published The Shipwreck; Laurence Sterne had just collected the materials for his Sentimental Journey; Sir William Blackstone had published his celebrated ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 424, New Series, February 14, 1852 • Various
... surprised to hear him speak with all the deliberation of an older and experienced man, and to see him everlastingly charging his wooden pipe; but in the Province of Quebec the boys are looked upon as men when they undertake men's work, and as to their precocity in smoking there is always the excellent excuse that it afford some protection in summer against the attacking swarms of black-flies, mosquitos ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... this fluctuate enough to make the record exciting. He was a slow, phlegmatic infant, with red cheeks and an exuberant crop of yellow curls. He slept all night and a good third of the day, and, beyond cutting ten teeth in as many months, exhibited no precocity. Nothing troubled him, if we except an insatiable hunger. He was weaned with extreme difficulty, and even when promoted to bread and biscuits and milk puddings, continued to recognise his nurse's past service and reward it with so sincere an affection that the woman accepted ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... little dot, and Selma had already begun to enjoy the maternal delight of human doll dressing, an extravagance in which she was lavishly encouraged by her husband. Babcock was glad of any excuse to spend money on his daughter, who seemed to him, from day to day, a greater marvel of precocity—such a child as became Selma's beauty and cleverness and his own ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... Tales from the Hills as much as Shakespeare improved on Love's Labour's Lost, as much as Shelley improved on Queen Mab, Robert Browning on Pauline, Byron on Hours of Idleness, he would to-day be without a peer. Mr Granville Barker is often cited as a classical modern example of precocity, but he was twenty-four when he wrote The Marrying of Anne Leete. Mr Henry James was twenty-eight before he had published a characteristic word. Mr Thomas Hardy at twenty-five had only printed a short story, and he was more than thirty ...
— Rudyard Kipling • John Palmer
... your heart. And this, moreover, was a mother's estimate of the child's disposition. Any other observer might have seen few but unamiable traits, and have given them a far darker colouring. But now the idea came strongly into Hester's mind, that Pearl, with her remarkable precocity and acuteness, might already have approached the age when she could have been made a friend, and intrusted with as much of her mother's sorrows as could be imparted, without irreverence either to the parent or the child. In the little chaos of Pearl's character ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Gabri; he was born at Pampinara, and entered the count's service when he was five years old; his father was also a shepherd, who owned a small flock, and lived by the wool and the milk, which he sold at Rome. When quite a child, the little Vampa displayed a most extraordinary precocity. One day, when he was seven years old, he came to the curate of Palestrina, and asked to be taught to read; it was somewhat difficult, for he could not quit his flock; but the good curate went every day to say mass at a ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the frontier—his father from the upper middle class, his mother "a Randolph"—he had been trained to an outdoor life; but he was also a prodigy in his studies and entered William and Mary College with advanced standing at the age of eighteen. Many stories are told of his precocity and ability, all of which tend to forecast the later man of catholic tastes, omnivorous interest, and extensive but superficial knowledge; he was a strange combination of natural aristocrat and theoretical democrat, of philosopher and practical politician. ...
— The Fathers of the Constitution - Volume 13 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Max Farrand
... The astonishing precocity of the short horns, their remarkable aptitude to fatten, the perfection of their forms, and the fineness of their bony structure, give them an advantage over most other races when the object of breeding is for the shambles. No animal of any other breed can so rapidly transform the ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... will never smoke? Excuse me. When he will smoke depends upon the precocity of his individual generation; and that increases in a direct ratio with time itself, in this country. Thus, to state the matter in an approximate inverse arithmetical progression, and dating the birth of "young America" about the year 1825,—previously to which reigned ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... habiliments and manners of a false manhood. Punch has found out and frequently illustrates this fact, and furnishes a series of pictures of Liliputians aping the questionable doings of their elders. It is observable, however, that he confines these portraits of precocity chiefly to one sex. Whether this be owing to his innate delicacy and habitual gallantry, or to the English custom of keeping little girls—and what we should call large girls also—at home longer, and under more restraint, than in our republic, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... have been a somewhat Dobbin-like individual, proved an affectionate husband and step-father. The little girl's prettiness and precocity appealed to him strongly. He could not do enough for her; and he spoiled her by refusing to check her wayward disposition and encouraging her mischievous pranks. It was not a good upbringing; and, as dress and "society" filled the thoughts of her mother, the "Miss ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... to make of them good-mannered and right-thinking men of the world, and succeeded in turning them out affectedly grave and ridiculous little prigs, disdainful of games, absolutely ignorant, without anything spontaneous or boyish about them, and of a desperate precocity. The little Jansoulets were not very happy in this forcing-house, notwithstanding the immunities which they enjoyed by reason of their immense wealth; they were, indeed, utterly left to themselves. Even the creoles in the charge of the institution had some friend whom ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... they cannot pass by the fact that in the course of the last twenty years the younger members of the community have been spending a steadily increasing proportion of their time, during the most impressionable period of life, in what are liable to prove forcing-houses of sexual precocity and criminal tendencies. There is every reason for regarding the habit of "going to the pictures" without adequate restrictions as contributing seriously to precocious sexuality, and also to weakening the powers of inhibition and self-control in other directions—powers which are the distinctive ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... expect children to be too good; not any better than we ourselves, for example; no, nor even as good. Beware of hothouse virtue. "Already most people recognize the detrimental results of intellectual precocity; but there remains to be recognized the truth that there is a moral precocity which is also detrimental. Our higher moral faculties, like our higher intellectual ones, are comparatively complex. By consequence, they are both comparatively ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... of precocity is related in the Third Book of the "Masnavi" (see ante p. 365), of which Mr. E. H. Whinfield gives an outline in his admirable and most useful abridgment of that work: The boys wished to obtain a holiday, and the sharpest of them suggested ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... him, to characterize his life first by its quantity. He belonged to the true race of the giants of learning; he took in knowledge at every pore, and his desires were insatiable. Not, perhaps, precocious in boyhood,—for it is not precocity to begin Latin at ten and Greek at eleven, to enter the Freshman class at twenty and the professional school at twenty-three,—he was equalled by few students in the tremendous rate at which he pursued ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... selfish gayeties. I compare their intellects to a rich tropical plant, which blossoms gorgeously and early, but rarely fruitens. The Southern women are, for the most part, a capable but undeveloped race of beings. With their precocity, like the exuberance of their vegetation, and with their quick, impassioned feelings, like their storm-freighted air, always bearing latent lightning in its bosom, they might become a something rich, rare, and admirable; but, never bringing thought up to the point of reflection; ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... impressed by the startling fact, but as he recalled the professor's statement that the brilliant Wilder was in college something like twenty years before this time, his brilliancy in being able to complete the course and now be out from the college did not seem to him to indicate any undue precocity on the part ...
— Winning His "W" - A Story of Freshman Year at College • Everett Titsworth Tomlinson
... attachment for him. But his grandmother is the one who, in spite of everything, prizes him like the breath of her own life. The very mention of what happened is even strange! He is now grown up to be seven or eight years old, and, although exceptionally wilful, in intelligence and precocity, however, not one in a hundred could come up to him! And as for the utterances of this child, they are no less remarkable. The bones and flesh of woman, he argues, are made of water, while those of man of mud. 'Women to my eyes ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... her face had been as reassuring to him as the upper, he might have put a reluctant faith in the pure-mindedness of these aspirations, without reverting to her origin, and also to recent rumours of her father and Lady Grace Halley. As it was, he inquired of the cognizant, whether an intellectual precocity, devoted by preference to questions affecting the state of women, did not rather more than suggest the existence of urgent senses likewise. She, a girl under twenty, had an interest in public matters, and she called on ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... senile in decrepid old age, and yet his separate existence began long before hers. Either hypothesis will explain the abnormally early development of the Chinese race, and its subsequent career of inactivity. Meanwhile the youthful nurse, in blissful ignorance of the evidence which her present precocity affords against her future possibilities, pursues her sports with intermittent attention to her charge, whose poor little head lolls about, now on one side and now on the other, in a most distressingly loose manner, an uninterested spectator ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... caprice and cruelty were too closely identified with what was most bewitching in her not to have become additional charms for us. In those days, while we were still hobbledehoys, she pleased us the more that she had, with the precocity of her sex, quite outstripped us where all subtle social forces are concerned. Although she could be a hoyden still, it was quite as easy for her to assume the part of an elegant young lady, equipped for society with charming manners, a fastidious ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... Theory of Vision, the Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, and the Three Dialogues, between the ages of twenty-four and twenty-eight; and thus comes very near to Hume, both in precocity and in influence; but his investigations are more limited in their scope than those ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... very young, was required daily to commit prescribed portions of the Word of God to memory; and the child soon became intensely interested in the study of the sacred oracles. The questions which he proposed to his father, as he repeated his appointed tasks, displayed singular precocity of intellect; and Leonides rejoiced exceedingly as he observed from time to time the growing indications of his extraordinary genius. But, before Origen reached maturity, his good parent fell a victim to the intolerance of the imperial laws. In the persecution under ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... behind which the musicians sang some ancient romance, without the guitar." [50] In fact, no further apparatus was employed than that demanded for the exhibition of mysteries, or the pastoral dialogues which succeeded them. The Spaniards, notwithstanding their precocity, compared with most of the nations of Europe, in dramatic art, were unaccountably tardy in all its histrionic accompaniments. The public remained content with such poor mummeries, as could be got up by strolling players and mountebanks. ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... married to an emperor. It was in that atmosphere that Yasmini learned she must either use her wits or be outwitted, and women begin young to assert their genius in the East. But she outstripped precocity and, being Western too, rode rough-shod on convention when it suited her, reserving her concessions to it solely for occasions when those matched the hand she held. All her life she has had to play in a ruthless game, but the trump that she has learned to lead ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... she had always shown the softer side of her nature and he knew her perhaps better, or at all events more intimately, than any of her old friends, for she had not treated him as a negligible junior even when he arrived in New York at the tender age of twenty-two. His ingenuous precocity had amused her and she had discovered a keen interest in the newspaper world of whose existence she had hardly been aware; no interviewer had ever dared approach her; and as he grew older, developing rapidly and more and more unlike her sons and her sons' friends, they had fallen into an easy pallish ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... at Rothley Temple, in Leicestershire, Oct. 25, 1800, but it was at Clapham that his boyhood was chiefly spent. His precocity startled every one who visited his father's hospitable home. At the age of three he would lie at full length on the carpet eagerly reading. He was never seen without an open book in his hands, even during ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... himself. The college teachers were all clergymen and the university curriculum in their days was regulated and limited by clerical ascendancy, and consisted of the Aristotelian and Butlerian philosophy, classics, and pure mathematics, without modern history or physical science. The remarkable precocity of Keble's intellect enabled him to graduate with the highest honours both in classics and mathematics at an age almost miraculously early even when allowance is made for the comparative youthfulness of students in general in those days. He was ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... read the translation, "The Dream" under the title, I felt a distinct shock of resentment as if the French language had been treacherous to my sacred ideas. Then there was the romantic name of "Ellerslie," which, notwithstanding considerable precocity in reading and spelling I carried off as "Elleressie" Yeas afterward when the actual syllables confronted me in a historical sketch of Wallace, the truth entered like a stab and I closed the book. O sacred first illusions ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... known as Politian, was also a Renaissance scholar and also a friend of Lorenzo, and his companion, with Pico, at his death-bed; but although in precocity, brilliancy of gifts, and literary charm he may be classed with Pico, the comparison there ends, for he was a gross sensualist of mean exterior and capable of much pettiness. He was tutor to Lorenzo's sons until their mother interfered, holding that ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... recognize. During the first year she took the nom de guerre of Aquilina, one of the characters in Venice Preserved which she had chanced to read. She fancied that she resembled the courtesan in face and general appearance, and in a certain precocity of heart and brain of which she was conscious. When Castanier found that her life was as well regulated and virtuous as was possible for a social outlaw, he manifested a desire that they should live as husband and wife. So she took the name ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... was delicate and small in appearance, which seemed to give greater effect to her wonderful precocity of intellect. She must have been her mother's companion and helpmate in many a household and nursery experience, for Mr. Bronte was, of course, much engaged in his study; and besides, he was not naturally fond of children, ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... in 1798, of a family of intense Roman Catholic piety. He showed at school a precocity which might bear comparison with Mill's. Expelled from school, cast off by his parents, dismissed by the elder Casimir Perier, whose secretary he had been, he eked out a living by tutoring in mathematics. ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... often an invalid, I was a pet in the family and many tales were told of my infantile precocity. On one occasion I had a fight with a little colored boy of my own age and I need not say got the worst of it. My grandfather, who came up betimes and separated us, said, "he has blackened your eye and he ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... commonplaces, and even at school boys were trained to commit them to memory, to expand them, and illustrate them from history.'[57] Finally they were taught to write verse. Such at least is a legitimate inference from the extraordinary precocity shown by many Roman authors.[58] This literary training contained much that was of great value, but it also had grave disadvantages. There seems in the first place to have been too much 'spoon-feeding', and too little genuine brain exercise for the pupil.[59] Secondly, the fact that at ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... the gutters of Montmartre into the later control of Madame Louison's pretty little pied d' terre in Paris, hard by Auteuil, in that dreamy little impasse, the Rue de Berlioz. Neither of these attendants were faint-hearted, for their young hearts had been attuned early to the wolfish precocity of the Parisian waif. And they had followed their resolute mistress in her weary quest of the ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... not yet nineteen when he commanded at Towton, at the head of almost fifty thousand men; and two months before he had gained the Battle of Mortimer's Cross, under circumstances that showed skillful generalship. No similar instance of precocity is to be found in the military history of mankind. His victories have been attributed to Warwick, but it is noticeable that he was as successful over Warwick as he had been over the Lancastrians, against whom Warwick originally fought. Barnet was, with fewer combatants, as remarkable an action ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... In the case of other children, the individuality is very marked at an early age. As a rule, the child with the marked individuality is the one from whom the most may be expected later in life. Sometimes this very individuality is mistaken for precocity. This is particularly the case with musicians. In a few instances the individuality of the master has been developed late in life, as was the case of Richard Wagner, whose early individual tendencies were toward the drama ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... methods of modern science, was born in 1561 (three years before Shakspere), the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal under Queen Elizabeth and one of her most trusted earlier advisers. The boy's precocity led the queen to call him her 'little Lord Keeper.' At the age of twelve he, like Wyatt, was sent to Cambridge, where his chief impression was of disgust at the unfruitful scholastic application of Aristotle's ideas, still supreme in spite of a century of Renaissance ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... filling the sac. The function of the endosperm is primarily that of nourishing the embryo, and its basal position in the embryo-sac places it favourably for the absorption of food material entering the ovule. Its duration varies with the precocity of the embryo. It may be wholly absorbed by the progressive growth of the embryo within the embryo-sac, or it may persist as a definite and more or less conspicuous constituent of the seed. When it persists as a massive element of the seed its nutritive function is usually apparent, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... from the family priest; he was sent to a school at Twyford, where he is said to have got into trouble for writing a lampoon upon his master; he went for a short time to another in London, where he gave a more creditable if less characteristic proof of his poetical precocity. Like other lads of genius, he put together a kind of play—a combination, it seems, of the speeches in Ogilby's Iliad—and got it acted by his schoolfellows. These brief snatches of schooling, however, counted for little. ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... signify much whether the family of girls happen to be rich or poor, unless indeed that early and sharp poverty causes a precocity which deepens girls' characters betimes, and by making them sooner women, robs them of a certain amount of the thoughtlessness, fearlessness, and impracticability of girlhood. But girlhood, like many another natural condition, dies hard; and its sweet, bright illusions, its wisdom ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... the Hon. H. S. Conway, Oct. 29.-Two Charades by Colonel Fitzpatrick. Precocity of Robert Stewart, afterwards Marquis ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... clear idea may thus be obtained of Rashi's early education; and in assuming that he soon distinguished himself for precocity and for maturity of thought, we shall not be shooting wide of the mark. But legend will not let its heroes off so cheaply; legend will have it that Rashi, in order to complete his education, travelled [traveled sic] to the most ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... regarded as an unattainable luxury. A common Tradesman cannot afford to let his son spend a third of his life in abstract studies. The children of the poor are therefore allowed to "feel" from their earliest years, and they gain thereby a precocity and an early vivacity which contrast at first most favourably with the inert, undeveloped, and listless behaviour of the half-instructed youths of the Polygonal class; but when the latter have at last completed their University course, and are prepared to put their theory into ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... the most promising young man who has appeared since—ahem—I appeared. He amazes me by his precocity and various endowment. But he alarms me by his copiousness and haste. He should shield his fire with both hands "and draw up all his strength and sweetness in one ball." ("Draw all his strength and all His sweetness up into ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... taking her small guests to the matinee. As the theaters were more limited in number then than now these comparative infants sooner or later saw practically everything that was on the boards—good, bad and indifferent; and they displayed a precocity of criticism that ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... A detective police officer told me that he knew of half- a-dozen cases where Italian fathers of this class had made a regular business of hiring out their children for the purposes of prostitution; and the precocity of development and expression frequently betrayed by the girls, still young in years, is mournful evidence of ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin |
