"Anachronism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... formerly assigned to romance writing; the art now consists in spinning a long narrative out of authentic materials which must be disguised or kept hidden; while its leading features are a delight in elaborate accessories and that very modern sentiment, a horror of anachronism. A few living artists, like Mr. Shorthouse and Mr. Stevenson, can still excel under these difficult conditions, which have driven a crowd of second-rate novelists into the extreme of minute realism. Into this retreat, however, they have been followed by a host of readers; for in these days ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... Nectan. The church was dedicated to St. Brigid; and the Chronicon Pictorum (Innes' Inquiry, p. 778), in ascribing its foundation to Nectan I. (about A.D. 455) instead of Nectan II., commits a palpable anachronism, and very evident error, as St. Brigid did not die till a quarter of the next century had elapsed. (Annals of the Four Masters under the year 525; Colgan's Trias Thaumaturga, p. 619.) Again, according ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... scarcely less gruesome than his shop. The furniture looked as if its manufacture had been coeval with the time of the Meynells, and the ghastly glare of the gas seemed a kind of anachronism. After a few preliminary observations, which were not encouraged by Mr. Grewter's manner, I inquired whether he had ever ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... together with a sharp blow. Bateman describes the death of one of the twins and its excision from the other, who died subsequently, evidently of septic infection. There is a possibility that this is merely a duplication of the account of the preceding case with a slight anachronism as to the ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... support and countenance the governor. The clergy and the third estate were likewise formally organized in two other orders, so that with clergy, nobles, and commons, Corsica became a French pays d'etat, another provincial anachronism in the chaos of royal administration. The class bitterness of the mainland could easily be and was transplanted to the island; the ultimate success of the process left nothing to be desired. Moreover, the most ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... over-elaboration, alike in food and the serving thereof. The very best decoration for a table is something good in the plates. This is not saying one should not plan to please the eye no less than the palate. But ribbon on sandwiches is an anachronism—so is all the flummery of silk and laces, doilies and doo-dads that so often bewilder us. They are unfair to the food—as hard to live up to as anybody's blue china. I smile even yet, remembering my husband's chuckles, after we had come home ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... is the history of revivals. Musical criticism, so far as I can see, is the least intelligent of the criticisms on this score. Unless a man writes in the exotic style of Brahms, Wagner, Dvorak and I know not what other Slav, Czech, Teuton or Hebrew, the critics are sure to accuse him of being an anachronism. The only man in England who is permitted to write in a style which is in the main of home growth is the Irish Jew, Sir Arthur Sullivan. If we may go to a foreign style why may we not go to one of an earlier ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... he yelled; and, in spite of his being such an anachronism, there was something grand now in the wild old figure, as he stood there in full view, from crown to buckled shoon, claymore sheathed, the jewels in his dirk sparkling, and the sun flashing from his eyes as he yelled out, "Ta slogan of ta Mackhai! ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... is wise; solicitude concerning it is an anachronism. Suppose one has accepted a certain position and finds himself in doubt of his fitness for that position. Nothing can be more important than for him to decide upon his next line of conduct. Shall he resign or continue? ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... him steadily. There was something determined about her that he liked. Her face was falling loose, but her eyes were calm, and there was something strong in her that made it seem she was not old; merely her wrinkles and loose cheeks were an anachronism. She had the strength and sang-froid of a woman in the prime of life. She continued drawing the lace with slow, dignified movements. The big web came up inevitably over her apron; the length of lace fell away at her side. Her arms were ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... may be an involuntary anachronism in my version of this legend, which is very pithily narrated in the Kan-ing-p'ien. No emperor's name is cited by the homilist; and the date of the revolt seems to have been left wholly to conjecture.—Baber, in his "Memoirs," ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... painted by Titian; that it is meant for a portrait, I find no excuse; some character more suited to the expression should have been chosen; and if it were only the picture of a saint, that expression was strangely out of character. An anachronism may be found in the Tobit over the door too, by acute observers, who will deem it ill-managed to paint the cross in the clouds, where it is an old testament story, and that story apocryphal beside; might I add, ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... cities on planets colonized at the time of the Federation, and even very ancient ones of cities on pre-Atomic Terra. But these people had contragravity; the towering, wide-spaced city beside this cross-gridded anachronism proved that. ...
— A Slave is a Slave • Henry Beam Piper
... for ladies who were as unprepared for possible accidents as was one of those described by Pepys as figuring in a court ball in his time; but to put scarcely anything but waltz tunes under the dialogue of "Der Rosenkavalier" is an anachronism which is just as disturbing to the judicious as the fact that Herr Strauss, though he starts his half-dozen or more of waltzes most insinuatingly, never lets them run the natural course which Lanner and the Viennese Strauss, who suggested their tunes, would ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... might have been a means of wealth at the time when Paul de Kock's novels said of a young man, "Paul was rich, he had two hundred and fifty a year." But since that time it had, according to him, become an anachronism, a kind of archaic property, a fancy fox which was only permissible in very wealthy people. He therefore realized his land and turned it into a small capital, which he placed, after consulting with a friend of his who frequented the Stock Exchange, ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... individual is merged in the clan." And as the realistic writers perfected their art, the more acute readers began to perceive that the hero who is a doer of deeds can represent only the earlier stages of culture which we have long outgrown. This hero came to be recognized as an anachronism, out of place in a more modern social organization based on a full appreciation of individuality. He was too much a type and too little an individual to satisfy the demands of those who looked to literature as the mirror ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... a little out of order,' said Elizabeth; 'either she meant his grandson, or Sir Walter Scott made as great an anachronism as when he made that same Ulrica compare Rebecca's skin to paper. If she had said parchment, it would not have ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the "Bull" in the High Street is a transition which seems almost an anachronism. It is but to follow in the traces of the Pickwick Club. The covered gateway, the staircase almost wide enough for a coach and four, the ballroom on the first floor landing, with card-room adjoining, and the bedroom which Mr. Winkle occupied inside ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... to violent scenes in public and to a number of duels later on. That this man of violent Pan-German sentiments should be the Pope's mentor and guide through the labyrinth of international politics seems a curious anachronism. ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... which is often urged against ancient philosophers is really an anachronism. For they can hardly be said to have generalized at all. They may be said more truly to have cleared up and defined by the help of experience ideas which they already possessed. The beginnings of thought about nature must always have ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... rent. 'Ten, twelve years hence—' he would muse more hopefully. 'But by that time,' I would say, 'you'll probably be married, and your wife mightn't quite—', whereat he would hotly repeat what he had said many times: that he would never marry. Marriage was an anti-social anachronism. I think its survival wasin some part due to the machinations of Capital. Anyway, it was doomed. Temporary civil contracts between men and women would be the rule 'ten, twelve years hence'; pending which time the lot of any man who had civic sense must be celibacy, tempered perhaps ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... got so far as to bring to England all the pagan deities, and rival shepherds contending for bowls and lambs in alternate strophes, these niceties seem a little out of place. After swallowing such a camel of an anachronism as is contained in the following lines, it is ridiculous to pride oneself upon ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... conversant with the Works of the Old Masters this piece of anachronism will hardly ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... may sometimes prevent us from the full enjoyment of the Boeotian absurdity of our neighbours. What can, at first view, appear a grosser blunder than that of the Irishman who begged a friend to look over his library, to find for him the history of the world before the creation? Yet this anachronism of ideas is not unparalleled; it is matched, though on a more contracted scale, by an inscription on ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... read it at once. She could not sleep afterwards, so much had she been excited. "Manse and Cuddie forced me to laugh out aloud, which one seldom does when alone." Many of the Scotch words "were absolutely Hebrew" to her. She not unjustly objected to Claverhouse's use of the word "sentimental" as an anachronism. Sentiment, like nerves, had not ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... respect the Old Testament type of a God- fearing hero, with the actual sword in his hands. The New Testament type of a Christian warrior without a sword is not one jot less, but more, heroic. The form of sympathy, help, and 'public spirit' which the 'man from the other side' displayed is worse than an anachronism now in the light of Christ's law. It is a contradiction. But the spirit which breathed through Abram's conduct should be ours. We are bound to 'seek the peace of the city' where we dwell as strangers and pilgrims, avoiding no duty of sympathy ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... words to a heat as voluble as his own. Often as the two moved briskly about, preparing a meal together, they shouted out from the dining-room to the kitchen a discussion on some unintelligible topic such as the "anachronism of the competitive system," so loudly voiced and so energetically pursued that when they came to sit down to table, they would be quite red-cheeked and stirred-up, and ate their dinners with as vigorous an appetite as though they had been pursuing ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... particular forms of belief naturally grow and flourish in certain stages of intellectual development, and fade when these conditions have changed; how much that is called apostasy and imposture is in reality anachronism, the survival in one age of forms of belief that were the appropriate product of an ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... bringing forward its dates; stories of immemorial antiquity are related as though they were the experience of the narrator's father or grandfather, and are modernised to suit that supposition. Legend never sticks at absurdity or anachronism. From some versions of the story it would appear that Tregeagle could not have lived earlier than the seventeenth century, in actual accordance with the date on his tombstone; but in others certain of the early Cornish saints are introduced, carrying the history twelve centuries back or further ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... seem like an anachronism to put the very words of the modern agnostic into the mouth of Buddha's tempter, but these men are merely threshing over old straw. The sneer of Epicurus curled the lip of Voltaire, and now merely breaks out into a broad laugh on ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... fourscore years, as we skip ages In turning o'er historic pages? Thou dost not to this age belong: Thou art three generations wrong: Old Time has miss'd thee: there he tarries! Go on to thy contemporaries! Give the child up. To see thee kiss him Is a compleat anachronism. Nay, keep him. It is good to see Race link'd to race, in him and thee. The child repelleth not at all Her touch as uncongenial, But loves the old Nurse like another— Its sister—or its natural mother; And to the nurse a pride it gives To ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... decorated in imitation of a Louis XIII. hôtellerie. Oaken beams supported the low-studded ceilings: The plaster walls disappeared behind tapestries, armor, old faïence. Beer and other liquids were served in quaint porcelain or pewter mugs, and the waiters were dressed (merry anachronism) in the costume of members of the Institute (the Immortal Forty), who had so long led poetry in chains. The success of the “Black Cat” in her new quarters was immense, all Paris crowding through her modest doors. Salis had founded Montmartre!—the rugged old hill giving birth to a generation of ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... the view, that every old belief, or institution, such as the throne or the Church, had served some need, and had a rational idea at the bottom of it, to which it might be again recalled, and made once more a benefit to society, instead of a curse and an anachronism. ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... this country," Hank said. "Progressive. Way ahead of the West. Shucks, modesty is a reactionary capitalistic anachronism. Shove 'em all into bed together, that's what ...
— Combat • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... individuality of the individual—once he is born would you tear asunder all the swaddling-bands of our baby civilisation; would you replace the rules of the nursery by the orderly anarchy of manhood and womanhood, and yet retain such an incoherent anachronism as compulsory birth—a disability which often cripples a man upon the very threshold of his career? Without this initial reform the individualism of your Ibsens and Auberon Herberts becomes a mere simulacrum, a hollow mockery. If ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... under the patronage of the king, and the direction of forty of the most distinguished artist. Reynolds, who had been mainly instrumental in founding it, had been unanimously elected president, and had thereupon received the honor of knighthood. [Footnote: We must apologize for the anachronism we have permitted ourselves, in the course of this memoir, in speaking of Reynolds as Sir Joshua, when treating of circumstances which occurred prior to his being dubbed; but it is so customary to speak of him by that title that we found it difficult to dispense with it.] Johnson was so delighted ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... Though an anachronism as regards this stage of my career, I cannot resist a little episode which pleasantly illustrates moral courage, or chivalry at least, combined ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... friendships are made and adorn the amenities of life. Moreover, our religious traditions in all Christian countries, and in some non-Christian ones like China, influence us to believe that war is wrong, indefensible, and, in the present year of our Lord, an anachronism. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... gift of visualising and vitalising the past. We Englishmen may leave it to the Scotchman Carlyle to settle with that comparison. For my own part, as a student of antiquity, I would maintain that, despite all petty anachronism, Shakespeare in his Roman plays comes nearer to the essential truth than any merely professional student can ever come. What he gives us is not archaeology, not the exact Forum nor the precise etiquette of the toga, but the man, the Caesar, the Coriolanus, the greasy populace, their heart ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... smoking a clay pipe and drinking rum and milk. He had never married, but he was by no means an ascetic in his morals, as more than one buxom wench in his parish had proved; and in all respects he was an anachronism, the like of which is rare now among the fells and dales, though at one time it was the normal type for the clergy of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... Dedication of his translation of the 'AEneid' to Lord Normanby, near the middle; when speaking of the anachronism that made Dido ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... modern sort of lady, as witness not only her use of the telephone—an instrument which seems in Charleston almost an anachronism; as, for that matter, the automobile does, too—but her dinner hour, which was eight o'clock. Very few Charleston families dine at night. Dinner invitations are usually for three, or perhaps half-past three or four, in the afternoon, and there is a light supper in ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... world; that the state can never occupy again the place in relation to the individual which it held in the cities of the ancient world; and that an attempt to identify in a modern state the ideal of the man with that of the citizen, would be an historical anachronism. ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... continued use of this Declaration; that British legislators in all parts of the Empire and the twelve million Catholic subjects of the Crown throughout the world should take further measures of constitutional protest; that the evil so greatly deplored was the result of an anachronism and of a barbaric law which had remained accidentally unrepealed; and that there was reason to hope that "this remnant of a hateful fanaticism" would soon be removed from ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... me,' one thing to notice is that David regards himself as possessing that Spirit. We are not to read into this psalm the fully developed New Testament teaching of a personal Paraclete, the Spirit whom Christ reveals and sends. To do that would be a gross anachronism. But we are to remember that it is an anointed king who speaks, on whose head there has been poured the oil that designated him to his office, and in its gentle flow and sweet fragrance, symbolised ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... high tide of imaginative originality among this sort of people. So it was to be the inevitable Louis XVI fete—or as near to it as attenuated, artistic intelligence could manage, and they altered Duane's very clever and correct sketches to suit themselves, careless of anachronism, and sent the dainty water-colour drawings to town in order that those who sweat and sew in the perfumed ateliers of Fifth Avenue might use them ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... Boies Penrose is not all as he is pictured. At a cursory glance he might appear to be a physiological, psychological, and political anachronism. At least he is sufficiently different from his colleagues to be, if not actually mysterious, not easily understandable. There is something fundamental about him. He inspires a certain awe which may not be magnetic but has the ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... Wittenberg had made it well known; it was of particular celebrity in Protestant England, as Luther had taught and written there shortly before, and the very name must have immediately suggested the idea of freedom in thinking. I cannot even consider it an anachronism that Richard the Third should speak of Machiavelli. The word is here used altogether proverbially the contents, at least, of the book entitled Of the Prince (Del Principe) have been in existence ever since ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... should not be attributed to the Evangelist, but to another Luke, also called 'Saint,' and a Florentine by birth. This painter lived in the eleventh century—that is to say, about seven centuries after the image of Oropa had been known and venerated! This is indeed an anachronism. ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... contrary, worked according to plan, and was bent on destroying whatever seemed to him absurd in the customs and institutions of the country. Practically everything seemed so to him: the anachronism of the Joyous Entry, the mediaevalism of the Grand Privilege of Mary of Burgundy, the regionalism of provincial States, the prestige of the Church, the pilgrimages, the intolerance, down to the popular festivities, the drinking bouts of the "kermesses" and the mad craving ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... the spiritual side of him shall be sacrificed to the sovereign, like his blood and treasure. Protestant liberties, respected by Richelieu and still more entirely by Mazarin, who acknowledged the loyalty of Huguenots in the Fronde, became an exotic, an anachronism, a contradiction, and a reproach, as absolute monarchy rose to the zenith. The self-government of the Gallican Church, the administration of the clergy by the clergy, was reduced to the narrowest ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... alive) with a rare winding- sheet, in emulation of a holy lady called Tuda, who had sent him a coffin: but, as in the case of Whitby, and of Holy Island, the introduction of nuns at Tynemouth, in the reign of Henry VIII, is an anachronism. The nunnery of Holy Island is altogether fictitious. Indeed, St. Cuthbert was unlikely to permit such an establishment; for, notwithstanding his accepting the mortuary gifts above mentioned, and his carrying on a visiting acquaintance with the abbess of Coldingham, ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... himself to this latitude of principle, the anachronism will not long stand in his way. Much indeed may be said in favour of this union of ancient Mythology with modern notions and manners. It is a sort of chronological metaphor—an artificial analogy, by which ideas, widely remote and ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... another picture, calling the older boy Saint John, and the wee baby Jesus. The years went by and we find still another picture of the Holy Family by this same artist, in which five children are shown, while back in the shadow is the artist himself, posed as Joseph. And with a beautiful contempt for anachronism, the elder children are called Isaiah, Ezekiel and Elijah. This fusing of work, love and religion gives us a glimpse into the only paradise mortals know. It ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... all her Pontiffs, driven by his jealous patriotism. We seem to be transported back into the times of a Sixtus IV. or an Alexander VI. And in truth, Paul's reversion to the antiquated Guelf policy of his predecessors was an anachronism. That policy ceased to be efficient when Francis I. signed the Treaty of Cambray; the Church, too, had gradually assumed such a position that armed interference in the affairs of secular sovereigns was suicidal. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... something of an anachronism, and had as lofty a disregard for convention as had the ladies thronging the Court of Merlin. Nor, it must be admitted, was she herself any pronounced stickler for exactitude. Thus, she lopped half a dozen years off her ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... of Ward, Knowles & Co. But he no longer lives in the country; nor does he run of nights after the coyotes under the moon. The early Teuton in him died the night of the Mill Valley fight with the bear. James J. Ward is now wholly James J. Ward, and he shares no part of his being with any vagabond anachronism from the younger world. And so wholly is James J. Ward modern, that he knows in all its bitter fullness the curse of civilized fear. He is now afraid of the dark, and night in the forest is to him a thing of abysmal terror. His city house ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... that this very expression, god of the sky, god of the cloud, is so entire an anachronism that we could not even translate it into Vedic Sanskrit without committing a solecism. It is true, no doubt, we must use our modern ways of speaking when we wish to represent the thoughts of the ancient world; but we cannot be too much on our guard against accepting the dictionary ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... of conciseness in a hurried situation I have made Cleopatra recommend rum. This, I am afraid, is an anachronism: the only real one in the play. To balance it, I give a couple of the remedies she actually believed in. They are quoted by Galen from Cleopatra's book ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... human; but it has now fulfilled its function and is ready to be cast aside into the scrap-heap of rudimentary vestiges such as gills in the throat and belief in the divine right of kings. Of course you do not think so; but I do not see that that will prevent you from aiding me to fling the anachronism into the scrap-heap. For I tell you now that the time has come when mere food and shelter and similar sordid things shall be automatic, as free and easy and involuntary of access as the air. I shall make them automatic, what of my discovery and ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... had entirely exhausted their ammunition; but fixing their long knives in the muzzles of their guns, they thus successfully charged on and defeated the enemy. The legend is mentioned, as every one must listen to it from the local guides, though—between ourselves—it is a most gross anachronism. ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... the king doubting this remonstrated with him and pointed out how easily adultery might have been unintentionally committed (Gen. xxvi.). Abimelech is called "king of the Philistines,'' but the title is clearly an anachronism. A very similar story is told of Abraham and Sarah (ch. xx.), but here Abimelech takes Sarah to wife, although he is warned by a divine vision before the crime is actually committed. The incident is fuller and shows a great advance in bdeas of morality. Of a more primitive character, however, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Cavour argued that the original part played by monks and friars was now filled, and of necessity more efficaciously filled, by laymen. Their presence in superabundant numbers in the modern State was an anachronism. It was only needful to compare the countries where they abounded in number and in influence, as in Spain and the kingdom of Naples, with England, Prussia, or France, to see whether it was possible to allege that they ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... Queen, Ann, daughter of the King of Bohemia; who first introduced the custom into this kingdom: for, before, women of every rank rode as men do" (T. ROSSII, Hist. Re. Ang. p. 205). In his beautiful illustrative picture of Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims, Stothard appears to have committed an anachronism, in placing the most conspicuous female character of his fine composition sideways on her steed. That the lady should have been depicted riding in the male fashion, might, it strikes us, have been inferred, without any historical research on the subject, from the poet's describing ...
— The Young Lady's Equestrian Manual • Anonymous
... vicinity of the station. While we were taking this glance about us our hampers were deposited on the platform and the train rattled off again with great briskness, as if time were of any importance, and as if the whole arrangement were not an anachronism in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... first cries of the young shall be uttered upon the anaesthetic air of a hospital, preferably a fashionable one. So young Mr. and Mrs. Roger Button were fifty years ahead of style when they decided, one day in the summer of 1860, that their first baby should be born in a hospital. Whether this anachronism had any bearing upon the astonishing history I am about to set down will never ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... recorders were appointed for the first time in the various provinces, who noted down statements and communicated the writings of the four quarters." An eminent critic—Mr. W. G. Aston—regards this as an anachronism, since the coming of the Korean scholar, Wani (vide sup.), did not take place until the year 405, which date probably preceded by many years the appointment of recorders. But it has been shown above that the innovation due to Wani was, not the art of writing, but, in all probability, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... little anxious. The visitors were usually young men, terribly respectful, but cherishing, as he imagined, ideals and opinions chasmally different from his; and he felt in their presence something like an anachronism, something like a fraud. He tried to freshen up his sympathies on them, to get at what they were really thinking and feeling, and it was some time before he could understand that they were not really thinking and feeling anything ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... while at Brescia, renewed communications with suspected persons, he was brought back to the Lagune and drowned. The minute particularities of Jaffier's depositions, and the motive which prompted him to offer them, (the latter, as we have already shown, resting on a gross anachronism,) are, we believe pure inventions by St. Real; and Otway has used a poet's license to palliate still farther deviations from authentic history. Under his hands, Pierre,—whom all accounts conspire in representing to us as a foreign, vulgar and mercenary ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 559, July 28, 1832 • Various
... to the geographical parts of the Liao shi, Kin shi, and Yuen shi, and adds: "M. Polo's commentators are wrong in suspecting an anachronism in his statement, or trying to find ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... "They emigrated from Koln and Crefeld to Philadelphia, where there is a quarter named Crefeld." Mr. Clinch felt himself shaky as to his chronology, but wisely remembered that it was a chronology of the future to his hearers, and they could not detect an anachronism. With his eyes fixed upon those of the gentle Wilhelmina, Mr. Clinch now proceeded to describe his return to his fatherland, but his astonishment at finding the very face of the country changed, and a city standing on those ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... much truth as they knew. One of such men as these I have sketched in Father Bruno. And if, possibly, the portrait is slightly over-charged for the date,—if he be represented as a shade more enlightened than at that time he could well be—I trust that the anachronism will be pardoned for the sake of those eternal verities which would otherwise have been ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... own part in the conversation, without the least respect to hist neighbour. The Baron of Bradwardine sang French CHANSONS-A-BOIRE, and spouted pieces of Latin; Killancureit talked, in a steady unalterable dull key, of top-dressing and bottom-dressing, [This has been censured as an anachronism; and it must be confessed that agriculture of this kind was unknown to the Scotch Sixty Years since.] and year-olds, and gimmers, and dinmonts, and stots, and runts, and kyloes, and a proposed turnpike-act; while Balmawhapple, in notes exalted above both, extolled his horse, his hawks, and a ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... despotism at home, they became the sudden instrument of war abroad. Without them Louis Napoleon could not have made himself Emperor, nor could he have hurried France into the present duel. If needed in other days, they are not needed now. The War System, always barbarous, is an anachronism, full of peril both to peace ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... demanded was an attendance at his religious services, and that the children should be sent to the classes which he held in the Mission House. It was a pastoral that held every element of beauty, but as an anachronism in the fierce setting north of "sixty" ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... of Rhodesia, and of certain territories in Portuguese Africa, North Borneo is the sole remaining region in the world which is owned and administered by that political anachronism, a chartered company. It was in the age of Elizabeth that the chartered company, in the modern sense of the term, had its rise. The discovery of the New World and the opening out of fresh trading routes to the Indies gave a tremendous impetus to ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... 4: arco de San Felipe. This is another anachronism on the part of Becquer, for the arch and church of San Felipe were not constructed until the eighteenth century. Neither exists at present. The arch traversed a narrow street between the church of the same name and the convent of Santa Ines. ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... incongruity and the fact that the automobile was a glaring anachronism did not prevent my abandoning my horse to the mafu and stretching out comfortably on the cushions of the rear seat. There I had nothing to do but collect the remains of my shattered dream-castles as we bounced over the ruts and stones. It was a rude awakening, and I felt half ashamed ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... Philistine was an anachronism, a survival from an older world. The day of the Minoan, like that of his early friend the Egyptian, had passed away. The stars of new races were rising above the horizon, and new claimants were dividing the heritage of the ancient world. To ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... either an anachronism or a mere fabrication. Bonaparte was fourteen in the year 1783. He was then at Brienne, where certainly he did not go into company, and least of all the company ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... would be most ungrateful. I only expected a more characteristic example of sea cookery. After what Mr. Vane told us, a lunch like the one you provided, with glass and silver, struck me as rather an anachronism." ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... the street as it began to get dark. Walking was easy; almost no one did it any more. The rush of private and commercial cars swarmed overhead and rumbled in the ground beneath. He was an isolated anachronism walking silently at the edge of the ...
— The Memory of Mars • Raymond F. Jones
... no interpretation exhausts their meaning. When we read into them the ideas of modern philosophy and combine them into a system logical and plausible after the standard of this age, we often feel that the result is an anachronism: but if we treat them as ancient simple discourses by one who wished to make men live an austere and moral life, we still find that there are uncomfortably profound sayings which will not harmonize ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... prophetic, or whether it is the result of incompetence, or whether it is merely a smile gone wrong in the baking. It is amusing to find Marocco, who has not been strict about archaeological accuracy hitherto, complain here that there is an anachronism, inasmuch as some young ecclesiastics are dressed as they would be at present, and one of them actually carries a wax candle. This is not as it should be; in works like those at Oropa, where implicit ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... the modern noises, and with its current flowed the stream of modern ideas. Within sight of the river a mystery, or anything uninvestigated, or aught unamenable to the spirit of the age, would have seemed an anachronism. But back here, among the tall wild-parsnip tops and the never-stirring clumps of orange lilies, life was different, and dreams ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... age,' remarked the Duke peevishly, 'when my birthdays have ceased to be a cause for congratulation. This review is an anachronism. In my father's time I rode at the head of the Guard, and led a charge on the day I was eighteen. Pish! I have grown wiser, and know how to enjoy life after a more rational fashion. To return to our ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... an extreme case of eighteenth-century manners, as he himself was an eighteenth-century personage (he died in 1799, in his seventy-eighth year); and that for the date in which the story is cast (1814) such manners are somewhat of an anachronism. During the generation contemporary with the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars—or, to put it another way, the generation that elapsed between the days when Scott roamed the country as a High School and University student and those when he settled in the fulness of fame and prosperity ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Italian life. A real enthusiasm for Italy's classical associations is indicated by his original purpose of extending his travels to Greece, an enterprise at that period requiring no little disdain of hardship and peril. But it would have been an anachronism if he could have contemplated the comprehensive and scientific scheme of self-culture by Italian influences of every kind which, a hundred and fifty years later, was conceived and executed by Goethe. At the time of Milton's visit Italian letters and arts sloped midway in their descent from ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... recast the types of highest personality from what the oriental, feudal, ecclesiastical worlds bequeath us, and which yet possess the imaginative and esthetic fields of the United States, pictorial and melodramatic, not without use as studies, but making sad work, and forming a strange anachronism upon the scenes and exigencies around us. Of course, the old undying elements remain. The task is, to successfully adjust them to new combinations, our own days. Nor is this so incredible. I can conceive a community, to-day ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... contemporary with him, if words are used that only became current at a later date, or are used in a sense that they only later acquired, or if later writers are imitated, or if events are mentioned that happened later ('anachronism'). Books are sometimes forged outright, that is, are written by one man and deliberately fathered upon another; but sometimes books come to be ascribed to a well-known name, which were written by some one else without fraudulent ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... room, the most charming room in Wren's End. Panelled in wood long since painted white, with two delightful rounded corner cupboards, it gave straight on to the wrens' sunk lawn from a big French window with steps, an anachronism added by Miss Janet Ross. Five years ago Anthony had brought a beautiful iron gate from Venice that fitted into the archway, cut through the yew hedge and leading to the drive. Jan had given this room to the children ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... centuries that had elapsed since the days of Vergil the term 'pastoral' had gained a new meaning and new associations. In the days of Augustus Pan was a boorish anachronism; it was left to medieval Christianity to create a god who was in fact a shepherd of men[24] and so to render possible a pastoral allegory that should embody the dearest hopes and aspirations of the human heart. That Christian pastoralists ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... the veil and glided to the shelter of a post not ten feet from her. He peered around it eagerly. Still panting from her efforts, she was on her knees beside the case, fumbling a key in the Yale lock, a curious anachronism which Simpkins, in his cleaning, had found on all the more valuable ...
— The False Gods • George Horace Lorimer
... with its strict centralization, the paternal regulation of industry and commerce, the flood of missionary zeal which poured in upon it, the heroism and courage of its priests and voyageurs, the venality of its administrative officials, the anachronism of a feudal land-tenure, the bizarre externals of its social life, the versatility of its people—all these reflected ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... shortly going into Parliament. They say that he is sure to be a great man. To us—to Philip and me, he has been extremely kind. I only meant that he seems to be in place here—or anywhere, indeed, where the world is moving; while Mr. Arthur, in Canada, is a walking anachronism. He is out ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... robes, even for the Queen; so would the "Ladies of the Bedchamber" if they did anything with beds except to sleep in them. As the fact is, their presence only served to strengthen the presumption that not merely their offices but that of Royalty itself is an anachronism, and all should have deceased with the era to which they properly belonged. It was well indeed that Paxton should have a proud place in the procession; but he held it in no representative capacity; he was there not in behalf of Architecture but of the Crystal Palace. To have rendered the pageant ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... blunder, by mistaking the king here alluded to for Alfred the Great: even Didbin, in his Bibliomania, falls into the same error although he suspected some mistake; he calls him our immortal Alfrid, p. 219, and seems puzzled to account for the anachronism, but does not take the trouble to enquire into the matter; Heylin's little Help to History would have set him right, and shown that while Alfrede king of Northumberland reigned in 680, Alfred king of England lived more than two ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... diminished, while his personal distinction was not, in his opinion, increased by the promotion. He refused to accept it because "it was no addition to his dignity, as he was already Cardinal and Bishop of Arras," but in this statement he committed an important anachronism. He was not Cardinal when he refused the see of Mechlin; having received the red hat upon February 26, 1561, and having already accepted the archbishopric in May of the preceding year. He affirmed that "no man would more resolutely defend the liberty ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Vico was now a hundred years old. I did not mention him in his chronological place, because he exercised no immediate influence on the world. His thought was an anachronism in the eighteenth century, it appealed to the nineteenth. He did not announce or conceive any theory of Progress, but his speculation, bewildering enough and confused in its exposition, contained principles which seemed predestined ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... sprang to life a logical production of the times. Their authors seized on the character of a king and a warrior—their highest conception of greatness, in the persons of Charlemagne and Arthur. Regardless of anachronism, they represented their heroes as the centre of a chivalric court, accoutred in the arms, and practising the customs of later centuries; they created in fact a new Arthur and a new Charlemagne, adapted to the new ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... tradition that the sailor was a dog, a different human species from the landsman, without laws and usages to protect him. This was a tradition which, for centuries, had been fostered in the naval service, and it survived among merchant sailors as an unhappy anachronism even into the twentieth century, when an American Congress was reluctant to bestow upon a seaman the decencies of existence enjoyed by the ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... spectacle, but that it is an improper theme for burlesque there cannot be the shadow of a doubt. Our dramatic authors have too long been in the habit of trying to raise a laugh about every thing, and we have too long been inundated with a species of drama in which the chief wit is anachronism and the chief wisdom a Cockney familiarity with the disreputable works of the Metropolis. We trust that the debut of the Prodigal Son at Vauxhall and the Casinos is that crisis of a disease which precedes a return to health, and that henceforth we shall hear less about ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... to translate it “Michael! sir, grammercy to you!” Compare the English use of “Marry!” (for Mary!) or “Gad!” (for God!) without by before them. It is written all in one word and spelt the same as the name of St. Michael in the same play. It is no more of an anachronism to make Eve swear by St. Michael than (in Res. Dom., 1387) to make St. Thomas ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner
... killed, but I did not kill him. Is it not the case that the author of a decree is not responsible for the sin of the decree?" Would Nathan have understood this logic? We think not. But if the Confession had been then in existence (if the anachronism may be pardoned), he might have appealed to it against Nathan; and we never should have had that awful threnody—the fifty-first Psalm. There is, then, no escape from the conclusion, that if everything that comes to pass has been foreordained, so also must it be the case with sin, ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... V.14: ——shall go to Constantinople] Shakespeare has here committed an anachronism. The Turks were not possessed of Constantinople before the year 1463, when Henry the Fifth ...
— King Henry the Fifth - Arranged for Representation at the Princess's Theatre • William Shakespeare
... formed, in fact, the religion of feudalism, and passed away only when the changed conditions of society made feudalism an anachronism. [15] While chivalry lasted, it produced some improvement in manners, particularly by insisting on the notion of personal honor and by fostering greater regard for women (though only for those of the ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... pick-pocket, the forger, the sweater, the roue, every one of whom may plead that he is but carrying out the Divine ordinances; if Alexander Borgia's perjuries, poisonings and debaucheries "break not Heaven's design," but are "ordained of God for some purpose," morality itself becomes an exploded anachronism. ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... new glazed card was to be seen on most of the fashionable tables in New York. It was of the particular tint most in favour that season, whether bluish or pinkish we dare not affirm, for fear of committing a serious anachronism, which might at once destroy, with many persons, all claim to a knowledge of the arcana of fashionable life. Having no authorities at hand to consult, the point must be left to the greater research of the critical reader. This card bore the name of T. TALLMAN TAYLOR; but whether in Roman ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... then, that Marie Louise's people, who had made almost no impression on the life of the town, should have lapsed from its memory. But it was discouraging. Marie Louise felt as much of an anachronism as old Rip Van Winkle, though she looked no more like him than an exquisite, fashionable young woman could look like a gray-bearded sot who has slept in his ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... few examples of legislation directed to the deaf as if they were peculiarly in need of the state's attention, and though such are hardly more than reminders of the past legal attitude, they are mostly an anachronism to-day, and should in great part ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best
... broke drearily for our friends, the two pedestrians, at the 'Blue Goat.' A day of dull aspect and soft rain in midsummer has the added depression that it seems an anachronism. One is in a measure prepared for being weather-bound in winter. You accept imprisonment as the natural fortune of the season, or you brave the elements prepared to let them do their worst, while, if confined to house, you have that solace of snugness, that comfortable chimney-corner which ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... or setting a mark of mental concern anywhere upon himself, is too far removed from modern perceptiveness to be a modern type. Physically beautiful men—the glory of the race when it was young—are almost an anachronism now; and we may wonder whether, at some time or other, physically beautiful women may not be ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... touched his heart. He had evidently felt himself isolated, with his old chivalrous ideas, in a world devoted to the worship of low things, tangible successes, and profitable realities. He was, so to speak, a living anachronism in the midst of a society which had faith in nothing except victorious brutalities, and which marched on, crushing, beneath its iron-shod heels, the hopes and visions of the enthusiastic. He recalled those evenings ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... saw her not at all. For one thing, he climbed no more to the spring-sheltering altar rock among the cedars; and for another, among all the wild creatures of the mountain, your moonshiner is the shyest, being an anachronism in a world of progress. One bit of news, however, floated in on the gossip at Little Zoar. It related that Nan's mother was dead, and that the body had lain two days unburied while Tike was drowning his sorrow in a ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... futile the attempt of Schleiermacher and others to arrange the Dialogues of Plato into a harmonious whole. Any such arrangement appears to me not only to be unsupported by evidence, but to involve an anachronism in the history of philosophy. There is a common spirit in the writings of Plato, but not a unity of design in the whole, nor perhaps a perfect unity in any single Dialogue. The hypothesis of a general plan which is worked out in the successive Dialogues ...
— Charmides • Plato
... mentions him as contemporary. He had subjugated Eastern Persia by that time and founded the Shiah religion. Barbosa writes: "He is a Moor and a young man," and states that he was not of royal lineage (Hakluyt edit. p. 38). Nuniz was thus guilty of an anachronism, but he describes Persia ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... sort of anachronism of the limbs, as in the case of the painter of Toledo, who painted the story of the three wise men of the east coming to worship, and bringing their presents to our Lord, upon his birth, at Bethlehem, whence he presents ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... new life, then better conduct. Men's way is, 'cultivate morality, seek after purity, try to be good.' And surely conscience and experience alike tell us that that is a hopeless effort. To begin with what should be second is an anachronism in morals, and will be sure to result in failure in practice. He is not a wise man that tries to build a house from the chimneys downwards. And to talk about making a man's doings good before you have secured a radical change in the doer, by the infusion ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... made no attempt at sentiment, for my mood went far deeper than sentiment. Indeed, though, every second of the time, I was living so vividly, so cruelly, in the past, I made one heartbroken acknowledgment of the present by beginning with the anachronism of a dry Martini cocktail, which, twelve years previous, was unknown and unattainable in that haunted gallery. That cocktail was a sort of desperate epitaph. It meant that I was alone—alone with my ghosts. Yet it had a certain resurrecting influence, ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... politicians. But the introduction of the spoils system had a meaning superior to its results. It was, after all, an attempt to realize an ideal, and the ideal was based on a genuine experience. The "Virginian Oligarchy," although it was the work of Jefferson and his followers, was an anachronism in a state governed in the spirit of Jeffersonian Democratic principles. It was better for the Jacksonian Democrats to sacrifice what they believed to be an obnoxious precedent to their principles than to sacrifice their principles to mere precedent. If in so doing they were ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... the Latin race; and the didactic quality of the 'De Rerum Natura' is unmistakable. Yet it would be uncritical to place this poem in the class which derives from Hesiod. It belongs really to the succession of Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Empedocles. As such it was an anachronism. The specific moment in the development of thought at which the Parmenidean Epic was natural has been already described. The Romans of the age of Lucretius had advanced far beyond it. The idealistic metaphysics of the Socratic school, the positive ethics ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... commemorated it. He sat between Lavater and Basedow, and during the meal the former expounded the Revelation of St. John to a country pastor, and the latter exerted himself to prove to a stolid dancing-master that baptism was an anachronism. ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... "The Critic" is not very often played nowadays; but every occasion of its revival is disfigured by the freedoms and buffoonery of its representatives. Modern costume is usually worn by Mr. Puff and his friends; and the anachronism has its excuse, perhaps, in the fact that the satire of the dramatist is as sound and relevant now as it was in the last century. And some modification of the original text might be reasonably permitted. For instance, the ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... has been noted by several critics. The epithets and metaphors, the description of the drunken debauch, and the swift, powerful narrative of the battle and the rout of the Assyrians, are in the best Anglo-Saxon epic strain. The poem is distinctly Christian; for the Hebrew heroine, with a naive anachronism, prays thus: "God of Creation, Spirit of Consolation, Son of the Almighty, I pray for Thy mercy to me, greatly in need of it. Glory of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Court. With a strange feeling, the general noticed a solemn old man in black, staring bleakly out the window. He realized suddenly it was probably a judge, and that the golden coin in his pocket had turned this costly mechanism into an anachronism. Nobody used the World Court any ...
— The Golden Judge • Nathaniel Gordon
... that cometh after me is preferred before me: for he was before me. And of his fulness have all we received, and grace for grace." At that time none had received of the "fulness of Christ," and the saying in the mouth of John Baptist is an anachronism. The word "cross" is several times used symbolically by Christ, as expressing patience and self-denial; but before his own crucifixion the expression would be incomprehensible, and he would surely not select a phraseology his disciples ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... makes out of that which he finds before him something which is independent of all time. He can only do this out of the materials ready to his hand, but that which he builds has the dignity of dateless age. A little painter is annihilated by an anachronism, and is conventionally antique, and ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... one need bother because the thing was bound to come, was indeed already arriving for all who had eyes to see—Republicanism did not so much die as fall asleep. It was all right, Liberalism told us—the Crown was a legal fiction, the House of Lords was an interesting anachronism, and in that faith it was, no doubt, that the last of the Republicans, Mr. Bright and Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, "kissed hands." Then, presently, the frantic politics of Mr. Gladstone effected what probably no other human agency could have contrived, ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... stage of civilised society. To call him a great general or a great statesman is to use utterly misleading terms. Generalship and statesmanship, as we understand them, did not yet exist, and to speak of them in the ninth century in England is to be guilty of a common, but none the more excusable, anachronism. AElfred was a sturdy and hearty fighter, and a good king of a semi-barbaric people. As a lad, he had visited Rome; and he retained throughout life a strong sense of his own and his people's barbarism, and a genuine desire to civilise himself and his subjects, ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... Christian Gumpel, would with justice complain that thereby all illusion was destroyed; and if Lord Burleigh in a moment of forgetfulness should don the hose of Henry the Fourth, then the War-Councilor Von Steinzopf's wife, nee Lilienthau, would not get the anachronism out of her head for the whole evening.... But little as this young man had comprehended the conditions of the Berlin drama, still less was he aware that the Spontini Janissary opera, with its kettledrums, elephants, trumpets, and gongs, is a heroic means of inspiring our enervated ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... He's been going back ever since I knew him. At present he's got to the thirteenth century; he may arrive at the Nicene age, but he'll never have a hold on his own. He's nothing but a holy anachronism." ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... who maintain that war is a Divine and providential institution, one of the eternal verities. In Germany the paradoxes of de Maistre are the commonplaces of historians and moralists. To an Englishman war is a dwindling force, an anachronism. It may still sometimes be a necessity, a dura lex, an ultima ratio, but it is always a monstrous calamity. In other words, to an Englishman war is evil, war is immoral. On the contrary, to the German war is essentially ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... told him. "But look, Siddy, I was going to sayest that I do know the plays. Having Queen Elizabeth speak a prologue to Macbeth is as much an anachronism as if you put her on the gantry of the British moonship, busting a bottle ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... the patois) of his pleasure in making my acquaintance, and led me to a strange uneasy easy-chair, much of a piece with the rest of the furniture, which might have taken its place without any anachronism by the side of that in the Hotel Cluny. Then again began the clatter of French voices, which my arrival had for an instant interrupted, and I had leisure to look about me. Opposite to me sat a very sweet-looking lady, who ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... is here an anachronism: I have noted that the title was first assumed independently by Mohammed of Ghazni after it had been conferred by the Caliph upon his father the Amir Al- Umar (Mayor of the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... go; The Providence that works in history, And seems to some folks such a mystery, Does not creep slowly on incog., But moves by jumps, a mighty frog; No more reject the Age's chrism, Your queues are an anachronism; No more the Future's promise mock, But lay your tails upon the block, Thankful that we the means have voted To have you ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... enim proprios fines sub te ulla dignitas custodivit. (Of course there is a certain anachronism in representing a statesman of the sixth century as using the ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... close proximity to railroad tracks, or upon the main thoroughfares of cities where stone or asphalt pavements resound to every hoof-fall, and where street cars go whirring and clanging by all night long, is something more than an anachronism; it is a fiendish disregard ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy |
