"Didactic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to express that we become tired of the task before we can comprehend the beauty; that we learn by rote before we can get by heart; that the freshness is worn away, and the future pleasure and advantage deadened and destroyed by the didactic anticipation, at an age when we can neither feel nor understand the power of compositions, which it requires an acquaintance with life, as well as Latin and Greek, to relish or to reason upon. For the same reason, we never can be aware of the fulness of some of ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... arranged, for the use of future syncretics, a system of coincidences, compiled from the plots of those magnificent soul-stirring extravaganzas produced and acted at the modern temples of the drama—the chaste Victoria—the didactic Sadler's Wells—and the tramontane Pavilion: but we have found the subject too vast for comprehension, and must content ourselves with noting some of the more exorbitant and refined instances of genius and hallucination displayed in those mighty works. Among ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 2, 1841 • Various
... impelled other apostles and early Christian teachers to write on the same themes with the same immediate purpose as did Paul. The result is a series of epistles, associated with the names of James, Peter, John, and Jude. In some, like Third John, the personal element is predominant; in others, the didactic, as, for ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... essay or a sermon, so intensely moral was it. She had her doubts about it from the beginning, for her lively fancy and girlish romance felt as ill at ease in the new style as she would have done masquerading in the stiff and cumbrous costume of the last century. She sent this didactic gem to several markets, but it found no purchaser, and she was inclined to agree with Mr. Dashwood ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... Did the great actress find those attributes in the part (they asked themselves), or did she infuse them into it? Previous representatives of Portia had placed the emphasis chiefly, if not exclusively, upon morals and mind. The stage Portia of the past has usually been a didactic lady, self-contained, formal, conventional, and oratorical. Ellen Terry came, and Portia was figured exactly as she lives in the pages of Shakespeare—an imperial and yet an enchanting woman, dazzling in her beauty, royal in her dignity, as ardent in temperament ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... and the university likewise differ in their methods of work. The college seeks the highest results in discipline. Its method is more formal and didactic. In the later years of the college course a certain amount of specialization is usually allowed, both for the ends of discipline and as a provision for the work of the university proper. The university adopts methods of work along the line of original discovery, literary ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker
... Tartars governs in a simple, ready way, without the aid of the Odes and the Book as in the case of China." Thus it was that, possibly with this ancient warning in his mind, he conceived a sudden, violent, and passionate hatred for didactic works generally, and two books in particular-the very two, passages from which pedants, philosophers, ambassadors, and ministers had for centuries hurled at each other's heads alike in convivial, argumentative, and solemn moments. In other words, the Odes and the Book, together with Confucius' ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... "that loyal and respectable people," "this enlightened and spirited people," etc., etc. The speakers who made use of this colloquial phraseology concerning the inhabitants of a distant continent, in the freedom of extemporaneous debate, were not framing their ideas with the exactitude of a didactic treatise, and could little have foreseen the extraordinary use to be made of their expressions nearly a century afterward, in sustaining a theory contradictory to history as well as to common sense. It is as if the familiar expressions often employed in our ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... by any class of readers, be used, it is simply for the sake of brevity; and because, as Kant says, "completeness must not be sacrificed to popularity," the attainment of which would be "a didactic triumph, attained only by omitting everything complicated, and saying only what exists already in ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... said Phelim, squaring himself, and placing the index finger of his right hand in his left hand, after the manner of the didactic, "the great thing is the discard, and your discard should be governed by two considerations—first, to better your own hand, and second, to cripple your opponent's. Your moderate player never thinks of this latter consideration. ...
— The Turquoise Cup, and, The Desert • Arthur Cosslett Smith
... matter of that, the old author, who thinks that he has a perfect right to choose between the verse form and the prose form simply according as he can versify or not, is grievously in the wrong. There is no more justification for, say, a purely didactic poem or descriptive poem than there is for the rhyming which begins somebody's treatise on optics ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... are so accustomed, and as I believe quite rightly, to look at all Christ's life down to its minutest events as intended to be a revelation of God, that we are sometimes apt to think about it as if His motive and purpose in everything was didactic. So an unreality creeps over our conceptions of Christ's life, and we need to be reminded that He was not always acting and speaking in order to convey instruction, but that words and deeds were drawn from Him by the play of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... man, officially a King withal, comported himself in the Eighteenth Century, and managed not to be a Liar and Charlatan as his Century was, deserves to be seen a little by men and kings, and may silently have didactic meanings ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... will not let me take my sea-bath every morning; they say it makes me too weak. Do they mean in the head, I wonder?... "Let the sanguine then take warning, and the disheartened take courage, for to every hope and every fear, to every joy and every sorrow, there comes a last day," which is but a didactic form of dear Mademoiselle Descuillier's conjuring of our impatiences: "Cela viendra, ma chere, cela viendra, car tout vient dans ce monde; cela passera, ma chere, cela passera, car tout passe dans ce monde." ... I finished my drawing, and copied some of "The Star ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... A Didactic Poem. Translated from the German of Friedrich Rueckert. By Chas. T. Brooks. Six ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... her gladness is to be without subtlety,—that is to say, without the slightest pleasure in any form of advantage-taking, or any shrewd or mocking wit: "she was simple as dove on tree;" and you will find that the color-painting, both in the fresco and in the poem, is in the very highest degree didactic and intellectual; and distinguished, as being so, from all inferior forms of art. Farther, that it requires you yourself first to understand the nature of simplicity, and to like simplicity in young ladies better than subtlety; and to understand ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... not a series of nursery-rules for man—formal, didactic droppings of a pedant's tongue. Homiletics is the appeal of man to man, for the welfare of his soul, and the true progress of mankind. Exegesis is not a matter of Hebrew or Greek alone. It includes the spiritual interpretation of the great problems of the race. Homer, Tennyson, Browning, ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... snug against the winter; and am happiest when all men leave me alone, or nearly all,—though many men love me rather, ungrateful that I am. My present book is Horace Walpole; I get endless stuff out of it; epic, tragic, lyrical, didactic: all inarticulate indeed. An old blind Schoolmaster in Annan used to ask with endless anxiety when a new scholar was offered him, "But are ye sure he's not a Dunce?" It is really the one thing needful in a man; for indeed ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... unchristian to repine at the providential failure of her efforts. Denis's deductions were, of course, a little less direct than his mother's. He had, besides, been fond of Arthur, and his efforts to keep the poor fellow straight had been less didactic and more spontaneous. Their result read itself, if not in any change in Arthur's character, at least in the revised wording of his will; and Denis's moral sense was pleasantly fortified by the discovery that it very substantially paid to be ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... (1824-8). It is not easy for modern taste to do justice to Godwin's novels; but on them his contemporary fame chiefly rested, and publishers paid for them high though diminishing prices. They all belong to the romantic movement; some have a supernatural basis, and most of them discover a too obvious didactic purpose. St. Leon (1799), almost as popular in its day as Caleb Williams, mingles a romance of the elixir of life and the philosopher's stone with an ardent recommendation of those family affections which Political ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... he reflected rationally on his vision, brought it more or less into harmony with a philosophical system, and, in embracing it, always had in view the improvement of mankind. Not for a moment, though, must it be imagined that he was a didactic poet. It was the theory of the eighteenth century, and for a brief period, when the first impulse of the Romantic Movement was spent, it was again to become the theory of the nineteenth century, that the object of poetry is to inculcate correct principles of morals and religion. Poetry, with its ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... destitute of the spontaneous ease which forms the chief beauty of epistolary writing. On the whole, we regard this biography as eminently instructive, presenting many noticeable facts in psychology and literary history, and well rewarding an attentive study, but of so uniformly a didactic cast as to grow tedious in perusal, and likely to find few readers beyond the circle of Wordsworth's ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... of sincere dissent, but the better to cover our connivance. My honourable friend, I admit, would not have been of the number of those who would so have accused us: but he may be assured that he would have been wholly disappointed in the practical result of our didactic reprehensions. In truth, the principle of non-interference is one on which we were already irrecoverably at variance in opinion with the allies; it was no longer debatable ground. On the one hand, the alliance upholds the doctrine ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... obvious—almost a truism; but the illustration by means of which he brought it home to his hearers was certainly born of poetic imagination. The life of the ordinary person he likened to that of the canary in its cage. And here, dropping his lofty didactic manner, and—if I may coin a word—smalling his deep, sonorous voice, to a thin reedy treble, in imitation of the tenuous fringilline pipe, he went on with lively language, rapid utterance, and suitable brisk movements and gestures, to describe ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... this double group. It is contemplative in tone, but inspired by a formed conviction, and, dramatically at least, by an instructive purpose; and thus becomes the centre of another small division of Mr. Browning's poems, which for want of a less ugly and hackneyed word we may call "didactic." ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... not sleep. My blood made a tumult through my body. Before dawn I had written two poems on national themes; didactic verses, each with a moral of democracy tagged to it, and much about the worth of simplicity in it, and the dignity of ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... be at once explained, shown to be obvious and useful. I am sated with Lesson and Allegory, weary of monitory ants, industrious bees, and preaching animals. The benefits of Civilization cloy me. I have seen enough shining of the didactic Sun. ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... the "Essay on Man" of Pope, the "Pleasures of Memory" constituted the finest English didactic poem. This opinion ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... Turgenev, for his former merits, and for his numerous admirers. There is no common thread, no common action which would have tied together all the parts of the novel; all of it is in some way just separate rhapsodies. . . . This novel is didactic, a real learned treatise written in dialectic form, and each character as he appears serves as an expression and representative of a certain opinion and direction. . . . All the attention of the author is turned on the principal hero and the other acting characters, ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... henceforward repose himself upon the mountain-side, or by the murmuring waters, with the happy consciousness of having not only followed the bent of his own inclinations, but contributed to the amusement and instruction of a numerous class of his fellow creatures. The present volume consists of no dry didactic dissertations on an art unteachable by written rules, and in which, without long and often dear-bought experience, neither precept nor example will avail; but it contains a sufficiency of sagacious practical advice, and is ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... had a pipe in his mouth, he became didactic, and he therefore proceeded to renew his donations of valuable advice to his nephew, who was still looking hard out of ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... always so genuine that the most imaginative feel its charm. His wisdom is deeper than it seems, so simple, practical, and direct as it is in its application; and his moral teaching more spiritual and penetrating than is apparent on a superficial study. He does not fall into the common error of didactic writers, of laying upon life more than it will bear; but he insists that it shall at least bear the fruits of integrity, truth, honour, justice, self-denial, and brotherly charity. Over and above the mere literary charm ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... Allow me to give you a few specimens of these choruses—the first as an example of that practical and yet surely not un-divine wisdom, by which they supplied the place of our modern preacher, or essayist, or didactic poet. ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... teaching for girls. As to reading aloud to children it begins to be recognized that it should not be too explicit, nor too emphatic, nor too pointed; that it must leave something for the natural grace of the listener's intelligence to supply and to feel. There is a didactic tone in reading which says, "you are most unintelligent, but listen to ME and there may yet be hope that you will understand." This leaves the "poor creatures" of the class still unmoved and unenlightened; "the child ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... locutions,—whose reading had been confined to the ordinary newspapers and chap-books of his time (with perhaps an occasional dip into the pages of "Ned Ward" and "Tom Brown"),—and who in his old age had preserved the pseudo-didactic of his youth. The "Adventures of Captain Dangerous" have been, in every sense, an experiment, and not a very gratifying one. I have earned by them a great many kicks, but a very few halfpence. Should the toe of any friendly critic be quivering in his boot just now, at the bare announcement of "Captain ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... in a salad," said Marian, with a wise and didactic air. "Its whole success depends on the way it ...
— Patty at Home • Carolyn Wells
... spherical—which was unusual, but not remarkable. The radar gave him the distance from the surface of the asteroid, and he measured the diameter and punched it through the calculator. "Observe," he said in a dry, didactic voice. "The diameter is on the order of five times ten to the fourteenth micromicrons." He kept punching at the calculator. "If we assume a mean density of two point six six times ten to the minus thirty-sixth metric tons per cubic micromicron, we attain a mean mass of some one ...
— Anchorite • Randall Garrett
... as the Roman to the Anglican. The spirit of the volume is not so gentle to the Church of Rome, as Tract 71 published the year before; on the contrary, it is very fierce; and this I attribute to the circumstance that the volume is theological and didactic, whereas the Tract, being controversial, assumes as little and grants as much as possible on the points in dispute, and insists on points of agreement as well as of difference. A further and more direct reason is, that in my volume I deal with "Romanism" ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... as old as Homer. Its laureate is Montesquieu. The more northerly you go, he said, the sterner the man grows. You must scorch a Muscovite to make him feel. Gray was a convert. One of the prose hints for his noble fragment of a didactic poem runs thus: "It is the proper work of education and government united, to redress the faults that arise from the soil and air." Berkeley entertained the same feeling. Writing to Pope from Leghorn, and alluding to some half-formed design he had heard him mention of visiting ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... portray in some degree their influence in the struggle of the Colonies to attain their independence. The narration of events takes the form of a story—a slight thread of romance being employed, rather than didactic narrative, to more vividly picture the scenes and the parts performed by the actors in the great historic drama. It will not be difficult for the reader to discern between the facts of history and the imaginative parts of ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... always held over the minds of men is akin to that of poetry; when the former becomes merely instructive and the latter purely didactic, both lose their power over the imagination. Astronomy is known as the oldest of the sciences, and it will be the longest-lived because it will always have arcana that ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... Advena, rebelliously; and indeed he had been a trifle didactic to her grievance. They laughed together, and then with a look at her in which observation seemed ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... the law about any matter with which he has a bowing acquaintance. That an expert should sit mute when his own subject is in debate, surprises your statesman profoundly. That the expert should not be brimming over with a didactic and confident flow of words when he has been invited to promulgate his views, confounds your statesman altogether. General Wolfe-Murray never seemed to succeed in getting on quite the proper terms either with his immediate superior, the War Minister, or yet with the members of the Government included ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... without either the descriptive grace of Guillaume de Lorris, or the wicked wit of Jean de Meung, but full of learning and matter, and written by an author certainly not devoid of the art of telling stories. The mind of this author was thoroughly didactic in its bent; for the beauty of nature he has no real feeling, and though his poem, like so many of Chaucer's, begins in the month of May, he is (unnecessarily) careful to tell us that his object in going forth was not to "sing with the birds." He could not, like Chaucer, ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... be didactic to the people, and that as their chief end. The structural arts, didactic in their manner; the graphic arts, in their ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... Moses and is certainly later than D. Moses is represented as speaking not with any hope of preventing Israel's apostasy but because he knows that the people will eventually prove apostate (xxxi. 29), a point of view very different from D's. (3) The Song of Moses, chap. xxxii. That this didactic poem must have been written late in the nation's history, and not at its very beginning, is evident from v. 7: "Remember the days of old, Consider the years of many generations." Such words cannot be interpreted so as to fit the lips of Moses. It must have been composed in a time ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... this rhetorical—or satirical, didactic—or perfunctory, treatment of classical themes were doomed. It is the glory of Romanticism to have opened 'magic casements' not only on 'the foam of perilous seas' in the West, but ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... undertaken to deliver the precepts. He deduces the pedigree of novel through several generations from Homer and Calliope. He then undertakes to characterise the most considerable writers in this line. He discusses with much learning, and all the logical subtlety so proper to the didactic muse, the pretensions of the Cyropedia of Xenophon; but at length rejects it as containing nothing but what was literally true, and therefore belonging to the class of history. He is very eloquent upon the Shepherd of Hermas, Theagenes and Chariclea, and the Ethiopics of Heliodorus. Turpin, Scudery, ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... majesty, the canons of Mosaic and Apostolic Scripture. All that the young reader need know is, that when Jerome died at Bethlehem, this great deed was virtually accomplished: and the series of historic and didactic books which form our present Bible, (including the Apocrypha) were established in and above the nascent thought of the noblest races of men living on the terrestrial globe, as a direct message to them from its ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... as these I was able to sum up, in clear and didactic form, the multifarious examples suggested by my memory, startled at first by their contradiction and then delighted at the light thrown upon them by these very formulae, due, not to my own merit, ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... may infer, good hearing extended to these unblushingly didactic Interludes attracted into authorship writers with purposes more aggressive and debatable than those pertaining to wise conduct. Zealous reformers, earnest proselytizers, fierce dogmatists turned to the drama as a medium ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... Miss Vance. "Poor Pauline! Her career was always a mystery to me. I was at school with her, and she was the most generous, lovable girl! Yet she came to a wretched end," turning to her flock, her tone growing didactic. "One is never safe, you see. One ...
— Frances Waldeaux • Rebecca Harding Davis
... sphere; and though the tale may end in gloom, it more frequently suggests a possible tragedy in order to heighten the effect of the happy denouement. For similar reasons the short story avoids the didactic tone, either presenting its lesson in clever disguise, or limiting its moral efforts to providing innocent amusement for ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... mountainous forest and the cave appear in their aspect of obstruction to life's opportunities. These only seem tolerable in comparison with the vicissitudes of fortune in the artificial court life. In As You Like It the forest of Arden is didactic in its lessons. It does not bring peace, but ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... properly, was himself the sovereign of Castile. His fate furnishes one of the most memorable lessons in history. It was not lost on his contemporaries; and the marquis of Santillana has made use of it to point the moral of perhaps the most pleasing of his didactic compositions. [41] John did not long survive his favorite's death, which he was seen afterwards to lament even with tears. Indeed, during the whole of the trial he had exhibited the most pitiable agitation, having twice issued ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... near the essential difference between prose and poetry, or rather between the poetic and the didactic treatment of a subject. The essence of creative art is always the same; namely, interior movement and fusion; while the method of the didactic or prosaic treatment is fixity, limitation. The latter ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... had brought to a certain conclusion four years previously the researches which he had pursued most carefully the whole time, did he make public the actual masterpiece, Entwurf einer Farbenlehre.7 (An English translation of the didactic part appeared about ten ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... changes to respect. Surely it is a most potent egg, a gallinaceous Swift. After all, anything but pointless and childless, since it has this strange quality of being offensive and engendering thought. Food for the mind if not food for the body—didactic if not delightful—a bit of modern literature, earnest and fundamentally real. I must try and understand you, Ibsen Ovarum. Possibly it is a profound parable I have stumbled upon. Though I scarcely reckoned on a parable with my bread and butter. ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... feature or pitch of voice, at once didactic and yet not uncomrade-like, must be counted a very important fact, especially in connection with the period when that voice was first heard. It must be remembered that Shaw emerged as a wit in a sort of secondary age of wits; one of those stale interludes of prematurely ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... effect. We seem to perceive that the poet had a truth or fact—philosophical, agricultural, social—distinctly before him, and then, as we say, clothed it in metrical and coloured language. Most argumentative, didactic, or satiric poems are partly of this kind; and in imaginative poems anything which is really a mere "conceit" is mere decoration. We often deceive ourselves in this matter, for what we call decoration ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... glimpses we obtain of the vailed department of nature, of which, though comprising the solution of the most important questions, we are in a state of almost total ignorance. In writing a book on these subjects, the author disclaims the intention of enforcing any didactic opinions. She wishes only to suggest inquiry and stimulate observation, in order to gain all possible light on our spiritual nature, both as it now exists in the flesh and is to ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 8 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 19, 1850 • Various
... her. How break off Flamin's love for his unknown sister? How rescue Victor from his self-imposed delicacy and win for him a bride? This is the substance of the story, hampered by wild, spasmodic interpolations and intrigues and didactic explanations. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... metaphysical love-verses, but whose imagination retained all its freshness and vigour; whose censure and approbation might be erroneously bestowed, but whose tears and laughter was never in the wrong. The infection which had tainted lyric and didactic poetry had but slightly and partially touched the drama. While the noble and the learned were comparing eyes to burning-glasses, and tears to terrestrial globes, coyness to an enthymeme, absence to a pair of compasses, and an unrequited ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of this romancer are the besetting sins of certain of our own novelists, who had at one time a fair degree of transient popularity. A lack of skill in the creation or accurate delineation of individual character, which, instead of representing men and women, are didactic exhibitions of the author himself, projected into various personages, and all bearing an unmistakable family resemblance—this it is that is at the bottom of the sudden decadence into which the writings of one or two of our more prolific romancers ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... those of the poems of Chaucer. The older fashions of instructing the people were still in vogue in the early part of Edward's reign. Richard Rolle, the hermit of Hampole, whose Prick of Conscience and vernacular paraphrases of the Bible illustrate the older didactic literature, was carried off in his Yorkshire cell in the year of the Black Death. The cycles of miracle plays, which edified and amused the townsfolk of Chester and York, crystallised into a permanent shape early in this reign, and were set forth with ever-increasing elaborateness ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... Plato and Aristotle, or to those of any other authors who have written on the same subjects in any country. These works, the Ihya-ul-ulum, epitomized into the Kimia-i-Saadat, and the Akhlak-i-Nasiri, with the didactic poems of Sadi,[38] are the great 'Pierian spring' of moral instruction from which the Muhammadan delights to 'drink deep' from infancy to old age; and a better spring it would be difficult to find in the works ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... Third Division was never even begun, and "the materials," we are told, "of which it would have been formed have been incorporated, for the most part, in the author's other publications." Nor need this change of plan be regretted: didactic poems admit easily of mutilation; and all that can be called plot in this series of works is contained in the Prelude, in which we see Wordsworth arriving at those convictions which in the Excursion he ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... natural sequence, those assigned to a lower year being preparatory to those of a higher. This sequence need not always be historical; the simpler course may well precede those which for any reason are more difficult. Methods of instruction will also naturally change, becoming less narrowly didactic with the advancement of the student. In the senior year the teacher will usually prefer to meet his classes in small sections, on the seminar plan, for informal discussion and the criticism of papers written by his pupils on questions suggested ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... may still linger, of course, over other verse-writers of the period. Anne Bradstreet's poems, for instance, are not without grace and womanly sweetness, in spite of their didactic themes and portentous length. But this lady, born in England, the daughter of Governor Dudley and later the wife of Governor Bradstreet, chose to imitate the more fantastic of the moralizing poets of England and France. There ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... experience. Marguerite made her statements with a certain careless aplomb, and these were usually within measurable distance of the fact, whereas a youth her age and ten years older, if he be of a didactic turn, will hold forth upon life and human nature with an ignorance of ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... into his waistcoat, and in his most didactic of tones).—"From a remote period, the choice of a title has perplexed the scribbling portion of mankind. We may guess how their invention has been racked by the strange contortions it has produced. To begin with the Hebrews. 'The Lips of the Sleeping' ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... be it spoken, in the full noonday genial splendour of our Reformed Church, with newspapers, the leading articles of which rise to a level with our greatest didactic writers, and are competent even to form the mind as well as to amuse the leisure hours of the young readers: with every species of direct communication, we yet hold to fallacies from which the credulous in Charles's time would have shrunk in dismay ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... more didactic, and altogether more meritorious than these is another series of designs belonging to the same period of time. They are not only as a rule conceived in better taste, but are, almost consequently, better in their execution. The following example from Cooling, a small village ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... his right hand whilst the left held a page ready to turn, he solaced himself, pending the appearance of the mid-day meal, with a few hundred lines of a favourite work—the didactic poems, I believe, of a certain Doctor Erasmus Darwin, on the analogies of ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... Editions of worthy Authors,—in three Parts; containing, I. The notbrowne Mayde; Master Sackvile's Induction; and, Overbury's Wife: II. Edward the third, a Play, thought to be writ by Shakespeare: III. Those excellent didactic Poems, intitl'd—Nosce teipsum, written by Sir John Davis; with ...
— Catalogue of the Books Presented by Edward Capell to the Library of Trinity College in Cambridge • W. W. Greg
... well-defined transaction; and the story of King Canute is a ballad,—one of the best that has been produced in our language in modern years. But such pieces as those called The End of the Play and Vanitas Vanitatum, which are didactic as well as pathetic, are not ballads in the common sense; nor are such songs as The Mahogany Tree, or the little collection called Love Songs made Easy. The majority of the pieces are not ballads, but if they be good of the kind ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... and sometimes wrote as many as twelve rondels in the day. (4) It was in rhyme, even, that the young Charles should learn his lessons. He might get all manner of instruction in the truly noble art of the chase, not without a smack of ethics by the way, from the compendious didactic poem of Gace de la Bigne. Nay, and it was in rhyme that he should learn rhyming: in the verses of his father's Maitre d'Hotel, Eustache Deschamps, which treated of "l'art de dictier et de faire chancons, ballades, ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... can ever wholly extinguish among mankind;" to illustrate "the growth and progress of individual mind aspiring after excellence, and devoted to the love of mankind;" and to celebrate Love "as the sole law which should govern the moral world." The wild romantic treatment of this didactic motive makes the poem highly characteristic of its author. It is written in Spenserian stanzas, with a rapidity of movement and a dazzling brilliance that are Shelley's own. The story relates the kindling of a nation to freedom at the cry of a young poet-prophet, the temporary ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... stole along,—hunters like himself,—mates, so to say, and companions, and whom he therefore addressed as such.... So that originally this kind of poetry was the exponent of a peculiar sort of feeling prevailing among the people, and had nothing whatever to do with the didactic or satiric, although at a later period satiric allusions began to ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... reading simple stories and didactic passages in the ordinary school-books, as Hillard's Second Primary Reader, Willson's Second Reader, and others of similar grade. Those who had enjoyed a briefer period of instruction were reading short sentences or learning the alphabet. In several of this schools a class was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... bit in his teeth. He would remember to his dying day one awful shriek in the night, as of a soul tormenting and tormented. He wanted the protection of a good woman, and sometimes against the clear whiteness of her letters so joyous and generous, even if a bit prim and didactic, he saw a vision of himself reflected as he was, and ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... his first wife, who died within two years afterward, plunging him into the deepest grief. During his courtship he dabbled (as almost every young lawyer does until he finds that clients are severe critics) in poetry, and wrote a didactic poem of two parts in heroic verse, entitled "The Power of Solitude." Adopting the criticism of the biographers—its prominent defects were exaggeration of feeling, confusion of imagery, want of simplicity of expression, stilted and artificial style. But though dull as a poem, it shows facility and ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... to this poem after its first appearance, the sixth, seventh, eighth and tenth, but in the finally revised edition these were cut out, very likely because Lowell regarded them as too didactic. Indeed the poem is complete and ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... important which did not tend directly to the same end. Nelson was made to speak, not only in his own words, but in the many little ways and actions which best show the stuff one is made of. There is no essay, nothing strictly didactic. Facts are given: inferences are left entirely with the reader. Few books are more wearisome than those which are thoroughly exhaustive, which point a moral and adorn a tale on every page. Imagination and thought must ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... elements prevailed in his literary composition or the Scott and Dumas elements—a question indeed which among those who care for him most has always been at issue. Or again, what degree of true inspiring and illuminating power belongs to the gospel, or gospels, airily encouraging or gravely didactic, which are set forth in the essays with so captivating a grace? Or whether in romance and tale he had a power of inventing and constructing a whole fable comparable to his admitted power of conceiving and presenting single scenes and situations in a manner which stamps them indelibly ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... inclination to moralize, to sing a song and then add a lesson to it. This is commonly attributed to Puritan influence; but in truth it is a universal poetic impulse, a tribute to the early office of the bard, who was the tribal historian and teacher as well as singer. This ancient didactic or moralizing tendency is very strong in Bryant. To his first notable poem, "Thanatopsis," he must add a final "So live"; and to his "Waterfowl" must be appended a verse which tells what steadfast lesson may be learned from the ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... sentence which at first sight suggests some relationship to the name of the book which, in the present series, inaugurated Miss Austen's novels. 'The whole of this unfortunate business'—says a certain didactic Dr. Lyster, talking in capitals, towards the end of volume three of Cecilia—'has been the result of PRIDE and PREJUDICE,' and looking to the admitted familiarity of Miss Austen with Madame D'Arblay's work, it has been concluded that Miss Austen borrowed from Cecilia, ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... near the land, and the Earth Breath, and the Earth Divinities, and the Italian soil,—and that southern laya center and gateway into the inner world which, I am persuaded, is in Italy. There are many didactic poems in world-literature,—poems dealing with the operations of agriculture;— and they are mostly as dull as you would expect, with that for their subject; but one of them, and one only, is undying poetry. That one is the Roman one. Its author was a Celt, and his models ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... pleading. However, he consented to the employment of the bridge teacher for her and, thereafter, two hours of each alternate afternoon, Sundays excepted, were spent by Mrs. Dott and two other female students in company with a thin and didactic spinster who quoted Elwell and Foster and discoursed learnedly concerning the values of no-trump hands. The lessons were given at the Dott home and Mr. Hungerford was an interested spectator. Daniel, who was not interested, and felt himself in ...
— Cap'n Dan's Daughter • Joseph C. Lincoln
... impression of what he has actually seen. The greatest difficulties that he has to contend against are the ignorance and the previous misconceptions of his readers. He must give information without appearing didactic, and correct what he foresees as probable false conceptions, without ostentatiously pretending to know better. His language must be as concise as possible, or else important sentences will be skipped; ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... in respect of the only possible question as to which of them is likely to be best remembered a generation or two hence. Only in one particular does it seem quite safe to predict—namely, that whatever may be the future standing of one who is said to have never penned a story without a didactic purpose of some kind, Henry Kingsley is certain of a permanent place in the literature of the young country where he encountered both the best and the ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... arbitrary, of course. No better exposition of theory can be found than is contained in some of these references dealing with actual laboratory usage and furnishings. On the other hand the two books by Dr. Kilpatrick, with their illuminating analysis of didactic materials, afford many concrete suggestions, at ...
— A Catalogue of Play Equipment • Jean Lee Hunt
... for literature. With the story of the small boy who stole a pin, repented of and confessed that crime, and then became a good and great man, I was as familiar as if I myself had invented that ingenious and instructive tale; I could lisp the moral numbers of Watts and the didactic hymns of Wesley, and the annual reports of the American Tract Society had already revealed to me the sphere of usefulness in which my grandmother hoped I would ultimately figure with discretion and zeal. And yet my heart was free; wholly untouched of that gentle ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... of nature and of real life, especially of peasant life, in the dim transition age of Hellas. The Homeric bards sing of the deeds of heroes, and of a far-away time when gods mingled with men. Hesiod sings of common men, and of every-day, present duties. His greatest poem, a didactic epic, is entitled Works and Days. This is, in the main, a sort of farmers' calendar, in which the poet points out to the husbandman the lucky and unlucky days for doing certain kinds of work, eulogizes industry, and intersperses among ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... completely does your own brief definition of poetry, "the rhythmic creation of the beautiful," exhaust your theory, and so perfectly is the theory illustrated by the poems. Natural bent, and reaction against the example of Mr. Longfellow, combined to make you too intolerant of what you call the "didactic" element in verse. Even if morality be not seven-eighths of our life (the exact proportion as at present estimated), there was a place even on the Hellenic Parnassus for gnomic bards, and theirs in the nature of the case must always ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... conundrums, tables of the assize of food; the laws respecting the sale of meat, bread, beer, wine, and other necessaries; while above and beyond all are a collection in various handwritten of ballads, songs, hymns, and didactic poems of a religious kind, some few of which have been met with elsewhere; but of the greater number of them no other ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... men? His moral truth—his ethics. What proved Jesus Christ the Son of God hardly less than his miracles? His moral precepts. And if ethics have made a philosopher the first of men, and have not been disdained as an adjunct to his Gospel by the Deity himself, are we to be told that ethical poetry, or didactic poetry, or by whatever name you term it, whose object is to make men better and wiser, is not the very first order of poetry; and are we to be told this too by one of the priesthood? It requires more mind, more wisdom, more power, than all the ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... Church Fathers, born about 250 A.D., and died about 330, probably at Treves. He wrote Divinarum Institutionum Libri VII. and other controversial and didactic works against the learning ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... at the point where The Ring changes from music drama into opera, it also ceases to be philosophic, and becomes didactic. The philosophic part is a dramatic symbol of the world as Wagner observed it. In the didactic part the philosophy degenerates into the prescription of a romantic nostrum for all human ills. Wagner, only mortal after all, succumbed to the panacea mania when his philosophy was exhausted, ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... best short stories of 1915, and others felt it to be the best story of the year. To "The Friends" have now been added in this volume two other stories of almost equal distinction,—"The Packet" and "'In the Way of Business.'" While Mr. Aumonier has a certain didactic intention in these stories, he has kept it entirely subordinate to the artistry of his exposition, and it is the few characters which he has added to English fiction that we remember after his somewhat obvious moral has been conveyed. His short stories have the same flavor of belated ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... brings Mr. EDEN PHILLPOTTS back to Devonshire, and I wave my little flag to welcome him. Of late he has sometimes been a shade too didactic for my liking, but here he gives us yet another plain tale of his beloved moor, and he is instructive only in showing the danger of too much money—a danger at which most of us can in these days afford to smile. The Mortimers were, one would ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 31, 1920 • Various
... spring, may think the flowers they saw sinking into the earth last autumn return again with the marks of decay removed, they cannot come behind our scenes and make sure; but we know that a new generation is born. The marionettes are not didactic; if the people choose to see in the Resurrection of Christ any one of Nature's ageless mysteries they may do so; they may see the birth of the younger generation, the blossoming of fresh flowers after winter, the awakening to a new day after sleep; or, if they prefer it, ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... "Forgive his crimes," etc. This is quoted from Night Thoughts by the English didactic ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... It will perhaps be urged that the same thing was done by the Greek poets. But with them the subject was for the most part extremely simple, and already known to the spectators; and their expositions, with the exception of the unskilful prologues of Euripides, have not the didactic particularising tone of the French, but are full of life and motion. How admirable again are the expositions of Shakspeare and Calderon! At the very outset they lay hold of the imagination; and when they have once gained the spectator's interest and sympathy ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... The didactic purpose of 'The Traveller' is defined in the concluding paragraph of the 'Dedication'; and, like many of the thoughts which it contains, had been anticipated in a passage of 'The Citizen of the World', 1762, i. 185:—'Every mind seems capable of entertaining ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... layer after another, may build up a shoal on which an heroic life and an otherwise magnanimous nature may bilge and go to pieces. All this we may learn, and much more, and Shakespeare was no doubt well aware of all this and more; but I do not believe that he wrote his plays with any such didactic purpose. He knew human nature too well not to know that one thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning,—that, where one man shapes his life by precept and example, there are a thousand who have it shaped for them by impulse and by circumstances. ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... appetite for such stories and ballads as were current among the neighbours. George Crabbe, the elder, possessed a few books, and used to read aloud to his family passages from Milton, Young, and other didactic poets of the eighteenth century. Furthermore he took in a country magazine, which had a "Poet's Corner," always handed over to George for his special benefit. The father, respecting these early signs of a literary bent in the son, sent ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... is by Arbuthnot. He points out that there are three great Persian didactic works, viz.:—The Gulistan, or Rose Garden, by Sadi; The Nigaristan by Jawini; and The Beharistan by Jami. The Nigaristan contains 534 stories in prose and verse. Some particulars of it are given in Arbuthnot's Persian Portraits (Quaritch, ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... see Tavish too," continued Kenneth, with a half-laugh at his companion's didactic form of ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... distinguishes her numerous flirtations can only be equalled by the pathos she has thrown into her work every now and then, as if to temper her brightness with a little shade. Her descriptions of scenery are specially vivid and delightful, and very often full of poetry. She is never didactic or goody-goody, neither does she revel in risky situations, nor give the world stories which, to quote the well-known saying of a popular playwright, 'no nice girl would allow her mother ...
— Mrs. Hungerford - Notable Women Authors of the Day • Helen C. Black
... are in any degree ever intruded by this least didactic of writers. It is the fact that teaches, and not any sermonizing drawn from it. Oliver Twist is the history of a child born in a workhouse and brought up by parish overseers, and there is nothing introduced that is out of keeping with the design. It is a series of pictures from the tragi-comedy ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... callow lover of nature—and makes feeble attempts at verse. Returning to the city he melts and unbosoms—the tender shaft of the unknowable Eros has penetrated to his heart—Nature's subtle spell is on him, to disappear and reappear. Then follow discussions, more or less didactic, leading to the second out-of-door scene (Autumn Glory). Here the lad does most of the talking and shows a certain lucidity and calm of mind. The discussion of Responsibility, Democracy, Education, etc., has inevitably detached ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... as his opinion that the art of producing a newspaper is as much in its infancy as is the science of electricity. "The yellow journal," said he, "is an evolution, just as trusts in their deeper significance are an evolution. We have had the didactic editor; he did his work and has passed away. We are now having the editor who deals with facts—'cold facts,' as Dickens would say—but, in his turn, he is only a part of the general evolution. There is not an editor ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... impressive way, and seasoning the principles of the Free Kirk with snuff of an excellent fragrance. It was hard even for the most generous charity to identify the spirit of the Disruption in such a figure, and the good elder grew so proper and so didactic that Carmichael went from bad ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... Choulette if he had finished the portrait of Misery on his stick. Misery had now become a figure of Piety, and Choulette recognized the Virgin in it. He had even composed a quatrain which he was to write on it in spiral form—a didactic and moral quatrain. He would cease to write, except in the style of the commandments of God rendered into French verses. The four lines expressed simplicity and goodness. He consented ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... public life. He labored for the enlightemnent of his people through his writings and his personal influence in journeyings all over the land, and especially through speeches at political meetings. His chief poetic work, the rationalistic-republican didactic poem, Creation, Man, and Messiah, appeared in 1830. It was severely criticised in a special, polemical writing by Welhaven (see Note 36), who continued his attack on all Wergeland's views and teachings in his Norway's Dawn. Thus arose the Wergeland-Welhaven ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... monument of presumptuous infatuation that any one should feel so strongly as he did that order could only be restored on condition of coming to terms with religious use and prejudice, and then that he should dream that his Supreme Being—a mere didactic phrase, the deity of a poet's georgic—should adequately replace that eternal marvel of construction, by means of which the great churchmen had wrought dogma and liturgy and priest and holy office into every hour and ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... dropped her cloak, and, not even glancing at G.J., went to the fire and teased it with the poker. Bending down, with one hand on the graphic and didactic mantelpiece, and staring into ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... since momentarily they kept leaving behind them a satisfied smile. Indeed, so engrossed was he that he never noticed that his coachman, elated with the hospitality of Manilov's domestics, was making remarks of a didactic nature to the off horse of the troika [11], a skewbald. This skewbald was a knowing animal, and made only a show of pulling; whereas its comrades, the middle horse (a bay, and known as the Assessor, owing ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... book of directions for gardening and cooking, it is not the least didactic but is written in a discoursive style and with a leisureliness and in a rhythm suited to the slow pace of a horse trotting through the winding lanes of the English countryside. As we read, we can almost see the butler bringing a fragrant pudding ...
— Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets • John Evelyn
... the real character and workaday opinions and beliefs of a writer. The teacher generally speaks from a height transcending his ordinary levels of thought and action. In Florio's Second Fruites his intention is didactic only in relation to imparting a colloquial knowledge of Italian. In this endeavour he arranges a series of twelve conversations on matters of everyday life between imaginary characters, who are, presumably, ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... papers, "Autocrat," "Professor," "Poet," are all studies of life from somewhat different points of view. They are largely made up of sober reflections, and appeared to me to require some lively human interest to save them from wearisome didactic dulness. What could be more natural than that love should find its way among the young people who helped to make up the circle gathered around the table? Nothing is older than the story of young love. Nothing is newer than that same old story. A bit of gilding here and there has a ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... as far as I have seen, Valerie Latour's husband and one or two others are the only men who have it here in New York, although lots are very good looking and intelligent, and all are kind; but there is a didactic way of talking, a complete absence of subtlety or romance.—And even those it would be perfectly safe to go with; because they would not dream of making love to one, but they have the igniting quality in themselves. Some of ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... grandmother to suck eggs, teach granny to suck eggs; preach to the converted. Adj. teaching &c.v; taught &c.v.; educational; scholastic, academic, doctrinal; disciplinal[obs3]; instructive, instructional, didactic; propaedeutic[obs3], propaedeutical[obs3]. Phr. the schoolmaster abroad; a bovi majori disscit arare minor[Lat]; adeo in teneris consuecere multum est [Lat][Vergil]; docendo discimus[Lat]; quaenocent docent[Lat]; qui docet discit[Latin]; "sermons in stones and good ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... having been so didactic. But it is fine to think that sin may have an object and work towards good. My father says that I seem to look upon the universe as if it were my property, and can't be happy until I know that all is right with it. Well, it does send a glow through me when I seem to catch a glimpse of the ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... didactic and at the same time demonstrative of affection is difficult, even with mothers towards their children, though with them the assumption of authority creates no sense of injury. Emily specially desired to point out to the erring one the paths ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... God's Way" belongs to the second group of Bjoernson's novels, of which the first group is represented by early peasant tales like "Arne." In this later category the stories are of a more or less didactic nature. Although "In God's Way" lacks something of the freshness and beauty that distinguished "Arne," it is, nevertheless a powerful and vivid picture of Norwegian religious life; and it is, of all Bjoernson's books, the one by which he is most widely known outside his native country. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... unnecessary all further remarks on his writings. He was equally admired for the dignity and sublimity of his moral and philosophical works, the vivacity of his satirical, the clearness and propriety of his didactic, the richness and variety of his descriptive, and the elegance of all, added to an harmony of versification and correctness of sentiment and language, unknown to our former poets, and of which he has set an example which ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... "Oroonoko" is worthy of notice as one of the earliest attempts on the part of an English novelist to deal with characters which had come under the writer's observation in actual life. It is still more important on account of the presence within it of a didactic purpose; a characteristic which for good or for evil has been a prominent feature of the English novel. Sir Thomas More had made use of fiction in the sixteenth century to urge his ideas of political and social reforms. Bunyan, more than a century later, ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... to his translation of Eusebius' "Life of St. Jerome." He was, moreover, a poet, author of "an often-translated song"; he wrote verses to discourage Duerer from spending his time in producing the doggerel rhymes which at one time he was moved to attempt,—framing poems of didactic import, and publishing one or two on separate sheets with a woodcut at the top, in spite of the inappreciative reception given to them by Spengler and Pirkheimer. Besides Spengler, there were "Christopher Kress, a soldier, a traveller, ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... been said of "the loud laugh that speaks the vacant mind." Most of us, in this work-a-day world, find no small benefit from allowing our minds to lie fallow at certain times, as farmers do with their fields. In the following pages, however, I believe wisdom and wit, the didactic and the diverting, will be found in tolerably ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... epic. On the other hand, again, an old tradition tells of the contest between Homer and Hesiod, which proves that when these two names were mentioned people instinctively thought of two epic tendencies, the heroic and the didactic; and that the signification of the name "Homer" was included in the material category and not in the formal. This imaginary contest with Hesiod did not even yet show the faintest presentiment of individuality. From the time of Pisistratus onwards, however, ...
— Homer and Classical Philology • Friedrich Nietzsche
... in the sciences hypotheses that are not believed in, that are preserved for their didactic usefulness, because they furnish a simple and convenient method of explanation. Thus the "properties of matter" (heat, electricity, magnetism, etc.), regarded by physicists as distinct qualities even in the first half of the last century; the "two electric fluids;" cohesion, ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... Advancement of Religion, he largely attributed the scandalous immorality everywhere prevalent to the insufficiency of religious instruction, and to the low character of the clergy, the result mainly of their ignorance and poverty. His Letter to a Young Clergyman is little more than a didactic adaptation of that portion of Eachard's work which deals with the character and education of the clergy. The Essay on the Fates of Clergymen is another study from the Contempt, while the fragment of the tract which he had begun, Concerning that Universal ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... author of a little library of writings on Italian art, was likewise of our company occasionally; and she evinced a marked liking for my father, which was remarkable, inasmuch as he was able to keep no sort of pace with her in her didactic homilies, which were delivered with a tranquil, ex-cathedra manner, befitting one who was the authority on her subject; one would no more have thought of questioning her verdicts than those of Ruskin; ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... Hamlet was not happy at Elsinore. It was not because he missed the gay student-life of Wittenberg, and that the little Danish court was intolerably dull. It was not because the didactic lord chamberlain bored him with long speeches, or that the lord chamberlain's daughter was become a shade wearisome. Hamlet had more serious cues for unhappiness. He had been summoned suddenly from Wittenberg to attend his father's funeral; ...
— A Midnight Fantasy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... to Montesquieu what Homer has been to the didactic writers on epic poetry. As the latter have considered the work of the immortal bard as the perfect model from which the principles and rules of the epic art were to be drawn, and by which all similar works were to be judged, so this great political critic appears to have ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... readers that in the third and longest study I have said little, save incidentally, either of treatment or prevention. The omission of such considerations at this stage is intentional. It may safely be said that in no other field of human activity is so vast an amount of strenuous didactic morality founded on so slender a basis of facts. In most other departments of life we at least make a pretence of learning before we presume to teach; in the field of sex we content ourselves with the smallest and vaguest minimum of information, often ostentatiously ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... developed by Alexander Gerard, William Duff, and some of the other contemporary associatioassociationistsnlsts. In order, however, to emphasize the importance of imagination, by which he largely means the imagistic liveliness of the poet's mind, he allows that the imagination is secondary only in didactic or ethical poetry. Such forms are perhaps best understood as hybrid, a kind of poetizing of philosophy, a sort of reasoning in verse, and therefore forms in which the imagination is not given full exercise. Given his premises it ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... unconsciously artistic story the charm of perfect artlessness as well as the semblance of reality. When Bunyan's lack of learning and culture are considered, and also the comparative dryness of his controversial and didactic writings, this efflorescence of a vital spirit of beauty and of an essentially poetic genius in him seems quite inexplicable. The author's rhymed 'Apology for His Book,' which usually prefaces the 'Pilgrim's Progress,' contains many significant hints as to ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... necessarily didactic and assertive for it is impossible to prove or disprove any of these postulates. It is for that reason, and the lack of time that I cite no instances. They would be merely illustrative and not probative, ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... occasions produces pure poetry and nothing else? Without affirming that it is so, we may at least ask the question. If other poets of our time show more intellectual strength than he, are they, perchance, given sometimes to adulterating their poetry with ratiocination and didactic preachments such as were better left to the proseman? Without affirming that it is so, we may at least ask the question. If other poets of our time can reach a finer frenzy than he and give it voice with a more melodious throat, are they, perchance, apt to forget that “eloquence ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... pastoureaux; in short, a spectacle for the eyes and the ears, for all the senses, the very opposite of the prevailing drama in which three pasteboard characters, seated on classic chairs, exchange didactic arguments in an abstract saloon. And still better, it is an imbroglio displaying a superabundance of action, amidst intrigues that cross, interrupt and renew each other, through a pele-mele of travesties, exposures, surprises, mistakes, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Man," wrote Voltaire after his return from England (1728), "seems to me the finest didactic poem, the most useful, the most sublime, that was ever written in any tongue. 'Tis true the whole substance of it is to be found in Shaftesbury's Characteristics, and I do not know why Pope gives all the honour of it to Bolingbroke, without saying a word of the ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... announcement. I found myself in daily and hourly receipt of sere and yellow fragments, originally torn from some dead and gone newspaper, creased and seamed from long folding in wallet or pocketbook. Need I say that most of them were of an emotional or didactic nature; need I add any criticism of these homely souvenirs, often discolored by the morning coffee, the evening tobacco, or, heaven knows! perhaps blotted by too easy tears! Enough that I knew now what had become of those original but never recopied verses which filled the "Poet's Corner" of every ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte |
