"Polyglot" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... interested her not at all, in a listless hand, long and delicate like her feet, and decorated with too many turquoise rings. Below, in the cabin, she could hear the noise of the men as they argued and shouted at each other in a polyglot of ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... myself, I have been unceasingly occupied for such a number of years in this mass," Molendino he calls them, "that that day seemed, as it were, a holiday in which I have not laboured so much as sixteen or eighteen hours in these enlarging lexicons and Polyglot Bibles." ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... be there at all,—and the wife and daughters seem very well-to-do indeed. He is kindly; considerate—sometimes effusively considerate—of his fellow travellers; patient with the ladies of his family, who in turn are noticeably patient with him. He is genial—very willing to talk with polyglot headwaiters and chauffeurs; in fact the wife and daughters are also practised conversationalists, although their most loyal admirers must admit that their voices are a trifle sharp or flat. These ladies are more widely read ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... signal-officer who had been at his telephone some thirty kilometres away when the city was taken and was off at three next morning, sat opposite me and told with great spirit how the only common language between him and some of his polyglot men was the English he had learned in school and they had picked ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... to bridge a moment fraught with possibilities, for it would be idle to assume that this polyglot gathering was composed of Bayards. Self-preservation is apt to prove stronger than chivalry under such circumstances. Let it be assumed that three among the twenty could escape that night, and it was horribly true that the ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... Englishmen, one would think that the only wise plan was to have the composition revised by one who is thoroughly acquainted with the language. That this natural precaution is not always taken we have ample evidence. Thus, at Havre, a polyglot announcement of certain local regulations was posted in the harbour, and the notice stood as follows in French: "Un arrangement peut se faire avec le pilote pour de promenades rames.'' The following very strange translation into English appeared below the French: "One arrangement ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... prohibitory law in Indian Territory, the resubmission of the prohibitory constitution of Maine, and in preserving the prohibitory law of Vermont. It has secured 20,000,000 signatures and attestations, including 7,000,000 on the Polyglot Petition to the governments of the world. Thousands of girls have been rescued from lives of shame and tens of thousands of men have signed the total abstinence pledge and been redeemed ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... who is down stairs," said Lady Mabel, "has been amusing us at dinner with his version of our adventure at the ford of the Cayo; and a very good story he makes of it, giving some rich samples of Captain Hatton's polyglot eloquence. He, alone, seems not to have been in the dark; and saw all, and more than all, that occurred—nor does he forget you in the picture. But, papa cannot see the wit of it ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... Federations, Funds, Conferences, Party-Days, Agenda, Referats, Press-Organs, each differentiating itself with meticulous subtlety from all the other Parties, each defining with casuistic minuteness its relation to every contemporary problem, each equipped with inexhaustible polyglot ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... "World's Ticket and Inquiry Office," the abundantly comprehensive name of a building near the north-east corner of Machinery Hall. In a central area sixty feet in diameter tickets to every known point are offered to him by polyglot clerks. Here, too, a wholesome interchange of ideas in regard to the merits of the various traveling regulations of different countries may be expected. Baggage-checks or none, compartment or saloon cars, ventilation or swelter in summer, freezing or hot-water-pipes in winter, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... approached they began to make acquaintances among the polyglot population of the neighborhood. Their old hotel, the culinary aristocrat of the district, possessed a cafe in which, with true French hospitality, patrons were permitted to occupy tables indefinitely on the strength of the slenderest orders. Here for the sake of the French atmosphere Stefan ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... a long time, and the longer they lasted the more heated became the disputes, culminating in shouts and personalities, and the less was it possible to arrive at any general conclusion from all that had been said. Prince Andrew, listening to this polyglot talk and to these surmises, plans, refutations, and shouts, felt nothing but amazement at what they were saying. A thought that had long since and often occurred to him during his military activities—the idea that there is not and cannot be any ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... Mr. Tutt. "He might maul him a little, but I won't. I'm just going to give him a full opportunity to test his little proposition that the institutions of these jolly old United States are perfectly adapted to settle quarrels among all the polyglot prevaricators of the world and administer justice among people who are still in a barbarous or at least in a patriarchal state. He's young, and he don't understand that a New York merchant is entirely too conscientious to find ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... O., now not much more than a mile away. He draws the distracted officer's attention to the phenomenon and leads him to understand that to start now would lead to an inevitable collision and a watery grave. The polyglot argument waxes furious, the men taking it up in their turn, when their leader falls out exhausted, and the Arab is still keeping up his end triumphantly when the great ship reaches us and slowly steams ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... never find their way to these isles, for which you must consult the pages of Mr. Gould or Mr. Bree—and chief among them the dark Orpheus, and the yellow Hippolais, surpassing the black-cap, and almost equalling the nightingale, for richness and variety of song—the polyglot warbler which penetrates, in summer, as far north as the shores of the British Channel, and there stops short, scared by the twenty miles of sea, after a land journey—and by night, too, as all the warblers ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... save me from the polyglot," said Mrs Mountstuart, in afright at Dr. Middleton's manner of pouring forth into the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... modifications; in regard to which he observed the most absolute silence. For a long time past he had been applying himself to the study of the Arab language and the various Mandingoe idioms, and, thanks to his talents as a polyglot, he had ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... would be to their advantage to be on terms of amity with the newcomers. How could this be achieved? A parley offered the most ready solution of the difficulty; and the professor—who was a perfect polyglot dictionary in human form—offered to essay the task of conducting it. This was by no means his first introduction to savages; he had encountered them in various parts of the world before, and had never experienced any very serious difficulty in ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... to the baths stood curiously for a while to watch one of the rapidly increasing sect of Christians, who leaned from a balcony over the street and exhorted a polyglot crowd of freedmen, slaves and idlers. He was bearded, brown-skinned from exposure, ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... Boston man an ulster had, An ulster with a cape that fluttered: It smacked his face, and made him mad, And polyglot remarks he uttered: "I bought it at a bargain," said he, "I'm tired of the ...
— Fables for the Frivolous • Guy Whitmore Carryl
... the most singular anecdotes respecting DEDICATIONS in English bibliography is that of the Polyglot Bible of Dr. Castell. Cromwell, much to his honour, patronized that great labour, and allowed the paper to be imported free of all duties, both of excise and custom. It was published under the protectorate, but many copies had not been disposed of ere Charles II. ascended the throne. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... of the West; while the keen though sleepy-looking Dutchmen, Chinese, Jews, Parsees, Siamese, Englishmen and Yanks, who negotiate and this interchange of wares manage to conduct the bargaining in their various lingoes by the aid of a polyglot dialect of their own, chuckling over the dollars and cash and cowries as they rake them in with the impression that they are getting the best of the deal, when all the time, perhaps, they ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... polyglot person is speaking, foreign words sometimes occur to him, which he at once translates into the language he happens to be using. Somewhat in the same way, when dialectic develops an idea, suggestions for ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... simple psalm, so constructed as scarcely to exclude a truth, or to offend a prejudice; with special reference to the great event of this year, and yet so ordered that it can never be out of season." "This polyglot hymn at the lowest estimate is a philological curiosity: so many minds, with such diversity in similitude rendering literally into all the languages of the earth one plain psalm, a world-wide call to man to render thanks to God." Dr. ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... unprogressive polyglot settlement, and the place assumed a still more primeval character when the Indian Reservation was formed near by. When French Canadian settlers arrived, however, the place became less discordant to the life of a new democracy, though they did little to make it modern in the sense that Lebanon, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... rich Englishman came here. He used to go out in the evenings and shoot bats; then he put them into bottles with spirits of wine—he was an amateur of bats. On the day of his departure from the place, he said to the polyglot Arab guide whom he had picked up somewhere ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... the slums of that polyglot seaport town Antwerp, which Belgians say is anything but real Belgium. To judge Belgium by them is like judging an American town by the worst of its back streets, where saloons and pawnshops are numerous and red lights twinkle ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... from the conversation of the inhabitants—was a visit which a governor of Hongkong had made there when he was a guest in the home of Alberto. Many were the tales told of this distinguished Englishman, who was Sir John Bowring, the notable polyglot and translator into English of poetry in practically every one of the dialects of Europe. His achievements along this line had put him second or third among the linguists of the century. He was also interested in history, ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... incentive toward working hard at French that she could not really be friends with this fascinating person until she learned to speak her language. Palmer—partly by nature, partly through early experience in the polyglot tenement district of New York—had more aptitude for language than had Susan. But he had been lazy about acquiring French in a city where English is spoken almost universally. With the coming of young Madame Deliere to live in the apartment, ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... music has ceased or softened down and is taken up afresh by the Martyr Chorus.[18] Again John's figures give out. He declares that nobody could count the multitudes that make up this chorus. It is a polyglot chorus. They sing in many different languages, but all blend into full rhythm. It's a scarred chorus, too. These have been through great tribulation. Their scars tell the mute story of the fierceness of the fight, and the steadiness of ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... that upon his fresh, rosy face would be an obvious mocking imitation of the Herr Papa—if German children could ever, by any possibility, be irreverent? Or why does the Fraulein Marie, his sister, pink as Aurora, round as Hebe, suddenly veil her blue eyes with a golden lorgnette in the midst of our polyglot conversation? Is it to evade the direct, admiring glance of the impulsive American? Dare I say NO? Dare I say that that frank, clear, honest, earnest return of the eye, which has on the Continent most unfairly brought my fair countrywomen under criticism, is quite as common to her more ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... been forced on him, bitterly, bafflingly, after he had climbed the narrow streets of that town which always seemed to him a patchwork of nationalities, a polyglot mosaic of outlandish tongues, climbed up through alien-looking lanes and courts, past Moorish bazaars and Turkish lace-stores and English tobacco-shops, in final and frenzied search of the ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... of the elevator she turned with hasty step toward the office where sat the hotel clerk, pen in hand. He listened with obsequious mien, like a polyglot quick to understand each of his guests, and coming out from his enclosure he made straight toward Jaime, who, still embarrassed by his unsuccessful venture, was pretending to read the advertisements in the vestibule. Febrer at first did not realize that ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... to its officers. The Commission and its staff are to enjoy diplomatic privileges, and its salaries are to be paid by Germany, who will, however, have no voice in fixing them, If the Commission is to discharge adequately its numerous functions, it will be necessary for it to establish a vast polyglot bureaucratic organization, with a staff of hundreds. To this organization, the headquarters of which will be in Paris, the economic destiny of Central Europe is ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... have known, for he was acknowledged to be quite a polyglot. Not that he could speak fluently in the two thousand languages and twelve thousand dialects which are spoken on the earth, but he knew at least his ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... trick of catching hopefully at a neighbor's phrase usually serves to defeat itself, as it unmasks the ignorance of said neighbor, and the tune ends in a sort of polyglot mouthing which is not at all flattering to the denizens of an ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... constancy is proportionate to the monotony of people's lives and minds. There is a lasting bond among schoolfellows because no one can become a boy again and have a new set of playmates. There is a persistent comradeship with one's countrymen, especially abroad, because seldom is a man pliable and polyglot enough to be at home among foreigners, or really to understand them. There is an inevitable comradeship with men of the same breeding or profession, however bad these may be, because habits soon monopolise the man. Nevertheless a greater buoyancy, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... these things had been bred a certain contempt for his own people—a contempt which he had made it a custom to conceal, but which now burst forth in a polyglot whirlwind of curses upon the heads of Kah-Chucte and Gowhee. They cringed before him like a brace of snarling wolf dogs, too cowardly to spring, too wolfish to cover their fangs. They were not handsome creatures. Neither was Sitka Charley. All three were frightful-looking. There was no flesh to ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... and polyglot audience inside the room, Helen soon became aware of nearly as many more spectators and listeners outside the building crowded about the open windows. The night was warm and still. The chapel had three windows on ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... of the Red River hard by where the City of Winnipeg with its aggressive business marts and its surging polyglot population now stands, there is the old Kildonan Church, which the original Selkirk Settlers, pioneers of the West, built for themselves and their children. These early colonists, unmindful of worldly gain, had the ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... conception of domestic liberty which makes it rest on a threefold support—divorce at will, an unrestrained printing-press, and the encyclopaedic education of polyglot children. But the truth is that Milton's classification is an after-thought. The pamphlets that he names were all written by him much about the same time, between 1643 and 1645; but the true history of their origin is more interesting ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... with thy clamor; Bird, beast, and reptile take part in thy drama; Out-speak they all in turn without a stammer,— Brisk Polyglot! Voices of Killdeer, Plover, Duck, and Dotterel; Notes bubbling, hissing, mellow, sharp, and guttural; Of Cat-Bird, Cat, or Cart-Wheel, thou canst utter all, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... said in his polyglot speech. "Hi'll not got a damned thing lef'. How many loads you'll got for your h'own ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... largely English, the Pedagogical Library, established under the auspices of the Commissioner of Education, and the San Juan Free Library, to which Mr. Andrew Carnegie has given $100,000, and which is polyglot, and was formally opened to the public April 20, 1901. There is also a growing number of libraries in the public schools. From the above data it appears that, owing to the peculiar conditions that obtained in this island, the people of Puerto Rico were ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... deficient, and the dictionaries mostly content themselves with pouring old stuff from flask to flask, instead of collecting fresh and unknown material. Such are recueils of prayers and proverbs, folk-songs and stories, riddles and satires, not forgetting those polyglot vocabularies so common in many parts of the Eastern world, notably in Sind and Afghanistan; and the departmental glossaries such as the many dealing with "Tasawwuf"—the Moslem form of Gnosticism. The excellent lexicon of the late Professor Dozy, Supplement aux Dictionnaires ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... of such thalassic islands, moreover, involves a population so small that it is highly susceptible to the effects of intercrossing. Too restricted to absorb the constant influx of foreign elements, the inhabitants tend to become a highly mixed, polyglot breed. This they continue to be by the constant addition of foreign strains, so long as the islands remain foci of trade or strategic points for the control of the marine highways. Diomede Island in Bering Strait is the ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... King, quite alone (save for the two Queens), bearing in his hand the vellum scroll, the record of his arbitration. This he proceeded to read, a polyglot copy of it having been already supplied to every Monarch, Ambassador, and official present. It was a long statement, but the occasion was so stupendous—so intense—that the time flew by quickly. The cheering had ceased the moment the Arbitrator opened the scroll, and a veritable ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... new-born babe could not have revealed itself more utterly incompetent. I verily believe that, despite our haste, we would have ended by escorting Placidia across Paris, and ensconcing her in the Marseilles train, had not Providence intervened in the person of a kindly disposed polyglot traveller. So, leaving Placidia standing the picture of complacent fatuosity in the midst of a group consisting of this new champion and three ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... was at one time looked upon as a mere jargon—but what the Jewish children learnt from their mothers—by taking special pains to translate into it the best thought of the world. This is a truly marvellous work. It has been done during the present generation, and Webster's Dictionary defines it as a polyglot jargon used for inter-communication ...
— Third class in Indian railways • Mahatma Gandhi
... she briskly assailed the rule as a disrespect to the sex, which reflected even upon the Virgin, the object, as he was forced to allow, of their high veneration. He smiled patiently, and confessed that Mrs. Vervain had all the reasons on her side. At the polyglot printing-office, where she handsomely bought every kind of Armenian book and pamphlet, and thus repaid in the only way possible the trouble their visit had given, he did not offer to take leave of them, but after speaking with Ferris, of whom he seemed an old friend, he led them ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... The polyglot disturbance that ensued baffles all description. Indeed, I should be puzzled to say exactly what took place, or after how many commands, defiances, threats, protestations, insults, and explanations, a semblance of peace was finally restored. I only know ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... or liqueurs. The customers of the brasserie were a mixed lot of women and men, the latter comprising' numerous nationalities, and all drawn to Paris by the wiles of the Goddess of Art. Topical songs of the day succeeded one another rapidly. A group of long-haired, polyglot students hung around the piano, while others played on violins or guitars, which they had brought to contribute to the evening's enjoyment. At intervals, when there was a lull, the click of billiard balls came from an adjoining apartment. Out on the boulevard, under the glaring ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... tongues must have been a very tame and quiet affair as compared to the polyglot chattering which burst upon Bobby's ears when he entered the small lobby of the Hotel Larken. The male members of the Neapolitan Grand Opera Company, almost to a man, were smoking cigarettes. There were swarthy ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... Usher furnished some extracts for his friend Selden's Marmora Arundeliana, and he deposited the manuscript itself in the Cottonian Library. Dr. Walton also found Usher's collection of much use in preparing his Polyglot Bible. Several of the manuscripts which had belonged to Usher were given to the Bodleian Library by James Tyrrell, the historian, who was the Archbishop's grandson. It was Usher's intention to have left his library to ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... streets and its polyglot population, Matadi is a picturesque spot. It is the goal of every official through the long years of his service in the bush for at this place he boards the steamer that takes him to Europe. This is the pleasant ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... at night the polyglot confusion of tongues would have ceased, the gaudily-uniformed swaggerers, the velveteen-coated, wide-awaked loafers, the filthy tatterdemalions of all nations and their womenkind would have turned in. Then Lady Hannah, attended by the unwilling Trudi, was accustomed to venture out for what ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... Hebrew MSS. of the Complutensian Polyglot were at Alcala in 1821, when were they removed to Madrid, and in what library at Madrid are they now? The Greek MSS. are supposed to have been returned to the Vatican Library. If the Chaldee MSS. are in the handwriting of one of the editors, as stated by Puigblanch, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 25. Saturday, April 20, 1850 • Various
... was kept out of it by the oppression of the times. For his sufferings and great learning he was installed Prebendary of Westminster, Sept. 5, 1660. In the year following he resigned his living of Barley, and died in 1672. He assisted Dr. Walton in the edition of the Polyglot Bible.] ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton
... the Government out of all proportion to the probable loss by failure. So when Napoleon least expected it they determined to act, and caught him napping. The defences of Antwerp had been left incomplete. There was no army to meet the blow—nothing but a polyglot rabble without staff or even officers. For a week at least success was in our hands. Napoleon's fleet only escaped by twenty-four hours, and yet the failure was not only complete but disastrous. Still so entirely were the causes ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... his Cave's "Historia Literaria," and Sir Walter Raleigh's "History of the World," and a whole array of Christian Fathers, and Plato, and Aristotle, and Stanley's book of Philosophers, with Effigies, and the Junta Galen, and the Hippocrates of Foesius, and Walton's Polyglot, supported by Father Sanchez on one side and Fox's "Acts and Monuments" on the other,—an odd collection, as folios from lower shelves are apt ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... true gateway to the city—below it the polyglot of Europe; above, the amalgam which makes America. It is a neighborhood of traditions which speak in the aspect of the solidly built row of houses facing to the south, breasting the living surge, ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... Mivart's the Morning Post had just announced. Mrs. Miles, whose delicious every other Wednesdays in Montague Square are supposed by some to be rival entertainments to Mrs. Newcome's alternate Thursdays in Bryanstone Square, pinched her daughter Mira, engaged in a polyglot conversation with Herr Schnurr, nor Carabossi, the guitarist, and Monsieur Pivier, the celebrated French chess-player, to point out the Boyar. Mira Miles wished she knew a little Moldavian, not so much that she might speak it, but that she might be heard ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... presumed to know any thing of Russian literature, or even to have enquired whether it contains any thing worth knowing? Are there a dozen literary men or women amongst us who could read a Russian romance, or understand a Russian drama? Dr Bowring was regarded as a prodigy of polyglot learning, because he gave us some very imperfect versions of Russian ballads; and we were thankful even for that contribution, from which, we doubt not, many worthy and well-informed people learned for the first time that Russia produced ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... excessively odd? It comes from Beatrice's being so religious and so tremendously moral—so a cheval on fifty thousand riguardi. And then of course we mustn't forget," my companion added, a little unexpectedly, to this polyglot proposition, "that some of Mark's ideas are—well, really—rather impossible, don't ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... The polyglot Tescheles was of a famous musical family, of mixed German and Russian origin, naturalized in England and domiciled in France—a true cosmopolite and a wonderful linguist, besides being also a cultivated musician and excellent ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... liberal studies. By the time she was thirteen she knew—in addition to Latin—Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, German, and several other languages, and was so renowned for her linguistic attainments that she was called, familiarly, the "walking polyglot." When she was fifteen, her father began to invite the most learned men of Bologna to assemble at his house and listen to her essays and discussions upon the most difficult philosophical problems; in spite of the fact that this display of her ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... Frida's library offered him an amazing choice of polyglot fiction. It contained nearly all Balzac and the elder Dumas, Tolstoi and Turgenieff, Bjoernsen and Ibsen, besides a great deal of miscellaneous literature, chiefly Russian and Norwegian. Here and there he came ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... mocking-bird — better the echo-bird, with a voice compounded of all sweet sounds, as the blossom of the Chinese olive is compounded of all sweet scents — is a pure lyrist; its throat is a lyre — Aeolian, capricious, many-stringed; as its name suggests, it is a polyglot mime, a bird linguist, a feathered Mezzofanti singing all the bird languages; yet over and above all this, with a something of its own that cannot be described." The mocking-bird speaks for himself in Thompson's 'To an English Nightingale': "What do you think of me? Do I sing by rote? ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... is superimposed with his old hankering for the oral and polyglot system of buncoing. That man had a vocabulary of about 10,000 words and synonyms, which arrayed themselves into contraband sophistries and parables when ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... three kinds, the equilateral or three-sided, the quadrilateral or four-sided, and the multilateral or polyglot. ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... and Courses of Study. The problem to be grappled with by this Society and others working on similar lines is no doubt one of immense difficulty. It is nothing less than the education in citizenship of the most heterogeneous, polyglot, and in some respects ignorant and degraded population ever assembled in a single city, since the days of Imperial Rome. The spread of political enlightenment in New York and other cities cannot possibly be very rapid; but no effort is being spared to accelerate it. I ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... kingdom in A.D. 1000 and for many centuries served as a bulwark against Ottoman Turkish expansion in Europe. The kingdom eventually became part of the polyglot Austro-Hungarian Empire, which collapsed during World War I. The country fell under Communist rule following World War II. In 1956, a revolt and an announced withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact were met with a massive military intervention by Moscow. Under the leadership ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... which are truly wonderful, enabling the bird to exactly reproduce and even improve upon the notes of almost any other songster. But in a state of freedom it has a song of its own which is infinitely rich and various. It is a garrulous polyglot when it chooses to be, and there is a dash of the clown and the buffoon in its nature which too often flavors its whole performance, especially in captivity; but in its native haunts, and when its love-passion is upon it, the serious and even grand side of its ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... was not so tragic, was the learned Arias Montanus, a Spaniard, who produced at the command of King Philip II. the famous Polyglot Bible printed at Antwerp in nine tomes. He possessed a wonderful knowledge of several languages, and devoted immense labour to his great work. But in spite of the royal approval of his work his book met with much opposition on the part of the extreme Roman party, who accused him to the Pope and ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... with the ante-Hieronymian one, in his Bibliorum Sacrorum Latinae Versiones Antiquae. It is founded upon the preceding one, and is less literal. The Syriac and Arabic versions, printed in the London Polyglot, are literal. The Hexaplar-Syriac version made by Paul, bishop of Tella, in the beginning of the 7th century ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... were learning Portuguese; but he himself had found a very good job here. He was saving money to go to England. He seemed to have no roots, as it were. I wondered, as I have often wondered of other polyglot people I have met, how much of any language they really know, which language do they think in? They always seem to me to resemble those lumps of floating grass one sees in the Gulf Stream, forever drifting onward, footless and fruitless to the end. They never seem to do anything with their marvelous ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... "for facts of that nature one does not altogether rely upon one's self alone; a woman's ear is not infallible, so says Saint Augustine; and I, therefore, wished to satisfy myself by other opinions beside my own, and as my Naiad, who, in her character of a goddess, is polyglot,—is not that the expression, ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... seemed to house millinery or furs. The second floor, by the winking electric letters, was the dentist's. Above this a polyglot babel of signs struggled to indicate the abodes of palmists, dressmakers, musicians and doctors. Still higher up draped curtains and milk bottles white on the window sills proclaimed the ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... his comrades realized that he was a polyglot. Then in a joyous spirit of over-confidence, he waved the oriflamme of speech in ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... was an enormous list of Trustees and the unwieldy character of the board, coupled with the irregular habits of the President, made the failure of the enterprise inevitable. Still it offered in its catalogues a good course of study and gave exhibitions, at which polyglot orations were delivered. The late Prof. Perley R. Lovejoy was the life of the institution and, after several classes had graduated, the University finally ceased to be, when Mr. Lovejoy accepted a position as Professor in ...
— The History Of University Education In Maryland • Bernard Christian Steiner
... Heydinger, he did nothing in the matter for five weeks, he merely left that crucial letter of hers unanswered. In that time their removal from Madam Gadow's into the gaunt house at Clapham was accomplished—not without polyglot controversy—and the young couple settled themselves into the little room on the second floor even as they had arranged. And there it was that suddenly the world was ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... forms—an improvement at any rate upon assassination. A stronger contrast there cannot be than that between these men and the citizen soldiers whom Germany the other day sent forth to defend their country and their hearths. The soldier had a language of his own, polyglot as the elements of the band, and garnished with unearthly oaths: and the void left by religion in his soul was filled with wild superstitions, bullet charming and spells against bullets, the natural reflection in dark hearts ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... to be polyglot services here. I saw books of prayer, or Scripture, in Hebrew, Greek, and German: in which latter language Dr. Alexander preaches every Sunday. A gentleman who sat near me at church used all these books ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... hundred volumes, the varied acquisitions of the philosopher, the historian, the satirist, the moralist, give diversity to his subjects, and an endless variety to his ideas. He possessed, as it were, a polyglot mind; he threw himself into the feelings and passions of every country and every age, and brought out in his dramas part at least of the inexhaustible store of human thoughts and events which have from the beginning of time agitated the human race. The East, with its sultans, its harems, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... Bible so much in all your life," said Alison, with a pretty pout. "You'll grow so good that I can't begin to keep up with you. When I try to read my polyglot, the baby comes and bites the corners, and squeals till I put it ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... it is true that a great portion of the human race, especially in the big polyglot empires and the smaller states of Europe, are groaning under the incubus of the language difficulty, and have to spend years on the study of mere words before they can fit themselves for an active career, then the abolition of this heavy handicap on due preparation for each man's proper business ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... given me. He used to sing a Hebrew drinking-song, which he had learned from some Jews with whom he had once travelled and astonished by joining in their conversation." {23} Borrow's colloquial gift was, to all appearance, closely allied to that of this polyglot Fleming. ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... renowned for its richly endowed university, founded by Cardinal Jimenes de Cisneros in 1510, which at the height of its prosperity numbered 12,000 students, and was second only to that of Salamanca. Here the famous edition of the Bible known as the Complutensian Polyglot was prepared from 1514 to 1517. The college of San Ildefonso, completed in 1583, was the chief university building. Its modernized Gothic church, the Colegiata, contains the 16th century marble monument of Jimenes (d. 1517) and a fine reredos. The greatest of Spanish writers, Cervantes, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... answer to this, if there were room to place the whole in a clear light, was as shattering as it was rapid. Another thought to entrap her by asking what language the angelic visitors of her solitude had talked—as though heavenly counsels could want polyglot interpreters for every word, or that God needed language at all in whispering thoughts to a human heart. Then came a worse devil, who asked her whether the Archangel Michael had appeared naked. Not comprehending the vile insinuation, ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... known in America; his reputation was European. He played the game because he loved it, being comfortably fortified with worldly goods. He was a linguist of rare attainments, specializing in the polyglot of southeastern Europe. He came and went like cloud shadow. His foresight was so keen he was seldom ordered to go here or there; he was generally on the spot when ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... times when she had sunk back in the carriage cushions and let her eyes dwell upon him contemplatively for a moment. He was beginning to hate Mrs. Denham, and he thoroughly loathed Bonneville, where a polyglot crowd of tourists came flocking into the small waiting-room just as Miss Ruth was putting up her hair and unconsciously framing for Lynde a never-to-be-forgotten picture ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... round her in a paroxysm of gratitude, regardless of her powder and chalk, which came off upon his coat and yellow beard in patches of white as he kissed her on both cheeks, calling her by every endearing name that occurred to his polyglot memory, from Sweetheart in English to Little Cabbage in French, till Cordova laughed and pushed him away, and made a ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... 700 patients. Anyone who was likely to be sick for any length of time was sent to India whenever the opportunity arose. Down at the British Hospital on the river front they were sending cases off that were likely to be more than three days ill. It was an oriental polyglot scene down there on the hospital quay in the comparative cool of evening, when the big white hospital ship lay off the bank and crowds of ticketed patients sat under the shelters waiting their turn to ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... and led his new acquaintance to a shady veranda where a polyglot waiter chipped his ice to his fancy, found him lemon, pounded sugar, fresh mint, square-faced Hollands, and syphon-water, and left the Colonel compounding in a high ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... that corner of Vanity Fair which takes a frankly materialistic view of life and of life's responsibilities, is shrewder than we generally credit, and the diplomatist's intimacy with the Pargeter household had aroused but small comment in the strange polyglot society in which lived, by choice, Tom Pargeter, the cosmopolitan millionaire who was far more of a personage in Paris and in the French sporting world than he could ever have hoped ...
— The Uttermost Farthing • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... fellow countrywomen came down the garden path and assured me that art had accompanied Mme. Vezin in her annual retreat from the Luxembourg Gardens. Entering I found the same perfect hostess and much the old dear, queer scene. I was bracing myself for a polyglot evening—being with all my travel quite incapable of languages—when the little maid announced importantly Mme. la Marquise del Puente. All rose instinctively as there entered an erect white-haired woman simply dressed in a black gown along ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... and the solemn atmosphere of the deserted city. The noisy twittering of multitudes of ubiquitous sparrows, equally at home in Doric temples as amongst the sooty chimney stacks of London; the twinklings and rustlings of the lizards in the young leaves and grass; the polyglot babble of excursionists from Naples or La Cava that a warm day in Spring invariably attracts to Paestum:—these are not sounds that blend well with the solemn spirit of the place. We long to cross the intervening ages so as to throw ourselves, if only for one short hour, outside the cares ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... second blossoming, like hope in the heart of age. They could scarcely refrain from betraying their exultation to the Hotel des Tourterelles, from which they had concealed their sufferings. But the polyglot population seething round its malodorous stairs and tortuous corridors remained ignorant that anything was passing in the life of these faded old creatures, and even on the day of drawing lots for the Wig the exuberant ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... hand, on purpose to escort her to the Continent and encompass her there, and had dedicated to her, from the moment of their meeting, all the treasures of his experience. She had judged him in advance—polyglot and universal, very dear and very deep—as probably but a swindler finished to the finger-tips; for he was forever carrying one well-kept Italian hand to his heart and plunging the other straight into her pocket, which, as ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... languages, read the Scriptures in their original tongues." Of course! Greek and Hebrew are mere play to a heroine; Sanscrit is no more than a b c to her; and she can talk with perfect correctness in any language, except English. She is a polking polyglot, a Creuzer in crinoline. Poor men. There are so few of you who know even Hebrew; you think it something to boast of if, like Bolingbroke, you only "understand that sort of learning and what is writ about it;" and you are perhaps ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... Petersburg upon its Neva was like a savage untamed London on a larger Thames; they were seagull-haunted tidal cities, like no other capitals in Europe. The shipping and buildings mingled in their effects. Like London it looked over the heads of its own people to a limitless polyglot empire. And Russia was an aristocratic land, with a middle-class that had no pride in itself as a class; it had a British toughness and incompetence, a British disregard of logic and meticulous care. Russia, like England, was outside Catholic Christendom, ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... sent on the mission. Three fathers were despatched to Fathpur, which was more than twelve hundred miles away. Akbar awaited their arrival with the utmost impatience. He received them with every mark of favor. They delivered their presents, consisting of a polyglot Bible in four languages and the images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. To their unspeakable delight the Great Mogul placed the Bible on his head and kissed the images. So eager was he for instruction ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... care for undertaking this task either, though it was certainly easier than the other. The polyglot guide would, I felt sure, deeply resent the rape ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... the highwayman wandered, fur-coated, into the City, the patterer has lost his occupation. Robbery and murder have degenerated into Chinese puzzles, whose solution is a pleasant irritant to the idle brain. The misunderstanding of Poe has produced a vast polyglot literature, for which one would not give in exchange a single chapter of Captain Smith. Vautrin and Bill Sykes are already discredited, and it is a false reflection of M. Dupin, which dazzles the eye of a moral and unimaginative world. Yet the wise man sighs for those fearless ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... us!" said Ranald MacEagh, springing to his feet. His chains clattered as he rose, while he drew himself as far as they permitted from the quarter whence the voice appeared to proceed. His fear in some degree communicated itself to Captain Dalgetty, who began to repeat, in a sort of polyglot gibberish, all the exorcisms he had ever heard of, without being able to remember more than a word or ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... Of the philosophic scribe, From the poet's inspiration, For the cynic's polished gibe, We invoke narcotic nurses In their jargon from afar, I indite these modest verses On a polyglot cigar. ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... alley cuts the block in the middle. It perishes in a little court in the centre of the block. The district is theatrical; the inhabitants, the bubbling froth of half a dozen nations. The atmosphere is Bohemian, the language polyglot, the locality precarious. ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry |
