"Illiterate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... each may exhibit, at the same moment, an advance to a different stage, just as we see in the same family the young, the middle aged, and the old. * * * In each nation, moreover, the contemporaneously different classes, the educated and illiterate, the idle and industrious, the rich and poor, the intelligent and superstitious, represent different contemporaneous stages of advancement. One may have made a great progress, another scarcely have advanced at all. How shall we ascertain the real state ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... the trollers, dividing the catch with the Bluebird and the Blanco. There was always a mustard-pot collector in sight. The weather was getting hot. Salmon would not keep in a troller's hold. Part of the old guard stuck tight to MacRae. But there were new men fishing; there were Japanese and illiterate Greeks. It was not to be expected that these men should indulge in far-sighted calculations. But it was a trifle disappointing to see how readily any troller would unload his catch into a mustard pot if neither of MacRae's carriers happened to be ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... music to produce a definite effect upon the worshippers who hear them. All of you must be aware that there are some kinds of music which have the remarkable effect upon you, of lifting you higher than you can rise by your own unassisted effort. Even the songs of illiterate Christian bodies do have some effect upon them, in raising them to a higher level, although they possess little of the true quality of the mantra. In Theosophy you find all these things dealt with scientifically—a mass of knowledge, but all ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... living philosopher who has anything like Mr. Darwin's popularity with Englishmen generally; and not only this, but his power of fascination extends all over Europe, and indeed in every country in which civilisation has obtained footing: not among the illiterate masses, though these are rapidly following the suit of the educated classes, but among experts and those who are most capable of judging. France, indeed—the country of Buffon and Lamarck—must be counted an exception to the general ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... diplomas and great charters with their own hands; and their great officers of state, chancellors and others, countersigned in autograph. The unlettered Merovingian kings made use of monograms composed of the letters of their names; and, curiously, the illiterate monogram was destined to supersede the literate subscriptions. For the monogram was adopted by Charlemagne and his successors as a recognized symbol of their subscription. It was their signum manuale, their sign manual. In courtly imitation of the royal practice, monograms ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... honest efforts to present a faithful likeness. But they are crudely executed, and are posthumous sketches largely depending on the artist's memory. The sculptor would be compelled to work in the spirit of the historian, who recreates a past event from the indication given him by an illiterate or fragmentary chronicle or inscription. He would be bound to endow with artistic life those features in which the authentic portraits agree, but the highest effort of the imagination would be needed to create an ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... industrious of all the pleaders, and had spent almost the whole strength and vigor of his body in that employment, he could not yet find any acceptance with the people, while drunken sots, mariners, and illiterate fellows were heard, and had the hustings for their own. "You say true, Demosthenes," replied Satyrus, "but I will quickly remedy the cause of all this, if you will repeat to me some passage out of Euripides or Sophocles." When Demosthenes had pronounced one, Satyrus presently taking ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... promise anything, agree to anything, nor sign anything (swear you are an "illiterate voter" rather than this last) without advice—or you may find yourself in a legal quagmire. Builders, as a rule, are on a level with horse-dealers in point of honesty—I could tell you some pretty stories from my ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... wonder and praise in the neighbourhood. On the other hand, those rabid little tracts, which dealt so summarily with the destinies of the human race, even when his growing reason and the perusal of works more classical or more logical had led him to perceive that they were illiterate, and to suspect that they jumped from premises to conclusions with a celerity very different from the careful ratiocination of mechanical science, had still, in the citations and references wherewith they abounded, ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... them to peace and unity." (See Mosheim's Eccle. Hist.) These were the kind of spiritual shepherds of whom Sabinus, the Bishop Heraclea affirms, that excepting Constantine himself, and Eusebius Pamphilus, they "were a set of illiterate creatures, that understood nothing." And now intelligent Catholics, especially Protestants who are content to read only the books of the Testament authorized by the Council of Nice, and agreed to ever since by your own bishops, although they and you profess to dissent from ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake
... to acknowledge the ignorance of the Spaniards in general, I have great pleasure in being able to state that during the latter years it has been becoming less and less, and that the rising generation is by no means so illiterate as the last, which was itself superior in acquirements to the preceding one. It is to be hoped that the progress in improvement will still continue, and that within a few years the blessings of education ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... to have her as a companion. Indeed, Frank was more than pleased, for he saw in this girl a singular character. Illiterate though she seemed, she was pretty, vivacious, and so bright that it was plain education and refinement would make her ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish
... engrossed them: and indeed he got the most by them! for I will venture, (contrary to the custom of profound historians, who always assign deep causes to great events,) to ascribe the better half of the Duke of Marlborough's greatness and riches to those graces. He was eminently illiterate, wrote bad English, and spelled it still worse. He had no share of what is commonly called parts; that is, he had no brightness, nothing shining in his genius. He had, most undoubtedly, an excellent good plain understanding, with sound judgment. But these alone would probably ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... of the pride that he and his associates feel in conferring upon him the highest honor in their gift,—the Wooden Spoon. He exhorts him to pursue through life the noble cruise he has commenced in College,—not seeking glory as one of the illiterate,—the [Greek: oi polloi],—nor exactly on the fence, but so near to it that he may safely be said to ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... cannot help feeling very uncomfortably as to my ideas of human nature, when I find that there is no dependence to be placed upon its perseverance, and that, at least among the illiterate, the most promising appearances may end in the ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... shortening words was very popular in the 17th century, from which period date cit(izen), mob(ile vulgus), the fickle crowd, and, pun(digrion). We often find the fuller mobile used for mob. The origin of pundigrion is uncertain. It may be an illiterate attempt at Ital. puntiglio, which, like Fr. pointe, was used of a verbal quibble or fine distinction. Most of these clipped forms are easily identified, e.g., cab(riolet), gent(leman), hack(ney), vet(erinary surgeon). Cad is for Scot. caddie, errand boy, now familiar in connection ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... mischievous. Doctors, if no better than other men, are certainly no worse. I was reproached during the performances of The Doctor's Dilemma at the Court Theatre in 1907 because I made the artist a rascal, the journalist an illiterate incapable, and all the doctors "angels." But I did not go beyond the warrant of my own experience. It has been my luck to have doctors among my friends for nearly forty years past (all perfectly aware of my freedom from the usual credulity as to the miraculous ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... even is as impossible in practice as the exclusion of the sick and ailing is unchristian. Infinitely more important were it to keep the gates of birth free from undesirables. As for the exclusion of the able-bodied, whether illiterate or literate, that is sheer economic madness in so empty a continent, especially with the Panama Canal to divert them to the least developed States. Fortunately, any serious restriction will avenge itself not only by the stagnation of many of the States, ...
— The Melting-Pot • Israel Zangwill
... which any boy might do, but able also to understand his thoughts and to interpret his intentions. He will add, that that framer of the law, if he had been intrusting the laws which he was drawing up to foolish men and illiterate judges, would have set down everything with the most scrupulous diligence; but, as it is, because he was aware what sort of men were to be the judges, he did not put down many things which appeared to him to be evident; and he expected that you would be not mere readers of his ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... general Greene upwards of three hundred miles! In fact, to scout him through the two great states of South and North Carolina as far as Guilford Courthouse! and, when Greene, joined at that place by two thousand poor illiterate militia-men, determined at length to fight, what did he gain by them, with all their number, but disappointment and disgrace? For, though posted very advantageously behind the corn-field fences, they could not stand a single fire from the British, ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... master of the Stationers' Company. That he also became a novelist was due to his skill as a letter-writer, which brought him, in his fiftieth year, a commission to write a volume of model "familiar letters" as an aid to persons too illiterate to compose their own. The notion of connecting these letters by a story which had interested him suggested the plot of "Pamela" and determined its epistolary form—a form which was retained ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... seventeenth number, in the shape of a slave auction, where the slaves are chattels, and classed with "horses and other cattle," and where the tortures of the whipping-post are in vigorous operation. Here was a message, which every slave, however ignorant and illiterate could read. His instinct would tell him, wherever he saw the pictured horror, that a friend, not an enemy, had drawn it, but for what purpose? What was the secret meaning, which he was to extract from a portrayal of his woes at once so real and terrible. ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... of Scotchmen. This sketch, as a whole, must be carried to Carlyle's credit, and is a permanent addition to literature. It is pious, after the high Roman fashion. It satisfies our finest sense of the fit and proper. Just exactly so should a literate son write of an illiterate peasant father. How immeasurable seems the distance between the man from whom proceeded the thirty-four volumes we have been writing about and the Calvinistic mason who didn't even know his Burns!—and yet here we find the whole distance spanned by ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... of divine power and aspiration: a conception which at moments becomes an actual experience of ecstatic possession by that power. And above and below all have been millions of humble and obscure persons, sometimes totally illiterate, sometimes unconscious of having any religion at all, sometimes believing in their simplicity that the gods and temples and priests of their district stood for their instinctive righteousness, who have kept sweet the ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... gaining fast upon the white ignorance, and the despised Negro is found to be living above many of his illiterate white neighbors. This makes it easy work for designing men to sharpen race prejudices, which by force and fear shall ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889 • Various
... year 1330 Louis Beaumont was bishop of Durham. He was an extremely illiterate French nobleman, so incapable of reading that he could not, although he had studied them, read the bulls announced to the people at his consecration. During that ceremony the word "metropoliticae" occurred. The bishop paused, and tried in vain to ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... beyond the mere detail of movements required by the varying circumstantialities of each particular case. But of the ultimate purpose, of the main strategic policy, or of the transcendent interests over-riding the narrow counsels that fell under the knowledge of the illiterate soldier, since no part was requisite to the fulfilment of each man's separate duty, no part would be communicated. It is barely possible that so much light as may be won from confessions, combined with so much further light as may be supposed ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... it would in school. Men are only boys. As soon as the fellows got it into their heads we were trying to work out a republic in a jail, they were possessed by it. I wish you could see the letters that were sent in to the paper. You couldn't publish 'em, some of 'em. Too illiterate. But they showed you what was inside the fellows. Sometimes they were ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... should mislead and miseducate the public mind! They proclaim, "This is the white man's Government," and the whole coil of copperheads echo the same sentiment, and upstart, jealous Republicans join the cry. Is it any wonder ignorant foreigners and illiterate natives should learn this doctrine, and be led to despise and maltreat a whole race of ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... logical inference would have been, that the body which required planks to transport it, could scarcely be classed with anything of the world of spirits. The links in arguments, however, are seldom respected by the illiterate and vulgar, who jump to their conclusions, in cases of the marvellous, much as politicians find an expression of the common mind in the prepared opinions of the few who speak for them, totally disregarding the dissenting silence of the million. While the men were first ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... on between Lepailleur and his wife with respect to Antonin. While the farmer had grown more and more exasperated with his son's idleness and life of low debauchery in Paris, the latter had supported her boy with all the obstinacy of an illiterate woman, who was possessed of a blind faith in his fine handwriting, and felt convinced that if he did not succeed in life it was simply because he was refused the money necessary for that purpose. In spite of her sordid avarice in some matters, the old woman continued bleeding herself ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... hanging and quartering in 1590 of "Duke, Hyll, Hogge and Holyday, iiij Semynaryes, Papysts, Tretors and Rebels for their horrible offences." "Burials, 1687 April 17th Georges Vilaus Lord dooke of bookingham," is the illiterate description of the Duke who was assassinated by Felton and buried at Helmsley. It is impossible to mention all the gleanings from parish registers; each parish tells its tale, its trades, its belief in witchcraft, its burials of soldiers killed in war, its stories ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... Indian; "your father will understand," as though reading her thoughts. He had clearly read her thought, this dispossessed, illiterate Indian chieftain. Yet, was he so illiterate? Had he not read in books which so few have learned to read? His life had been broken on the rock of civilization, but his simple soul had learned some elemental truths—not many, but the essential ones, without which there is no philosophy, no understanding. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... that way. Don't you remember his saying, 'I have traveled much, been among people of royalty, title and nobility, have lived among the rich, and great society leaders, also among great politicians, learned men, spiritual giants, business people, also among the poor, also the illiterate, the abandoned, the offscouring, and the outcasts of society; and I have yet to see the person that is not as good as I.' So you see he thinks that you are just as good as he. Now, dear, don't be ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... introduced by the poet, no doubt, as a contrast to the turbulent and busy character of the other lady. The boisterous captain is a well-drawn and a well-supported character. He is rugged, honest, blunt, illiterate, and gallant. But it is the character of the hero Taylor which is drawn and sustained with the most art and nature. In the first place he is brave, although some have contradicted this, by saying that ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... of being a little languid from the effects of the fever. The recovery of poor BETTY KITE was a great comfort to the whole family; for, although she was one of the plainest women in the world, and also very illiterate, and full of superstition, yet she was an unequalled servant both as to cleanliness and work. I was a great plague to her in various ways. She not being the best tempered woman in the world, I used to irritate her very much, ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... George Guess, who invented the Cherokee alphabet, was the grandson of a white man. This invention, however, was a very remarkable achievement, and it is worthy of a word here. Sequoia was altogether illiterate. He could neither write nor speak English, but he saw that the whites could talk with each other by means of pieces of paper. So he set himself to work to examine his own language. He found that sixty monosyllables could be so combined as to represent every word in the Cherokee language, and for ...
— Stories Of Georgia - 1896 • Joel Chandler Harris
... Madrid]—he immediately took possession of the said religious, who was with him at all hours of day and night, in his house. [He did so] in order that the religious should prepare for him the documents, acts, and inquiries for which he was commissioned, on account of the illiterate manner in which the fisherman usually drew them up. From this may be interred what documents he will carry to the court, with a hand so malicious and bold—but with the safety of the father confessor's broad shoulders, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898—Volume 39 of 55 • Various
... possible that Mrs. Brown's illiterate authority, or one of his predecessors in title, took 'fee' in the third sense ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... though conducted upon a stage comparatively obscure, serves to show us "the sort of men that formed the rank and file of the army of the Reformers. They were not illiterate, sectarian, noisy controversialists—far from it; they were men who had studied the word of God, and knew well how to wield the weapons with which the armory of the Bible supplied them. In respect of erudition they were ahead of their age. When we confine our attention to such brilliant centers ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... are old and young and middle-aged persons, men and women, married and single, persons with many relatives and others with few, native and foreign born, strong and weak, well and ill, good and bad, educated and illiterate. Yet there are ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... dominating element in the Democratic party, who had hoped and expected, through their policy of "Masterly Inactivity" and intimidation of white men, that the convention would be composed almost exclusively of illiterate and inexperienced colored men. Although a minor at that time, I took an active part in the local politics of my county, and, being a member of a Republican club that had been organized at Natchez, I was frequently called upon to address the members ...
— The Facts of Reconstruction • John R. Lynch
... ladies, daughters of Colonel Montford, of Halifax county, North Carolina. When Cornwallis and his army were at Halifax, on their way to Virginia, Tarleton was at the house of an American citizen. In the presence of Mrs. Willie Jones, Tarleton spoke of Colonel Washington as an illiterate fellow, hardly able to write his name. "Ah! Colonel," said Mrs. Jones, "you ought to know better, for you bear on your person proof that he knows very well how to make his mark!" At another time, Tarleton ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter
... inveterate enemy and persecutor. Speculative dogmas of religion, the present occasions of such furious dispute, could not possibly be conceived or admitted in the early ages of the world; when mankind, being wholly illiterate, formed an idea of religion more suitable to their weak apprehension, and composed their sacred tenets of such tales chiefly as were the objects of traditional belief, more than of argument or disputation. After the first alarm, therefore, was over, which arose from the new ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... upon one of those queer arguments illiterate young men used always to find so heating. Science or Socialism? It was, of course, like arguing which is right, left handedness or a taste for onions, it was altogether impossible opposition. But the range of my rhetoric enabled me at last ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... parishioner, owed to him his office, and was necessarily thrown into close intimacy, during the long voyage, he fell naturally under his influence, which, all things considered, could not have failed to be controlling. The Governor was an illiterate person, but of generous, confiding, and susceptible impulses; and the elder Mather was precisely fitted to acquire an ascendency over such a character. He had been twice abroad, in his early manhood and in his later ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... on, she had superstitiously regarded the cup as exercising a Satanic influence on the mind of her master; but even if she confessed it now, he must make an example of one whose fanaticism would set wrong right after the notions of an illiterate sect, and not according to the laws of the land. He just send the case to be tried by a jury! If she convinced the twelve men composing that jury, of the innocence she protested, she would ...
— The Elect Lady • George MacDonald
... at Genoa on the night of February 18, 1784, of parents in humbly prosperous circumstances, his father being a ship-broker, and, though illiterate in a general way, a passionate lover of music and an amateur of some skill. The father soon perceived the child's talent, and caused him to study so severely that it not only affected his constitution, but ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... wrote verses) which contrasts with the phlegm of his illustrious contemporary, General Grant. The latter had a vein of coarseness, of commonness rather, in his nature; evidenced by his choice of associates and his entire indifference to "the things of the mind." He was almost illiterate and only just a gentleman. Yet by reason of his dignified modesty and simplicity, he contrived to write one of ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... hog-latin to me for?" cried the cripple, who, throughout the address, betrayed the most illiterate obduracy; and, with an incensed look, anew he ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... enlarge the range of purely immediate experience and give it deepened as well as wider meaning by connecting it with things which can only be signified or symbolized. It is doubtless this fact which is the cause of the disposition to identify an uncultivated person with an illiterate person—so dependent are we on letters for ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... them. These things could not have occurred as they are narrated, and Dr Bataille is exploiting the ignorance of that class of readers to whom his mode of publication appealed. As products of imagination his marvels are crude and illiterate; in other words, they belong to precisely that type which is characteristic of romances published in penny numbers, and when he pledges his rectitude regarding them he does not enlist our confidence but indicates the slight value which he sets on ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... to consider the patronage of authors as any part of his duty, and the tradition which made him consider writing poetry as a proper accomplishment is dying out. Since that time our aristocracy as such has been normally illiterate. Peers—Byron, for example—have occasionally written books; and more than one person of quality has, like Fox, kept up the interest in classical literature which he acquired at a public school, and added a charm to his parliamentary ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... exercised by Plato and Swift on the love affairs of Shelley, Hazlitt, and Burns. And afterwards they write essays on the lectures, and the names in order of merit are put in conspicuous places. You see how your little germ has grown? The illiterate middle-class of your ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... crime of coining; and there cannot be a doubt, that in the remoter districts, where gold is utterly unknown, a most lamentable series of frauds would be perpetrated, with little risk of detection, but with the cruelest consequences to the poor and illiterate classes. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... of hearers from far and near; and almost all classes, as to intelligence and social standing, were represented. A man like myself, who only occasionally strikes such a crowd, hardly knows how to adapt himself to the situation. If he lets himself down to the comprehension of the illiterate, the highbred city folks may say: "He is beneath his calling." And if he lifts himself up to their standard of appreciation, the unlearned go away without being able to say amen to what they have heard. I decided, however, to follow the example of ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... any of them. He knows little of history or literature, less of music, nothing of art, and has but a superficial smattering of science. Of matters relating to his life and activities on the farm he has heard almost nothing. The rural child is not illiterate, but he is too close to the border of illiteracy for the demands of a twentieth-century civilization; it is fair neither to the child ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... the election of a grotesque divine, whom Pattison, with an energy of phrase that recalls the amenities of ecclesiastical controversy in the sixteenth century, roundly designates in so many words as a satyr, a ruffian, and a wild beast. The poor man was certainly illiterate and boorish to a degree that was a standing marvel to all ingenuous youths who came up to Lincoln College between 1850 and 1860. His manners, bearing, and accomplishments were more fitted for the porter of a workhouse than for the head of a college. But ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley
... them. It has always been so. The church has built itself up out of the community, and for the most part it puts very little back. It conducts schools, to be sure; and yet eighty per cent of the Mexican people are illiterate, it has some few institutions of help and mercy; but the whole land cries out for doctors and teachers and friendly ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... Army lassies at the street corners, and look upon her as a representative of a lower class who are doing good "in their way," prepare to realize that you have made a mistake. The Salvation Army is not an organization composed of a lot of ignorant, illiterate, reformed criminals picked out of the slums. There may be among them many of that class who by the army's efforts have been saved from a life of sin and shame, and lifted up to be useful citizens; but great numbers of them, the leaders and officers, ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... that at the age of eight she could read the Greek Testament in the original; that she was from her earliest youth emotional and sentimental; that despite her intellectual tastes and attainments she gave her hand to an illiterate journeyman plumber and glazier; and that when the fruit of this union lay dying by her side she insisted on dictating to her husband a poem afterward published under the moving caption of "A Mother's Address to Her Dying Infant." Another of her poems, by the ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... its manager in the Thirties, the Forties and the Fifties, was a personality and a personage. The handsomest of men and the most illiterate, he exemplified the characteristics and peculiarities of the days of the river steamer and the stage coach, when "mine host" felt it his duty to make the individual acquaintance of his patrons and each and severally to look after their comfort. Many stories are ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... in the parish of Caddo during the following month. In fact, the number of murders, maimings and whippings during these months aggregated over one thousand.[4] The result was that the intelligent Negroes were either intimidated or killed so that the illiterate masses of Negro voters might be ordered to refrain from voting the Republican ticket to strengthen the Democrats or be subjected to starvation through the operation of the mischievous land tenure and credit system. What was not done in 1868 to overthrow the Republican regime ...
— A Century of Negro Migration • Carter G. Woodson
... Duke, "this good man once saved your life. He now comes to save your soul." Charles faintly answered, "He is welcome." Huddleston went through his part better than had been expected, for he was so illiterate that he did not know what he ought to say on an occasion of so much importance, and had to be instructed on the spot by a Portuguese ecclesiastic, one Castel Melhor. The whole ceremony occupied about three-quarters of an hour; and, during that time, the courtiers ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... Kabir.' They conceive of the deity as consisting of light, and therefore it seems probable that, like the other Vaishnava sects, they really take him to be the Sun. Kabir prohibited the worship of all idols and visible symbols, but as might be expected the illiterate Kabirpanthis cannot adhere strictly to this. Some of them worship the Bijak, the principal sacred book of their sect. At Rudri near Dhamtari on the Mahanadi one of the Gurus is buried, and a religious fair is held there. Recently a platform has been made ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... calm and almost childlike simplicity, a power for individual and general good. "It combines all the fascination of a fairy tale and all the simple truth of human adventure, holding out the same allurement to every being, whether he is a noble, a commoner, a merchant, a literate or illiterate person, a private soldier, a lackey, children of both sexes, beginning at an age when a child begins to love a fairy tale—all might read it or listen to it, without tedium." Every one will draw from it what he most needs. Not less than upon these he sees its wholesome effect on the creative ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... never a refined or cultivated man, Vespasian, by his hardy virtues, restored the vigor of the Roman government, and gave peace and prosperity to his subjects; while he who founded a library and established schools of rhetoric can not have been so wholly illiterate as ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... forgetting to inquire for the book you recommended. He was a great deal too full of the market to think of any thing else—which is just as it should be, for a thriving man. What has he to do with books? And I have no doubt that he will thrive, and be a very rich man in time—and his being illiterate and coarse need ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... that this was their constant way, and that all his life long he had made it a rule, after supper was over, to call out his family to dance and rejoice, believing, he said, that a cheerful and contented mind was the best sort of thanks to heaven that an illiterate peasant ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... rather observe (with Industrious Leland) that the poor Britains, being harass'd by those Roman Conquerours with continual Wars, could neither have leisure nor thought for the penning of a Regular History: and that afterwards their Back-Friends, the Saxons, were (for a good while) an Illiterate Generation; and minded nothing but Killing and taking Possession. So that 'tis a wonder that even so much remains of the Story of those Times as the sorry Fragments of Gildas; who appears to have written ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... to exchange the happiness of his family circle, the splendour of an imperial court, the luxuries of enormous wealth, the refined society of statesmen, and the ennobling intercourse of philosophers for the savage wastes of a rocky island and the society of boorish illiterate islanders, or at the best, of a few other political exiles, all of whom would be as miserable as himself, and some of whom would probably ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... from a comparatively illiterate man like the captain of the schooner, to whom we were under travelling obligations, and a joke from my equal, a scholar and a gentleman, are two distinct things. I wish the expression, 'that girl of ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... parting gift from a brother officer, who had brought them both from Newfoundland itself. The father's name was Crusoe, the mother's name was Fan. Why the father had been so called no one could tell. The man from whom Major Hope's friend had obtained the pair was a poor, illiterate fisherman, who had never heard of the celebrated "Robinson" in all his life. All he knew was that Fan had been named after his own wife. As for Crusoe, he had got him from a friend, who had got him from another friend, whose cousin had received him as ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... his evil attitude towards her;" this is an allegory in which the giant plainly represents England and the little girl, Ireland; the implication is manifest though no mention is made of either country. Strange to say the most perfect allegory in the English language was written by an almost illiterate and ignorant man, and written too, in a dungeon cell. In the "Pilgrim's Progress," Bunyan, the itinerant tinker, has given us by far the best allegory ever penned. Another good one is "The Faerie Queen" by ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... among the illiterate populace, both Greek and Roman, even from the age of Eumolpus to that of Augustus, a good deal of firm faith in a future life, according to the gross scheme and particulars preserved to us still in the classic mythology. A thousand current allusions and statements ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... letter too," said Kitty, handing him an illiterate letter. "It's from that woman, I think, your brother's..." she said. "I did not read it through. This is from my people and from Dolly. Fancy! Dolly took Tanya and Grisha to a children's ball at the Sarmatskys': ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... a young Franconian herdsman, John Beheim, of Niklashausen—a 'poor illiterate', Trithemius calls him. In the summer of 1476, as he watched his flocks in the fields, he had a vision of the gracious Mother of God, who bade him preach repentance to the people. His fame soon spread, and multitudes gathered from great distances ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... he demanded with that impatience characteristic of the illiterate for modern methods of communication. "Pwhat ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... with oaths and curses for the other's cowardice had bound up the wound himself with strips torn from his shirt and resumed the fighting. His courage there, and before and after, although he was an illiterate person and could neither read nor write, had caused him to be appointed boatswain of the ship that had carried Morgan's flag, and he had followed his leader for many years with a blind devotion that risked all and stuck at nothing to be of ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... dignity to even the most commonplace and trivial string of talk. The newest form of English diction is of course never written; the sense of that leisure-class propriety which requires archaism in speech is present even in the most illiterate or sensational writers in sufficient force to prevent such a lapse. On the other hand, the highest and most conventionalized style of archaic diction is—quite characteristically—properly employed only ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... other formula, both of them applicable to souls in purgatory. It is painful to think that such a mockery should be made of religion, in order to press the authority of man; it is disgusting to find such things sent by rational men to rational men, to be disseminated amongst an illiterate and fanatical populace. The friends of emancipation may ridicule, if they choose, the indications of a new reformation which now show themselves in Ireland; but so long as free discussion is allowed, and such ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... he began, "those two girls are only half educated? Yes sir, gastronomically, they are positively illiterate, and it's a shame! W'y, they don't know hot biscuits and molasses. They don't know buttermilk. They don't know yams. Nor paw-paws, nor persimmons. They don't even know watermelon. Now isn't ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... and fans, and illustrating books, these men write fancy scrolls in the various ornamental styles so much prized by the Chinese; they keep accounts for people, and write or read business and private letters for the illiterate masses. ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... of these various degenerate and illiterate attempts at book-work we have only to watch the last expiring gleams of classic art beneath the ruthless footsteps of the barbarian invaders of ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... dwell on the most fascinating scenery. Accordingly, I hastened to Regla with my letter of introduction, which was interpreted by Bachicha to the Italian grocer, the friend of Rafael, to whom I was confided. Il signore Carlo Cibo was an illiterate man of kind heart, who had adventurously emigrated from Italy to furnish the Havanese with good things; while, in return, the Havanese had been so pleased with his provender, that Carlo may be said to have been a ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... Indian. Colonel Howell, having heard the explanation of the finding of the letter, without any hesitation and evidently without any qualms of conscience, drew out the enclosure. The letter was an illiterate scrawl. ...
— On the Edge of the Arctic - An Aeroplane in Snowland • Harry Lincoln Sayler
... Tona was convinced at last. That was where he got all those big words and that moral philosophy which stirred the bottom of her soul; and she looked at the books with the superstitious awe of an illiterate. Across the counter, mechanically sewing, without thinking of what she was doing, she would sit looking at Martinez fixedly, studying his thin blond mustache for half an hour at a time, then the elegant lines of his nose for just as long, and finally the exquisite skill with which he parted ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... designation, current in the literature of the sixteenth century,[264] of Le Dieu de Pate, or Le Dieu de Farine. The pompous and complicated ceremonial, with its repetitions devoid of meaning for the illiterate spectator, is, on the whole, the favorite object of satire. In strict accordance with the spirit of the rough controversy of the times, little mercy is shown to religious antagonists. There is a good specimen of this ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... grandeur of unapproachable infinity. That which is infinite admits of neither increase nor diminution. Is it not so with genius of a certain altitude? Homer, Milton, Shakspere, were perhaps men of equal powers. Homer was, it is said, a beggar; Shakspere an illiterate wool-comber; Milton skilled in all human learning. But they have all risen to an equal height. Learning has added nothing to the illimitable genius of the one; nor has the want of it detracted from the infinite powers of the others. But it is ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... girl in the world. She's braver than Molly Breckenridge, and I like her immensely. All the boys at Brentnor think she's fine, and we all hope some grand romance will come out of the facts of her parentage. She doesn't come of any illiterate, common stock, Mamma. You may be sure of that. So I hope you'll be nice and not—not too Stark-ish ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond
... wrote in 1884, on his return to Peking, 'that there is here more than I can do, and writing must go to the wall.' And as late in his life as 1890 he added, 'I could have made, and could now make, I believe, money by writing, but I do not write. I settle down to teach illiterate Chinamen and Mongols, heal their sores, ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... black and white, so far as the States were unable or unwilling to afford it, such as had been provided for in the States of the North for all their citizens. It was never contemplated by them to give the right to vote to a large number of illiterate citizens, without ample provision for their education at the public charge. General Grant accompanied his official announcement to Congress of the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment with an earnest recommendation of such a provision. Earnest efforts were made ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... naturally raised the question in the Hon. Morison's mind as to precisely what the girl's attitude toward escape might be. It seemed, of course, preposterous that this fair and beautiful young woman should prefer to remain in the filthy douar of an illiterate old Arab rather than return to the comforts, luxuries, and congenial associations of the hospitable African bungalow from which the Hon. Morison had tricked her. The man flushed at the thought of his duplicity which these recollections aroused—thoughts which were interrupted by The ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... saturating the national mind with the principles of the Reformation than the diffusion of the Book of Martyrs on this gigantic scale. In a few years there was scarcely a parish church in England that did not possess a chained copy of the work. The illiterate might frequently be seen standing in a group round the lectern, while one among them better instructed than the rest read to them aloud its graphic and lying legends. Added to this, in many churches a chapter was read to the assembled congregations every Sunday evening ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... streaming out in splendid carriage or miserable shay. Rich and cultured, poor and illiterate, human beings are all alike in their love of butchery and blood. We reached the great ragged stretch of open ground, hideous and bare enough, and the structure of the bull-ring reared itself before us, a sinister curve against the ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... life that their face value had to be accepted chiefly on faith, for a ten differed from a one only as one Guatemalan soldier differs from his fellows, in that each was much more tattered and torn than the other. After all there is a delicate courtesy in a government's supplying an illiterate population with illegible money; no doubt experience knows other distinguishing marks, such as the particular breeds of microbes that is accustomed to inhabit each denomination; for even inexperience could easily recognize that each was so infested. ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... elephant pipe, which we obtained (Fig. 17) a little more than a year ago, was found some six years before by an illiterate German farmer named Peter Mare, while planting corn on a farm in the mound region, Louisa County, Iowa. He did not care whether it was elephant or kangaroo; to him it was a curious 'Indian stone,' and nothing more, and he kept it ...
— Animal Carvings from Mounds of the Mississippi Valley • Henry W. Henshaw
... toward gentility in such an amiable way that better people liked her. The motherliness and sweet sincerity of her—the fact that she loved her frankly illiterate husband and worshipped, almost from afar, her cultured daughters was the thing that brought her down from the base height of the "climbers" and lifted her kindly, harmless personality to the ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... its past tense and participle to be securely fixed before it will be used. It is perhaps wholly the uncertainty of these that has made the word to be avoided. Chid and chidden should be taught, and chode and chided condemned as illiterate. ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 3 (1920) - A Few Practical Suggestions • Society for Pure English
... is impossible to be done; while he wants generosity, frankness of heart, benevolence, manners and every qualification that distinguishes the worthy man. O my dear! what a degree of patience, what a greatness of soul, is required in the wife, not to despise a husband who is more ignorant, more illiterate, more low-minded than herself!—The wretch, vested with prerogatives, who will claim rule in virtue of them (and not to permit whose claim, will be as disgraceful to the prescribing wife as to the governed husband); How shall such ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... education in the South—as indeed of every other form of education—was quite low. The Chief Surgeon of the prison, Dr. Isaiah White, and perhaps two or three others, seemed to be gentlemen of fair abilities and attainments. The remainder were of that class of illiterate and unlearning quacks who physic and blister the poor whites and negros in the country districts of the South; who believe they can stop bleeding of the nose by repeating a verse from the Bible; who think that if in gathering their ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... my first mission was about the 1st of April, 1839. I bade adieu to my little family and started forth, an illiterate, inexperienced man, without purse or scrip. I could hardly quote a passage of Scripture, yet I went forth to say to the world that I was a minister of the gospel, bearing a message from on High, with the authority to call upon all men to repent, be baptized ...
— The Mormon Menace - The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite • John Doyle Lee
... men of learning praise our actions, and thereby inspire us with additional courage in war. I wish I could employ more time in reading, and could expend some of that money on learned men which I must throw away on so many illiterate knights." ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... infinite variety. It is not the same to-day as it was yesterday. It is always changing the character of its charms and always increasing them in number. It delights all the senses. Its pleasures are not of an unsocial character; for every visitor, high or low, learned or illiterate, may be fascinated with the fragrance and beauty of a garden. But shells and minerals and other curiosities are for the man of science and the connoisseur. And a single inspection of them is generally sufficient: ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... complaint arrived in England denouncing the outrages inflicted on the friends of the apostolic see. It is hard to dissociate the pope's feeling in this matter from his rejection of the nomination of the king's chancellor, Ralph Neville, Bishop of Chichester, to the see of Canterbury, as an illiterate politician. ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... and with that bulwark against invasion which an hereditary order of aristocracy usually erects, loosened to its very foundations by the copious admixture of foreign nobles. I have to present to the reader, here, the imbecile priestcraft of the illiterate monk, there, the dark superstition that still consulted the deities of the North by runes on the elm bark and adjurations of the dead. And in contrast to those pictures of a decrepit monarchy and a fated race, I have to bring forcibly before the reader the vigorous attributes of the coming ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... dreadfully frightened at what he had seen in the moon. At first I laughed at the story and the odd idea of a huge, great fellow being alarmed at a glance through a telescope. Since then, however, on reflection, it seems to me perfectly natural. He was illiterate; he had never read of astronomy; to him it was really like a sudden peep into another world, for the instrument was exceptionally powerful, and the view of the sunlight on the peaks and the shadows in the valleys must have been ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... view that it was confined entirely to the upper classes. That the manuscript volumes of the romantic tales which were so eagerly purchased and treasured by the educated classes could never possibly come into the hands of the rude illiterate peasants is a fallacious argument. Scanty indeed would be our folk-lore had it all been transmitted graphically. Chaucer bears evidence of the widespread popularity of these ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... his own little savings, not one in a dozen of the children would ever enter a school-room or see a book. As it is, only one sixth part of the children are, or ever were, under instruction. And the instruction they receive is too often from persons themselves illiterate and full of superstition, but who are the best teachers who can be obtained with limited means. Consider, then, the real condition of affairs,—three hundred and fifty thousand blacks, a large share of them children or grandchildren of those who were brought from Africa, with the wild ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... equivalent. The assize records show that offences against public morality are almost wholly confined to the towns in Artois, and it is a notable fact that these particular offences are much more frequently committed by persons who can read and write than by the illiterate.' ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... knapsack, was corporal in Africa, sergeant in the Crimea, and after Solferino had been made lieutenant, having devoted fifteen years of laborious toil and heroic bravery to obtaining that rank, and was so illiterate that he had no chance of ever ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... gravest face; no story is too silly, no falsehood too glaring, for them to believe and to retail, in fullest confidence of its truth. Gross ignorance is one of their characteristics; they are superstitious, credulous, illiterate, to an almost incredible extent. Clement considers that "the Lord continually proves to us that there shall be a future resurrection" by the following "fact," among others: "Let us consider that wonderful sign which takes place in Eastern lands—that is, in Arabia ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... appear from a broad-minded consideration of the practical workings of this Postal Direct Primary law that there is no valid reason why it would not work with splendid success even in the congested and illiterate districts of our larger cities. But even admitting for the sake of argument that a certain percentage of the ignorant and vicious vote could be corrupted by the bosses, it certainly could not be large. It could not possibly exceed ten per cent of the registered vote. In light of the fact that ...
— Story of the Session of the California Legislature of 1909 • Franklin Hichborn
... the tradition that one of the family "murdered his cook, and was afterwards compelled to adopt the red hand in his arms." Este is perfectly correct in his concise but comprehensive particulars. That which, by the illiterate, is termed "the bloody hand," and by them reputed as an abatement of honour, is nothing more than the "Ulster badge" of dignity. The tradition adds, that Sir Thomas Holt murdered the cook in a cellar, at the old family mansion, by "running him through with a spit," and afterwards buried ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various
... Garden. For this act the vials of misrepresentation and abuse were poured on Lady Burton's head. She was accused of the "bigotry of a torquemada, the vandalism of a John Knox." She has been called hysterical and illiterate. It has been asserted that she did it from selfish motives, "for the sake of her own salvation, through the promptings of a benighted religion," for fear of the legal consequences which might fall upon her if she sold the book, for love of gain, for love of notoriety, ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... and figures not imaginary but real. It demands therefore a combination of qualities unnecessary to the poet or writer of romance—glacial judgment coupled with fervent sympathy. The poet may be an inspired illiterate, the romance-writer an uninspired hack. Under no circumstances can either of them be accused of wronging or deceiving the public, however incongruous their efforts. They write well or badly, and there the ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... kindly patron, Leonard Dowson had been able to carry out his desire and qualify as a dentist, he was under no delusion as to his social position. He came of humble, illiterate folk, and he knew well enough that in a fashionable, high-class practice he would ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... Lysandreia. He gave the crown of victory to Nikeratus, which so enraged Antimachus that he suppressed his poem. Plato, who was a young man at that time, and admired the poetry of Antimachus, consoled him for his defeat by pointing out to him that the illiterate are as much to be pitied for their ignorance as the blind are for their loss of sight. When, however, the harper Aristonous, who had six times won the victory at the Pythian games, to show his regard to Lysander, told him that if he won the prize again he intended to have his name ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... indescribable." The result is a most remarkable jumble of misinformation and fiction, with which Field plied Garland to the top of his bent. What Garland thought were bottom facts were really sky-scraping fiction. As if this were not enough, Garland made Field talk in an approach to an illiterate dialect, such as he never employed and cordially detested. Garland represented Field as discussing social and economic problems—why not the "musical glasses," deponent saith not. The really great and characteristic point in the dialogue was where something Field said ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... only when it had ceased to be in my power to derive its most important benefits from such a conviction that I perceived the necessity of becoming acquainted with more languages than that of my native country. Now I am twenty-eight and am in reality more illiterate than many schoolboys of fifteen. It is true that I have thought more and that my daydreams are more extended and magnificent, but they want (as the painters call it) KEEPING; and I greatly need a friend ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... avalanche across the mountain to the other side before it engulfed and ruined the world. While Europe agonized in torments unthinkable, immeasurable, and yet mysteriously endurable only because there was no escape visible, the Jake Nuddles, illiterate and literate, croaked their batrachian protest against capital, bewailed the lot of imaginary working-men, and belied the ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... persevering, at least till the young king's majority, in the ecclesiastical model established by that great monarch. He defended the use of images, which were now openly attacked by the Protestants; and he represented them as serviceable in maintaining a sense of religion among the illiterate multitude.[*] He even deigned to write an apology for "holy water," which Bishop Ridley had decried in a sermon; and he maintained that, by the power of the Almighty, it might be rendered an instrument of doing good, as much as the shadow of St. Peter, the hem of Christ's ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... chartered by the Congress for the benefit of the most illiterate and humble of our people, and with the intention of encouraging in them industry and thrift. Most of its branches were presided over by officers holding the commissions and clothed in the uniform of the United States. These and other circumstances ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... to college, I presume?" asked an illiterate but boastful exhorter of a clergyman. "Yes, sir," was the reply. "I am thankful," said the former, "that the Lord opened my mouth without any learning." "A similar event," retorted the clergyman, "happened in ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... to join the party. "I am provoked," said Lady Mabel, "to find how little progress I have made in speaking Portuguese. But it is not surprising what a complete mastery the rudest and most illiterate people here have ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... glamour of an ancient superstition, and took the veil after a very commonplace and squalid Protestant fashion. This particular "fruit" against whom Carmichael in his young uncharitableness especially raged, because he was more self-complacent and more illiterate than his fellows, married the daughter of a rich self-made man, and on the father's death developed a peculiar form of throat disease, which laid him aside from the active work of the ministry—a mysterious providence, as he often explained—but allowed him to enjoy life with ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... in this nonsense. An ambitious lawyer passes his nights in retouching stock pieces, from which he can reap neither fame nor profit. He gives his work to a second-rate illiterate actor, who adopts it as his own. Bacon is so enamoured of this method that he publishes 'Venus and Adonis' and 'Lucrece' under the name of his actor friend. Finally, he commits to the actor's care all his sonnets to the Queen, ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... the better written may be assigned (at earliest) to the close of the seventh century; the other (again at earliest) to the close of the ninth. Both are corrupt; the work of two illiterate copyists who—strange to say—were both smatterers enough to betray their little knowledge by converting Pervigilium into Per Virgilium (scilicet, "by Virgil"): thus helping us to follow the process of thought by which the Middle Ages turned Virgil into ...
— The Vigil of Venus and Other Poems by "Q" • Q
... much knowledge requires neither Learned Education, or great Study, to the attaining of it, appears in that the first Christians were mean and illiterate People; to which part of Mankind the Gospel may rather be thought to have had a more especial regard than that they are any way excluded from the Benefits thereof by incapacity in them to receive it. In the Apostles Days there were not many Wise who were call'd, and he tells us that ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham
... see that Nature hath no end In her great works responsive to their worths; That she, that makes so many eyes and soules To see and fore-see, is stark blind her selfe; And as illiterate men say Latine prayers 5 By rote of heart and dayly iteration, Not knowing what they say, so Nature layes A deale of stuffe together, and by use, Or by the meere necessity of matter, Ends such a work, fills it, or leaves it empty 10 Of strength, ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... was a "best seller" in our country for several months. Some who like to bewail the degeneracy of our art and literature and of our drama, declare that its popularity is simply due to a fashion. Biographies are the fashion, and therefore it is the transitory habit of the illiterate book buyer to purchase, if he does not read, biographies. This view may be dismissed with a scornful wave ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... that year the regiment was embarked on steamboats and sent to Memphis, Tennessee, where we joined the command of General A.J. Smith. General Smith was organizing an army to fight the illiterate but brilliant Confederate General Forrest, who was then making a great deal ...
— An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (Colonel W. F. Cody) • Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody)
... that every solid argument is against the extraordinary court, and that every one in its favor is specious only. It is a transfer from a judicature of learning and integrity, to one, the greatness of which is both illiterate and unprincipled. Yet such is the force of prejudice with some, and of the want of reflection in others, that many of our constitutions have copied this absurdity, without suspecting it to be one. I am glad to hear that ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... Peter he was succeeded by his wife Catherine, an amiable but illiterate woman, who was wholly under the influence of Menshikov, one of Peter's chief favourites. After a short reign of two years, she was succeeded by Peter II., son of the unfortunate Alexis, in whose time ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... problem of how to keep these men in touch with their households in isolated and illiterate villages in India. Mr. Hume, one of the secretaries in Lahore, devised a far-reaching plan whereby every letter was forwarded through missionaries or Christian workers or officials to the distant home of the soldier. The whole community gathers to hear the news from the Indian regiment ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... South which made men look back with longing even to the sharper agonies of the war. Coloured voters were brought in droves, by their Northern fuglemen, to polling-places which were guarded by United States troops. Utterly illiterate negroes crowded the benches of State legislatures. A Northerner and staunch Union man has assured me that in the Capitol of one of the reconstructed States he has seen a coloured representative gravely studying a newspaper which ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... divination. The habit that the mantis has of first stretching out one fore leg, and then the other, and of preserving such a position for some little time, has also led to the belief among the illiterate that it is in the act, in such cases, of pointing out the road to the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... for commentators and have caused so various constructions to be put upon it? It is clear, the professor maintains, that the reference is to pagan rhetors from Gaul whose arrogant presumption, founded on their learning, made them regard with disdain the comparatively illiterate apostle of the Scots. Everyone is familiar with the classic passage of Tacitus wherein he alludes to the harbours of Ireland as being more familiar to continental mariners than those of Britain. We have references moreover to refugee Christians ...
— The Life of St. Declan of Ardmore • Anonymous
... preachers of that day were not quite so illiterate as Elder Hankins, and it is but fair to say that the Adventists of to-day are a very respectable denomination, doing a work which deserves more recognition from others than it receives. And for the ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... imprecating destruction on his brethren while the cup was passing from hand to hand. After he had been some time a member of the congregation he began to preach; and his sermons produced a powerful effect. He was, indeed, illiterate; but he spoke to illiterate men. The severe training through which he had passed had given him such an experimental knowledge of all the modes of religious melancholy as he could never have gathered from books; and his vigorous genius, animated by a fervent spirit of devotion, enabled ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... in Manila then, reenforced by those whom the uprising had frightened out of the provinces, were a few who realized that they belonged among the classes caricatured in Rizal's novels—some incompetent, others dishonest, cruel ones, the illiterate, wretched specimens that had married outside their race to get money and find wives who would not know them for what they were, or drunken husbands of viragoes. They came to the Philippines because they were below the standard ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... sup of it again. By thy favour, sweet fount. See, the water, a more running, subtile, and humorous nymph than she permits me to touch, and handle her. What should I infer? if my behaviours had been of a cheap or customary garb; my accent or phrase vulgar; my garments trite; my countenance illiterate, or unpractised in the encounter of a beautiful and brave attired piece; then I might, with some change of colour, have suspected my faculties: But, knowing myself an essence so sublimated and refined by travel; of so studied and well exercised ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... interesting. He was by no means illiterate. His writing is trim, his accounts in good form and correctly figured. But it was more a fashion in that day to spell as pronounced, and his orthography gives us a ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... with hot vinegar, of teaching elephants to dance on the slack rope, of making malleable glass, of writing epic poems that any body would read after they had been published a month, and the stupendous invention of new religions, a secret of which illiterate Mahomet was the last ...
— Hieroglyphic Tales • Horace Walpole
... the black letter are sought for with the same avidity with which the English antiquary peruses a monumental inscription, or treasures up a Saxon piece of money. The popular ballad, composed by some illiterate minstrel, and which has been handed down by tradition for several centuries, is rescued from the hands of the vulgar, to obtain a place in the collection of the man of taste. Verses which, a few years past, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... make me err; I wou'd the Beauties of the Mind prefer. Among the Few, I'd have a Man of Sense, Endu'd with Modesty and Temperance; Not with a great, and yet a good Estate; Not too much Learning, nor Illiterate, And yet he shou'd (avoiding each extream) Know more of Man, than Man shou'd know of him. Be Gen'rous and Well-bred, but not Profuse; Not giv'n to Flattery, nor to take th' Abuse: Gentile his Carriage, and his Humour such, Shou'd speak him Sociable, ...
— The Pleasures of a Single Life, or, The Miseries Of Matrimony • Anonymous
... 18. An illiterate patchwork of lifeless and uninteresting scribbling appeared under my byline day after day in the Intelligencer. Not a word, not a thought of my own was left. I was not restrained from protest by the absurd threats of Le ffacase, but prudence dictated not throwing away ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... sometimes been vaunted as the proper education for the industrial classes'—an absurd and shallow system which has been urged by quacks and dabblers in world-bettering, and which has been exhausted without avail in England—the system dear to single-sided Gradgrinds and illiterate men who grasp a twig here and there without knowing of the existence of the trunk and roots. It lays down a perfectly scientific and universal basis, believing that the most insignificant industry, to be perfectly understood and pursued, must proceed from a knowledge of the great principles ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... excited sincere admiration in a country where women are illiterate; and the breadth of her understanding was such as to take in the details of government. She chose her agents with rare judgment, and shifted them from pillar to post, so that they might not forget their dependence on her will. Without a parallel in her own country, she has been sometimes ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... to see that the boy who attempts to prematurely support his widowed mother may lower wages, add an illiterate member to the community, and arrest the development of a capable workingman. As she has failed to see that the rules which obtain in regard to the age of marriage in her own family may not apply to the workingman, so also she fails to understand that the present conditions ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... of knot records or quippos, which will be explained in due time. These records were simply aids to the memory. Mr. Squier places them "about on a par with Robinson Crusoe's Notched Calendar, or the chalked tally of an illiterate tapster." They are manifestly of ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... probably did not come from the same hand.[63] The English translation was evidently made some time before the appearance of this edition of 1648, for Randall says in his Introduction that "This little Book was long veiled and obscured (by its unknown tongue) from the eye of the illiterate and inexpert, until some years since, through the desires and industries of some of our own countrymen, lovers of Truth, it was translated and made to speak to thee in thine own dialect and language. But the time of its Nativity ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... sea—a sort of common, covered with heath and furze—on which the ancient Britons have left their indelible mark, in the shape of pits and hollows and trenches, with their relative mounds and hillocks. Here, in the days of old, our worthy but illiterate forefathers had grubbed and dug and turned up every square foot of the soil, like a colony of gigantic rabbits, in order to supply the precious metal of the country to ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... Apology does not desire it may be inferred from the foregoing remarks, that horror of Atheism, and detestation of its apostles, is confined to the low, the vulgar, the base, or the illiterate. Any such inference would be wrong, for it is certainly true that learned, benevolent, and very able Christian writers, have signalised themselves in the work of obstructing the progress of Atheism by denouncing its principles, and imputing all manner of ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... an Irishwoman, who had been elected by the votes of the laborers on the new Albemarle Extension, in the neighborhood of which she kept a grocery store. Nelly Kirkpatrick was a great, red-haired giant of a woman, very illiterate, but with some native wit, and good-hearted enough, I am told, when she was in her right mind. She always followed the lead of Mr. Gorham (whose name, you see, came before hers in the call), and a look from him was generally sufficient to ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... read out forged letters to the illiterate people. A very judicious expedient, I must say. Village folks can be got to believe anything. But ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... job as book-reviewer, dramatic critic, or manuscript-reader, since they have the naive belief that these occupations require neither toil nor training, and enable one to "write on the side." Meanwhile they make their livings as sub-editors on trade journals, as charity-workers, or as assistants to illiterate ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... philosophical; "the moments of unreasonable happiness are the most enviable no doubt, for there is neither gall nor satiety in the reaction. All this is as enchanting as—well, as a woman's promise. What lies beyond? Illiterate and mercenary Spaniards, vicious natives, and boundless ennui, one may safely wager. But if all California is as beautiful as this, no man that has spent a winter in Sitka should ask ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... men of letters have developed wonderful feats of memory; and among illiterate persons, by means of points of association, the power of memory has been little short of marvelous. At a large hotel in Saratoga there was at one time a negro whose duty was to take charge of the hats and coats ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... homes for them. He dispatched about fifty of these families to Worcester. That year marked the fifth of its permanent settlement, and was composed of fifty log-houses, inhabited by two hundred souls. The new comers appear to have been of the poorer and more illiterate class of the five ship loads. At first they were welcomed, because needed for both civic and military reasons. In September of 1722 a township organization was effected, and at the first annual town meeting, names of the strangers ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... greater hardship that the perfectly illiterate were excluded. But this was a necessary requirement of our programme. We wished to transfer the right of the absolute free self-control of the individual to the domain of labour from that of the relation of servitude which had existed ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... day when he had first come to the city to work out his dreams among men. In the human tide that ebbed and flowed through this world gateway, he saw men of wealth and men of poverty—people of culture and position who had come or were going in Pullman or private cars and illiterate, stupid, animal looking, emigrants who were crowded, much like cattle, in the lowest class. There were business men of large affairs; countrymen with wondering faces; shallow, pleasure seekers; artists and scholars; idle fools; vicious sharks watching for victims; mothers with flocks of ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... Cooper's novels, so Wykoff got his inspiration for a career from studying and admiring the diplomatic parvenus of Queen Anne's time. These Bohemiens de la haute volee, who drew their first motives from study, are by far more interesting and tolerable than those of an illiterate type. ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland |
